Computer science and the market: Metamorphoses of fundamental ideas

If the forms of cognitive practice change with changes in methods of production, forms of social organization, engineering and technology, this means that we must elucidate the relationship between cognition and action, between theoretical and applied practice, between consciousness and behavior…. Where scientific research goes into decline, we observe narrow specialization of the scientific language and loss of its connections with the daily language.M. Wartofsky,Models

Conclusion

The interest in open systems in the West is increasing year after year. CSCW is thus slanted to become the most popular scientific-technical direction of the first years of the next century, especially as a result of the increased activity of American providers and the U.S. government program for the creation of an Internet-based “information highway of the century” [14]. For instance, as part of the program for large-scale acceptance of Internet, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) allocates funding only to organizations that make their projects available on Internet [15], and the European Community officially subjected all European research to specific networking requirements [16]. Theoretical topics of CSCW, including computer hermeneutics and development of “computer Esperanto” will thus be strongly influenced by information science and information infrastructure, which are changing the industry of information production and information use in “first world” countries.

We hope that we have managed to demonstrate that the drama in computer science is an apparent phenomenon, which is attributable in our domestic conditions to the absence of direct and effective links with the “open world”. Our view can be supported by the thought expressed by A. Toffler: “…some scientists paint a picture of the world of science as activated by its own inner logic and evolving according to its own laws in total isolation of the surrounding world. In this connection we cannot but remark that scientific hypotheses, theories, metaphors, and models are formed under the influence of economic, cultural, and political factors acting outside the walls of laboratories” [17].