The next generation of computers I owned was called 286, after the processor name. Now the computer had mouse, hard disk and a rudimentary Windows. This was the first computer I worked on which could deliver things I did not have to program myself – objectively speaking this was not true. Perhaps the 286 computer in the end of the 1980’s is the first in the generation of computers we are using now in 2006. Only 15-20 years have passed and now I feel strongly that we are on the verge of a new step in the man-computer evolution. This step is based on a wide array of things. Some of these things are about hardware and software, but the most important things are about people. Using distance as metaphor, you could say that the distance between man and computer has been closing up for every year since the first computer was “born”. I use the word cyborgization process to describe this closing gap between man and computer. I feel quite assured that some day man and computer will be integrated. I am not sure the integration will be physical though. I do not think our skin and the air around us is such a strong border as you might believe. I do not think a tool is more me just because it is operated into my hand and connected to my brain. I do think feelings like love, joy and passion are at least as strong connectors as artificial connections to my brain.

In the middle of the 1990’s I went on a new journey with my travel mate, the computer. I discovered the path I am onto right now; the path of Web 2.0. This was almost ten years before the concept Web 2.0 was coined. Still, the concept I met was to be the core in Web 2.0 - Collaborative Filtering. Collaborative Filtering is basically a set of algorithms, which use people’s choices, habits and paths to create recommendations. If I show the system I like a certain music artist, I might get recommendations on similar artists. The point of collaborative filtering is to create relations between users with similar preferences in order to present recommendations.

I saw, and still see, Collaborative Filtering as a start of hybrid entity comprised by flesh, metal and metaphors. I saw collaborative filtering entities turning into a completely different way of life in a near future. After a time, these rather romantic notions were divided in two streams - one stream of praxis and one of theory. These streams were intertwined but none the less distinguishable. One led to a more user oriented urge to use these practices in my daily life and one stream led to a more epistemological interest. These streams are still alive in this thesis and you will notice them.

Two of the many articles trigging my interest were David Maltz’ and Kate Ehrlich’s Pointing the way: active collaborative filtering (Maltz, 1995) and Running Out of Space: Models of Information Navigation (Dourish and Chalmers, 1994). Dourish and Chalmers lead to the next step in my evolution towards Web 2.0. It is not about Collaborative Filtering, but Social Navigation. These two subjects lived parallel lives for many years, and still do to some extent. My notion of the difference between these two computer science subjects is that they are two sides of the same coin. Collaborative Filtering has evolved to be mostly about mathematics and programming, while Social Navigation is mostly about interface and collaboration research (HCI and CSCW). Since I do not have disciplinary knowledge about these academic subjects, it is self-evident that these thoughts are only my personal view. Especially Social Navigation is an interdisciplinary research subject, which also includes actors from information science, artificial intelligence, social psychology and so on. The book Designing Information Spaces: The Social Navigation Approach (edited by Kristina Höök, David Benyon and Alan J. Munro) (2003) gives a very good overview of the field.

Both Collaborative Filtering and Social Navigation are at the core of the Web 2.0 mindset. But after some time I felt stuck. I could not find the political, ideological dimension I needed to nurture my interest. This was about 2002-2003. At this time I started my graduate studies at Technoscience Studies at Blekinge Institute of Technology. I already worked as a librarian at the same university college and my aim was to find a form for these practices to act together in some way. It was more difficult than I could imagine and this difficulty was only inside me. Both the Library and Technoscience Studies are into horizontal thinking. The transdiciplinary approach at Technoscience Studies was one of the things that attracted me most about going into graduate studies.

The first text I read in my graduate studies was Donna Haraway’s book Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991). This book includes her most famous texts A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century and Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. These articles are among the first of Haraway’s major publications and they are still the most well known. They have got wide recognition and both articles are published on the Internet. These articles echoed in me and found epistemological friends among other thoughts in philosophy and literature I had pondered on many years before. The Cyborg figure and the thought of knowledge as situated are still two of my most dear companions.

The next concept in my evolution towards the Web 2.0 concept was folksonomy. This was sometime around 2004/2005. At first it passed me by as an interesting phenomenon, but it did not really sink in. But somewhere by the end of the summer 2005 I saw the word briefly written in a mail from one of my colleagues (Thanks Anna!). It trigged something in me even though I hardly remembered what it meant. Folksonomy belonged to the same context as Collaborative Filtering and Social Navigation, but it had what I was searching for - ideology and politics. It was about democracy and non hierarchical thinking. I will return to folksonomy in more detail later.

Directly after I started to do research about folksonomy I bumped into the concept Web 2.0. Web 2.0 engulfed the concept folksonomy, but contained even more exiting possibilities. Web 2.0 is what I wanted Collaborative Filtering and Social Navigation to be, but could not find in those concepts. It is a new way of thinking about information, knowledge and people. I am quite sure it will change the view of many of our most dear concepts such as the document and the file, but it will also have impact on more profound questions such as what is a human, what is identity and what is knowledge.

Finally in this foreword some words about knowledge production. I want my knowledge production to be created in application (and implication) contexts, and not in a framework of social norms. I always had trouble understanding the term method, since I interpret it as “how” in the context of a particular situation, and not “how” according to a readymade framework. In this understanding, the concept of transdisciplinarity is essential. This is important for the understanding of my work. The concept transdisciplinary does not only address academic disciplines. It is also questioning borders between academic settings and the society we are integrated in. Knowledge wants to be free. Knowledge does not want to be contained within borders like this. I do not believe that traditional borders and frameworks produce better knowledge. Neither do I think established methodological frames can filter knowledge from unnecessary context. Context is rarely unnecessary and points of context can only be removed by addressing the context as a whole. Knowledge production should be distributed by thinking of society as an integrated whole, and not as separate parts as government, industry, academy and subparts as natural science and social science. Transdisciplinary is both a working layer and a distribution system for knowledge. (Gibbons, 1994), (Nowotny et al., 2001)

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