According to Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture legitimacy exchange is…
…a term that refers to the process by which experts in one area draw on the authority of experts in another area to justify their activities.
and it follows interestingly with
As Bowker explains, “An isolated scientific worker making an outlandish claim could gain rhetorical legitimacy by pointing to support from another field–which in turn referenced the first worker’s field to support its claim. The language of cybernetics provided a site where this exchange could occur.”
The other term I took from the book is “network forum” in which individuals from different fields can meet and exchange legitimacy. Turner’s book gives the Whole Earth Catalog as a print example.
Related posts:
- Academia on the experience of poverty It takes a lot of words for academia to say “We’re can’t describe the experience of poverty”. This is from...
- Twenty-four dollars This weekend was Boston’s first book festival. I purchased The Little Money Book by David Boyle (“What is money? What...
- Criticism of Actor-Network Theory Once you have a basic definition, I find it easiest to learn about something through its criticisms: what is criticised...
[...] is its parallelism with Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture from which I have quoted before. By the 1960s, the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse had revived much of the spirit [...]