This volume comes in the wake of a stinging practical joke that brought many of the professional tensions between scientists and humanists into sharp relief. One of the editors, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, and one of the contributors, literary scholar Andrew Ross, coedited a 1996 issue of the academic journal Social Text that was devoted to "postmodern" studies of science-contemporary scholarly work that emphasizes the influence of cultural values and institutional politics on science. That special issue featured an essay by physicist Alan Sokal, who, in discussing a "transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," expressed the critically fashionable view that scientific knowledge is often not truly rational, and that claims of scientific objectivity can mask pursuit of the interests of dominant groups.

The problem was that after the issue was published, Sokal revealed his article as a hoax-a satire of postmodernism fabricated out of bits of jargon. Both the mainstream media and hostile scientists framed the journal's failure to reject the piece as an indictment of contemporary humanists. The editors' ignorance of real scientific knowledge rendered them incapable of distinguishing spoof from substance, the argument ran.

Technoscience and Cyberculture, edited by Stanley Aronowitz along with three graduate students in sociology (Barbara Martinson), philosophy (Mich-ael Menser), and English (Jennifer Rich), is evidence that the charge has not entirely fazed the community these scholars represent. The purpose of the book is to further "cultural studies" of science and technology-an umbrella term for a range of postmodern scholarly efforts that focus on how specific as-pects of everyday life are shaped by larger social, economic, and political influences. While the essays included are diverse, representing 11 fields of study, they are united in their conviction that, Sokal notwithstanding, scientific knowledge is saturated with cultural assumptions.

Proponents of cultural studies argue that technology is commonly developed and used by powerful interests to maintain control over social conditions. Thus the critic's job is to point out the values and beliefs that drive technological systems, and to suggest ways to keep those forces from dominating people's lives. In this book, for example, experimental architect Lebbeus Woods describes how the design of "anarchic" spaces can compensate for the control of public space by political authorities and commercial developers. The idea would be to allow citizens to circulate free from both surveillance and the compulsion to consume.