Where hidden values live
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: What if we started with ethnographic observations and brought in abstractions and values at a later stage? This commentary takes that question seriously, using 3 years of longitudinal fieldwork in an EU-funded urban logistics project to both confirm and extend the article's diagnostic framework of value disconnects. A single cargo bike, deployed, broken down, tinkered with, demonstrated and eventually stashed away in a depot, turns out to be a productive lens for understanding where values in technology projects actually live: not in the systems designed to hold them, nor in the principles declared to guide them, but in the informal, embodied and often ephemeral practices that gather around technologies as they move through the world. The commentary confirms the article's five disconnects and proposes a sixth, value dispersal, alongside a pedagogical argument for why noticing it requires a fundamentally different kind of methodological training than technology development currently offers.
Source: Dialogues on Digital Society
Author: Vaike Fors
Institution: Halmstad University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,400
OpenAlex ID: W7204246586