Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat

More than fifty years have passed since Robert Merton formulated, in his doctoral dissertation on Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, what he later, in his "Shandean Postscript," came to call the "kindle cole" principle: the "sociological discovery of the distorting effects of public (as distinct from private) polemics among men of science."' According to the kindle cole (or "Hooke-Newton-Merton") principle of scientific polemics, scientists ought to avoid engaging in public controversies and try to insulate themselves from the responses of the "excitable crowd," both scientific and other.