Graduate students and other early career scholars who are interested in contributing content and/or serving as assistant editors for Backchannels, the blog of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), are encouraged to contact Steve Jackson, who chairs the 4S Web Committee.
Linguists first used the term backchannel to refer to the spontaneous responses and signals that provide interactivity to what is only apparently a one-way communication. Social media users have adopted the term to refer to the unofficial, multi-directional online conversation that parallels formal academic exchange at a lecture or conference. The Backchannels blog is intended to have a similar relationship to scholarly discourse in STS. It provides an outlet for alternative-format scholarly communications, publishing shorter, timelier, media-rich communiques of interest to the global STS community. The editors welcome proposed contributions.