SOCIAL APPROPRIATION OF THE ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT
Nelson Javier Pulido Daza
Universidad de la Salle, Bogotá, Colombia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2840-9962
Adriana Mata Puente
Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, México
Introduction
The term appropriation has a wide acceptance in these times, since it deals with the analysis and implementation of science and technology policies. The use of the expressions social appropriation of the electronic document, social appropriation of science, or the conjunction of both “objects” of appropriation, usually occurs in the context of academic work on technological culture, processes of public participation of citizenship, new models of conceiving the relationship between society, science policy and technology. The breadth of meanings detected in the uses of the term and its associated expressions would indicate that, rather than a stable meaning within the framework of a theory, it is a range of meanings with greater or lesser association, which operates as a field of problematization on the political, cultural and social dimensions of the presence of technological knowledge in society.
The appeal to strengthen the processes of social appropriation of the electronic document is present in the fundamentals of governmental interventions in the field of technology and innovation and in the discourses of academic communities, in reference to the new social contract of science in the 21st century and to the purposes of greater social relevance of knowledge[1] . Social appropriation is associated with a positive and desirable situation, i.e., a value translated into a public policy objective that is present in the formulation of government plans and programs to support science.[2]
[1] Regarding the link between the process of social appropriation of science and the new social contract of science in the 20th century, Noemí Sanz Merino (2008) makes a historical review of the changes in science and technology policies during the last 50 years and the specifically political dimension of appropriation expressed in the different prevailing models.
[2] This is the case, for example, of public science and technology organizations in Colombia and Argentina. In Colombia, MINCIENCIAS has designed an institutional strategy to strengthen the social appropriation of science and technology, understanding this as a process of understanding and intervention on the relationship between technoscience and society, built on the participation of the various social groups that generate knowledge (http:// www.colciencias.gov.co/sites/default/files/ckeditor_files/files/ES- TRATEGIA%20NACIONAL%20DE%20ASCTI_VFinal.pdf). In Argentina, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation defines as a public policy objective the establishment of the value of scientific culture as a path to social development through the formation of citizenship, the encouragement of participation and the social appropriation of knowledge (http://www. mincyt.gob.ar/ministerio-presentación).