I just ran across this quote which I thought encapsulated the issue nicely: "As Hirsch and Silverstone (1992) argue, information technology poses unique challenges because it is both a set of artifacts to be consumed as well as a medium within which social relations are conducted." (from Nafus and Tracey "Mobile Phone and Concepts of Personhood" in Katz & Aarkhus Perpetual Contact, p.208) Thanks, that helps a good deal, Nancy. For me at least. The artifact concept seems to me to go a long way in addressing the process-like nature and the entity-like nature of IT. Is this extendable to meta-artifacts? I think it has to be, though undoubtedly there’s a constant or relatively constant merging of the meta form with the non-meta form. And then, are there meta-media? Are social studies meta-social relations? Something on the meta-media idea at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_9/aigrain/ I hope I’m not just rambling into infinite regress. Or is infinite regress part of the nature of the construct............ Best regards, William William Bain PhD Student Comparative Literature Department of Spanish Philology Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona --------------------------------- All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.