We must reassess the social, political, and historical forces that are providing new contexts for the field. Petrina is at his most adamant when he suggests that scholarly productions such as yearbooks should be sent out for peer review. Countering, John Ritz suggests that the judgements of the professionals who prepare these yearbooks ought to be sufficient quality control. Many fields, at least serious ones, would reject this out of hand. I agree with Petrina that we get supremely better quality scholarship when publications such as yearbooks, that are meant to stand across time as the best expressions of the ideas of particular generations of scholars, are peer reviewed.
Yearbooks are important primary source documents.
Petrina is saying, and I agree, that the processes that produce them must be consistent with normal publication expectations for serious works in serious fields. I did not always agree with Petrina. In other words, philosophers of technology do not have a discipline to which they can point, and they pay a status price here. Like ours, theirs is a field still in the making, still seeking legitimacy as valid knowledge. While it is true that a disciplinary quest for technology is to some extent political in nature, I do not see such a quest as lost energy, nor do I see it as inferior to other activity designed to establish the subject.