The BBC’c “Click” program has a quite watchable bit on the battle of map services that is increasingly gaining momentum.
The first couple of minutes of this six-minute segment stick to the basics of mapping and the provision of map and navigation services but the last minute or so turns to the Google vs. Apple competition discussed here earlier. More particularly, the clip offers a comparative look at Apple’s map service embedded in iOS 6. It appears that Apple is betting primarily on 3D mapping and crowdsourcing while Google is systematically expanding both its ground-based and airborne forces.
Furthermore, the segment reminds us that Microsoft is also in this market via “bing”. We will see what happens later this year with the release Windows 8 and an expanding fleet of Microsoft-powered mobile devices. It is already hard to imagine the amount of capital these companies are committing to over- and out-map each other.
While Apple’s services are not yet live and Microsoft has yet to become competitive in the mobile market, the arms race in the map wars by now is truly on.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a piece on how the flood of app-based service provision can make you lazy.
There are apps that let you call someone to wash your car just where you parked it; apps to let somebody queue for you; and certain apps like TaskRabbit let you “Get just about anything done by safe, reliable, awesome people”. Or, if you are lucky enough to be living in San Francisco, you may want to use “Get It Now” to “Have the best of San Francisco delivered to you in under one hour”.
Appropriately for the Journal, author Jessica Vascellaro uses the terminology of outsourcing to describe what is happening in the use of these app-based services. As we are outsourcing all kinds of activities to other people via our smartphones, however, the question may not only be whether we become lazier, but also whether we become embedded. Can there be any doubt that we do? The tone of cultural criticism in the WSJ piece suggest that we are losing something here but are we not in fact extending ourselves in truest McLuhan style? In that sense, the work I am outsourcing is still there, and it is still my work – done by others. In outsourcing activities, I am simply using the infrastructure of mobile communication in order to make many things happen simultaneously. Does service provision through infrastructures turn us into small-time Leviathans?

Call for papers

III 2012 – Innovation in Information Infrastructures Workshop
9th – 11th October 2012

The University of Edinburgh Business School
29 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh, UK

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Eric Monteiro – NTNU
Steve Sawyer – Syracuse University
David Ribes – Georgetown University
Geoff Walsham – University of Cambridge

Rationale:
This workshop will focus on the emergence and continuing evolution of new kinds of information infrastructures (IIs) in business, the corporate world and other settings. By connecting a growing number of systems and data, Information Infrastructures support user work in everyday life, but also bring about increased organizational and technological complexity. As IIs permeate an increasingly broad range of social and institutional contexts, they generate both new kinds of challenges for information systems development, and new social, organizational and market forms as foci for social study.

This is the second Edinburgh workshop on IIs in recent years. The first, in 2006, explored what were then emerging visions of the future1. Some of the computing models set out have subsequently failed to materialise as expected, whilst others not predicted have come into being. Today, we find that the ecology of players, services, software and platforms enabled by network connectivity and modern tools is increasingly complex. Information infrastructure standards and patterns of usage have been established, legitimating a growing set of user strategies, social competences and forms of expertise. In this workshop we ask how information infrastructures and related social, organizational and market forms innovate.

Important Dates:
Deadline for submission of short paper: 30 June 2012
Decision of abstract acceptance: 22 July 2012
Final program available: 25 September 2012

Submission:
If you wish to present a paper at the III 2012 workshop submit a short
paper (3 to 4 pages). Please submit them as email attachments
(Microsoft Word files only) to this email address – i.i.i@ed.ac.uk –
indicating in the e-mail subject the title of the workshop: III2012

Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue
of an international rated peer reviewed journal.

Themes:
The workshop will bring together researchers to share empirical studies, analytical approaches and methodological concerns in the understanding of Information Infrastructures innovation, and to explore what the future holds for research in this area. We invite papers on the following themes:

Emerging Information Infrastructures

– Social media applications that enable the sharing and collation of information between peers and across multiple sites
– The further integration and expansion of corporate enterprise systems (e.g. ERP, CRM)
– Patient health record infrastructures that connect up various health providers
– New models for the provision of computing services (such as Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing)
– The Internet of Things
– Data analytics
– New platforms that seek to leverage the time/expertise of globally distributed communities of developers (e.g. FLOSS, the Apple App store).

Analytical approaches

– The Social Shaping of Technology and its extension into the Biography of Artefacts perspective 
– Socio-material understandings of Information Infrastructures
– Approaches influenced by ethnomethodology and micro-sociology
– Science and Technology Studies approaches
– Approaches which appreciate the “long now” and multi-sitedness of Information Infrastructures 

Methodological concerns

– Adequacy of conventional methodologies for understanding the scale, scope and evolution of II
– Questions of fieldwork focus when researching information infrastructures
Submission and Registration Guidelines can be found on the University
of Edinburgh Business School Website:
http://www.business-school.ed.ac.uk/about/school-events?a=44968

Executive Committee:
G. Haywood
H. Mozaffar
A. Eshraghi
V. Wiegel

Scientific Committee:
R. Williams
N. Pollock
S. Anderson
M. Hartswoood
G.M. Campagnolo
I. Graham

As the battle between Apple and Google continues to escalate, the Wall Street Journal features an interesting article about Google Maps, and mobile maps and navigation software and servives more generally, as a crucial stake this conflict. Over the next couple of days, Apple is expected to announce its own mapping service and will subsequently disembed Google Maps from Apple devices. Google Maps was in many ways crucial to the initial succes of the iPhone and both companies cooperated heavily in attracting and redirecting smartphone users to mutual advantage. This cooperation with, basically, Apple selling devices and Google selling ads deteriorated with the advent and increasing market share of Android devices. Now, “Apple is going after the map market to have more control over a key asset in the widening smartphone war”, as WSJ authors Jessica Vascellaro and Amir Efrati comment. Their article has interesting details on both the early days of cooperation, the ensuing suspicions, distrust and secrecy involved in waging the war of the mobile device ecosystems. You can check out the whole article here.

Anybody out there working on this? In terms of shaping technology/building society through infrastructural assemblages, this case is clearly a steal. It encourages, among, I’m sure, many other things, to think about the layering of different kinds of infrastructures – territories, maps, directions, ads, planners, pedestrians, etc. – and the different kinds of circulation these infrastructures attract, moderate, and redirect. What a massive case of heterogenous engineering.

Tom Vanderbilt is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, and in a recent news/interest article, he framed the acceptance of public transit as an infrastructure question; that is, infrastructure with soul, that is still efficient for moving human bodies around.

It is a striking comparison he makes in the opening image:

Planned cities like Dubai (left) are considered high system/low empathy while places that grew more organically, like the favelas of  Rio (right) are low system/high empath.

Then he goes onto to ask, can you make infrastructure that is efficient, but still has soul?

A planned-from-scratch place like Dubai, or Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” Leadbeater argued, was “high system/low empathy,” while the favelas of Rio, which grew up organically and are sustained by a web of informal networks, could be considered “low system/high empathy.” Then there are places—Lagos, he suggested—where neither axis is particularly optimized. How, he wanted to know, could you design for both?

I was advertising the paper by Marion Brivot and Yves Gendron earlier last year, now I have finally come around to give it a more thorough read. I am really impressed, and I would like to push a couple of points here about infrastructures that can be taken from this work (which, again, in its entirety is here).
The paper, first of all, does a good job of introducing the literature about new forms of surveillance, adding on a couple of recent French works that have yet to be taken up, as far as I can tell, in international discourse (whether in STS or accounting). Most notably, Brivot and Gendron adopt the notion of “sousveillance” or, in the English terminology they are proposing, “sub-veillance”, from a paper by Dominique Quessada. The basic insight is that contemporary ICTs indeed establish new forms of visibility and discipline but rather than an updated form of Benthamite panopticism a lateral form of surveillance is the result. Against this background the “big brother” idea of control appears like a belittlement of actual governance and the type of discipline that results from the ICT-mediated visibility of individual and collective conduct, and like a more or less infantile projection of disciplinary power among the governed. In contemporary forms of “sub-veillance” individuals play games of visibility and visibilization from which discipline emerges laterally from reflexive processes of reciprocal control and impression management. Brivot and Gendron demonstrate this empirically by a case study of a knowledge management system in an tax/law firm.
The authors argue that while panopticism may be an outdated image of contemporary forms of surveillance, the Foucauldian account of technologies of the self doing the actual governing remains very much valid. In effect, they present us with an Foucauldian account beyond panopticism which I think, may be very relevant to infrastructure studies with respect to ICT. While many people, faced with the power of ICT to make activities and economies visible and accessible to control, are still primarily afraid that a central power will accumulate some form of power-knowledge in order to control them, in the social network, facebook, and twitter world, the real power resides in the spread of artefacts and inscriptions across networks and participants. The despotic power of visibility, if it really exists, primarily derives from participants’ inclination to make themselves visible and from playing ICTs competitively in one way or another. Governance, control, and so on do not the result from some general plan or paradigm but from often from idiosyncratic detournments.
In conclusion, Brivot and Gendron urge the reader to “take into account the complexities, ambiguities and paradoxes which characterize today’s rhizomatic forms of control and surveillance. This is a difficult task since one of the greatest challenges confronting surveillance studies is to develop a grasp on the chaos and cacophony that underlie the spread of surveillance in organizations and society (…). Foucault can be very useful in making sense of this cacophony – as long as researchers look beyond the confines of the panoptical conceptualization which, quite paradoxically, Foucault helped to make fashionable.” (p. 153)
Now, I am stumbling upon another paper in the same journal that is just about to be published, arguing something very similar about the use of online ratings and social media in the travel sector. It is written by Susan Scott and Wanda Orlikowski; check it out here.
Looks like the old Foucauldian understanding of disciplinary power is just getting a Web 2.0 update.