How is it that Steve Jobs can die and people mourn the man as if he were a family member, and Dennis Ritchie dies and there is hardly a blip on mainstream media?

I realize that many people spend more time with their iPhone than any family member or friend, but try living in our digital age without C programming, windows, or linux.

Thoughts?

The father of C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.

Call me a naive STS newcomer, greenhorn, curly girlie or whatever, but as I was reading all this STS stuff I got more and more confused. And after a lively debate with a colleague from Hamburg University who told me „nobody is doing sociology of knowledge in STS anymore“ I got even more confused. What does that mean „not anymore“? The more I read the more I got the impression that STS proceeds somehow ‘evolutionary’. It seems like everybody is doing ANT (except of those who do post-ANT understood – somebody has to be against it). Other theories and concepts seem to be completely out of fashion.

Coming more from an organisation studies perspective I’m completely not used to something like that. Postmodernism, Neo-Institutionalism, Systems Theory, Structuration Theory – they are used (of course by different researchers) at the same time. What I mean is, not everybody in organisation studies does, let’s say, Neo-Institutionalism and John W. Meyer. In STS there seems to be a consensus – at least somehow – that ANT is the concept to be used.

There was this debate on „thirdwaveness“ a few months ago: http://www.installingorder.org/how-many-sts-waves-does-it-take-to-create-a-d

Well, I was wondering: Is ANT the platform shoes of STS? Will Latour be out of fashion in 2015? And what will be the dernier cri in 2015?

A fellow named “Peter” recently commented on Endre’s first post; turns out, he’s the long-time maintainer of content at ANTHEM, which is a blog originally formed to be:

… the public face of ANTHEM, the “Actor-Network Theory — Heidegger Meeting,” a gathering of human and nonhuman actors that are interested in both actor-network theory and the work of Martin Heidegger, as well as the relationship and controversies between the two. Our primary focus is the question of technology. We are interested not only in the philosophy of technology but also in the empirical issues pertaining to the social study of technology.

However, those meetings appear to be over, but the blog lives on … still nutured by Peter and readers.

Check it out — I am and now I’m getting turned-onto Princes, Wolves, and quadruple objects … oh yeah, Peter, what about quadruple “things”!?

I’m just starting to get turned-onto this line of research on “hollow states,” which is about the decreasing duties associated with state enterprise and how to manage the relations between states and non-state entities as they adopt a greater number of previously-state, now-outsourced duties related to governance.

This paper on infrastructure caught my attention. It is written by Georgia’s O’Toole.

Citation:

Laurence J. O’Toole, Jr.

Hollowing the Infrastructure: Revolving Loan Programs and Network Dynamics in the American States

J Public Adm Res Theory (1996) 6(2): 225–242

Abstract:

Trends toward more complex intergovernmental programs and greater use of public-private arrangements carry implications for public management, since these developments signify challenges for administrators called upon to manage within hollowed institutional settings: interorganizational networks for effectuating policy. The implications of such shifts are explored by examining one important program change of the last decade: the move away from federal grant support for municipal wastewater treatment infrastructure and toward the creation of separate state revolving-loan funds (SRFs). National regulatory standards remain, but the central place of the EPA in the infrastructure effort has shifted largely into other hands, with consequences for the implementation of policy. Altered policy instruments stimulate the formation of more complex network patterns involving new actors who offer needed technologies. These changes carry implications for program operations and results. Evidence from the operations of SRFs suggests that these developments are significant and also that public management has become, if anything, even more consequential in such networked contexts.

Do infrastructure studies suffer from a before-and-under bias?

The term infrastucture, per my understandings of the term, but also reflected in the wiki site, takes on two basic meanings.

First, infrastructure gets one of its meanings, which also double as conceptualizations, by being what precedes whatever system it supports, hence, infrastructure comes before the system it facilitates. This might be called “infrastructure as antecedent” (or pre-structure).

Second, infrastructure, perhaps this time in a more etymological sense, is also meant to denote the undergird that holds a system in place, for example, the layers of earth, sand, and rocks which create the bed under which roadways can be built and, hence, the interlinking arteries of transit can be laid. This might be called “infrastructure as support” (like a craddle, or sub-structure).

Of course, the notion of “sub-structure” is not foreign territory for sociologists. In fact, in numerous lines of scholarship far outside of sociology, there is a belief that something “real” or “raw” maybe even primordial can be discovered in the depths or beneath. Likewise, there is precedent in nearly any historical analysis, some being executed better than others on this measure, that that which occurs before a given event in need of explanation is often seen as powerfully influencing its later form. In this sense, infrastructrure almost becomes akin to “pre-structure.”

These are sometimes used in infrastructure studies to justify their reason for being done in the first place; some version of “it came before and powerfully shaped X” or “it is beneath and powerfully supports X”. Sometimes these claims are explicit, but often they are more implicit such that were the author, one would imagine, to get a review who writes “why study this at all?” the author would be almost dumbfounded as if to say “duh.”

Now, infrastructure that comes before the system/material it supports, I suspect, operates according to different dynamics as compared to (a) infrastructure that comes after the system/material it supports (i.e., a system that is imposed on pre-existing materials such as security infrastructure developed in response to and not before serial crimes) or (b) infrastructure that support from above rather than below (i.e., a system that is not under us, but on us, although an obvious infrastructureal equivalent of this illudes me now — imagine the infrastructural equivalent of glasses on a human face, which does not support from below, and instead supports on top of or above the person).

Do infrastructure studies suffer from a before-and-under bias? This might be a nice empirical question.

This morning’s New York Times on-line features an article titled “New State Laws Are Limiting Access for Voters” and it presents or conceptualizes the infrastructural entitiy of “the state” in a couple of interesting ways.

On the one hand, states are presented in the journalist protrayal as active agents, in this case, passing laws.

Five states passed laws this year scaling back programs allowing voters to cast their ballots before Election Day, the Brennan Center found.

On the other hand, this hard work was the networked outcome of competing representatives with diverse interests.

Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, and question why photo identification should be routinely required at airports but not at polling sites. Democrats counter that the new laws are a solution in search of a problem, since voter fraud is rare. They worry that the laws will discourage, or even block, eligible voters — especially poor voters, young voters and African-American voters, who tend to vote for Democrats.

More in the middle, we see “the state” as both an actor, capable of passing laws, but also an effect of networked practices and representations, as evidenced by the now law-enforced presentation of government-issued identification cards at voting booths (the state being more like the effect, rather than the cause).

The biggest impact, the Brennan Center said, will be from laws requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote. This year, 34 states introduced legislation to require it — a flurry of activity that Jennie Bowser, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, called “pretty unusual.”

In reflecting on these issues, I am reminded of a dichotomy in the literature about states and statehood. Sometimes the state is presented as an empty signifier capable of action, as evidenced in their ability “pass laws this year.” In contrast, sometimes states are defined by their effect, as evidenced by the now law-enforced presentation of government-issued identification cards at voting booths. In our final example, we see one of two things: either an actor-network (where the state is conceptualized as an actor because it is a network) or a register-shift, meaning that the state registers as an actor during certain actions as a shortcut in presenting ideas, but also as an networked entity composed of competing actors incapable of concerted effort that might otherwise be called “state action.”

Check out this recent video from the FuturICT group in which Paul Lukowicz presents his take on the project from the perspective of a computer scientist.
A lot of the issues we have been discussing come up very explicitly in this bit. Particularly interesting, I think, is how emergent structures on the one hand and purposefully built infrastructure on the other are being renegotiated conceptually, and how both are finally associated with the use of a platform by an potentially infinite and yet unkown set of users: “there will be an infrastructure” which all kinds of people may contribute to, may use to run their own projects on, built their own apps, and so on. This particular aspect of infrastructure as platform may be worth exploring further, as it has all kinds of conceptual implications, and an interesting political undertone.

A couple of more videos are linked at the site, for example a ten-minute promo of the project.

Many thanks to my mentor, Alice Robbin of Indiana University’s School of Library Sciences, for turning me onto this interesting new paper by Nancy C. Roberts.

Beyond Smokestacks and Silos: Open-Source, Web-Enabled Coordination in Organizations and Networks

What accounts for coordination problems? Many mechanisms of coordination exist in both organizations and networks, yet despite their widespread use, coordination challenges persist. Some believe the challenges are growing even more serious. One answer lies in understanding that coordination is not a free good; it is expensive in terms of time, effort, and attention, or what economists call transaction and administrative costs. An alternative to improving coordination is to reduce its costs, yet there is little guidance in the literature
to help managers and researchers calculate coordination costs or make design decisions based on cost reductions. Th is article explores two cases—the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Offi ce’s Peer-to-Patent pilot program and the online relief eff ort in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there in 2010—to illustrate the advantages and constraints of using Web 2.0 technology as a mechanism of coordination and a tool for cost reduction. The lessons learned from these cases may offer practitioners and researchers a way out of our “silos” and “smokestacks.”

Now, I’m not totally convinced that the author is suggesting that infrastructure is the answer to reducing transaction costs associated with coordination efforts. However, the claim, which seems well substantiated to me, that the challenges facing those attempting to coordinate are growing “even more serious” amid ever complex webs of people, places and things seems like a valuable position to take for those of us writing on infrastructure.

The position can be used to justify infrastructure research. Why is this needed? All too often, I see papers on infrastructure that must justify their raison d’être and their justification is little better than “duh, its infrastructure”, “its the reason other stuff can work,” or “its the stuff that civilization is made of.” However, I am dissatisfied with all of these reasons, even though I share the personal sentiment, esp. “duh, its infrastructure.”

Of course, there are a variety of reasons that we might want to invetigate/examine infrastructure, especially for theoretical purposes. However, scholars tend to fail to justify their research on a more general or social level, and this position on transaction costs associated with coordination is probably a decent position to start from.

Seeing this intersting tilt-shift video of a city, I was reminded that scale is a salient issues regarding infrastructure as infrastructural entities often exist in at such massive scale that it is difficult to “humanize” or make it “knowable” to people.

Similarly:

Regarding numbers, sometimes numbers are so large that their meaning (or reality) is somehow compromised by their sheer size/scale and they are somehow unknowable.

Regarding art, sometimes a painting or sculpture can be so large that it fails to relate to human viewers.

All of this reminds me of the first time I read de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life” and, in particular, the section on walking in cities. The experience of walking in a city is quite different as compared to maps of the city or arial views. Unlocking the scale issue for infrastructure is quite important, especially emphasis on the massiveness, but, as this video indicates, although only through implication and extension: as scholars, we may need to find a way to write tilt-shift about infrastructure.

A colleague of mine, Eric Charles (psychology), recently posted some thoughts about how brains work in the world of Marvel X-men. It occurs to me that the modest role of expertise and cognitive psychology that oftentimes make it into our classes on STS might be meaningfully enhanced if we teach a lesson like this about X-men to students.

Explicitly how memory works might be a fruitful avenue, the role of memory and what it means to “know” something, and what expertise might mean if we consider the brain/body relationship, and of course, one gets to talk about Wolverine during class in the process.

Check out this recent video from the FuturICT group in which Paul Lukowicz presents his take on the project from the perspective of a computer scientist.
A lot of the issues we have been discussing come up very explicitly in this bit. Particularly interesting, I think, is how emergent structure on the one hand and purposefully built infrastructure on the other are being renegotiated conceptually, and how both are finally raised to the offer of a platform: “there will be an infrastructure” which all kinds of people may contribute to, may use to run their own projects on, and built their own apps.

A couple of more videos are linked at the site, for example a ten-minute promo of the project.

An interesting endeavour was recently brought to my attention that, I think, is well worth checking out: the FuturICT project. I will just give you a sample of quotes from the website and you will immediately see that this project in more than one way relates to the topic of this blog:
“FuturICT wants science to catch up with the speed at which new problems and opportunities are arising in our changing world as consequences of globalization, technological, demographic and environmental change, and make a contribution to strengthening our societies’ adaptiveness, resilience, and sustainability.  It will do so by developing new scientific approaches and combining these with the best established methods in areas like multi-scale computer modeling, social supercomputing, large-scale data mining and participatory platforms. (…) The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. (…) Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies probably constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century and is equally important for the development of novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive information and communication technologies (ICT), based on socially inspired paradigms. We think that integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society. Data from our complex globe-spanning ICT system will be leveraged to develop models of techno-socio-economic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inform the development of a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organized ICT systems. (…) The FuturICT flagship proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to.”
Basically, as it appears to me, the FuturICT is a call to arms of sorts for social scientists of all persuasions to do something with the myriad of data our current ICT systems are producing. The aim is to build an epistemic infrastructure, or rather a range of infrastructures that would put all these data to use. One of the interesting things is that everybody can at this point is invited to join in, though the emphasis is clearly on building a large network of institutions, the current state of which you can see here. It very probably though will not hurt to leave your name, affiliation and expertise, if only to be updated as things progress. Some of the information provided at the website does sound kind of sci-fi, some of it kind of eery, but believe me, as I happen to know some of the people involved, these people are very serious – and they are very capable. So, I am very curious what this will grow into.
One thing this made we wonder about with respect to the exploration of infrastructures in general was whether we have been giving quantity enough thought. The impetus for the FuturICT initiative is the mass of data already available, and the rationale is that the very fact of having these data not only will support an epistemic infrastructure but that is also constitutes an outright demand for it. Is this not something which dintinguishes infrastrutures (e.g. infrastructures for traffic, services or electric power) from other types of networks and socio-technical assemblages: that there is some input or throughput, that it comes in high numbers, and that developer-entrepreneurs try to establish infrastructures as complements or as purpose-giving or profit-generating tools with respect to the throughput?

A few months ago, Jan-Hendrik and I were discussing the utility of writing book reviews. One concern we had was that book reviews basically do nothing for one’s academic standing, but more than that, in thinking about the book reviews themselves, we were frustrated with them because unlike journal articles, they rarely reference other book reviews for the same book.

So, we wrote a book review that did, to test if there was any value to this. We enlisted a student of mine, Alexander Kinney, and we set to work writing a book review that included other reviews of the same book.

We wrote our editors:

To the editors,

Please see a book review of Latour’s “Reassembling the Social.” While my co-authors realize that the length is somewhat past the desired 1000 words, we hope that you find the document satisfactory. It employs a somewhat unorthodox approach where other book reviews are cited where appropriate so that we can essentially “review what has not yet been sufficiently reviewed by other reviewers.” Additionally, we ask for a small editing consideration for adding a small “box” around a subset of identified text (this mirrors what was done in Latour’s book). I know that this is an unorthodox review, and hope that the innovation is tolerated. Still, we are prepared to make amends if this document does not meet the standards of the journal.

best,
Nicholas J. Rowland

So, it has gone through a couple rounds of editing and is now in the proofs stage (please note that we realize that Latour’s book was written in 2005 [not 2007, as the title currently states]). Also, this new approach to book reviews also requires that one reviews a book a few years after publication rather than soon after publication. This is so that the other reviews can be written and, to some extent, responded to.

Here is the document below, feel free to comment on the approach, style, or content:

Search by Drawing

Draw an interesting curve, then click ‘Correlate!’ to find query terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.

https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw

This is somewhat humorous, but there is a good point here for STS and new institutionalism about the stabilization of forms and structures, in this case, the structure of informational news stories/shows — also termed “visual language”.

*NOTE: Modest swearing.*

Here is the link.

A friendly fight over standards in the plug market for electric cars appears to be brewing, according to a NYT article this morning.

WITH electric cars and plug-in hybrids at last trickling into the showrooms of mainstream automakers, the dream of going gasoline-free is becoming a reality for many drivers. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt can cover considerable distances under electric power alone — certainly enough for local errands and even most daily commutes — while enabling their owners to shun gas stations.

The multi-media portoin of the article is good stuff — I suspect similar pictures will be featured in an STS article sometime soon…

See the wiki devote to infrastructure. What should be added, deleted, or improved?

I recently attended a conference on “Game theory and society” at the ETH in Zürich. It was a very productive conference with a good mixture of plenary sessions with people like Brian Skyrms and Herbert Gintis and the usual host of more work-in-progress oriented panel sessions. Speakers and attendants had backgrounds in sociology, philosophy, economics, biology, even in physics. If there was a common and unifying interest, this interest was in modeling elementary forms of cooperation. All the more striking was the nearly complete absence of people from sociological theory. Game theory, it appears, has been largely abandoned by sociological theory, leaving it to colleagues specializing in formal modeling or generally versed in quantitative methods. It happens that I found this to be quite a pleasant bunch of people to be around.
A couple of questions with respect to our interest in infrastructures have been bugging me since:
– I might start with the issue brought up by Nicholas a couple of posts ago whether there is a problem in sociological theory of addressing questions of efficiency. After working through some of contemporary game-theoretical research and comparing it to the state of the art in sociological theory, how could I not agree? Game theory could be one, if not THE weapon of choice for sociologists discussing questions of efficiency in an analytical manner, and evolutionary approaches have been demonstrating that the use of game theory need not be congenial to either rationalistic or economistic reconstructions of effiency. Evolutionary game theory is particulary good at showing how inefficent equilibria come about and turn out to be stable.
– Closely related are questions of utility that tend to be treated with a similar kind of disregard by many sociologists. One does not need to adopt a utilitarian perspective to see that analyses how relationships and structures develop, how artefacts evolve and diffuse, etc. are correlated with (mostly implicit) ideas about utility. We may of course treat such ideas about the utility of contacts, associations, or tools as mere background assumptions of our observations of infrastructures, or we may broadly consider them as taken care of by looking at practice pragmatically. Seeing what can be accomplished by taking a more analytic approach to utility, I suspect though that we can do better than just telling utility stories (either with respect to particular cases or in the exposition of theory).
– Which brings me to the more general question of research orientation. Why is there so little modeling in STS and in the emergent field of studies of infrastructures? Researchers have been investigating broadly and writing quite generously about how complex forms of modeling are utilized in the construction of truths and technological artefacts but have been making little use of these methods and tools themselves. It is surely great to have so many sound STS case studies and ethnographies at our disposal in discussing our theoretical concepts and ideas about infrastructures, but again I suppose we could do much better with a less restrictive choice of methods and approaches. If there is a unilateral bias in favor of qualitative methods, story-telling and small-n studies, systemic problems in aggregating empirical data (if not, in the end, a constant recycling and re-invention of theoretical concepts with little progress in accumulating empirical intelligence) are likely to result.
Should we therefore not try to engage more with formal models of cooperation, social order and infrastructures? In Zürich, I found the doors to be generally open, and that there is a lot to learn in terms of concepts and methods. And I find myself encouraged to look into this in a more sustained manner.