Some notes I took while reviewing Susan Leigh Star's seminal article 'The Ethnography of Infrastructure'. In American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 43, No. 3, November/December 1999, 377-391.
In her work describing methodological aspects of infrastructure studies or, as she prefers to name it, the ‘study of boring things’, Leigh Star highlighted the difficulty and strangeness of studying infrastructures: “struggles with infrastructure are built into the very fabric of technical work”. According to her, such studies do not incorporate only the usual strangeness that is habitual to anthropological work. Rather it is a second-order strangeness, of an embedded sort – “that [strangeness] of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place”. She was referring to these things we often do not considered as important: “as well as the important studies of body snatching, identity tourism, and transglobal knowledge networks, let us also attend ethnographically to the plugs, settings, sizes, and other profoundly mundane aspects of cyberspace, in some of the same ways we might parse a telephone book”. We can see just how technical media of each time participate in the perception of the mundanity of each of these artifacts, such as computer settings or telephone books. So “the ecology of the distributed high-tech spaces is profoundly impacted by the relatively understudied infrastructure that permeates all its functions. Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you will miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power” (Latour & Hermant, 1998). And she remarks: “Perhaps if we stopped thinking of computers as information highways and began to think of them more modestly as symbolic sewers, this realm would open up a bit”. The article also highlights some important methodological tools: Infrastructural inversion (Bowker, 1994) -> “foregrounding the truly backstage events of work practice to help describe the history of large-scale systems”. Bowker, G. 1994. Information mythology and infrastructure. According to Leigh Star & Ruhleder (1996), in their work on Worm Communities, INFRASTRUCTURES as technical systems have the following dimensions: a) Embeddedness; b) Transparency; c) Reach or scope; d) Learned as part of membership; e) Links with conventions of practice; f) Embodiment of standards; g) Built on an installed base; h) Becomes visible upon breakdown; i) Is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally (p.381-382). See more in: Leigh Star & Ruhleder (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure. Some particular notes on these dimensions: d) The taken-for-grantedness of artefacts and organisational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice (p. 381). e) Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice (e.g., the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs). Generations of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboards and thence by the design of today’s computer furniture (Becker 1982) (p.381). f) Infrastructure does not grow out of nothing. It wrestles with the inertia of the installed base and inherits strengths and limitations from that base. Optical fibers run along old railroad lines; new systems are designed for backward compatibility, and failing to account for these constraints may be fatal or distorting to new development processes (Hanseth & Monteiro, 1996) (p.382). g) The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks; the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout (p.382). Infrastructure and Methods: The article also highlights that the methodological implications of a relational approach to infrastructure are considerable: Fieldwork (...) transmogrifies to a combination of historical and literary analysis, traditional tools like interviews and observations, systems analysis, and usability studies (p.382). People make meanings based on their circumstances, and (...) these meanings would be inscribed into their judgements about the built information environment (p.383). The labor-intensive and analysis-intensive craft of qualitative research, combined with a historical emphasis on single investigator studies, has never lent itself to ethnography of thousands. (...) The scale question remains a pressing and open one for methodological concerns in the study of infrastructure. (...) Yet, I know of no one who has analysed transaction logs to their own satisfaction, never mind to a standard of ethnographic veridicality (p.383-384). Tricks of the Trade: In this section, Leigh Star examines tricks she developed in her studies which can be helpful for analysing infrastructure and unraveling some of its features.
The thorny problem of indicators: In Leigh Star’s view, one can read information infrastructure either as: a) A material artifact constructed by people (physical and pragmatic properties); b) a trace or record of activities (transaction logs, email records, classification systems as evidence of cultural decisions, conflicts and values); c) a veridical representation of the world (here the information system is tacitly taken as if it was a complete enough record of actions). These are three different orders of information that researchers can access. It is easy to elide these functions of indicators, so it is VERY important to cultivate an awareness of these differences and to disentangle them. I.e.: “Films about rape may say a great deal about a given culture’s acceptance of sexual violence, but they are not the same thing as police statistics about rape, nor the same as phenomenological investigations of the experience of being raped” (p.388). Not to confuse precision and validity in the creation of a system of indicators and categories. They are two different indicators. Bridges and barriers: “At least since Winner’s (1986) classic chapter, ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ the question of whether and how values are inscribed in technical systems has been a live one in the communities studying technology and its design” (p.388). In this study, Winner observed how a behind-the-scenes policy decision was made to make automobile bridges over parkway in New York low in height. With this, public transport such as buses could not pass, only private small vehicles. Results: Poor people were barred from richer suburbs of Long Island, not by policy, but by design. This is just one example. Matters of accessibility, for instance, rely on that as well. The same with computers and IT infrastructure in poor countries or regions: it would have the infra funded, but perhaps the electricity would be expensive. The same now happens in relation to sustainable systems for media infrastructure and global injustices. Building the infra and not fixing the energy systems will just make the differences in economics larger. She concludes that, still in the 90’s, that “applying the insights, methods, and perspectives of ethnography to this class of issues is a terryfying and delightful challenge for what some would call the information age”.
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AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
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