People, places, technology, and such

Through Nicolas Nova’s blog, I got access to a paper on infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. The point that authors try to make is that infrastructure, defined as ‘the structures that lie below or beneath the surface of applications and interactions’ plays a key role in defining how we experience and interact with the world.

What I found more interesting is how the authors do not focus only on what we would call technological infrastructure. Infrastructure is not only about power supply, broadband connections and wi-fi hotspots, but also about space and things that populate it, about the ways we interact with, and the meanings we attach to them.

This conceptualization of infrastructure is aligned with Latour’s view of the agency of objects. Objects play a role in the course of actions, they participate, as actors, in the formation of associations. But these associations are difficult to trace except in specific moments when they are rendered visible: when there are innovations, i.e. new object types or modes of interaction are created; when they are approached by users unfamiliar with them, or when they stop working (due to accidents, breakdowns, strikes…). These are exactly the situations in which infrastructure becomes relevant: when there is some change in it (innovation), when it is approached by somebody not familiar with it, or when simply it is not working any more, at least as the user would expect it to work.

New applications, new technologies, new artifacts, can change the strength of some associations, and maybe create new ones. In that process, part of the underlying infrastructure is going to become visible and relevant again, it is going to evolve and change, as the innovations and the way we associate to them adapt to it, and finally become themselves part of the infrastructure.

These days, I’m slowly progressing on the self-imposed task of reading Brumo Latour’s introduction to Actor-Network Theory: Reassembling the Social. Although Latour’s writing style is relatively light, at least compared to other sociology theorists such as Habermas or Bordieu, I still find quite difficult to grasp all the subtilities of actors, mediators, translation, oligopticons, plug-ins…My first experience with ANT was in a doctoral course about Technology, Economy and Society, where different theories about the interaction between technology and society, such as technological determinism or social construction of technology, were briefly described. What I found most interesting about ANT, and differentiating to other theories and frameworks, was the role it gives to non-human actors.

Society and Technology Studies have always struggled to accommodate the mechanisms in which technological artifacts and society interact and shape each other. The solution that ANT gives to this problem is quite simple and, at least apparently, neat: there is no technology and society as two separate realms that interact with each other: technological artifacts, and also science facts, are actors in the social network, that interact with other actors in a process of constant reshaping and reassembling.

This concept may sound strange at first, but if you look at it in more detail it starts to make, at least, some sense. It is quite obvious that technological artifacts, such as for example the Internet, on one side embody the values, concepts, ideas, cliches…. of the people, groups, and organizations that participate in their design and development (in their construction…); but they also reshape, reorganize, reassemble those other actors, be them humans or not.

ANT has also had its antagonists and it has been, and still is, subjected to very passionate debates (passionate, at least, for academics standards…), such as the Science Wars episode of the early nineties. Hard core positivists freak out whenever the concept of science being socially constructed is introduced. Latour addresses this topic in Reassembling the social with, I think, a good point: saying that science is constructed does not mean that scientific and technological knowledge is not true, but rather that there are lots of resources, interactions and relations between different actors (remember both human and not human) that have to be assembled to construct it.

However, the part I’ve found most interesting of the book is the section about how to do ANT research, how to write risky accounts in Latour’s terms. The author describes an ethnographic approach and a method to capture data about actors and associations, using four notebooks to ensure that both the actors’ own perceptions and the effect of the field data on the research and the researcher are logged.

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