Ethnographies of Infrastructure or ‘The Society of People Interested in Boring Things’
‘The Society of People Interested in Boring Things’
“Some five years ago, in Palo Alto, California, I joined with several colleagues, all ethnographers, to found a new professional society1. The idea for the society arose from a series of conversations we had about our somewhat unusual research topics - things that most people would find quite dull. We called it The Society of People Interested in Boring Things. All of us were, in some way, interested in a broad study of information technology, using ethnography.”
(Star 2002: 108)
I wanted to start this post with that particular quote because it was actually what I most vividly remembered from my first reading of this well-known paper by Susan Leigh Star.
I’m still amazed by the humorous tone and the way Star introduced something important to her and her peers that they actually took quite seriously without taking themselves too serious. I find that really refreshing in an academic paper and especially so because I think it helps readers to relate to the text and the author and therefore helps the author to communicate the importance of studying things and practices that most people would initially disregard as too mundane, to banale or just too boring.
Excerpt
Author
Susan Leigh Star
Full title:
Infrastructure and Ethnographic Practice: Working on the Fringes
I think Star’s argument also exposes a tension in ethnography. While ideally ethnography pays close attention to everyday practices and routines since the inception of ethnographic fieldwork more than a hundred years ago, and those everyday events should qualify as quite “boring” most of the times because of their repetitive and supposedly insignificant nature, there still tends to be a tendency to focus on “the exotic” in those analyses of everyday realities. At least this is what I gather from her text and I think it still holds true in many cases. But to be fair, from my limited overview, I also think there has been a general shift towards the more mundane and “boring” matters since the 1990th or early 2000s.
In the following passage, Star provides her interpretation of what makes it difficult to study infrastructure as one type of a boring thing (or an assemblage of boring things) ethnographically:
“The first barrier to using fieldwork is seeing infrastructure, and that means getting past the first take on information infrastructure – that it is boring, not as exciting as the traditional issues fieldwork is so good at ‘catching.’ At first try, using fieldwork to stand and watch people punching keys and looking at screens is terribly difficult for trying to see social order. Or, in fact, to see much of anything. (…)
As I have noted, for historical reasons, infrastructure is usually singularly unexciting as a research object for ethnographers. The human, symbolic, interactive aspects of infrastructure are terribly difficult for ethnographers to ‘open up’ in the way that we easily may open up conversations, rituals or gestures. Infrastructure often appears simply as a list of numbers of technical specifications, or black boxes, wires and plugs, in the scientific/disciplinary workplace. (Where is the human behavior side of that?)” (Star 2002: 108f.)
Another paragraph that really stuck with me from Star’s paper is her fantastic demonstration of recognizing social structure in highly formalized and abstract text corpora like the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) or a telephone book. I had tears of joy in my eyes while I was reading it:
“Reading the ICD is a lot like reading the telephone book. In fact, it is worse. The telephone book, especially the yellow pages, contains a more obvious degree of narrative structure. It tells how local businesses see themselves, how many restaurants of a given ethnicity there are in the locale, whether or not hot tubs or plastic surgeons are to be found there. (Yet most people don’t curl up with a good telephone book of[sic.] a Saturday night.)2”
(Star 2002: 110)
In the paper, Star goes on to illustrate how the telephone book encodes e.g. culturally prevalent gender ideologies (which is not to say those are “just ideas”) or historical changes in the cultural perception and positioning of drug addiction. I think Star presents those inquiries into encoded social structure in an exceptionally lucid style.
While this kind of “deconstructing” allegedly neutral objects and pointing to their socio-cultural fabric and all the values and norms embedded in them might evoke a stale taste of 90th postmodern critiques, Star makes it clear from the beginning, that this kind of “analysis” is not what she has in mind:
“One way to understand these emphases, from an ethnographic point of view, is not to yell ‘ah ha, a bias! I knew it all along.’ This is not only bad fieldwork, it becomes a silly sort of boredom after the first éclat that science indeed contains values and biases. What is of more concern to information sciences is how to use this ethnographic information to theorize about the information-communication aspects of social order, and to help us understand the changes wrought by information technology.” (Star 2002: 111)
It is this much more moderate and nuanced way of approaching the things we study with curiosity that I appreciate so much about ethnography - this effort to try at least to really understand the specific ways of being in the world, of interacting with other people, entities and objects and how those relations are constantly in flux. Instead of approaching any particular field or object with a preconceived notion of what evil or bliss we surely will find there, I think this close attention to the details and specifics of how for example specific technologies (in contrast to some vague concept of “technology” in general or even information technology) affect and transform certain relations and concrete interaction patterns allows for a far more adequate understanding of the respective matter and consequentially also a more adequate ways of acting upon this understanding.
Star points to the work that goes into the creation of a thesaurus and how this process and its result have changed in form due to new information technologies:
“New faster, bigger databases and algorithms for disambiguation change some things about the problems - speed of processing, revising thesauri on the fly, (…). In earlier times, changes to thesauri in print versions, could take years or decades, involve many committees and much heated, but invisible, discussion of revisions. These have by no means disappeared in the digital realm, but take a different form, some of it automated. However, while the smoke may have disappeared from the smoke-filled rooms of committees, the heat has not. To bring this back again to ethnographic practice, it is precisely the role of fieldwork to understand – through a kind of temporary membership – these fringes and nuances. The fact that there are clashes and differences in meaning is a commonplace of ethnography. What is new is the speed and complexity with which these fringes appear in our everyday lives, via information technologies. Methodologically, we need to learn to speak to them as a form of social ordering – not to sort them out on behalf of others, but to take note of the shape and nature of the clashes, their duration, and their consequences.”
(Star 2002: 111)
Flip just one page in your PDF viewer and Star gives a concise summary of an earlier study where she and her colleague Karen Ruhleder simultaneously studied the work of a community of biologists while at the same time contributing to the development of an information management system for that community (-> co-design / collaborative design). In only one paragraph Star is able to give a rough idea of the system’s troubled adoption due to A) other more accessible technologies and B) differences in the usage intended by the devs on the one hand and and the actual use or resistance to it by the biologists on the other (112).
Flip another two pages and the author presents a hilarious account of her’s and her husband’s struggle with the categories and questions on an immigration form while casually (but not in a distasteful way) pointing to the highly problematic origin of some of those categories in the eugenics movement and stressing “the range and nature of what computer scientists would call ‘legacy systems’ found in everyday life and in formal systems” (ibid 114).
She continues with a short overview of ethnographic research on knowledge production e.g. in scientific laboratories as it became more common in Science and Technology Studies and the resulting turn to materiality.
The central concept of her paper - infrastructure - is laid out in the following quote in a way that also demonstrates Star’s excellent writing style, which I could not possibly match in any attempt to rephrase its content in a suitable manner:
“Defining infrastructure is not as obvious as it may seem. I had a commonsense notion of infrastructure when I first started studying the design of interdisciplinary computer systems – infrastructure as something that other things “run on,” things that are substrate to events and movements. Railroads, highways, plumbing, electricity, and more recently, the information superhighway. Good infrastructure is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand. This image holds up well enough for most purposes—-turn on the faucet for a drink of water and you use a vast infrastructure of plumbing and water regulation without usually thinking much about it. However, in light of a deeper analysis of infrastructure, and especially to understand large-scale technical systems in the making, or to examine the situations of those who are not served by a particular infrastructure, this definition is both too shallow and too absolute. For a highway engineer, the tarmac is not infrastructure but topic of research and development. For the blind person, the graphics programming and standards for the World Wide Web are not helpful supporters of computer use, but barriers that must be worked around2. One person’s infrastructure is another’s brick wall, or in some cases, one person’s brick wall is another’s object of demolition. As Star and Ruhleder put it, infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices2. (…) In my studies of the development of computer systems and scientific work, I have begun to see infrastructure as part of human organization, and as problematic as any other part. I’ve done a kind of Gestalt switch, what Bowker has called an ‘infrastructural inversion’ – foregrounding the truly back stage elements of work practice, the boring things2. (…)Technological developments are processes and relations braided in with thought and work. In the study of nematologists mentioned above, Ruhleder and I listed the properties of infrastructure as that which is embedded; transparent; having reach or scope; is learned as part of membership; has links with conventions of practice; embodies standards; is built on an installed base (and its inertia); becomes visible upon breakdown; and is fixed in modular increments, not centrally or from an overview.”
(Star 2002: 116f.)
In addition, Star also offers a short but precise definition of her (and Griesemer’s) famous concept of boundary objects (ibid. 118), she further elaborates on taken-for-granted inscriptions of social structure (ibid. 119) the invisible work (ibid. 120) of marginalized and unrecognized workers and the tinkering and workarounds technical solutions or scientific classification systems require us to come up with (ibid. 118).
And there are still a lot of fascinating anecdotes and illustrations, summaries and examinations to be found in this very dense and yet accessible text from almost twenty years ago that are nonetheless relevant to the day.
The central message resonates throughout her text with the world we live in, I think: Ethnographies of the “boring” things, of infrastructure, of all the taken-for-granted and invisible aspects of our everyday lives including technology are important. This message is particularly clear in the following plea:
“[L]et us also attend analytically to the plugs, settings, sizes, and other profoundly mundane aspects of cyberspace, in some of the same ways we might parse a telephone book. (…) There are many fewer studies on the effect of standardization or formal classification on group formation, the design of networks and their import for various communities, or on the fierce policy debates about domain names, exchange protocols, or languages. Perhaps this is not surprising, given the invisible and boring nature of many of these venues from the point of view of social science and humanities. The latter topics tend to occur in semi-private settings, or buried in inaccessible electronic code. Theirs is not the usual sort of anthropological or ethnographic strangeness. Rather, it is an embedded strangeness, a second- order one, that of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place. (…) Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power (but see Latour and Hernant, 1998). Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change. Your ethnography will be incomplete.”
References
Star, Susan Leigh
2002 Infrastructure and Ethnographic Practice: Working on the fringes. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14(2): 107-122.