The Invisible Aspects of Digital Infrastructure

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Infrastructure has long been of interest to STS scholars – different types (transport and communication), studied from different perspectives (historical, economic, ethnographic).

In this session, we focus on two aspects of digital infrastructures. The first concerns science, research and education. Knowledge work depends not only on classification (in labs, databases, libraries) but also on the invisible work of technicians, software engineers and information professionals. The second is how digital infrastructures are entangled in questions of privacy, security and surveillance. Despite the globalising affordances of digital technologies, we know that they are taken up in local settings, often in very different ways. We also know that privacy, security and surveillance mean very different things in different contexts.

This session opens up discussion about the invisible aspects of digital infrastructures, by bringing together insights from STS about socio-technical ensembles together with ideas from (Marxist) sociology and political economy. Presenters and audience members are invited to reflect on the meaning of hidden infrastructures and to what extent STS can recover the significance of infrastructure that has disappeared because it is taken for granted, as in debates around the 'post-digital' that posit the internet as being 'taken for granted'.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / The invisible aspects of infrastructure

Chair

• Tim Jordan, University of Sussex

Discussant

• Sally Wyatt, Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht Univer

Individual Presentations

• Prototypes for Openness: Platforming Non-Commercial Open Science Infrastructures - Kyle Harp-Rushing, University of California, Riverside

• Upturning Infrastructure: Obfuscation, Invisibility, and the Material Contours of Knowledge Infrastructures - Robert Montoya, University of California, Los Angeles; Gregory Leazer, UCLA Dept of Information Studies

• The Room Where It Happens: The Hidden “Business” of Infrastructure in Social Science Data Archives - Kalpana Shankar, School of Information and Library Studies, University College Dublin; Rachel Williams, Simmons College; Kristin Eschenfelder, University Of Wisconsin-Madison

• Demonstrating Cyber Security: Making Invisible Breaches Visible - Jessamy Perriam, Open University

• Probing the Political-Economic and Social Dimensions of Present Information Technology Development in Mainland China - Michael Unger Kowen, UC Berkeley Department of Sociology

• The Other Computing Counterculture: Community Memory's Public Computing Terminals - Joseph Richard DeLeon, University of Michigan

Session Organizers

• Sally Wyatt, Department of Technology and Society Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht Univer

• Tim Jordan, University of Sussex