Quotes that I find interesting.
“Materials that constrain and enable biological researchers. Rats, petri dishes, taxidermy, planaria, drosophila, and test tubes take center stage in this narrative”.
“Many classifications appear as nothing more than lists of numbers with labels attached, buried in software menus, user’s manuals , or other references”.
“In the built world we inhabit, thousands and thousands of standards are used everywhere, from setting up the plumbing in a house, to assembling a car engine to transferring a file from one computer to another”.
“There are standards for paper size, the distance between lines in lined paper, envelope size, the glue on the envelope, the size of stamps, their glue, the ink in a pen, the sharpness of its bib, the composition of the paper and so forth”.
INFRASTRUCTURE
“Embeddedness; Infrastructure is sunk into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies”
“Transparency; Infrastructure is transparent to use in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks”.
“Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice; for example; the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by affect electrical power night rates and needs”.
“Built on an installed basis”
“Becomes visible upon breakdown. 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. Even when there are backup mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now visible infrastructure”.
notes
Ubiquity
"classifications schemes and standards literally saturate our environment".
"In the built world we live in thousands and thousands of standards are used everywhere"
"Becoming irate"; "Becker had succeeded in unearthing a little of the hidden classificatory apparatus behind the scenes of the airline. He notes that the interaction after this speeded up and went particularly smoothly". I familiarise with speeding up a piece of technology that is standardised. When I used to put credit on my phone I would have to follow a sequence of questions and say yes or no, or press a number, i would press it as quickly as possible just as the question is about to be asked, sometimes it worked and other times it didn't. I am curious about how we can manipulate technology the way it is programmed. It is interesting how we quicken up, because often when you buy a state of the art piece of equipment we are startled and excited by how clever it is, it feels so powerful, that we can't understand how to use it. But once we understand it and get into the habit of using it, its like second nature to us. So we become cleverer than the item, once we have sussed its limits. Often my impatience encourages me to mess around with the item and explore its limitations.
"We also need concepts for understanding movements, textures, and shifts that will grasp patterns within the ubiquitous larger phenomenon".
"Other's are everywhere, structuring social order"
Materiality and texture
"built into and embedded in every feature of the built environment"
"physical entities, such as paper forms, plugs, or software instructions encoded in silicon, and conventional arrangements such as speed and rhythm, dimension, and how specifications are implemented".
The indeterminacy of the past
"Multiple voices and silences are represented in any scheme that attempts to sort out the world"
Practical politics
"Investigating categories and standards as technologies".
"Arriving at categories and standards , and, along the way, deciding what will be visible or invisible within the system".
"even when everyone agrees on how classifications or standards should be established, there are often practical difficulties about how to craft them. For example, a classification system with 20,000 bins n every form is practically unusable for data entry purposes. The constraints of technological record keeping come into play at every turn".
Infrastructure and method: convergence.
Standards, categories, technologies, and phenomenology are increasingly converging in larger-scale information infrastructure"
"we are concerned with what they do pragmatically speaking as scaffolding in the conduct of modern life".
Resistance
"Donald MacKenzie's (1990) wonderful study of "missile accuracy" furnishes the best example of this approach. In a concluding chapter of his book, he discusses he possibility of "uninventing the bomb" by which he means changing society and technology in such a way that the atomic bomb becomes an impossibility".
"Standards and classifications, however dry and formal on the surfaces, are suffused with traces of political and social work. Whether we wish to uninvent any particular aspect of complex information structure is properly a political and a public issue"
"Others are almost accidental- systems that become so complex that no one person and no organisation can predict or administer good policy".
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