Technology and Dis/Organization: Digital data infrastructures as partial connections

Abstract

This paper addresses the relationship between digital technology and dis/organization by theorizing and analysing digital data infrastructures as partial connections. Much literature attends to the ordering and controlling organizational powers of digital data infrastructures. We propose to expand existing discussions by also exploring their disorganizing aspects. Drawing on Marilyn Strathern, we conceptualize digital data infrastructures as partial connections that both connect and disconnect, with the implication of simultaneously ordering and disordering the social relations implicated by digital data infrastructures. With a case study of a national well-being survey used in Danish education governance, we illustrate this point, showing how connective and commensurable powers of digital infrastructures not only (re-)organize social relations through their datafication but also disorganize the infrastructural imperative of connectivity in unanticipated ways. This leads us to argue that dis/organization is integral to the powerful ordering capacities of digital data infrastructures.