Socio-technical Assemblage Research Articles

Ethnography, Objects and Reflexivity: A Case Study of the Selfie Stick

In her paper on Ethnography, Objects and Reflexivity: A Case Study of the Selfie Stick Jessamy Perriam focuses on how objects of a rather faddish nature such as the selfie-stick might be observed from a Science and Technology Studies perspective with the concept of disconcertment and an autoethnographic and ethnomethodological approach. The latter in terms of doing a breaching experiment. Perriam argues for the co-existence of discourses on the selfie-stick from strong rejection by journalists and the public to broad attention and wide use in everyday life. The former relate its use to narcissism and potential harm and the latter to its representations for social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. The selfie-stick and the specific images it produces may be understood as enabling a multi-layered socio-technical assemblage of (non-) human relations, existing in both material and digital field sites.

The “forced performativity” of a strategy concept: Exploring how shared value shaped a gambling company's strategy

Using performativity as a theoretical angle, this paper explores how shared value, a strategic management concept, shaped a gambling company's strategy despite the inherent inconsistency between gambling, a socially harmful activity, and shared value, which is intended to create economic value by creating social value. The study introduces the notion of “forced performativity”, the process wherein a concept performs in a highly infelicitous context. It identifies three moments that were determinant in the forced performativity of shared value: the Porter author-isation, referring to the mobilisation of the author's persona to establish the legitimacy of the concept; the causality distortion, when causalities drawing explicit links between social and financial performance are created; and the incitement of friction, wherein the purposeful maintaining of tensions ensured the stabilisation of the socio-technical assemblage. These three moments are connected within a process model of forced performativity. The paper contributes to the ongoing debate about how recent sociological ramifications of performativity relate to its linguistic origin by arguing for the complementarity of these two approaches. The intent is also to open a discussion about a performativity-based understanding of corporate social responsibility.

Towards productive critique of large-scale comparisons in education

ABSTRACTInternational large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation’s education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic ‘race’. These assessments provoke passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Within academe, ILSAs are researched by sociologists and psychometricians, policy experts and statisticians. This multidisciplinary, multi-voice discussion has not always served to highlight the complexity of the issues involved. Instead, discussions across various groups of actors have often led to a polarisation of views and a hardening of stances. Large-scale comparisons have deeply divided academic opinion with regard to their validity, usefulness and use. The divergence in ontological commitments, methodologies and paradigms of research makes discussions among one set of scholars almost incomprehensible to another. New theories, concepts and vocabularies are urgently required to engage productively with this important phenomenon. Borrowing concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the history and sociology of numbers, I argue that understanding such comparative exercises as socio-technical assemblages would move the critique of large-scale comparisons in education in more productive directions.

Dangerous assemblages: Salts, trihalomethanes and endocrine disruptors in the water palimpsest of the Llobregat River, Catalonia

Water flows through time are connected to specific instances of socionatural and sociotechnical assemblages of human and non-human components. We propose the concept of “water palimpsest” in order to characterize the complex histories of chemical and metabolic alterations embodied in water flows, potentially disruptive for humans and other living beings. Through the concept of palimpsest we interpret the configuration of water flows as constantly evolving towards new patterns maintaining at the same time traces of past mixtures. In order to decipher water pollution by means of a political ecology approach we argue that it is necessary to characterize the historical contours under which certain substances in river waters appear, interact and become hazardous. Engaging critically with literature on assemblages but also with chemical and epidemiological scientific literature, and drawing from archival and oral sources, we provide an account of historically produced pollution in the waters of Llobregat River (Catalonia) by unravelling the assemblages that shape the water palimpsest in this river. In parallel, we narrate the advances in instrumentation and analysis which permitted to detect and measure substances beyond recognition by human senses and preceded legal regulations on pollutants, starting from milligrams and (thus far) arriving at nanoscales. Focusing on the emergence of three typologies of pollutants – salts, trihalomethanes (THMs) and endocrine disruptors (EDs) – we unveil how these three assemblages embody specific instances of Llobregat socioenvironmental history, pointing towards a palimpsest characterized by increasing levels of complexity and uncertainty. The concept of water palimpsest allows us to incorporate non-human agency into the analysis of water quality and to infuse political ecology with materiality and thus with a (largely missing) focus on physicochemical and biological processes.

Lethal visions: the eye as function of the weapon

ABSTRACTIn measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a ‘logistics of perception’, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking) and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders is concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has however extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light itself through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation is to be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb.

Layers of sense: the sensory work of diagnostic sensemaking in digital health.

Sensory judgements have always been a part of medical practice and this sensory work is often entangled with technologies, from the stethoscope to digitised devices for advanced life support. This article investigates this sensory work and its entanglements with technological sensors in diagnostic practice. Based on semi-structured interviews, it presents a close analysis of practitioners’ use of anaesthetic monitoring and telemedicine. It argues that senses and sensors are recursively combined in the moment towards understanding. In this, digital technologies do not present self-evident data, but rather the practitioner must learn to sense the sensors to interpret health and illness. Sensory work (of both the senses and sensors) is not dispensable or entirely delegable because it is intimately entwined with sensemaking. The significance of sensory work to sensemaking reinforces the importance of its consideration in digital health sociotechnical assemblages.

The praxis and politics of building urban dashboards

This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard – a website built by two of the authors that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information – from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence to unpack the building of the dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.

Hacktivism: On the Use of Botnets in Cyberattacks

This article offers a reading of internet-based activism or ‘hacktivism’ as a phenomenon that cannot be confined to the instrumental use of information technologies. It focuses on a subset of hacktivism – the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for political ends – that aims at making an internet host unavailable to its intended users. Since the early 2000s these attacks have been increasingly conducted by means of botnets – networks of infected computers that send bogus requests to a target website without the consent of their users. The capacity of botnets to engender a more-than-human politics is analyzed from two distinct theoretical angles. First, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, the hacktivist DDoS is discussed as an assemblage of signifying and a-signifying components, voluntary and involuntary actions. Second, Gilbert Simondon’s notions of transindividuation and transduction allow for a conceptualization of hacktivism as a sociotechnical assemblage with a high degree of indetermination.

The microgeographies of global finance: High-frequency trading and the construction of information inequality

Automated high-frequency trading has grown tremendously in the past 20 years and is responsible for about half of all trading activities at stock exchanges worldwide. Geography is central to the rise of high-frequency trading due to a market design of “continuous trading” that allows traders to engage in arbitrage based upon informational advantages built into the socio-technical assemblages that make up current capital markets. Enormous investments have been made in creating transmission technologies and optimizing computer architectures, all in an effort to shave milliseconds of order travel time (or latency) within and between markets. We show that as a result of the built spatial configuration of capital markets, “public” is no longer synonymous with “equal” information. High-frequency trading increases information inequalities between market participants.

Indigenous cryptocurrency: Affective capitalism and rhetorics of sovereignty

Financial technologies embody and shape notions of social, as well as financial, worth. New digital ‘alt-finance’ systems, including the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies,’ are no exception: technology, rhetoric, imagined users and non-users, and a long history of sociotechnical, political, and cultural relations are all elements in a dynamic assemblage with wide-ranging consequences. This paper examines the rise and fall of one alt-finance system: MazaCoin, a Bitcoin variant intended to benefit the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The story of MazaCoin is one of an attempt to unite two apparently divergent sociotechnical assemblages: (1) a libertarian, elite technology of cryptocurrency, and (2) a richly traditional indigenous community with a deep desire for cultural survivance, bound up in a precarious economy left behind in the wake of more than a century of genocide.

Assembling desires: Synthetic biology and the wish to act at a distant time

Wonderful living things such as biological clocks, sensors, living cameras and switches are often presented as iconic designs in synthetic biology. The wonderfulness of such living things resides in their performative powers: they ‘count’, ‘memorise’ or ‘imprint’, and they do so by living. This paper explores design in synthetic biology. It follows a basic biological part, a BioBrick construction, situating it as an element of more complex socio-technical assemblages. The paper explores how living designs in synthetic biology are stabilized and given credit. Rather than producing static matters of fact, synthetic biology turns the dynamics of life itself into a matter of design. Arguably, living designs in synthetic biology displace the epistemic focus, moving its referential anchoring from ‘back’ in reality to ‘ahead’ in the future or from the natural organism to the possible living thing. A will to act at a distant time is inscribed in the living wonderful things of synthetic biology. The paper proposes a number of ways in which action is displaced towards the future within synthetic biology designs: as recursive innovation, potentiality, technological acceleration and anticipatory action. Matters of design in synthetic biology are justified on the premise that wished-for futures can be realized.

Organising the machine: material-discursive practices and mobile medical equipment engineers

In this paper, I consider the mobile work of medical equipment engineers to reveal material-discursive practices during the installation of a Cone-Beam Computerised Tomography system. In doing so, I draw together elements of organisation studies and mobilities to explore movement in relation to matter, meaning and materialisation. I use the medical equipment engineers’ work to explore materialities of organising in physical spaces that are continually changing and examine how mobile work shapes, and is shaped by, context, ordering and potentiality. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with medical equipment engineers, the data are interrogated to elucidate these highly mobile working practices, specifically drawing out practices and materialities that relate to ordering and space making. The analysis describes the way in which engineers temporarily “own” spaces in which their work takes place whilst also being shaped by the organisation in which they are placed. I discuss the technologies of ordering (or control), which take the form of plans or protocols (physical or virtual), and material elements, such as signage, that shape, influence and control but also facilitate, enable and authorise mobile work to take place. Modes of ordering, or strategies, are unpacked to reveal how mobilities influence material-discursive becomings and thus how the mobilities of the engineers become internal to the sociomaterial ordering of the machine. Through this empirical paper, I demonstrate how the mobilities paradigm can help understand these circulations of knowledge and thus understand how mobile work shapes sociotechnical assemblages.

Assemblage of the vertical: commercial drones and algorithmic life

Abstract. This paper takes up the increasingly popular topic of drones – including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), and a vast panoply of commercial drones and copters – to argue that our analysis should lie not so much on drones as objects, but as assemblages of the vertical. Drones, I argue, constitute a socio-technical assemblage of the sky and vertical space, which means that our focus should be not (only) on their technological development and capacities but also on their effects and affects. The latter of these include increasing algorithmic data collection and circulation that follow anticipatory logics.

Symposium 3: (Dis)connective Practice in Heterotopic Spaces for Networked and Connected Learning

This paper explores the implications of learners’ and educators’ appropriation of Social Networking Sites (SNS) for informal open, networked and connected learning through the lens of learner practices within sociotechnical assemblages. Relevant themes identified from the literature are the impact of an advocacy approach in open, networked and connected learning; the mutuality of openness and closure; time-space online; connective and dis-connective practices and heterotopias.A theory of Disconnective Practice has been developed by Light in relation to SNS that helps us to understand practice through considering disconnection as well as the more usual perspective of connection. Mejias' critique of the nodocentric view presented by SNS can help by alerting us to the concept of paranodes, spaces that lie beyond the logic of the network. Providers of SNS benefit from connection, media production and sharing by members that enhance their advertising services.I explore heterotopias, unsettling fragmentary places, in open practice using two vignettes of PhD students, one in a social context and another in a research context. The first vignette explores the global nature of context and culture collapse across SNS, as a student moves to a different country and culture to undertake PhD study. This vignette highlights the impact of the combination of persistent data and (hyper)connection to extended and invisible audiences. The second vignette explores how different regimes of Open Access publishing operate within the politics of Higher Education (HE) contexts.Although heterotopias are important to open, networked and connected learning they can be difficult to achieve: disconnective practice can help. Networks crave connection and resist our scrutiny. Thus learners need to be able to practice disconnection as well as connection, and be able and prepared to challenge the logic of SNS and institutional systems.How can digital literacy practices of learners and teachers take account of learning on SNS when the focus of SNS is to benefit advertising services that are the actual customers?

Disassembling Bike-Sharing Systems: Surveillance, Advertising, and the Social Inequalities of a Global Technological Assemblage

The rapid expansion of bike-share systems worldwide has been praised as a sign of the environmental movement, with positive consequences for transportation, the economy, and health in urban areas. But is it really possible that politicians, information-technology companies, and global players such as banks and advertising firms have suddenly joined the ranks of those advocating bicycle use for the sake of the environment and a better quality of life in cities? Bike-share systems, like any other artifact, are a technological assemblage formed by technical, cultural, economic, and social factors and actors. When this assemblage stabilizes and is socially accepted, debate cools down and some unresolved features are put aside. We argue that disassembly of the bike-share system, highlighting the use of electronic keys, credit cards, and the strategic location of docks in upmarket urban areas, may enable us to unveil some of its features and reveal a more complex sociotechnical assemblage.

Thinking critically about and researching algorithms

ABSTRACTMore and more aspects of our everyday lives are being mediated, augmented, produced and regulated by software-enabled technologies. Software is fundamentally composed of algorithms: sets of defined steps structured to process instructions/data to produce an output. This paper synthesises and extends emerging critical thinking about algorithms and considers how best to research them in practice. Four main arguments are developed. First, there is a pressing need to focus critical and empirical attention on algorithms and the work that they do given their increasing importance in shaping social and economic life. Second, algorithms can be conceived in a number of ways – technically, computationally, mathematically, politically, culturally, economically, contextually, materially, philosophically, ethically – but are best understood as being contingent, ontogenetic and performative in nature, and embedded in wider socio-technical assemblages. Third, there are three main challenges that hinder research about algorithms (gaining access to their formulation; they are heterogeneous and embedded in wider systems; their work unfolds contextually and contingently), which require practical and epistemological attention. Fourth, the constitution and work of algorithms can be empirically studied in a number of ways, each of which has strengths and weaknesses that need to be systematically evaluated. Six methodological approaches designed to produce insights into the nature and work of algorithms are critically appraised. It is contended that these methods are best used in combination in order to help overcome epistemological and practical challenges.

Infrastructure as intermeditation – from archives to research infrastructures

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the steps taken to produce new kinds of integrated documentation on the Holocaust in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project. The authors present the user investigation methodology as well as the novel data design to support this complex field. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on the scholarly primitives framework. From here, it proceeds with two empirical studies of Holocaust archival research and the implementation steps taken. The paper employs key insights from large technology studies in how to organise such work. In particular, it uses the concepts of social-technical assemblages and intermediation. Findings – The paper offers a number of findings. First from the empirical studies, it presents how Holocaust researchers and archivist perceive the way they currently do research in archives. It then presents how the intermediation and digital transformation of such research can be enabled without violating its foundations. The second major insight is the technical research into how to use graph databases to integrate heterogeneous research collections and the analysis opportunities behind. Originality/value – The paper is based on existing work by the authors but takes this work forward into the world of real-life existing historical research on archives. It demonstrates how the theoretical foundations of primitives are fit for purpose. The paper presents a completely new approach on how to (re)organise archives as research infrastructures and offers a flexible way of implementing this. Next to these major insights, a range of new solutions are presented how to arrange the socio-technical assemblages of research infrastructures.

Making territory through infrastructure: The governance of natural gas transit in Europe

Recent political and military events in Ukraine have brought into sharp focus concerns over the security of European gas supplies from Russia. At the same time, the creation of an infrastructural and political ‘energy union’ has become a key stated priority for the governing bodies of the European Union. Both contingencies have highlighted the 28-nation bloc’s dependence on energy sources well beyond its state boundaries, underpinned by the existence of a transnational network for the transport and distribution of natural gas. We develop a theoretical framework predicated upon assemblage and governance approaches to explore the regulatory practices and spatial features associated with this hitherto largely unexplored infrastructural realm. Qualitative evidence from interviews, policy documents and media reports is interrogated interpretively and with the aid of social network analysis techniques. The paper reveals the existence of a socio-technical assemblage for the transmission of natural gas across national boundaries emerging as a result of the erosion of decision-making power away from established state actors, and the rise of new institutional orders. While undermining the organizational arrangements that have traditionally dominated the European gas sector, these contingencies also challenge existing understandings of transnational energy governance as they apply to overland gas transit.

The baffling concept of technical mediation in Bruno Latour

This article seeks to contribute to the discussion of Bruno Latour’s and others’ actornetwork theory (ANT), in the hope that it will shed new light on theories of the social, theories of networks, and to interdisciplinary studies, especially regarding technique and its relation to communication and culture. For this, the concept of technical mediation will be explained in its relation with the notions of translation, actant, flat anthology, and sociotechnical assemblage. Thus a theoretical construct is developed which is antagonistic to the old dichotomies that radiate from a laggard Cartesianism which even today remain under the most varied, often unrecognized forms

The Praxis and Politics of Building Urban Dashboards

This paper critically reflects on the building of the Dublin Dashboard -- a website that provides citizens, planners, policy makers and companies with an extensive set of data and interactive visualizations about Dublin City, including real-time information -- from the perspective of critical data studies. The analysis draws upon participant observation, ethnography, and an archive of correspondence, to unpack the building of the Dashboard and the emergent politics of data and design. Our findings reveal four main observations. First, a dashboard is a complex socio-technical assemblage of actors and actants that work materially and discursively within a set of social and economic constraints, existing technologies and systems, and power geometries to assemble, produce and maintain the website. Second, the production and maintenance of a dashboard unfolds contextually, contingently and relationally through transduction. Third, the praxis and politics of creating a dashboard has wider recursive effects: just as building the dashboard was shaped by the wider institutional landscape, producing the system inflected that landscape. Fourth, the data, configuration, tools, and modes of presentation of a dashboard produce a particularised set of spatial knowledges about the city. We conclude that rather than frame dashboard development in purely technical terms, it is important to openly recognize their contested and negotiated politics and praxis.