Socio-technical Practices Research Articles

Parasitic Platforms and the Crisis in News

ABSTRACTThe viability of news has been in rapid decline since the mid‐2000s. This poster presents a critical analysis of how news publishers themselves helped precipitate the crisis by enthusiastically adopting Big Tech platform technologies and audience‐building strategies. I show how search and social media platforms disrupted publishers' relationships with audiences and advertisers by appropriating control over news distribution and revenue. I use Anthony Giddens' structuration theory and Bruno Latour's actor‐network theory to explore the restructuring of the news industry by the sociotechnical practices and surveillance economics of today's dominating platforms. Leveraging Michel Serres' concept of social parasitism, I present a research framework for assessing symbiotic and parasitic relationships in sociotechnical systems using historical, quantitative, and qualitative methods, and to identify where news publishers still have agency to begin resolving the crisis. And I suggest the urgency of this research framework as publishers rapidly adopt new AI technologies.

“Social Media Has Been Helpful in Learning About Myself and Finding My Community”: The Affordances and Constraints of ICT‐Based Queer History Content Creation

ABSTRACTThis paper reports on findings from 31 semi‐structured interviews with North American Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)‐based content creators who focus on LGBTQIA+ history. While the research broadly explored the information practices and digital preservation strategies of these content creators, this paper highlights how the participants navigated their respective ICT choices (ranging from personal blogs to Instagram accounts) and what affordances and constraints emerged from these choices. The paper highlights how such potentialities and pitfalls across varied social media and web‐based platforms informed the sociotechnical practices of queer historical knowledge production and how the participants leveraged the features of various ICTs to expand the visibility of queer‐affirming content and resources. The paper concludes by exploring these practices and their theoretical and practical implications for practitioners at the intersection of digital curation and archiving marginalized histories with an explicit emphasis on collaborative rather than extractive opportunities for collaboration between such content creators and cultural heritage institutions.

Emphasizing the Social in Sociotechnical Approaches to the Digital Curation of Visual Information

ABSTRACTThis panel explores the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the expanded sociotechnical practices associated with the preservation, curation, and use of visual information and ongoing perceptions of the affordances and constraints associated with new and emerging visual information objects. The panelists and the respondent work with the curation and preservation of visual information across a variety of research areas and utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the parallel and divergent sociotechnical challenges of curating visual information across analog, digitized, and born‐digital contexts. Sites of analysis range from format‐specific identity‐representation issues to the cultural practices of media archivists, translational challenges when moving complex scientific data across various digital and analog formats, and the role of accessibility in the design and deployment of discovery systems within cultural heritage institutions. Responding to the unique and intersecting challenges produced by working with visual information across various archival and digital curation contexts, the panelist will reflect on the practical and theoretical outcomes from ongoing research projects and identify persistent and emergent issues within the digital curation of visual information.

The role of critical remote sensing in environmental justice struggles

Since the 1970s, remote sensing has been used to monitor the environment, address national security concerns, and manage Earth resources within a market framework. However, environmental organizations can also utilize remote sensing data infrastructure to support oppositional narratives, legal processes, and direct action. We present a framework for the socio-technical practice of remote sensing in alliance with those communities and organizations that are struggling for environmental justice on the global commodity frontiers. Positioned at the intersection of critical geography and political ecology, we examine the ways that critical remote sensing has been adopted in five major types of environmental conflict: struggles opposing fossil fuel exploitation, timber extraction, intensive food production, water management practices, and the effects of mining. We present a baseline inventory of remote sensing resources that are useful to the five conflict types and are freely accessible online. A global perspective on the planetary environmental crisis is essential, and we suggest that remote sensing practitioners can, through workshops or online tutorials, help environmental justice organizations towards independent use of remote sensing data. The local communities should then determine whether remote sensing products can contribute to their struggles.

A situational ethics and harmonization challenges in the case of EU biodiversity data governance

ABSTRACT The article discusses challenges in harmonizing biodiversity data by considering situational ethics in the valuation of data practices. Data harmonization involves technical processes for managing and governing data by linking, aligning, and binding datasets. Our study views data harmonization as a socio-technical practice encompassing both technical management and cultural contexts of data production and valuation. Using qualitative interviews, we aim to understand data harmonization through Reflexive Thematic Analysis, identifying patterns within empirical data. Our research shows data harmonization as aligning datasets and settings involving human and non-human agents within EU biodiversity data politics. Through qualitative inquiry, we explore EU biodiversity data politics as a model of biodiversity datafication, highlighting challenges and values such as learning processes for all actors, simplicity in data management, broad adoption of observation schemes, and promotion of the Western model of engaged citizenship as a good observer.

Scripts of Security: Between Contingency and Obduracy

The special issue on Scripts of Security proposes to advance interdisciplinary exchanges between Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies. While performativity, enactment, and intra-action have opened important questions about the messiness of security practices and the contingency of their effects, there has been less attention to the obduracy of institutionalized agency and how continuities and asymmetries of power are reproduced, challenged, and maintained. This Special Issue proposes to revisit and rework the notion of script and the related analytical toolkit to make sense of both contingency and obduracy in the technopolitics of security. The contributions gathered here make three interventions in order to account for contemporary challenges posed by the increasing securitization of diverse sociotechnical practices. Firstly, they update, integrate, and reconfigure the notion of script and its associated toolbox to account for the specificities of security practices. Secondly, the articles revisit critical analyses of security in light of the notion of script. Finally, they show how such an updated notion of script can hold together accounts of contingency and obduracy and not jettison one at the expense of the other.

Feeding cattle under suboptimal conditions in Kenya: From emphasising technical (non-)adoption to stimulating adaptive performance

In the climate-development interface, research for development gained a strong interest in climate-smart agriculture and sustainable forms of intensification. Moreover, the urgency to respond to climate change stimulates a strong and sometimes exclusive focus on mitigation, driven by research-based agricultural practices. In the livestock sector, this materialises in strategies to lower emissions from livestock, which centralises the adoption question: what can we do to stimulate the use of best practices by smallholder farmers? This paper flags the risk that this outlook may overlooksmallholder farmers' capacities to navigate sub-optimal conditions of drought or scarcity. The paper applies an alternative lens for understanding ‘agriculture-as-performance’ and highlights smallholder cattle owners’ agency and resourcefulness. It aims to create a conceptual space to examine how adaptive capacities are grounded in the rhythms of agriculture under suboptimal conditions. Empirically, the study focuses on the cattle-feeding practices of five farming households evolving through seasons and lifetimes in a sedentary agricultural system in Kenya. Our frame identifies diverse affordances, conceptualised as opportunities for actions, emerging and disappearing in the immediate material environment, and we portray cattle feeding as a networked response anchored in practices of giving, sharing, and receiving. We use our insights into the dynamics and performance of entangled socio-technical practices to sketch the contours of an alternative pathway for agriculture for development. We argue in favour of a shift from an exclusive focus on the adoption of predefined optimal solutions to a diagnostic and catalytic approach integrating situated adaptive performances through which farming households respond to action opportunities.

More accurate less meaningful? Why quality indicators do not unveil the socio-technical practices inscribed into land use maps

Remote sensing plays an important role for modern geography and environmental science. At the same time, it often stands on a weak epistemological foundation. Remote sensing results are mostly treated as strictly objective, context-independent artifacts. This vastly ignores the human practices that led to these results. Thus, remote sensing data are uncritically incorporated into (environmental) policy decision-making processes without understanding exactly how they were generated. Recent research has been critical of this. In a previous study, I showed that the accuracy of land use results can be increased by class aggregation, while the geographic or environmental meaning of the results suffers. I called this provocatively the “more accurate, less meaningful (MALM)” effect and showed that it exists regardless of the technical level of classification. In this study, I discuss the extent to which MALM can be remedied by choosing an appropriate quality indicator. I show that, to the largest extent conceivable, the quality indicator does not and cannot unveil the effects of socio-technical practices, which are materially inscribed into land use maps. Hence, quality indicators are unable to objectivize the effects of practices and values by the researchers. Consequently, they do not solve the MALM problem. On the contrary, I show that the explicit inclusion of geographic knowledge in quality addresses the MALM effect to the largest extent possible. This reinforces my claim that more attention needs to be paid to considering the values and practices behind remote sensing information. I discuss the results in a broad context and argue that and why critical remote sensing based on critical (physical) geography and science-and-technology studies is vital to better incorporate such results into policymaking.

Algorithmic war and the dangers of in-visibility, anonymity, and fragmentation

ABSTRACT AI-enabled systems are likely to inform future decisions to initiate war. They are well placed to manage data and deliver recommendations at speeds that far surpass human abilities. Yet, AI-enabled vision and knowledge, which inform military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance practices, curiously sustain both exposure and opacity. Machine learning algorithms are famously called black boxes even as they are in practice widening what we can see and know. While many call for greater algorithmic transparency to combat this technological opacity, I argue that this desire is misguided because it overlooks how algorithmic reason, which promises more precise knowledge and more efficient decision making, naturally conceals through political and socio-technical practices of in-visibility, anonymity, and fragmentation. Given how these practices will likely come to shape AI-enabled resort-to-force decision making, this article concludes with the suggestion that AI-enabled decisions are likely to undermine democratic legitimacy.

Performing a global learning crisis: citizen-led assessments, social accountability, and directing democracy

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes how the citizen-led assessment (CLA), which measures and publicises learning levels in education, triggers bottom-up reform. Drawing on science studies and political theory, the paper examines the performative effects of the CLA in Kenya, showing how it (1) produces a crisis by projecting poor learning outcomes, (2) mobilises feelings to spur action, and (3) enacts a global education reform strategy. The paper discusses how the performance of the CLA’s egalitarian politics foregrounds human actors while backgrounding the work of the sociotechnical practices that script their actions. Moreover, the analysis reveals a paradox, highlighting how the CLA projects educational inequality as the pre-political backdrop for egalitarian development, locating efforts to empower citizens within a knowledge-power nexus of global educational governance. The paper calls for closer scrutiny of how social accountability tools choreograph education reforms by protecting the sociotechnical mechanisms that project inequalities, and the manner these practices direct democracy.

A Contested Script: Conjuring Security through Registration in Italy

This article aims to map out the various meanings of security entailed by the different uses and misuses of registration in Italy. As will emerge from this analysis, population registers have been employed either as tools for observing the population and its dynamics or, on the contrary, as devices for identifying its “deserving” members. By drawing this map, this article contributes to the analysis of the “technical shaping of social outcomes” that is at the center of the special issue on the continuum between contingency and obduracy in sociotechnical practices of securitization. Theoretically, population registers are framed in the article as socio-technical and socio-legal devices which embed scripts. As will emerge, they have been historically sub-scribed, de-scribed, or de-inscribed by their users. Methodologically, this analysis relies on a research path focused on registration as a bordering device which has been conducted over the last ten years through several methodological approaches and on a research/action experience which was launched in 2020. Through the author’s participation in a group of political activists, nongovernmental organization members, lawyers, and scholars who are committed to combatting discriminations, original ethnographic, documentary, and discursive data have been collected.

DEAR BABY GAYS: INVESTIGATING THE SOCIOTECHNICAL PRACTICES OF OLDER LGBTQ+ TIKTOK USERS

Much scholarship and public discourse alike focus on TikTok’s widespread uptake by young people, including LGBTQ+ youth. However, LGBTQ+ people on the platform often experience challenges relating to visibility and censorship. As users of a variety of ages have joined TikTok’s youthful population, this paper explores the sociotechnical practices of older LGBTQ+ TikTok users as they emerge from, and are shaped by, the platform and its user cultures. It does so through an analysis of older LGBTQ+ TikTokers’ videos and metadata, gathered through novel methods for configuring research accounts to serve up this content to the For You page. Once the accounts were trained to deliver this content through TikTok’s personalized algorithmic curation, videos were collected for one hour per day over a duration of approximately 4 weeks for each account. Preliminary visual and textual analysis of videos indicates recurrent themes related to constructing identities that intersect age with sexual identity, giving advice, sharing about personal experiences and queer history, and circulating counter-discourses against homophobia and transphobia as well as messages of solidarity with targets of discrimination. Analysis of how these users negotiate TikTok’s affordances also indicates that platform’s features, policies, and dominant user practices permeate and shape older LGBTQ+ TikTokers’ self-representations, such that the platform and modes of paying attention to it have become a central element of their content.

‘NOT LIKE OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS’? BEREAL AND THE REMEDIATION OF LIVENESS IN THE PLATFORM ENVIRONMENT

‘Social media’ represent a dynamic technological environment, in which emerging platforms make use of comparisons to existing apps to construct their own reputation. This is the case of BeReal – a platform that allows users to share pictures once a day, and only when triggered by a notification. In this paper, I combine digital technography and the platform walkthrough method to examine how BeReal deploys antagonistic discourse towards dominant media to promise a more authentic experience. In so doing, I frame the platform as evoking, appropriating, and remediating (Bolter and Grusin 2000) notions of mediated liveness – not only when it comes to a promised ‘real-time’ connection but also referring to particular ways of ‘being there’, sharing experiences, and having ‘real’ experiences through technological mediation. This discussion matters because it demonstrates how claims of immediacy and of a direct access to ‘reality’ are manifested and negotiated in contemporary sociotechnical practices. In this context, BeReal’s version for “platformized authenticity” – the co-option of ‘the authentic’ to advance platforms’ growth and commercial goals – is a process marked by a recursive, cyclical negotiation between technical mediation and claims of liveness.

Settlement types, territorial discourse and the symbolic production of the ‘post-industrial town’

Couched in work on territory, discourse and symbolic power, this paper examines how dominant representations and classifications of settlement types are produced by overlapping political, media and academic discourses through an investigation of the ‘post-industrial town.’ The 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) membership and the 2019 General Election thrust England’s deindustrializing towns into the foreground. Viewed as the primary settlement type of the ‘Brexit heartlands’ and the ‘Red Wall’, descriptions, encodings and classifications of the ‘post-industrial town’ have proliferated across media, academic and political discourses. Following, the article draws on Critical Discourse Studies to trace the emergence of the ‘post-industrial town’ as a territorial production. I argue that the ‘post-industrial town’ has been produced by discursive and socio-technical practices invoking symbolic imaginaries of how places look, who lives there and their practices. In the case of ‘post-industrial towns’, a dominant symbolic production has emerged of an older, white, working-class, non-cosmopolitan and socially conservative type of settlement. Moreover, discursive and symbolic territorial productions have led to (un)wilful misrepresentation and misrecognition as places ‘on-the-ground’ are brought into political strategizing and discourse.

Towards pluriversal views of digital technologies: the experiences of community and indigenous radios in Chiapas, Mexico

ABSTRACT This article aims to present an emerging perspective for analyzing digital technologies, centering around the concepts of pluriversality and communality, and drawing on the experiences of the Network of Communicators Boca de Polen, a civil organization that has been supporting community and indigenous radios in Chiapas, Mexico for over two decades. Using a Participatory Action Research framework, the study delves into the network's experiences and those of the radios it has accompanied, revealing a profound interplay of sociotechnical practices deeply rooted in communal experiences. It sheds light on a particular pathway of technology appropriation and resistance and, by shifting the place of enunciation, explores new dimensions of concerns and possibilities enabled by digital technologies. The experiential knowledge gained from Boca de Polen is presented as a tangible manifestation of a pluriversal vision of technology, vital for fostering inclusive critical reflections on the multifaceted implications of digital technologies.

Why is safety in intrapartum electronic fetal monitoring so hard? A qualitative study combining human factors/ergonomics and social science analysis

BackgroundProblems in intrapartum electronic fetal monitoring with cardiotocography (CTG) remain a major area of preventable harm. Poor understanding of the range of influences on safety may have hindered improvement. Taking...

To prove or improve? Examining how paradoxical tensions shape evaluation practices in accreditation contexts.

Although programme evaluation is increasingly routinised across the academic health sciences, there is scant research on the factors that shape the scope and quality of evaluation work in health professions education. Our research addresses this gap, by studying how the context in which evaluation is practised influences the type of evaluation that can be conducted. Focusing on the context of accreditation, we critically examine the types of paradoxical tensions that surface as evaluation-leads consider evaluation ideals or best practices in relation to contextual demands associated with accreditation seeking. Our methods were qualitative and situated within a critical realist paradigm. Study participants were 29 individuals with roles requiring responsibility and oversight on evaluation work. They worked across 4 regions, within 26 academic health science institutions. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and analysed using framework and matrix analyses. We identified three overarching themes: (i) absence of collective coherence about evaluation practice, (ii) disempowerment of expertise and (iii) tensions as routine practice. Examples of these latter tensions in evaluation work included (i) resourcing accreditation versus resourcing robust evaluation strategy (performing paradox), (ii) evaluation designs to secure accreditation versus design to spur renewal and transformation (performing-learning paradox) and (iii) public dissemination of evaluation findings versus restricted or selective access (publicising paradox). Sub-themes and illustrative data are presented. Our study demonstrates how the high-stakes context of accreditation seeking surfaces tensions that can risk the quality and credibility of evaluation practices. To mitigate these risks, those who commission or execute evaluation work must be able to identify and reconcile these tensions. We propose strategies that may help optimise the quality of evaluation work alongside accreditation-seeking efforts. Critically, our research highlights the limitations of continually positioning evaluation purely as a method versus as a socio-technical practice that is highly vulnerable to contextual influences.

Using a Service Lens to Better Understand Practices –and Vice Versa

Many studies of practices involve service exchange, and many service researchers have discovered the central role that sociotechnical practices play in service –in particular, within the service-dominant logic school of thought. In this paper, we propose an analytical lens that builds on this mutual interest to understand complex practices involving service exchange. Practice researchers can gain new insights regarding practices embedded in service ecosystems. At the same time, service researchers can better explain actor behavior by looking deeper at sociotechnical practices. We develop a concept toolbox based on practice and service-dominant logic research literature. We illustrate the usefulness of the toolbox through an interpretative case study of public service to include children with disabilities in leisure activities. Seeing practices as parts of larger multi-stakeholder service ecosystems 1) can help us better explain behavior in those practices and understand how they are affected by other overlapping practices, 2) brings forward the importance of value and how multiple actors need to interact in order to create value for each other, and 3) enriches service-dominant logic with a focus on sociotechnical aspects that are central to many practice studies.

Learning from Other Communities: Organising Collective Action in a Grassroots Food-sharing Initiative

This paper illustrates the work of creating, infrastructuring, and organising a food-sharing community from the ground up. Drawing on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and a three-year engagement with FoodSharing Stockholm, the paper shows how the processes of starting up a grassroots initiative are shaped by participants’ direct experience and knowledge of similar initiatives. The analysis draws attention to: (1) how central activities such as recruiting volunteers, choosing digital tools, and establishing partnerships with food donors are conceived and organised, (2) the concrete challenges of sharing surplus food, such as adopting a distribution model, and negotiating fairness, and (3) how governance and decision-making models are adopted and (re)negotiated over time. The paper introduces the term Collective histories of organising to capture the impact that learning from previous experiences can have on communities’ efforts to set up and run; and re-orient design visions towards the consideration and adoption of existing sociotechnical practices, rather than always aiming at novel digital explorations. We outline three emerging dimensions that can characterise “Collective histories of organising” as a concept, (1) configuring capacities, (2) configuring sociotechnical practices, and (3) configuring participation. The paper contributes practical sensitivities to build, sustain, and infrastructure surplus food-sharing initiatives, where these three dimensions are discussed as central concerns designers and other food-sharing communities could learn from.

Participatory Writing as Activism: The Work of Organizing a Swedish MeToo Initiative Through Social Media

This paper extends the literature on social media activism by foregrounding the invisible work of orchestrating it. We analyze the activities of a #MeToo group in a Northern European country and characterize the group's efforts to catalog incidents of gender-based harassment and discrimination as an activist, platform-mediated participatory writing project. Our analysis details the work of organizing this form of activism, particularly: 1) the editorial work that underlies publishing personal stories on social media, 2) the emotional labor that unfolds as part of this form of writing, and 3) the work of creating publics. By drawing attention to these efforts, the paper frames activism as effortfully driven, sometimes in tension with the platform or evolving value positions. We conclude with a discussion on the role of social networking sites in organizing activism where writing is central, and with a set of sensitivities that can support designers and activists alike in designing socio-technical practices concerned with social change.