Abstract
Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Ecologies, Multiplicity appears as a book out of standard since the very first moment you pick it up. The elegant hardcopy is considerably squarer than usual books. The impression of escaping standardisation then continues as you browse through the table of contents, where the most known (mainly Anglo-Saxon) names in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and information technologies do not occur. Indeed, besides the foreword by Geoffrey Bowker, this book constitutes a genuine continental European take on STS and information infrastructures, with authors’ perspectives and case studies ranging from Italy to France, from Germany to Belgium, from Austria to Romania.
This note should not be misleading, though. On one hand, the whole book consistently and pervasively engages with STS literature in English, especially the British and North-American one. On the other hand, while doing so, it has the merit of implicitly historicising this literature. By problematising STS notions that were initiated and established in English, it indeed returns depth to their original formulations, and collocates them in the current debates about mobilities, vulnerability and preventative medicine (just to name a few topics addressed by the contributions).
This is especially true of the Introduction, in which the editors carefully recall the STS literature on information infrastructure and computer supported collaborative work since the 1990s. Theirs is not so much a philological exercise per se, but rather an endeavour to set the ground to analyse heterogeneous fields involving informational dimensions through an ecological perspective. Drawing upon the STS-established notion of ‘boundary object’, Mongili and Pellegrino introduce the conceptualisation of ‘infrastructure-as-boundary’ as a way to claim sociological analysis of infrastructures as boundaries, and not simply as coordinating tools. They ask in particular to what extent two key insights formulated by Susan Leigh Star about boundary objects—namely, the relationship between the well-structured and ill-structured, and the production of residual categories—can be scaled to the infrastructural level.
While this is the conceptual framework around which individual contributions revolve, it is, nevertheless, challenging to encompass the multiplicity of cases discussed in the fourteen chapters that constitute this book. Chapters’ distribution, for example, escapes easy standardisation as well. Contributions focused on what might be most obvious STS topics (e.g., design, users, health care and software studies) are scattered along the four main sections. As the editors point out, chapter subdivision follows subtler principia divisionis, which however are not fully clarified.
The book—if one dares to synthesise certain themes—unfolds along three major directions. First, most of its contributions aim to extend the range of artifacts, technologies and practices that can be conceived of as boundary objects. Pellegrino, for example, further develops the relationship between infrastructures and boundary objects as it emerges through three heterogeneous cases (a naval disaster, a sensor information classifier and haematological cancer) that unveil the relationship between contingency and vulnerability. She argues that boundary objects can govern or even contrast contingency’s ability to emphasise vulnerability of groups or infrastructures, when they provide adequate tools for categorical work.
A specific example of boundary object governing contingencies is provided by Turrini’s analysis of risks thresholds in preventative medicine. By focusing on the processes through which the ‘advanced maternal age’ cut-off has been developed, practised and questioned, he discloses the performative nature of risk thresholds as boundary objects. Similarly, Klein and Schellhammer describe the introduction of industrial drugs automatic dose dispensing (ADD) in Germany as a disruptive infrastructural innovation. In their analysis, ADD is being constituted as a terrain of negotiation between established and emergent assumptions about the roles of health care actors. However, differently from Pellegrino’s suggestion, here the ways ADD was framed by diverse coalitions failed to provide categorical tools to govern infrastructural vulnerability.
Another case of (failed) boundary objects as source of instability that jeopardise collaboration among actors is provided by Francesco Miele, who analyses a spin-off organisation providing consultancy and software on hydrogeological risk. Neresini and Viteritti contribute to the endeavour of extending the variety of boundary objects by adopting a micro perspective on biotech laboratory components. Kits of ready-made substances, devices and procedures are described as ‘pieces of research activities standard enough to be boxed up, mass-produced and used by many’. While they share with infrastructures some traits such as opacity, standardisation and interoperability, being disposable laboratory kits cannot be fully identified with infrastructures, but rather with boundary objects.
Second, as previously mentioned, a notable trend in the book is the re-contextualisation—and therefore re-semantisation—of concepts originally introduced by STS authors in the late 1990s. For example, ‘convergence’—the double process through which information artifacts and social worlds come together—is exemplified in the analysis of a client development by Mongili as the alignment and recombination of software and protocols, demos and slides, desktop practices and originators acting as users into new socio-technical assemblages. Isabella describes efforts to configure users of a mobile application as the result of convergent managerial practices and divergent uses performed by technicians. Similarly, Lugano proposes a theoretical model based on convergence versus divergence as a conceptual tool to analyse and improve the design of mobile devices. He argues that up to now ‘amplification’ (i.e., convergence) of social network signals in digital communities design has received far more attention than ‘attenuation’ (i.e., divergence). That is, combining, connecting and aggregating information have been the focus of mobile social software, much more than features for clustering and filtering information. In the last, Michela Cozza recovers the notion of ‘convergence’ as more adequate than ‘interoperability’ in order to describe the mutual constitution of information artifacts and social worlds in Italian science parks.
Third, the book at times tries to force the boundaries of the ecological take on information infrastructures and to dialogue with other (STS and non-STS) traditions. Thus, Poderi recovers Annemarie Mol’s notion of multiplicity in order to describe the relationship between design knowledge and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development infrastructure. Stefano Crabu proposes an interesting extension of the ecological paradigm by focusing on the ecologies of actions that come to establish protocols in molecular biology laboratories as ‘infra-structuring objects’. In as much as they are ‘used by scientists of the same professional community to define a space of technical work’, protocols as infra-structuring objects differ from boundary objects that allow cooperation among actors from diverse social worlds. Further addressing this latter concept, Denis and Pontille pay attention of an aspect that is underrepresented in the rest of the book, namely the elusiveness of (cycling) databases and infrastructures, that neither tend towards creating epistemic communities nor social worlds, as it is instead postulated in the literature on boundary objects.
Finally, Lazzer and Giardullo propose a framework that integrates the ecological STS paradigm with practice theory in order to interpret the reading and writing practices associated with the emergence of the e-book. A similar effort to put STS infrastructural studies in dialogue with adjacent scholarships is pursed by Mitrea, who proposes a model of intelligent mobility as a dispositive by engaging with a rich post-modern literature.
All in all, Information Infrastructure(s) constitutes a dense and stimulating reading for scholars interested in extending the ecological infrastructure paradigm to emerging fields of research that involve informational dynamics, besides digital media. It also provides a consistent compendium of STS infrastructure studies that graduate students might find thought-provoking, although sometimes repetitive (for example, almost each contributor feels obliged to start his/her chapter with a definition of infrastructure).
Besides this stylistic drawback, one major weakness should be mentioned. Paradoxically (i.e., given its effort to criticise actor-network formulations like ‘immutable mobile’ and ‘obligatory passage point’ in the light of the ecological approach), Information Infrastructure(s) presents a flaw that has traditionally been imputed to actor-network theory. While it furthers the ecological endeavour to highlight multiplicity, openness, instability and collaboration, the book seems to lose sight of how authority is constructed through processes of knowledge making, of where power is nested, and along which trajectories it is distributed in these infrastructural entanglements. While assuming distributed and collective generativity not only as epistemological necessity, but also as an ontological horizon, this collective endeavour seems to downplay the original STS understanding of information infrastructures as exclusion-generating and power-distributing devices.
This being said, the books positions itself as an original attempt to open the field of STS-informed infrastructure studies to emerging disciplines and concerns. As such, it is worth reading not only by an STS-savvy readership, but also by scholars interested in the informational dynamics taking place in biotechnology, medicine and health care, organisational studies, innovation policy, design, user and mobility studies.