A Tangent: On Telecoms and FISA

I've written elsewhere that the single most cited saw in the STS literature is the law of path dependency (with its attendant, self-explanatory paradigmatic example, the QWERTY keyboard.

Because choosing paths requires certain trade-offs, with respect to digital infrastructure and its various applications, it is far too early to accept limitation by fiat. Policies, laws and regulations that begin with "thou shalt not ______" should be treated with some suspicion. Those that enable the proliferation of paths that we can later become overdependent upon are worthy of at least occasional consideration; those that foreclose possibilities (thus limiting those very paths) should be viewed skeptically.

An example: although there are reasons why it is not always preferable to have governments involved in planning, building, and running broadband infrastructure, legislation such as that existing in presently 14 states that precludes government involvement in those activities. True, the "patchwork" of models, providers and networks is creating complexities, but they are not preventing innovation, detracting investment, or limiting the proliferation of platforms, applications and technologies.

So what does this have to do with FISA? Well, I have a position on granting immunity retroactively to telecommunications companies that may have too readily divulged their customers' private information.

But I'll stick the accusation aside (for now), and make the observation that the fallout from FISA-telecom imbroglio points to yet another benefit of the "patchwork" approach. In the era of telecom consolidation, when a single provider releases information to the government, the privacy of millions of customers is potentially compromised. If customers are distributed among thousands of providers, then if a single provider acquiesces to government's pressure for revealing proprietary data, the number of affected parties is potentially drastically reduced.

So when it comes to structural firewalls against government overreaching, a large number of small providers may be more effective than a small number of big ones.

Into the Breach

Okay, so how many times can you say infrastructure on a written page? Here's the latest abstract of the diss abastract:

This dissertation project uses the particular contemporary challenge of cyberinfrastructure as an occasion to explore the potential of the community planning process in infrastructure provision generally. In short, my research aims to assess whether and the extent to which local planning efforts have a measurable effect in terms of cyberinfrastructure deployment. Given that access to cyberinfrastructure is taken to be an essential to economic viability, more and more communities are engaged in both demand- and supply-side efforts at increasing their use of and infrastructure for high-speed Internet access. Since infrastructure deployment is a moving target, explaining the diffusion of infrastructure to underserved areas is both a methodological and policy challenge. In the wake of lagging private sector investment and the increasing affordability of wireless technologies, the public sector has shown an increasing willingness to engage in infrastructure provision, renewing debates of long standing. Given the attendant controversy regarding public sector involvement in telecommunications infrastructure provision, many communities have stressed the need to encourage demand, hoping that such stimulation will encourage private investment in infrastructure. This dissertation assesses a set of community planning processes in the state of Kentucky that have the potential to bridge the (often ideological) gap between private and public investments. Making use of extensive data on broadband deployment gathered as part of the Kentucky initiative, this dissertation project presents evidence that the public planning process may serve to identify pockets of demand for services previously invisible to private sector providers. This project makes two contributions to scholarly discourse, one theoretical and one methodological. As will be detailed in the literature review below, this dissertation is situated between two streams of discourse that need bridging—theories of infrastructure (and other socio-technical systems) and theories of local and public involvement in the planning process. My contention is that the role suggested for the planning process mediates in important ways between the prerogatives of system-builders and the needs of communities, demonstrating a necessary space of articulation that treads the boundary between supply and demand. Moreover, methodologically, this dissertation attempts to harness the techniques of multi-level modeling and geostatistics to determine whether or not a “planning effect” explains infrastructure deployment.

Hughes and Second Creation

So this is one piece I need to hang on to from the original blog:

So I've been reading Thomas P. Hughes. Some stuff I've been revisiting (such as Networks of Power and “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems” from The Social Construction of Technological Systems. It seems the standard reading of Hughes is that he's a social constructivist, which means, you know, like that people make machines, right?

Well, yeah. And, in turn, machines make people, too.

I have to admit that I was rather delighted by Rescuing Prometheus because it showed the subtlety of Hughes' thinking. Or maybe I'm just humoring myself because I believe that Hughes is saying something that validates my own argument.

Namely, front and center, I am trying to show that public involvement in broadband projects (among other instances of public engagement) is having several noteworthy consequences. At the very least, it is a shift away from infrastructure construction by engineers and managers, a shift that Hughes (rather clunkily) describes as a postmodern paradigm of project development.

More crucially, Hughes tells us that the integral part of that shift toward the postmodern is the role of the public:

"A key characteristic of the new approach is public participation. This implies the need for a public informed about the creative process of system building and the ways in which its values can be embedded in the second creation. Prometheus, the creator, once restrained by defense projects sharply focused upon technological and economic problems, is now fee to embrace the messy environmental, political, and social complexity of the postindustrial world." (Rescuing Prometheus, p. 14).

That messy environment is precisely what I'm interested in. Hughes account of what's new and important about contemporary public projects.

Hughes describes the shift toward messiness as a rejection of Fordism and Taylorism(which is really a questioning of the received wisdom of the Enlightenment model):

"During the half-century following World War II, America continued to produce a cornucopia of material goods through modern management and engineering. Alongside this capitalistic, free-enterprise achievement, the country's capacity to create the large-scale technological systems that structure our living spaces has grown as well. Post-World War II government-funded projects have introduced a creative management and engineering style substantially different from one called modern that flourished during the period between the two world wars.

"The modern, or pre-World War II, managerial and engineering approach associates management with large manufacturing firms rather than with joint ventures and projects such as SAGE, Atlas, Central Artery/Tunnel, and ARPANET. Unlike post-World War II managers and engineers invovled with projects that introduced new technolgogical systems, such as computer networks and urban highways, the prewar managers and engineers became employees of well-established firms whose products changed only incrementally." (p. 300)

Self and Net/Lifeworld and System

Well, after that last entry, I gazed upon a stack of papers I've been meaning to work through. One popped out, "Communicative Action and the Network Society" (JPER, 2004) by Verma and Shin. Not a bad kernel of insight, so far as it goes. But, as is often the case with anyone dealing with Castells and Habermas, it resides at a fairly high level of abstraction. That's gripe number one. Gripe number two is that it is a crime of omission that most planners who cite Habermas still get all het up about his (laudable) work from the 70s. I've yet to read a good account in planning theory of Facticitaet und Geltung. Why on earth not? I'll get to gripe number one further in a minute and leave gripe number two behind (sticking in my craw...). Verma and Shin work through a brief description of Castells' notion of the "network society" and draw comparisons between it and Habermas' notion of lifeworld and system. Their basic interpretation: there is a lot of common theoretical ground between Castells and Habermas. Castells raises a concern that the growing hiatus between individuals and the Net creates a form of alienation that form and be formed by the creeping irrelevance of the nation state. This concern parallels, the authors argue, Habermas' basic model of colonization of the lifeworld by systems resulting in withdrawal of support and legitimacy. While Castells is more focused on diagnosis than cure, if redemption is to be found it is, surprise, surprise, in civil society (which for Habermas, of course, is the space in which communicative action tends to function and can "work its way up" into formal political and other discourse). For both, the question centers on reproduction of the lifeworld. How in either late capitalism or in the network society do "grammars of everyday life" take root? Or are they thoroughly colonized? For Castells, it seems, the big threat of the Net is that the immediacy of presence is lost, meaning that identities and social movements cannot coalesce. Castells sees very little potential for social movements online because, as the authors describe, they do not have a formal ("real") character. So, what does this have to do with infrastructure? Well, perhaps not much. I was arguing that communicative action and the tensions resident between lifeworld and system as described by Habermas may be a useful analytical approach for understanding the breach between system builders and adoption. This breach is the fundamental problem of infrastructure as I see it (and methodologically between LTS theory and SCOT). So Verma and Shin and barking up a similar tree. And they are working through Castells in order to do it. But they're not interested in "building" in the way infrastructure studies is. Rather, they remain at the level of meaning construction in an online world. So their work will warrant a citation, but isn't adding much to my thinking (today).

Back in the Saddle

Ooops. I've let the blog slide. And it's such a good way to get moving... Well, this entry is back in the saddle in more ways than one. While I've been mulling, pulling out hair (what's left), and writing, I've been returning, as a dawg to its vomit, via the problematic of "the breach", as we've uncovered it, to Habermas. (sigh) Namely, as I have been conceiving it (why do I say "I"? my conception is heavily indebted to theories of large technical systems generally, particularly those of a social-constructivist bent (if that's not all of them), as well as to latter day critics, such as actor-network theorists), infrastructure is properly best seen as process. Upon reading Paul Edwards' musings on "infrastructuration" (fascinating and original approach; terrible word...), I've been re-coding my thinking a bit by way of Habermas. As Paul describes it, "Infrastructure and Modernity" (.pdf), theories of infrastructure are often (one surmises, pathologically) bifurcated methodologically by scale. On one hand, we have Hughes' sweeping grand history of systems builders. On the other, we have, say, the social meaning of the telephone. In other words, infrastructures appear to be built by folks who rig gigantic stretches of hardware. On the other, infrastructure is best seen as a question of adoption by a lay public, whose randomness and manifold nature are the wellspring of the various flukes and compromises (ah, the QWERTY keyboard!) that define and shape. The obvious problem, of course, is that both of these perspectives are crucial to understanding how the Second Creation gets built and integrated into everyday life. Paul argues that what is necessary is a multi-scalar approach, one that links these rather different domains (as well as their rather different lifespans). For Paul, infrastructuration is essentially a dance among these scales and levels. The dance is hardly choreographed, formalized or readily apparent. Indeed, it is bloody hard to specify and study. My general agreement with Paul's perspective has caused me of late to re-ruminate on Habermas, particularly his notions of system and lifeworld. Infrastructure, then, gets built as system-builders conceive and superimpose their creations (whether they be water systems, railroads, telephones, or broadband) on a world in which the everydayness of existing systems is already taken for granted. As systems settle into the frame of expectations of folks, they become, a component of shared meaning, which is precisely how Habermas defines the lifeworld. In my own project, I'm interested in assessing how community-level engagement (dare we call it communicative action? Nah...) leads to changes in (in my cases increases in) how hardware gets deployed. I'm looking, in other words, at the breach between system and lifeworld and asking how communicative action pushes system-builders to appreciate and instantiate the prerogatives of the latter.

Abstract Moving

So I'm migrating to blogger. Much as I love it, I won't be at the present location forever after all.... Had a great time at the JPER workshop for new scholars in Berkeley. Met a great group of folks and the normal white trash (Anna, I never said it, sorry). Anyway the outcome of the event is my new abstract (such as it is):

Infrastructure studies focuses on the troublesome interface between “system builders” (or suppliers) and the specific contexts of adoption (or demand). In the case of cyberinfrastructure (which includes among other elements telecommunications networks that provide high-speed Internet access) the digital divide can be seen as existing precisely at this interface. The potential uses of cyberinfrastructure are an abstraction from everyday life for denizens of underserved areas; meanwhile market providers are blind to this very conundrum. This paper argues that the community planning process can play a vital role by identifying particular potential uses of cyberinfrastructure, motivating and framing the actions of suppliers and community members alike. Making use of extensive broadband deployment data gathered as part of a statewide planning initiative in Kentucky, this paper presents evidence that the community planning process focusing on articulating demand can in fact lead to increases in supply.