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.

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).