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)

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.