Media Technologies
Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society
edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Media technologies : essays on communication, materiality, and society / edited by
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot.
p. cm. — (Inside technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-52537-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Digital media. 2. Communication and technology. I. Gillespie, Tarleton, editor
of compilation. II. Boczkowski, Pablo J., editor of compilation. III. Foot, Kirsten A.,
editor of compilation.
P96.T42M43 2014
302.23'1—dc23
2013014966
10
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Contents
About the Contributors ix
Editors’ Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction 1
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
I
The Materiality of Mediated Knowledge and Expression
2 Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology Studies: An
Unfinished Project 21
Leah A. Lievrouw
3 Steps Toward Cosmopolitanism in the Study of Media Technologies:
Integrating Scholarship on Production, Consumption, Materiality, and
Content 53
Pablo J. Boczkowski and Ignacio Siles
4 Closer to the Metal 77
Finn Brunton and Gabriella Coleman
5 Emerging Configurations of Knowledge Expression
Geoffrey C. Bowker
99
6 “What Do We Want?” “Materiality!” “When Do We Want It?”
“Now!” 119
Jonathan Sterne
7 Mediations and Their Others
Lucy Suchman
129
Contents
II
viii
The People, Practices, and Promises of Information Networks
8 Making Media Work: Time, Space, Identity, and Labor in the Analysis
of Information and Communication Infrastructures 141
Gregory J. Downey
9 The Relevance of Algorithms
Tarleton Gillespie
10 The Fog of Freedom
Christopher M. Kelty
11 Rethinking Repair
Steven J. Jackson
167
195
221
12 Identifying the Interests of Digital Users as Audiences, Consumers,
Workers, and Publics 241
Sonia Livingstone
13 The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Networks
Fred Turner
References 261
Author Index 309
Subject Index 319
251
1
Introduction
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
Beyond the Plateau
This volume is both an invitation to those scholars who have undertaken
the study of media technologies and a provocation to the broader fields and
traditions in which they work. We believe a productive plateau has been
reached, wherein distinct intellectual trajectories originating from disparate fields have gathered around a common purpose: to understand media
technologies as complex, sociomaterial phenomena. In much of contemporary scholarship, media technologies are no longer treated as things that
simply happen to society, but rather as the product of distinct human and
institutional efforts. They are not seen as emissaries of revolution or harbingers of imminent disaster, but as constructs richly etched with the politics,
presumptions, and worldviews of their designers. They are not necessarily
fulcrums of change in people’s lives, but protruding bits of material culture
that incorporate into and sometimes press upon the lived practices of their
users. They are not gleaming icons of the new, but have specific historical
trajectories as individual objects and as the residue of societal ambitions.
Still, though social researchers1 of media and of technology should, by
now, be able to easily enjoy fruitful exchanges of ideas, efforts to engage in
substantive conversation have too often been constrained by two impediments. First, in communication and media scholarship, the overwhelming
focus has been on texts, the industry that produces them, and the viewers
that consume them; the materiality of these devices and networks has been
consistently overlooked. News, in the study of media, has been typically
construed as paragraphs on a page, rather than the page itself; the headlines
are examined, but not the newsboys who shout them, the teletypes that
clatter them out, or the code that now renders them into clickable hyperlinks. This has made it difficult to examine media not merely as messages
that affect minds, but as social relations by other means, an engagement
2
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
of people through information and through things, that happens to use
words, sounds, and images as social currency.
When media scholars have turned their attention to the technology
involved, they have rarely attended to “the tightly-interwoven relationship
between the material and the symbolic” (Boczkowski and Lievrouw 2008,
967). Instead, explicitly or by omission, they have tended to cling to the
assertion that the technology is neutral with respect to the communication
being undertaken—or have leapt to its opposite, to seductive and often
naïve forms of technological determinism, proclaiming the things themselves as ushering in dramatic change.
The turn to digital, networked media technologies has begun to move
this literature past this first impediment. But the field of communication
and media studies has always been a distinctly heterogeneous intellectual
space, stitched together as a loose patchwork rather than emerging as a family tree from common roots of inquiry. So when communication and media
scholars’ attention turned to the digital, it happened in many places and
for many reasons, with an intellectual response that was far from cohesive.
Social psychologists interested in interpersonal communication and
collaboration began exploring computer-mediated communication in the
1990s. While this research has made important advances in understanding
the mediation of cognition, conversation, and group dynamics (see Kalman
et al. 2006; Kraut et al. 1998; Parks and Floyd 1996; Walther 2011), it has
been more interested in using the technology as a convenient opportunity for plumbing the complexity of human communication per se than in
problematizing the technology. During the same period the study of mass
media also shifted its attention to digital media and the Internet (Chaffee
and Metzger 2001; Morris and Ogan 1996; Newhagen and Rafaeli 1996;
see also Walther, Gay, and Hancock 2005). More often than not, this work
borrowed conceptual and theoretical lenses developed in earlier studies of
traditional print and broadcast media: media effects (Metzger 2009; Shah,
McLeod, and Yoon 2001; Walther 2011), uses and gratifications theory
(Althaus and Tewksbury 2000; Papacharissi 2012), and audience studies
(Baym 2000; Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). Critical political economists,
who cut their teeth on the highly concentrated media industries, posited
the nascent digital industry as simply continuing or exacerbating this oligopolistic control (Bagdikian 2004; McChesney 2004). Media ecologists
began to fasten the “information revolution” onto their histories of broad,
media-driven social change (Kittler 1999; Levinson 1997); cultural studies
scholars championed “cyberculture studies” as an emergent interdiscipline
(Silver 2000; Silver and Massanari 2006).
Introduction
3
So, while many scholars in the field of communication and media studies do now address information technologies, most have done so in ways
that enact, either explicitly or by omission, a deterministic understanding of technology as one of the following: the intervening variable that
explains a measurable change, the historical catalyst that explains a social
shift, or the tool with which passive audiences can finally succumb to or
resist the tyranny of mass culture.
There have been exceptions to this tendency. Raymond Williams, back
in 1974, urged us to look beyond claims that media change our world, for
“behind all such statements lie some of the most difficult and most unresolved historical and philosophical questions. The questions are not posed
by the statements; indeed they are ordinarily masked by them” (9). Roger
Silverstone (1994) later noted the “double articulation” of communication
technologies as being at once a tool for conveying meaning, and a meaningful thing in its own right. Both of these analyses, though focused on
television, proved influential for scholars of the digital technologies to follow. And all along, cultural historians were revealing communication technologies as the product of social forces and specific contexts, whether they
be electricity (Marvin 1988), radio (Douglas 1987), the telephone (Fischer
1992), television (Williams 1974; Spigel 1992), computer systems (Edwards
1996), or the Internet (Abbate 1999) and the web (Turner 2006).
By the late 1990s, information technologies were becoming a more
embedded part of social practice, and more and more central to the circulation of news, entertainment, and public discourse. Although social
researchers were not always quick to respond, there were calls, from scholars and funders, to study Internet technologies and their social impact. For
media scholars, it was the rapid technological change that seemed to most
warrant explanation: the texts and genres of new media have been difficult to analyze, in part because they are so prolific and so evanescent.
This helped to foreground the material technology over the symbolic content. And although both stakeholders and commenters too often wrapped
these technologies in breathless hyperbole, their overstated proclamations
themselves may have helped make it so apparent that more nuanced social,
political, cultural, behavioral, and historical understandings were required.
In response, some communication and media scholars—eager to get a handle on these new artifacts and practices, but troubled by the way the sociotechnical was so often bracketed, reified, or entirely overlooked—began to
look for intellectual resources elsewhere.
A more nuanced debate about the impact and complexity of the material artifact had been going on in sociology, history, anthropology, and
4
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
philosophy of technology, particularly under the rubric of science and
technology studies (STS). This comparatively smaller but vibrant domain
of inquiry was also in part a response to the very same notions (technology as neutral, technology as revolutionary) evident in communication
and media studies, but focused on public and political understandings of
technology. To counter these assumptions, STS scholars took as their central concern the ways that materiality, practice, and politics are necessarily
entangled. In contrast to most work in communication and media studies,
STS scholars debated the ramifications of the material without oversimplifying it, and posited these sociotechnical ensembles as situated historically
and in specific social and political contexts.
However—and here we reach the second impediment that has hindered
efforts to engage in substantive conversation—until recently, STS-based
scholars have largely overlooked media technologies. Perhaps because
they had to justify themselves to colleagues studying the “hard” sciences,
and to scientists and engineers skeptical of their entire undertaking, STS
scholars have preferred studying those technologies perceived to be important, serious, historic, substantial—particularly those involved in industry
and engineering, knowledge production, the military, and transportation.
There has been no STS-based analysis of the Internet or the World Wide
Web on par with Latour’s (1996) experimental French train systems, Winner’s (1980) bridges, Vaughan’s (1997) space shuttle disaster, or Pinch and
Bijker’s (1984) bicycles.
The attention STS scholars have paid to information technologies has
tended to focus on the computerization of work practices and environments. Most prominent among this work, which many of the contributors
to this volume see as formative intellectual predicates for their own scholarship, are the “social informatics” approach championed by Rob Kling
(1996), the early work of Lucy Suchman (1987) within the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), the attention paid to information practices and infrastructures by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
(1999), Steve Woolgar’s (1991, 2002) “configured user” and “virtual society” projects, the use of activity theory by Bonnie Nardi and others (Nardi
1996; Kaptelinin and Nardi 2006) to examine systemic contradictions in
the cultural-historical trajectories of technologies, and Andrew Feenberg’s
(1991, 1999) critical theory of technology.
Over the course of the last decade, this ideational meeting point, between
communication and media studies on the one hand and science and technology studies on the other, is where fruitful intellectual exchanges have
emerged. Theoretical perspectives originating in STS, particularly the social
Introduction
5
shaping of technology and actor network theory, have been taken up by
communication and media studies scholars working on digital media. Some
STS scholars studying information and computer technologies (ICTs) began
tying their work to communication and media studies to better attend to
the symbolic dimensions of these tools. In the annual international conference of the STS field, the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S), attention to new media has grown over the past decade from a panel here or
there to multiple streams of presentations, preconference events, and even
keynotes. In the communication and media studies journals and conferences that attended to new media, the theoretical vocabulary of STS began
to take hold.
These are the routes through which social researchers of media technologies have reached the current plateau of an emergent community of
scholars with some common insights and aims. They have fended off the
slippery presumption of technological determinism and legitimated media
technologies as a worthy object of scholarly analysis. They have made the
case that the study of media technologies, to be compelling, must contextualize the technology historically, culturally, and systemically, and explicate the social, material, and temporal dimensions of how technologies are
produced, deployed, configured, and used. They have grappled with the
conceptual changes made salient by digital, networked media: decentralization of production, ubiquity of access, the disintegration of the mass/
interpersonal distinction, the resurgence of the amateur, the modularity
and opacity of software, the fluid shape of networked knowledge, and the
laterally connected practices of social meaning. They have brought the
intellectual tensions between structure and agency, control and resistance,
and change and stasis—so fundamental to social and cultural theory of the
last century—to the fluid technological landscape of this one. Leaders from
this community, many now mid-career, have made inroads in convincing
their home disciplines of both STS and communication and media studies
that nuanced social research into media technologies is a relevant part of
the broader disciplinary aims. As editors, our primary purpose for producing this volume was to provide some conceptual paths forward for future
scholarship within this community and beyond.
Though terminology and angle of approach may differ, similar directions are being pursued in recent work in media and cultural studies (Bruns
2008; Gitelman 2006; Jenkins 2006; Varnelis 2008), in the ethnographies
of digital cultural practices (Ito et al. 2009; boyd 2010; Gray 2009; Baym
and Burnett 2009), in the materialist turn being explored in cultural theory
(Berry 2011; Galloway 2004; Gane and Beer 2008; Packer and Crofts Wiley
6
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
2011; Parikka 2012), in game studies (Bogost 2012; Monfort and Bogost
2009; Taylor 2006), in debates in media theory and elsewhere on the concepts of “mediation” and “mediatization” (Couldry 2008; Lievrouw 2009;
Mansell 2012; Silverstone 2005; Wajcman and Jones 2012), in the scholarship on information policy (Benkler 2007; Cohen 2012; Lessig 1999; Nissenbaum 2009; Zittrain 2008), and in critical information studies (Dourish
2004; Edwards 1996). This volume builds on and extends facets of the intellectual project of each of these works.
But what should come next? There have been some suggestions as to
how to move forward from this plateau, how to most fruitfully extend
contemporary inquiry into media, technology, and society. These fall into
three categories. Some propose to identify key dynamics of new media,
meso-level qualities sufficiently common to all media technologies that,
extracted from their specific contexts, can be held up as defining characteristics, or at least distinctive ones. These conceptual vocabularies—numerical
representation, automation, modularity, variability, transcoding (Manovich 2001); accessibility, peer-to-peer, value at the edges, aggregation (Ito
2008); network, information, interface, archive, interactivity, simulation
(Gane and Beer 2008)—provide scholars ways to pin a social consequence
to a dynamic, rather than to a particular tool or to “new media” in their
entirety. At the same time, these terms can easily become unmoored and
dizzying as they proliferate.
Others propose a more diligent attention to the complexity of new
media technologies, shedding old analytical frameworks that prove too
constrictive. Lievrouw and Livingstone (2006), for example, propose to
replace a linear understanding of traditional media with a heuristic that
has predictable components, but does not presume beforehand how those
components are related in any given context:
We do not specify a priori any set relationship among the three component processes
of infrastructure. Where the mass communication tradition has spent decades struggling with and, more recently, unpacking the linear relationship among production,
text, and audience (i.e., production makes texts which have effects or impacts on
audiences, consistent with the sender-message-receiver model of communication),
in new media research no such linear assumption is necessary . . . it is precisely the
dynamic links and interdependencies among artefacts, practices and social arrangements that should guide our analytic focus (3).
Tools designed to examine “mass media” or “mass society” will no longer
suffice; the “multiple, shifting configurations” (5) of the network provide a
more appropriate metaphor.
Introduction
7
In his recent work, Sterne (2012) offers a different take on the complexity
of media technologies, proposing that we “modulate the scale of our analysis of media somewhat differently. Mediality happens on multiple scales
and time frames. Studying formats highlights smaller registers like software,
operating standards, and codes, as well as larger registers like infrastructures, international corporate consortia, and whole technical systems” (11).
Finally, some social researchers of media and technology argue that it is
not sufficient to merely acknowledge complexity, that scholarship has an
obligation to work toward conceptual frameworks that enable more robust
analyses. For example, Boczkowski and Lievrouw (2008) propose not just
to recognize a perennial tension between determination and contingency,
but also to note that the tension plays out differently in different contexts:
“future work might address the particular conditions that may tilt the balance towards determination or contingency, or the specific mechanisms
and processes that ‘harden’ sociotechnical configurations under certain
conditions, or make them more malleable in others” (966).
In producing this volume, we do not seek to map all the intersecting
scholarship on media technologies, or to merely showcase the new and
exciting work happening at its cusp. Instead, we want to propose new questions and pathways, where scholars of media technologies might want to
go next, given not only the theoretical exchange now occurring but also
what the shifting media and information landscape now makes possible
and, arguably, requires or even demands of us. We hope the volume can be
a starting point for just that.
How This Collection Came to Be
This volume began with Margy Avery, a senior acquisitions editor at MIT
Press. She sought us out as dialogue partners about the streams of work she
had observed at recent STS and communication and media conferences,
and suggested that we develop a scholarly collection that mapped the intersections of communication and media studies, and science and technology
studies. One model she proposed was a collection she had helped develop
a few years earlier, Pinch and Swedberg’s 2008 volume, Living in a Material
World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies. But soon after
embarking on the project, we had to acknowledge that the approach taken
by Pinch and Swedberg would not work with our own fields. While economic sociology is a specific domain of inquiry housed within the field of
sociology, communication is a field unto itself, and one with sprawling subfields and somewhat porous boundaries. Were we to attempt to address all
8
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
the ways in which ideas in STS intersect with the field of communication,
much less all the ways it conceivably might, we would need to incorporate
journalism studies, bibliometrics, sociolinguistics, political economy, management and organization, the rhetoric of science, education, and so on.
Instead, we wanted the collection to identify and enliven the key conceptual challenges for scholars devoted to the study of media and information technologies across the fields of communication and media studies and
STS. Soon we latched on to a different model: Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch’s
landmark 1987 collection, The Social Construction of Technological Systems.
More than representing the Venn diagram overlap of two fields, that collection articulated an emerging intellectual project that grew from those
fields, and in some ways called that project into being. Since its publication,
that collection has served as a benchmark for that intellectual project as
it has moved forward. All three of us have found value in Bijker, Hughes,
and Pinch’s collection (often known as the “school bus” book because
of its stark, two-toned cover) for how it opened up for us a new space of
inquiry. We have sought to craft a collection of essays and commentaries,
which, when read together, offer similarly provocative and agenda-guiding
insights that may inspire others to break new conceptual ground in the
social research of media and technology.
We began by inviting potential contributors whose scholarship we knew
already spoke both to and about these fields and the intersections between
them, who had made important empirical contributions in this arena,
and who offered conceptual tools and insights that transcend their respective empirical cases and illuminate potential paths forward in the study of
media technologies. Though we tried to err on the side of editorial restraint,
to allow contributors to develop essays that sprang from their own thinking
and that made the contribution they most wanted to make, we did make
one stipulation: that each step back from the particulars of their work and
methodological interests to reflect on underlying areas of conceptual concern that build from or speak to theorizing media technologies.
However, we did not want to enlist such accomplished scholars and
then ask them to labor alone to produce essays that would merely share
adjacent pages. One of the reasons the Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch volume is
so strong is that it emerged from a face-to-face workshop designed to push
the sociology and history of technology forward; the individual essays,
though exploring quite different theoretical avenues, read like a coherent
conversation when taken together. So it was extremely important to us
that our collection develop a similar coherence. Toward that end we would
need to engage in focused dialogue together, at each stage of the volume
Introduction
9
development process, about the ideas and gaps in the work we had read and
the work we had produced.
This effort took a number of forms. First, contributors provided a short
abstract of the essay they planned to develop. These abstracts were circulated with the entire group, and became objects of discussion between the
contributor and one of the editors. The contributors then produced threethousand-word sketches of their essays, which also were circulated, in
anticipation of an intensive day-long workshop (preceded by a substantially
less intensive dinner) that took place just before the 2011 4S conference in
Cleveland. There, at the Great Lakes Science Center overlooking chilly Lake
Erie, we worked in pairs to swap feedback on the essays we were preparing,
then met in groups organized around commonalities among them to identify connections and oversights. As editors, we also provided the contributors with a concept map of eleven meso-level concepts we felt live in and
across the fields of communication and STS, and asked them to draw where
their essays were situated in relation to these concepts. These impromptu
visualizations became another opportunity for discussion of what the entire
collection had in common. We continued and expanded these discussions
in a lively and well-attended roundtable at the 4S conference itself.
Following the Cleveland conference, the contributors developed drafts
of their essays. We editors discussed how the essays might speak to each
other, and decided on the two groups of four that form the two main parts
of the collection. The contributors then peer-reviewed each of the other
essays in their part. We saw this as important for two reasons: first, each
author enjoyed the benefit of several sets of talented eyes during the writing process; second, seeing the other three essays helped contributors to
sharpen their own. All of the drafts and the comments were made available to the entire group. A draft of this introduction was also posted to the
group, where feedback and criticism were solicited.
In addition, it was important to us to tie these essays to a longer legacy
of scholarship. We therefore invited four scholars who have had a deep
impact on the social, cultural, and historical study of media technologies to
each serve as discussants for one of the parts of essays we have assembled.
We did not want these to be afterthoughts, pasted onto the volume. The
discussants were urged to not only comment on each essay in their part
but to also illuminate points of intersection among them, and to relate the
problems probed in the essays to other veins of thought.
We asked a great deal of the participants in this volume, and we are
deeply grateful not only for what they delivered but also for the willingness and good spirits they offered along the way. The overarching goal of
10
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
all of this editorial orchestration, this great taxing of our colleagues and
friends in which we engaged, was to produce a volume that would gather
the scholarship under a single umbrella while giving back to that scholarship a set of dialogical provocations that might serve the field well by providing fertile starting points for the next wave of scholarship.
In our efforts to collect this work, articulate vexing problems, and find
common threads in scholarship on media technologies, we have crafted
two sets of essays and commentaries that we believe illuminate some useful paths forward. The first addresses materiality and the mediation that
produces and embeds new forms of knowledge and expression; the second
addresses the practices and meanings that maintain the sociomaterial formations that are media technologies by animating, building, translating,
and repairing them. This is not to say that these are the only two possible
directions. The volume reveals both some common assertions and some
rich diversity and disagreement. But it does attempt to hold a focus on
these two thorny sets of issues, showing how they are vital to understanding media technologies but also fundamental to the study of communication and society. Thus, what started as a mapping exercise about the past
and present turned into a more programmatic attempt to chart future pathways in the study of this domain of inquiry. Revealing where we have been
motivated reflections on where we might go next.
Part I: The Materiality of Mediated Knowledge and Expression
At the most fundamental level, media technologies are about the linkages
between the symbolic and the material. That is, all technologies have a
symbolic dimension, but media technologies have distinctive, material
capabilities to embed, transform, and make accessible symbolic content
such as news stories, novels, movies, and songs. How to best characterize
the relationship between these two dimensions has been a longstanding
concern of scholarship about media technologies. The four essays in part I
offer different, yet related ways to account for those linkages at the intersection of communication and media studies and STS.
In chapter 2, Leah A. Lievrouw examines the causal connections between
the symbolic and the material in the making and circulation of media technologies. Calling the scholarship thus far an “unfinished project,” Lievrouw
begins by unpacking the strong rejection of technologically deterministic views in both communication and media studies and STS, in order to
question the persistence of causal accounts in social constructionist views.
She calls for a renewed emphasis on “mediation” as a way to overcome
Introduction
11
the limitations tied to the lingering of social constructivism. Mediation,
defined as “an ongoing, articulated, and mutually determining relationship
among three components [artifacts, practices, and social arrangements] of
communication technology infrastructure and three corresponding processes or modes of change [reconfiguration, remediation, and reformation,
respectively],” affords an explanatory stance that better balances the material and the symbolic. In a formulation that echoes Latour’s (1991) claim
that “technology is society made durable,” Lievrouw notes that “the real
power of the intellectual connections between STS and media studies will
ultimately be theory that moves beyond ‘determinisms’ to capture the multifaceted complexity of technology as communication made durable.”
Chapter 3 by Pablo J. Boczkowski and Ignacio Siles complements Lievrouw’s argument by noting that most of the existent scholarship on media
technologies has exhibited a silo mentality, focusing on either the material
or the content dimension, and on either the production or the consumption dimension, but rarely both, and almost never all four. Some studies
look at the making of media content, but ignore issues of materiality and
reception; some focus on the uptake of new artifacts, but pay scant attention to how this uptake might be shaped by the content they carry. Arguing
that this silo mentality has presented significant limitations in accounting for the interpenetration of materiality and content, and production
and consumption, in the “life cycle” of media technologies, Boczkowski
and Siles call for a more cosmopolitan perspective. They argue that this
perspective “seeks to create new opportunities for reimagining established
approaches and for conceiving new modes of inquiry.” To this end, the
authors offer suggestions in the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical,
and design domains of scholarly practice on media technologies.
In chapter 4, Finn Brunton and Gabriella Coleman provide a different
entry point to some of the issues addressed by Lievrouw and Boczkowski
and Siles in their attempt to “get close to the metal.” Brunton and Coleman focus on infrastructural dynamics as a problem for media studies.
Their emphasis on infrastructure, practices, and users echoes Lievrouw’s
call for mediation as the mechanism that brings these disparate elements
together. By looking at these three elements, and the ties that bind them,
Brunton and Coleman encounter “the multiple, sometimes contradictory
and sometimes coexistent experiences that obtain on the network infrastructure.” They propose ways to escape the “misplaced concretism” and
the “collapse” of multiple perspectives into one. Those who can successfully navigate the networks using a technical expertise that permits them
to reside closer to the material and farther from the purview of network
12
Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
operators—their examples include network sysops, Anonymous hackers,
and spammers—have no such illusions about the hardness or inaccessibility of the material strata. Albeit different in intention and emphasis, Brunton and Coleman’s position resonates with Boczkowski and Siles’s proposal
for a cosmopolitan sensibility in the study of media technologies, though
Brunton and Coleman prefer to emphasize multiplicity.
Geoffrey Bowker starts in chapter 5 where Brunton and Coleman end by
taking up the issue of multiplicity not only as a descriptor of what has been
but also, most important, of what might be when we think about the future
of our own modes of knowledge expression. Bowker focuses on the embodiment and circulation of (scientific) knowledge, and the implications for how
this knowledge is generated and appropriated. Here he reflects on the limitations that the dominance of the single-authored journal article, as both a
content genre and a material artifact of sorts, has had for knowledge practices
in the contemporary context. By historicizing how this dominance came to
be and remaining mindful of the manifold options ahead of us, Bowker calls
for imagining alternative forms of scholarly publication that might better
suit our networked, data-intensive knowledge landscape. By calling attention to “the dangers of the mass production of knowledge,” Bowker believes
that “the promise of this moment is that we can deliberatively produce ways
of knowing and ways of expressing knowledge that open rich futures.”
Part I closes with sharp and textured responses by Jonathan Sterne in
chapter 6 and Lucy Suchman in chapter 7. Recounting the history of different causal formulations in the study of media technologies, Sterne interrogates the centrality of materiality in the chapters in part I and reminds
us that, while we may clamor against social constructionism now as insufficiently material, it is instructive to remember that constructionism itself
was clamoring at the excesses of positivism. He concludes with astute observations about how questions of causality continue to animate attempts to
articulate the relationship between materiality and constructivism. Suchman draws on her own intellectual trajectory and recent research to reflect
on the positions proposed in chapters 2 to 5, and contends that developing
adequate frames for the ways in which media and technologies configure
each other remains a necessary and worthwhile aim.
Part II: The People, Practices, and Promises of Information Networks
The story of stabilization is fundamental to the social constructivist understanding of technology, whereby once-contested technologies seem to settle into some comfortable frame of understanding. But this narrative arc is
Introduction
13
a matter of perspective. In contrast to stabilization processes, what may be
remarkable about technology as a social achievement, and of media technologies in particular, is that they must be maintained, that their contested
meanings persist and thrive, that they are the fragile residue of constant
activity, and that they must be made and remade in every instance. Their
seeming stability is itself a social accomplishment and an important myth
to preserve in the face of a reality in which they require constant handling,
ongoing repair, and regular upkeep of their public legitimacy.
Perhaps our stories about media technologies are a bit like our commonplace understanding of glass. Glass, as most understand it, can be shaped
because it is malleable when it is first heated, before cooling into its familiar, solid, clear form. But from the benefit of a longer view, we just might
be able to perceive that even cold, hard glass remains a liquid, constantly
but slowly changing—its stillness in fact an illusion, its clarity in fact a
trick. Each of the essays in this part tries on this phase shift in perspective,
seeing technology as in motion, as maintained, as in process, as remaining
contradictory, as held together time and time again through the minute,
unobserved practices of the many.
For technologies that often appear to function instantly, automatically,
even magically, it may be that the hardest and most important story to tell
is about the real people who make them possible, narrate them into significance, repair them when they break, and tinker with them when they need
to change. But this phase shift in perspective requires a concerted effort to
look beneath the technology at the human underbelly of the sociotechnical system. The essays in part II each invite us to do so. Beneath the artifacts
and within the networks are people attempting to construct, maintain, and
ultimately disassemble material things. The way they make, remake, and
unmake media technologies has lasting consequences for the artifacts and
for their users.
Gregory J. Downey begins chapter 8 with a call to recognize all manner
of “virtual workers” who help make information move in what feels like
frictionless ways. We are seduced by the ease of Google search or the speed
of our ATM to believe that these are simply networks of computers responding to our requests at lightning speed. When our query to the library database serves up a multitude of results, we too often forget the immense work
required to classify, sort, arrange, and connect library resources—digital
ones just as much as those on library shelves. Downey wants to draw our
attention to the “informational labor” that allows information, situated in
a particular time, space, and institution, to “jump context.”
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Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
Using as historical examples librarians and archivists, telegraph delivery boys, and the real-time stenographers who caption media programs,
transcribe court proceedings, and translate speeches, Downey highlights
how each helps information move across space or time, from institution to
institution, or from one semantic context to another. The flow of information is in fact a product of human labor, pushed forward by the hands of
these invisible workers. An analysis of information networks that overlooks
these kinds of labor fundamentally misunderstands how these systems
work and further reifies the invisibility of their efforts. It also may miss the
way that these laborers, working at key transactional points in the flow of
information, have historically been aware of and politically active around
key sociocultural tensions, tensions that matter for the users for whom the
information is designed.
In chapter 9 Tarleton Gillespie focuses on a more contemporary moment
of disappearance but raises a complementary set of questions to Downey’s
analysis. He calls for sustained attention to the place of algorithms in the
public information landscape. These tools, from search engines to recommendation systems to the organization of social networking sites, render
information unto users according to human, but now automated, criteria.
He argues for unpacking these systems, not just as artifacts with politics,
but also as new knowledge logics that are displacing more editorial modes
of information legitimation. This is vital in the face of our embrace of
these tools as sites for public discourse, the seductive calls for new insights
through “big data,” and the turn to using these systems to both curate and
govern the contours of public speech.
Gillespie articulates six dimensions of the political valence of algorithms.
Together, these are intended as a heuristic for how to consider the values
behind what information is included in the database and what these systems attempt to know about their users; for how algorithms impose oblique
but human-generated evaluative criteria and how they present their results
under a rubric of objectivity that legitimates their intervention; and for how
algorithms tangle with but may also shape users’ information practices,
sometimes providing a terrain for political contest, but also mirroring back to
users calculated snapshots of themselves as members of taste publics or participatory communities. In these ways, the algorithm, presented as a cleanly
mechanical offer of results simply returned in response to query, in fact
shapes, curates, and legitimates knowledge and the publics who engage it.
In chapter 10, Christopher M. Kelty suggests we also must attend to
the political ideologies that travel with these technologies. Computers
and information networks were born amid strident debates about political
Introduction
15
freedom, and for many of their designers and public champions, they are
icons of those ideals, so much so that our notions of freedom have developed and changed around them. To do justice to this tangle of the material
and the inspirational, Kelty proposes that we tease out the complexities
of these notions of freedom and liberty that swell unexamined in the ad
campaigns of manufacturers and in the eager chatter of fans, journalists,
and critics.
For Kelty, the way to do this is to return to the claims made by some
of the Internet’s founders, particularly in the “man-computer symbiosis”
envisioned by J. C. R. Licklider and the “augmented intelligence” pursued
by Douglas Engelbart. Here, in their visions for the future of computational
technology, competing ideals of freedom were served up and negotiated.
Revealing the contours of their beliefs, Kelty suggests, will inform modern political philosophy and add depth to the claims made by new media
scholars about the political imaginaries that animate new media. But, Kelty
warns, we must understand how information technology designers are
thinking about political freedom, because thinking about freedom as something that can be delivered by a technology, or designed into it, changes
the meaning of freedom itself.
In attempting to think about media technologies, social researchers tend
to focus on their beginnings: the context in which they were developed,
the moment they were released, their early adopters. Perhaps too much is
made of the initial decisions, the early controversies, the first implementations as the most crucial constitutive choices (Starr 2004) defining the
technology and the practices that will coalesce around it. This myopia is
suspiciously aligned with both the marketing of technological novelty
and the planned obsolescence of gadgets. Steven J. Jackson argues here, in
chapter 11, that despite this “productivist bias,” it may be just as important to unearth what it is that keeps a technology going, who makes its
continued use possible, how it changes over many iterations, and how it
ends. To look, as Downey also does in this volume, to the labor involved in
the maintenance and the dismantling of things, reveals not only invisible
work, but also another source of innovation and change happening well
outside of the R&D department of the software giant or the garage of the
amateur inventor. Change often comes in the moments of breakdown, and
in the myriad responses to it.
But Jackson’s aspirations here are greater. He posits an entirely different
frame of mind around technology, what he calls “broken world thinking.”
If we were to see technologies not as dazzling sparks that shoot off into
the lived world, but as fragile achievements constantly needing repair to
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Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot
survive, this might shift our focus from the politics of artifacts to a more
sober attention to the wondrous and persistent attention and care people
pay to things they hold quite dear.
In their commentaries, chapters 12 and 13 respectively, Sonia Livingstone
and Fred Turner each engage in creative reflection, making intriguingly different arguments about what the essays in part II have in common and about
the emerging scholarship around media technologies they signal. Both Livingstone and Turner tie insights from these essays to longstanding concerns
that have animated the study of media more broadly. Livingstone reminds
us that thinking about users and audiences remains critical to understanding our contemporary media environment. Each of the essays, she argues, is
concerned about users, but implicitly frame them in different ways. Calling
out these assumptions, and putting users politically front and center, even
if they are not the analytical object, is a gesture vital to the examination of
new media technologies as a part of public life. Turner considers whether the
classic media studies concerns about representations, their commercial aims,
and the worldviews they deliver still matter when scholarship seems more
interested in the shape of networks and the politics of software. His closing
reminder is that although networked culture may seem to have left behind
the stodgy concerns for “mass society” that shaped twentieth-century scholarship about media, perhaps it has powerfully brought those fears to fruition,
accelerating and normalizing them, and building its own worldviews not
into the representations it constantly churns, but into the social and technical infrastructure itself.
***
There may be no way to comprehensively or exhaustively map all the intersecting work of social researchers of media and technology. We certainly do
not accomplish it here. But the heterogeneity of the scholarship is its highest virtue. We hope that every one of the chapters in this volume, and the
dialogue among them, will serve as foundational starting points for a new
set of questions going forward. We hope that readers of this volume exploring issues around media technologies can light upon one of these chapters,
and find in it a careful consideration of a thorny problem in the field, a
breadth of understanding of the contours of that problem, and a provocative insight to chase. We also hope that this volume affords social researchers of media and technology the impetus to move their own inquiries
beyond the obligatory rejection of technological determinism (and beyond
an uncritical embrace of social constructionism)—and to begin reclaiming
the centrality that understanding media technologies should have in the
fields of communication and STS and beyond.
Introduction
17
Note
1. We have chosen in this introduction to refer to “social researchers” of communication and media and of technology as a way to negotiate both whom we mean to
refer to and whom we do not. The scholars we have in mind make their intellectual
home in a number of fields, including sociology, communication, anthropology, science and technology studies, history, philosophy, cultural studies, and information
science. Although we are joined by an interest in the way that media technologies
emerge from and reshape social practices, meanings, and institutions, to aggregate
us under the term “sociology” would exclude too many people. At the same time,
those of us who intermingle with scholars with technical expertise, be they in computer science, engineering, or information systems, often use the tag “social,” to
distinguish ourselves from those who focus on the technical. So, rather than have
to repeatedly say, “the social, cultural, historical, economic, and institutional” and
“as opposed to technical” every time, we used the shorthand term “social research”
to encompass this.