Call me Al: Alison Powell on Community and Technology

Spaces of Engagement

I am at McGill again today, to hear Patricia Aufderheide speak about the development of the internet, network neutrality, and the role of copyright in creating public media. The rest of the week I have been home, sitting in my office from day, to dusk, to night, writing my thesis proposal. Coming here is often a shock: the university has a quiet, removed aura (and an ivory tower – on a hill) that reminds me of my undergrad days. It’s a privileged space, and one that contrasts with other places I have been visiting in the last months and years: street fairs, community colleges, government offices, cafés, bars, technical schools and my own home office. Last week I was also here, at the Converging in Parallel policy workshop, to give a talk on the importance of understanding the metaphors used in broadcasting and telecommunications policy and research. I was on a telecom policy panel, a young woman sitting among men, a critical “sociologist” among economists and policy wonks. I talked about translation: one of the things I am learning as I start my “career” is about the importance of translation. Not just between languages (and between the ways of thinking that each different language permits), but also between different cultures: activist and policy-making cultures, government and university cultures. At the end of the Converging in Parallel conference, Sandra Braman pointed out the great advantages of doing progressive research in a “post-scientific” context, but also illuminated how this same context can be mobilized to silence debate or marginalize critical voices.

Critical social research is about engaging in different spaces, and creating the conditions for translation. But it’s a hard thing to do. What is an academic’s job? Is it to understand the many complex faces of reality, moving through different spaces, meeting and understanding actors, and balancing all of their perceptions? Is it to act as a translator – a mediator – between all of these actors? Or is it to reflect and write, to provide a critical perspective on the world, from a place just outside of it?

As I move from the monasticism of my writing process to the whirlpool of engagement and activism, I ask myself these questions. Which are the spaces where I can most engage? And where is my starting place, my “home turf”?

Pat says, “we create the discourses, and the frames for educating.” So perhaps that’s a place to start.

Infrastructures of openness and enclosure

I've been reading Bowker and Star's excellent book Sorting Things Out today. They write a history of various types of classificiation systems to make an argument that informational infrastructure has a social, political, and economic history. They call this approach infrastructural inversion.

While running in the park in the curiously golden English sunshine, I began to think about how infrastructures (especially the way Bowker and Star describe them) and protocols (especially the way Alexander Galloway describes them in Protocol) work together to define spaces of openness and enclosure. The infrastructures of the park, especially the fences and paths, physically define spaces for specific purposes (dogs here, but not there; children under 5 on these jungle gyms, not those ones; sand in the sandbox but not in the wading pool). But so too do the protocols that have shaped these infrastructures and make them meaningful. They are invisible, and perhaps more subtle, and as a foreigner I am unaware of some of them (pass on the left, not on the right, unless you want to be smushed by cars or step on a small child). Others are more obvious: (don't talk to strangers) or insidious (language and accent place the park visitors clearly on a defined social ladder).

But still, a curious social scientist out jogging can draw some conclusions about how protocol and infrastructure can define some spaces as public or open (like the park) while still maintaining strict forms of control or enclosure over them. The argument becomes more difficult when we consider the mediated public spaces we build through mediated communication.

On the lunch table below are the physical traces of any number of infrastructures and protocols that regulate communications (among other human endeavors). A thorough enumeration of them (which I will spare you) would have to include the infrastructures of book distribution, electricity, cellular telephone communication, computer operating systems both open-source and proprietary, and innumerable protocols ranging from the arcane (integration of sensors into ad-hoc networks) to the banal (creation of legible cursive writing using a pen).

If as Bowker and Star point out, infrastructures have their histories and futures built into them, and if cultures are necessarily built upon protocol, how can we manage this bewildering jumble of infrastructures and protocols to create some public space for communication? Is it possible to use the terms of openness and enclosure when both of them are necessary?