Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

Refracting Urbanism: The Multiple Histories (as well as Geographies) of the Networked City

This article was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.This piece explores the role of history in the splintering urbanism thesis, and infrastructure studies more generally, to make the case for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple histories underpinning the networked city. I reflect on the use of history as an argumentative ploy in Splintering Urbanism, criticize common framings of the past in infrastructure studies, and map out an agenda for future scholarship on urban infrastructure histories based on this critique. In doing so, I argue that the messiness of infrastructure history gets obscured when told through evolutionary or retrospective narratives.Peer Reviewe

Objecting (to) Infrastructure: Ecopolitics at the Ukrainian Ends of the Danube

In southern Ukraine, two hydraulic infrastructures continue to exist despite environmentalist campaigns that have exposed them as fragile, broken or unprofitable. The Danube-Dnister Irrigation Project (DDIS), a Soviet mega-project that diverted water from the Danube and turned the Sasyk estuary into a reservoir, receives state funding despite a 1994 ban on its use for irrigation. The Bystre Shipping Canal, built in 2004 despite domestic and international opposition, is losing money but continues to operate. These cases exemplify the material politics of infrastructuring in which infrastructure is understood as an antagonistic process of assembling networks of humans and nonhumans rather than a fixed facility. This approach helps explain how the confluence of unruly coastal matters and the politics of expertise have facilitated these shipping and irrigation infrastructures’ re-embedding in bureaucratic networks. These cases show that obduracy and fragility, as well as visibility and invisibility––conditions that figure prominently in infrastructure studies––should be considered in terms of oscillation rather than as ontologically distinct or static conditions. This analysis also highlights the limits of the modernist search for scientific certainty in resolving environmental conflicts in Ukraine, and some possibilities to experiment politically with new decision-making procedures. This account can thus serve as a “story that intervenes” by pointing beyond reform impulses that re-enact modernist narratives of progress within a strict nature-society divide

Reflections on digital innovation

The paper by Henfridsson et al. opens up a new agenda for IS research on the content and process of digital innovation. The crucial element in their perspective is the role of recombination in innovation. They supplement an emphasis on design recombination with a symmetrical emphasis on use recombination. While supporting Henfridsson et al.s overall argument, I point out how central parts overlap with and are extended in disciplines outside IS research

Data Infrastructures in Ecology: An Infrastructure Studies Perspective

The development of information infrastructures that make ecological research data avail¬able has increased in recent years, contributing to fundamental changes in ecological re¬search. Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the subfield of Infrastructure Studies, which aims at informing infrastructures’ design, use, and maintenance from a social science point of view, provide conceptual tools for understanding data infrastructures in ecology. This perspective moves away from the language of engineering, with its discourse on physical structures and systems, to use a lexicon more “social” than “technical” to understand data infrastructures in their informational, sociological, and historical dimensions. It takes a holistic approach that addresses not only the needs of ecological research but also the diversity and dynamics of data, data work, and data management. STS research, having focused for some time on studying scientific practices, digital devices, and information systems, is expanding to investigate new kinds of data infrastructures and their interdependencies across the data landscape. In ecology, data sharing and data infrastructures create new responsibilities that require scientists to engage in opportunities to plan, experiment, learn, and reshape data arrangements. STS and Infrastructure Studies scholars are suggesting that ecologists as well as data specialists and social scientists would benefit from active partnerships to ensure the growth of data infrastructures that effectively support scientific investigative processes in the digital era.Ope

Potential for Higgs Physics at the LHC and Super-LHC

The expected sensitivity of the LHC experiments to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the measurement of its properties is presented in the context of both the standard model and the its minimal supersymmetric extension. Prospects for a luminosity-upgraded ``Super-LHC'' are also presented.Comment: Invited talk at 2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detector Workshop and Second ILC Accelerator Workshop, Snowmass, CO(Snowmass05) 3 pages, 0 figures. PSN ALCPG060

The Coherence Problem: Mapping the Theory and Delivery of Infrastructure Resilience Across Concept, Form, Function, and Experienced Value

In this contribution we explore the interface between the functional characteristics of infrastructures as artefacts and social need supplier. Specifically we are concerned with the ways in which infrastructure performance measures are articulated and assessed and whether there are incongruities between the technical and broader, social goals which infrastructure systems are intended to aspire to. Our analysis involves comparing and contrasting system design and performance metrics across the technical — social boundary, generating new insights for those tasked with the design and operation of networked infrastructures. The assessment delivered in the following sections is inherently interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral in nature, bringing thinking from the social and environmental sciences together with contributions from mathematics and engineering to offer a commentary which is relevant to all types of physical infrastructure