Crabu, S.

Mongili, A.

S. Crabu

A. Mongili

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Politecnico di Milano

Nowadays, social scientists frequently consider infrastructure analysis as a starting point for an in-depth disentanglement of the multidimensional process of technoscientific innovation and societal change with a particular focus on the social and material ecologies in which human behavior is embedded (Gillespie et al. 2014). Since the mid ‘90, interest in infrastructure has profoundly permeated social theory attracting growing attention from sociologists, anthropologists and ethnographers working in the multidisciplinary STS field. Conceptually speaking, infrastructure can be considered sophisticated socio-material entities emerging by means of the management of a “series of tensions (between local and glob-al, today’s requirements and tomorrow’s users, research and development; be-tween project and originating practices, implementation and maintenance/repair, individual and community; but also identities and practices, planned and emer-gent course of action)” for the purposes of ordering everyday life (Mongili and Pellegrino, 2014, p. xvii).Connecting to this broad field of inquiry, over recent years PaSTIS has developed a solid interest in the study of infrastructuring, a dimension through which infra-structures are generated and performed in practice. More precisely, PaSTIS has carried out a constellation of research, academic events and editorial projects aimed at capturing and exploring design and shaping, use, maintenance and re-pair activities related to infrastructure and infrastructuring work (Denis et al. 2015; Balbi et al. 2016). In so doing, we have cultivated an analytical perspective orient-ed to scrutinizing infrastructure as ongoing and open-ended processes ground-ed around an ecology of cognitive, material, and symbolic resources enacted by means of situated practices (Crabu 2014). thE rEbEllious sidE of infrastructuring workOne of the main research projects dedicated to the issue of infrastructuring work has related to Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) construction and consolida-tion processes. Conducted in partnership with the University of Trento, this project focused on these grassroots and joint working infrastructures, generally built-up at local level by media-activists, hackers and ‘nerds’ on the basis of explicit polit-ical as well as civic beliefs oriented to opposing the neoliberal and hierarchical matEriality, politics and infrastructuring work Stefano Crabu and Alessandro MongiliThe study of infrastructures in terms of “infrastructur-ing” and “infrastructuring work” represent a starting point for an in-depth disentanglement of the multidimen-sional process of technoscientific innovation and soci-etal change. The project on Wireless Community Network led us to conceptualize bottom-up infrastructures as the emerging outcome by a heterogeneous process in which the mutual engagement of media activists, hackers and scien-tists turns a political project into an innovative digital infrastructure model. In performing our investigation on design and development in computing, we argued that in-frastructuring is a field of heterogeneous activities and challenges extant relations, work positions, skills and hierarchies.EASST Review 2016 I Vol 35 I No 418governance of the commercial Internet. In this sense, WCNs imply heterogeneous work in which technical practices require constantly alignment with symbolic, po-litical and organizational activities. From this point of view, WCNs constitute an exemplary environment with which to investigate processes of heterogeneous ‘infrastructuring’ (Star and Bowker 2002) at the local level in the field of digital media technologies (Parks and Starosielski 2015).Technically, WCN is a decentralized infrastructure consisting of interconnecting antennas usually set up on the roofs of participants’ homes or on those of in-formal groups or volunteer organizations. These decentralized networks are fully independent from the Internet, although in a few countries they were popularized as a less expensive alternative to commercial ISP connections. WCNs are mostly self-built as volunteers adapt existing software, hack hardware, set up coordina-tion rules, and materially install antennas. In this sense WCNs are rooted in a radical critique of contemporary governance of the Internet raising awareness on a relevant issue pertaining to the reconfigurations of power relationships between citizens and governments and also regarding distribution asymmetries relating to the growing pervasiveness of digitally-mediated communication (Crabu et al. 2015). In other words, WCNs represent alternative approaches counteracting the pervasive practices associated with the centralized control of digital communica-tions and therefore shaping more autonomous and self-governed digital interac-tion spaces.This research was based on a qualitative case study on the Ninux.org project, the main Italian WCN. The empirical data was gathered via in-depth interviews, doc-umentary analysis and ethnographic observation of online and offline interaction aiming to investigate how Ninux.org members’ identities and motivations, as well as material artifacts, play a role in shaping and sustaining infrastructuring work in unconventional innovation contexts such as “squatted community centers” or do-it-yourself environments. This research work will focus in particular on the cultural, political, and techno-logical issues rooted in the Ninux.org project highlighting the way these differ-ent aspects are strictly interwoven and can hardly be understood as separate Fig. 1: The work of setting-up a WCN’s antenna on a roof.Courtesy of Ninux.org. STS Multiple19dimensions. We thus unraveled the intricacies of the mutual relationship be-tween the various actors involved in the project emphasizing that the WCN is an emerging outcome from the cooperation of members involved in a process of mutual-learning and sharing of academic expertise and political outlooks. Indeed, contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. Taking into account this cru-cial aspect, we have shown that the shaping of grassroots infrastructures implies a processual and in-the-making work of creation and maintenance developed out-side predictable and conventional innovation settings (Crabu et al. 2016).Overall, on the basis of this research project we have been able to argue that bot-tom-up infrastructures, or more specifically ‘inverse infrastructures’ (Egyedi and Mehos 2012), are the result of an heterogeneous innovation process in which technical, political, material and cultural aspects interact recursively with each other and in which the mutual engagement of media activists and scientists is crucial in turning a political project into an innovative digital infrastructure model.infrastructuring in computing dEsign and dEvElopmEntAnother research project related to infrastructures carried out by PaSTIS has re-garded design and development practices in computing. Drawing on seminal work by Gregory Bateson, Leigh Star (2010, 610) used to say that users and designers, especially in computing, are bound together by a “double bind”. In the digital envi-ronment, it is extremely hard to distinguish design from development in practice. Although the design-mode in computing is a strategic re-ordering, designers limit themselves in practice to assembling elements that already exist, only rarely intro-ducing new ones. Many developers verify or produce interoperability among the elements which are driven to converge in a new device. Their job thus consists of prolonged use of tools, libraries, databases and materials at hand. This use is often inextricably intertwined with their main activity. Sometimes developers act as designers, changing the original project or writing pieces of software for the purposes of integrating the heterogeneous elements better (Mongili 2014).Fig. 2: A meeting of Ninux’s cod-ers Courtesy of Ninux.org.EASST Review 2016 I Vol 35 I No 420In order to explore this designer-developer tangle in depth we carried out ethno-graphic research into an Italian company working in telecommunications, Internet connections and other digital services. We studied their design and development practices in computing and more specifically monitored the development of an application for video surveillance connected with a social network owned by the same company. In particular, we observed testing activities which were articu-lated in two main information specific tools, two defect tracking systems (DTS), softphones, a protocol suite (SIP), a camera and so on. Testing practices move forward as contingencies emerge. The ability of specif-ic actors to exploit unanticipated gaps in previewed practices can be crucial to progress following and accompanying testing, development and design aiming at interoperability (at least at demo level) between a camera, a social network architecture and SIP protocol. To achieve this, developers looked for a camera and developed patches on extant codes, achieving OS level. They also intervened within the DTS which we have considered information infrastructure here, playing around with their different versions, obliging them to include the SIP Protocol as a part of their routine monitoring, interpreting their reports and learning the classi-fications they operate with. Not infrequently they interpreted and tried to change the threshold proposed by the DTS.In accordance with Leigh Star and many other scholars, we can consider any information artifact, which relates a human activity and forms a whole with it, as an information infrastructure thus emphasizing the relational aspect of this definition. Every information artifact can converge toward a specific activity, be-coming an information infrastructure but not every artifact is necessarily an in-frastructure. This convergence is relatively unstable and obliges humans to take care of the infrastructure nesting their activity as a normal routine. Therefore, the ‘infrastructuring’ process challenges the invisibility of these infrastructures, their taken-for-grantedness. And a multiplicity of actors intervenes continually to alter elements and fix them.By focusing on designing and developing, any new device can be conceptualized as the emerging outcome of hybrid practices, aimed to manage adverse contin-gencies and any sort of tensions. Infrastructures intersect any activities but are also extremely fragile. Infrastructures contain relations, especially through the data culture that they express, which is based on forms of classification contain-ing forms of hegemony. This is another crucial issue: infrastructuring is a field of heterogeneous activity at the very center of technological cooperative circulation and at the crossroads of contemporary innovation processes.On the basis of this theoretical and empirical reflection, issues related to infra-structures and their design and development now represent a consolidated pillar around which PaSTIS’s research work is organized.rEfErEncEsBalbi, G., Delfanti, A. and Magaudda, P. (2016), Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality, Infrastructures. An Introduction, in “Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies”, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 7–16.Crabu, S. (2014), Give us a protocol and we will rise a lab. The shaping of the infra-structuring objects, in A. Mongili and G. Pellegrino (eds.), Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Contexts, Ecologies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK, pp. 120–165.Crabu, S., Giovanella F., Maccari, L. and Magaudda P., Hackivism, Infrastructures and Legal Frameworks in Community Networks: the Italian Case of Ninux.org, in “The Journal of Peer Production”, vol. 9 – Special Issue: Alternative Internets.Crabu, S., Giovanella, F., Maccari, L. and Magaudda, P. (2015), A Transdisciplinary Gaze on Wireless Community Networks, in “Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies”, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 113–134. STS Multiple21Stefano Crabu is Post-doc research fellow in Sociology at University of Padova and PaSTIS with particular interests in the study of processes of technoscientific innovation. His recent publications have centered on sociomaterial and epistemological aspects of biomedicine, laboratory practices, and infrastructuring work. stefano.crabu@unipd.it Denis, J., Mongili, A. and Pontille, D. (2015), Maintenance & Repair in Science and Technology Studies, in “Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies” , vol. 6, pp. 5–15.Egyedi, T.M. and Mehos D.C. (2012), Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham.Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.G. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) (2014), Media Technologies. Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Mongili, A. (2014), Designers as Users: Blurring Positions and Theories in Creative Practices, in A. Mongili and G. Pellegrino (eds.), Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Contexts, Ecologies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle u/T, pp. 2-25.Mongili, A. and Pellegrino, G. (2014), The Boundaries of Information Infrastructures: An Introduction, in A. Mongili and G. Pellegrino (eds.), Information Infrastructure(s): Boundaries, Contexts, Ecologies, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle u/T, pp. XII-XL.Parks, L. and Starosielski, N. (eds.) (2015), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, University of Illinois Press, Champaign.Star, S.L. (2010) This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept. In “Science, Technology, and Human Values” , 35(5): 601-617.Star, S.L. and Bowker, G.C. (2006), How to infrastructure, in A. Lievrouw and S.M. Livingstone (eds.), Handbook of New Media, Sage, London, pp. 230–245.Alessandro Mongili is lecturer in Sociology, Modernization and Technoscience at the University of Padova. His research interests include computing and technology (Donne al computer, with C. Casula, Cagliari 2006; Tecnologia e società, Rome 2007; and Information Infrastructure(s), with G. Pellegrino, Newcastle u/T 2014), and innovation in marginal areas (Topologie postcoloniali, Cagliari 2015).EASST Review 2016 I Vol 35 I No 422

Materiality, Politics and Infrastructuring Work

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Materiality, Politics and Infrastructuring Work

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