Technology and the Texture of Modernity

This chapter introduces networks, contexts/ecologies, and innovations as the three main concepts that make technology pivotal for constructing contemporary societies, as well as many ideas of modernity. Technologies are not mere artifacts, but also sociotechnical networks made by distinct artifacts composed, in turn, by different elements belonging to various technical networks. Digitalization has exagerated and changed this process, which was present from the very beginning of modern technological history. Any multiple assemblage looks for its continuous existence in two different fields: at the mere technical level, on standardization and classification of elements and activities; and at a human and social level, on uses, habits, conventions, and practices.

Networks

Social scientists study many different types of networks, from policy networks to sociotechnical networks, in order to better understand processes of change. These diverse networks have a number of characteristics in common, including interconnectedness, flows, and fragility. Exploring these characteristics in relation to smart grids helps us to better understand the social nature of energy sector innovation. In this chapter, I use these themes and concepts to assess three examples: international smart grid policy networks; a local community network on Bruny Island, Australia; and a fragile network, the digital metering programme in the State of Victoria, Australia.

Social Machines

People use familiar networked technologies for coordinating social activities, from games to problem-solving. Such sociotechnical networks have been called social machines, and can be found in healthcare and well-being, crime prevention, transport, citizen science, and in particular during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The role of platform(s) as host(s) is key as to how, and how privately, the social machine operates. Social machines can be monetized on the DC Commercial Internet, and monitored on the Beijing Paternal Internet. One means of democratizing the platform is the project to re-decentralize the Internet and Web, to break down the walls of walled gardens and restore decentralization. One such idea, Solid, is described in detail, where people take charge of their personal data, storing it as linked data to increase its utility, but keeping it in personal online datastores (pods) under their control.

Performativity of expectations

The discovery of CRISPR/Cas9 has drawn attention to gene editing technologies that enable genetic material to be added, removed, or altered at particular locations in the genome. Applied to plant modification, gene editing technologies are expected to improve crop productivity and profitability, quality, food safety, and the environment, while also enabling breeders to develop entirely new varieties. Excitement about these technologies spread quickly from the global to national arenas and from the scientific community to industry and to policy makers. However, this enthusiasm stands in counterpoint to the public’s deep skepticism about genetically modified foods. Drawing ideas from the idea of performativity of expectations, this article examines the social dynamics through which the new field of plant gene editing technologies has emerged in Japan by looking into the ways in which this new field is framed, understood, and envisaged in science policy documents and how the promises made in these documents serve to attract the interest of necessary allies, drawing resources, and forming sociotechnical networks, while also impeding the emergence of a counternarrative. This article uses varying sources to answer its research questions, including science policy texts and other types of archival records, such as meeting agendas and minutes, slides, parliamentary records, and specialized magazine articles. In addition, a series of participant observations took place at a range of meetings such as science policy working groups and public forums. The study found that even though genetically modified organisms stand as a political antecedent to gene editing, and thus could have interfered with the formation of this new field, collective frameworks grounded in epistemic nationalism facilitated the research and development of gene editing technologies, with material effects such as attracting institutional support and funding.

Consumption, "Tourism-Merchandise" and Actor-Network Theory: The Cartography of Controversies and the Case of Telegraph Rock Trail – RJ

The contemporaneity is marked, in part, by the Control Society, characterised, among other aspects, by consumption. In this scene, both the material and the immaterial objects come to have value in the market, so that one of the influential tools in this period is the use of sociotechnical networks, also involving the social behaviours of individuals and their desires of belonging. In this perspective, the research aims at analysing the use of the images inherent to the landscape of the Telegraph Rock Trail - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - transmitted in these networks, as an influencing factor in the increase of the number of visitors in this place, having as background to the control society. The study attentive to Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which measures the fact that the "human actor" and "non-human" can transform the society. Thus, Facebook posts were analysed from the Cartography of Controversies, which is the operationalisation of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT). For that, the contents of the publications from the years 2015 to 2017 were analysed, in the page called "Pedra do Telégrafo_RJ", with 41 thousand participants. Clues point out that the use of socio-technical networks, in the scope of consumption may have influenced the process of production of the trail, through its transformation into a product that now has market value, through the logic "tourism-commodity".

Cultural Techniques and the Politics of Detail: Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and/as Media Theory

Tom McCarthy’s novels are informed by media theory, and this essay reads his novel Remainder not only with theory in order to highlight parallels to reflections on cultural techniques and sociotechnical networks but also tries to assess its relevance as theory. My essay will, first of all, introduce the media theoretical framework of cultural techniques and show how cultural techniques are described in Remainder. The parallel agendas of the novel and cultural techniques research, I argue, converge in a shared interest in materiality, practices, and the seemingly banal details of everyday life but put them into different perspectives. I will then read Remainder as a contribution to the theoretical debate on cultural techniques and suggest that the novel draws our attention to a politics of detail in theories of practices, the everyday, and cultural techniques.

‘The biggest legal battle in UK casino history’: Processes and politics of ‘cheating’ in sociotechnical networks

Previous literature on cheating has focused on defining the concept, assigning responsibility to individual players, collaborative social processes or technical faults in a game’s rules. By contrast, this paper applies an actor-network perspective to understanding ‘cheating’ in games, and explores how the concept is rhetorically effective in sociotechnical controversies. The article identifies human and nonhuman actors whose interests and properties were translated in a case study of ‘edge sorting’ – identifying minor but crucial differences in tessellated patterns on the backs of playing cards, and using these to estimate their values. In the ensuing legal controversy, the defending actors – casinos – retranslated the interests of actors to position edge sorting as cheating. This allowed the casinos to emerge victorious in a legal battle over almost twenty million dollars. Analyzing this dispute shows that cheating is both sociotechnically complex as an act and an extremely powerful rhetorical tool for actors seeking to prevent changes to previously-established networks. Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers a rich toolkit for examining cheating, but in addition the cheating discourse may be valuable to STS, enlarging our repertoire of actor strategies relevant to sociotechnical disputes.

Actor-network Theory and cartography of controversies in Information Science

The present study aims to discuss the interactions between the Actor-network Theory and the Cartography of Controversies method in Information Science research. A literature review was conducted on books, scholarly articles, and any other sources addressing the Theory-Actor Network and Cartography of Controversies. The understanding of the theoretical assumptions that guide the Network-Actor Theory allows examining important aspects to Information Science research, seeking to identify the relationships between information, people, and technological equipment in the structure of information flows that create intricate information sharing networks. This interaction between the Actor-network theory and Information Science highlights the role of the research method Cartography of Controversies as an approach that results from the use of the Actor-network theory to investigate the creation of sociotechnical networks.

Knowing pandemics

How does microbial emergence become a local area of medical, political, and technological intervention in cities such as London or Frankfurt? Through a multi-sited ethnography of urban health authorities, hospitals, blue light services, and epidemiologists, this article examines the achievement of pandemic order in times of crisis. Its specific focus is on pandemic influenza preparedness. By tracing the complex spatiotemporal, technological, and administrative dimensions required for the articulation of a local pandemic threat, this paper will look at how public health experts know about the arrival of an influenza pandemic, how sociotechnical networks are assembled in the decision-making process, and how single cases of illness are drawn into spaces of pandemic potential. Integrating concepts from science and technology studies and critical global health, the article highlights how disease emergence entails hard work and administrative, technological, political, and biomedical skills in order to be made present and tangible. In consequence, it will be argued that local pandemic preparedness does not result from a linear adaption of internationally circulating standards, but from rather precarious modes and modalities of ordering.