Infrastructuring Publics

290 Pages·2019·6.973 MB·English

by  Matthias Korn, Wolfgang Reißmann, Tobias Röhl, David Sittler

Medien der Kooperation
Matthias Korn
Wolfgang Reißmann
Tobias Röhl
David Sittler Editors
Infrastructuring
Publics
Medien der Kooperation
Reihe herausgegeben von
Erhard Schüttpelz, Siegen, Deutschland
Digital vernetzte Medien werden als kooperative Werkzeuge, Plattformen und
Infrastrukturen gestaltet, die bestehende Öffentlichkeiten transformieren und neue
Öffentlichkeiten ermöglichen. Sie sind nicht mehr als Einzelmedien zu verste-
hen, sondern verlangen eine praxistheoretische Auffassung der Medien und ihrer
Geschichte. Alle Medien sind kooperativ verfertigte Kooperationsbedingungen.
Ihre Praktiken und Techniken entstehen aus der wechselseitigen Verfertigung und
Bereitstellung gemeinsamer Mittel und Abläufe. Darum verläuft die Erforschung
digitaler Medien quer zur gängigen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsteilung und ver-
langt eine gezielte Engführung von Medientheorie und Sozialtheorie.
Digital network media are designed as cooperative tools, platforms and
infrastructures which transform existing publics and give rise to new ones. Digital
media can no longer be understood as individual media, but demand a practice-
theoretical perspective on media and their history. All media are cooperatively
accomplished devices of cooperation. Media practices and techniques evolve
from the mutual making of shared resources and joint processes. That’s why the
study of digital media disturbs our scientific division of labour and remains a
challenge for the intersections between media theory and social theory.
Weitere Bände in der Reihe http://www.springer.com/series/15624
Matthias Korn · Wolfgang Reißmann ·
Tobias Röhl · David Sittler
Editors
Infrastructuring Publics
Editors
Matthias Korn Wolfgang Reißmann
Siegen, Germany Siegen, Germany
Tobias Röhl David Sittler
Siegen, Germany Köln, Germany
Diese Veröffentlichung wurde durch Publikationsmittel der Deutschen Forschungs-
gemeinschaft im Rahmen des SFB 1187 Medien der Kooperation ermöglicht.
This publication has been made possible by funding from the German Research Foun-
dation (DFG) as part of the CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation.
ISSN 2520-8349 ISSN 2520-8357 (electronic)
Medien der Kooperation
ISBN 978-3-658-20724-3 ISBN 978-3-658-20725-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20725-0
Springer VS
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019
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Contents
Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1
Matthias Korn, Wolfgang Reißmann, Tobias Röhl & David Sittler

Perspectives

Infrastructuring Publics: A Research Perspective .............................................. 11
Matthias Korn, Wolfgang Reißmann, Tobias Röhl & David Sittler

Historical Infrastructure Research: A (Sub-)Discipline in the Making? ............ 49
Christian Henrich-Franke

How Are Infrastructures and Publics Related and Why Should We Care?
An Email Conversation ......................................................................................... 69
Sigrid Baringhorst, Noortje Marres, Elizabeth Shove & Volker Wulf

Civic Culture

Net Neutrality: Anatomy of a Controversy ........................................................ 87
Sebastian Gießmann

Foodsharing as the Public Manufacturing of Food Reuse .............................. 113
Mundo Yang, Lisa Villioth & Jörg Radtke

“Sorting Stories Out”: Classifications and Classifying in Fan Fiction ........... 139
Wolfgang Reißmann & Svenja Kaiser
VI Contents
Public Transport

Infrastructures of Digital Civics: Transportation, Advocacy, and Mobile
Computing ............................................................................................................ 169
Christopher A. Le Dantec

Staged Wrecks: The Railroad Crash Between Infrastructural Lesson and
Amusement ........................................................................................................... 185
Gabriele Schabacher

Making Failure Public: Communicating Breakdowns of Public
Infrastructures ...................................................................................................... 207
Tobias Röhl

Science and Academia

Public Concerns in Sustainability Research: Observations on a
Naturalist Expedition in Papua New Guinea ................................................... 225
Tanja Bogusz

The Politics of Communication Controlling: On a Conceptual
Infrastructure for the Management of Publics ................................................. 243
Hagen Schölzel

Ways of Making Wittgenstein Available: Towards Studying
Infrastructures and Publics in the History of Editing Wittgenstein’s
Writings ................................................................................................................. 265
Christian Erbacher

Bionotes ................................................................................................................. 285
Introduction
Matthias Korn, Wolfgang Reißmann, Tobias Röhl & David Sittler
This volume presents selected papers from the First Annual Conference of the
Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation”, funded by the
German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). The
conference, entitled “Infrastructures of Publics – Publics of Infrastructures”,
was held from December 8–10 2016 at the University of Siegen, Germany. In
four sections with three chapters each, contributors from diverse disciplines
and fields of interest explore the concepts of infrastructures and publics, often
centring around one concept and establishing relationships to the other. Many
chapters are based on empirical and/or historical cases to enable situated and
praxeological insights and, taken together, point towards a new research per-
spective of infrastructuring publics.
***
Our volume’s first section, Perspectives, consists of three chapters, intended to
open up overarching debates on the relationship of infrastructures and publics
and on different ways of researching their interconnections.
In “Infrastructuring Publics: A Research Perspective”, Matthias Korn,
Wolfgang Reißmann, Tobias Röhl and David Sittler trace the separate develop-
ments of the concepts of infrastructures and publics in order to merge them
into one research perspective. In doing so, they seek to build an understanding
of infrastructuring publics as a new research perspective that (1) is practice-ori-
ented (instead of starting with strong assumptions on the shape of things); (2)
is aware of the common scaling of infrastructures and publics as a media-his-
toric constant (instead of beginning and stopping at digitisation); (3) acknowl-
edges the inevitable interrelation of social and material agencies (instead of a
techno-sceptic “people only/people first ontology”); (4) addresses the shape
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019
M. Korn et al. (eds.), Infrastructuring Publics, Medien der Kooperation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20725-0_1
2 Matthias Korn, Wolfgang Reißmann, Tobias Röhl & David Sittler
and practical usage of infrastructural media and the omnipresent, but often
hidden and invisible infrastructural and bureaucratic work (instead of primar-
ily focusing on the contents and the aesthetics of public media); (5) highlights
testing, experimenting and projecting publics as important modes of infra-
structuring publics (instead of following a teleological approach); and (6) takes
a cautious approach to placing normative demands, but has its own normative
bias in the efforts of making infrastructures and practices of infrastructuring
public (instead of leaving the black box unopened).
In “Historical Infrastructure Research: A (Sub-)Discipline in the Mak-
ing?”, Christian Henrich-Franke argues that, since the turn of the millennium,
cultural, media and social historiography have experienced a shift towards re-
search on infrastructures. This shift involved the application of new theories
of infrastructure and perspectives from other disciplines, resulting in new his-
torical materials being analysed. Reviewing historiographic studies on trans-
national infrastructures, Henrich-Franke discusses the driving forces of this
research. He shows that historical infrastructure research has a clearly defined
object, a theoretical alignment (for example with STS and standardisation the-
ories) and a clear focus on practices of negotiating, building, maintaining and
using infrastructures. He concludes that it is still not a (sub)discipline in the
traditional sense as for example economic history or the history of technology,
but rather an interdisciplinary topic that enables research to combine perspec-
tives and methods.
The chapter “How are Infrastructures and Publics Related and Why
Should We Care? An Email Conversation” documents an interdisciplinary
email debate between Sigrid Baringhorst, Noortje Marres, Elizabeth Shove and
Volker Wulf – prominent scholars from disciplines ranging from political sci-
ence to sociology and socio-informatics – on the timeliness and importance of
viewing infrastructures and publics together. The debate distinguishes differ-
ent theoretical, methodological and empirical positionings on the two concepts
and examines their interrelation with regard to scholarly debates as well as
current political issues.
Introduction 3
The second section, Civic Culture, includes three chapters focussing on
the infrastructural conditions and/or the practices of “making public” in the
area of civic engagement and popular media.
Sebastian Gießmann’s contribution, entitled “Net Neutrality: Anatomy of a
Controversy”, provides insights into the contested nature of the infrastructural
conditions of digital publics. Gießmann investigates recent debates on net neu-
trality, highlighting the interpretative flexibility of the term. Because of its con-
tested and ambiguous status, it is an “ideal type” (Star and Griesemer) that
different stakeholders around the globe can adapt to their needs. In the USA,
the discrimination of certain services was an issue, while the debate centred on
zero-rating (no charge for specific domains) in India and on throttling data
volumes in Germany. Yet, all of these debates rest on the assumption that in-
frastructures such as the internet can and should be neutral means of commu-
nication and interaction, thus denying their intrinsic normative character.
In “Food Sharing as the Public Manufacturing of Food Reuse”, Mundo
Yang, Lisa Villioth and Jörg Radtke present an extensive case study on food shar-
ing as one example of civic engagement. Going beyond conventional under-
standings of counter-publics as public blaming or symbolic critique, the au-
thors focus on the processual interplay between civic engagement, material
participation and media resonance. Activists attempt both to engender food
waste as a public issue and to co-produce an alternative infrastructure or an
alternative food system respectively. Yang et al. identify three main material
practices as integral parts of the material participation specific to food sharing:
engaged citizens re-infrastructure the food system, they re-code the cultural
meaning of the distinction between waste and food, and they “publicise” the
issue of food waste. This chapter locates food sharing as material participation
within the network of food system, online platform, social media, localities,
activists, consumers, issue publics, but also the mass media that helped pro-
mote the project through positive coverage.
Inspired by Bowker and Star’s investigations on large-scale bureaucratic
classification systems, in “‘Sorting Stories Out’: Classifications and Classifying
in Fan Fiction”, Wolfgang Reißmann and Svenja Kaiser examine classifying prac-
tices and classification devices in the area of popular media culture, in