SI741 Group Project
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Contents |
Introduction
Reconciling three disparate infrastructure stories can be a heady task. Nonetheless, if projects are considered to be "infrastructure" stories in nature, the underlying principles of infrastructure and systems theory should run through them, different in instantiation and effect, but present. For this project, we will attempt to identify main points of infrastructure theory relevant to three environments by first comparing them in pairs, and then discussing possible points of conceptual convergence.
In order to deal with the complexity of comparing three distinct systems and projects, we have decomposed the problem in the following way: Each team member will provide a perspective on an aspect of infrastructure theory that applies to the topics of the other two. Following this perspective, the other two (whose projects have been described) will supply responses to the statement with particulars and details of the topic that they support or refute.
At its core, this group project is not a paper with a neatly defined thesis; rather, capitalizing upon the collaborative nature of the wiki environment, it is more approximate of a conversation or debate about developing shared perspectives in interpreting infrastructure. We have chosen the discussant and response format in order to ensure that each team member has the chance to learn about and address the topics of the other two. A "conceptual convergence" section at the end gives us an opportunity to draw together common threads from all three projects vis-a-vis infrastructural themes that we have studied.
The wiki presentation of this work is thus organized in the following manner: The current page provides an overview of the entire progression of thought, with links to more detailed descriptions of individual regions and the discussions comparing regions. Our conclusions about possible points of convergence are included at the bottom of this page.
Short Topic Descriptions
Telecommunications in South Africa
Telecommunications in South Africa has undergone dramatic shifts in the last two decades. Three important developments influenced the transition: 1) Apartheid ending and government change; 2) Privatization, and 3) the introduction of mobile telephony. Here we will focus on mobile phones, and the novel and unique effects they are having on developing regions of South Africa.
More detail on Telecommunications in South Afica.
Commercial Transport Toll Collection Systems in Germany
The appearance of an electronic toll collection system for commercial trucks on the Autobahn is prompting shifts in various complementary infrastructures. As a result of the new toll, early changes can be seen or predicted in (1) political, (2) economic, (3) social, and (4) industrial/organizational systems.
More detail on Commercial Transport Toll Collection Systems in Germany.
The Transformation of Personal Communications Infrastructure in Japan
The trajectory of adaptation and emergence of personal communication technlogies and networks in Japan in the last decade indicates that those technologies and networks have become a large-scale sociotechnical system that is mature, reliable, and ubiquitous. In this section, we will briefly discuss about historical developments in three areas: policy, technology, and cultural reforms that transformed the personal communication device into a personalized-mass communication infrastructure.
More detail on the Transformation of Personal Communications Infrastructure in Japan.
Pair-wise Project Comparisons
South Africa and Japan
- South Africa and Japan comparison
- Discussant: Cory Knobel
- Responses by Archer Batcheller and Aiko Takazawa
The way that communication technology is used responds to the collectivist and clan-based cultures of Japan and South Africa, respectively.
Germany and South Africa
- Germany and South Africa comparison
- Discussant: Aiko Takazawa
- Responses by Cory Knobel and Archer Batcheller
Comparison between Germany's Toll Collect systems to South Africa's telecommunication infrastructure seems to discern bipolar goals of the development of infrastructure and the purpose of government's involvement.
Japan and Germany
- Japan and Germany comparison
- Discussant: Archer Batcheller
- Responses by Aiko Takazawa and Cory Knobel
While mobile phones in Japan are both technically and culturally transparent, the toll collection system in Germany has only achieved technical transparency. It continues to clash with German culture. This difference may be explained by approaches to design.
Points of Conceptual Convergence
Through the decomposition of the three topics into pair-wise comparisons, and feedback from seminar participants, there are some threads that do seem, in fact, to run through the three projects. While the dynamics of these themes manifest and work differently in each, the underlying interpretation may be that these are entrenched aspects of infrastructure theory which tie together analytical frameworks. To this end, we have identified four themes on which we will briefly comment.
The Role of Users
Fischer's concept of the user heuristic applies well in examining the infrastructure stories of Germany, Japan, and South Africa with respect to the ways in which people interact with the larger structures at hand. As a moderate constructivist model describing the evolution of telephone use in the United States until 1940, Fischer rejects the outright deterministic and purely social constructivist views of technology adoption and infrastructure enrollment (Reed, 2000). To this end, Fischer poses three primary questions related not to the technology or infrastructure itself, but how the technology functions in the hands of the user (Cheshire, 2006)
- Why and how do individuals use a particular technology?
- How did using it alter other (perhaps less immediate) aspects of life?
- How does the collective use of a technology and the collective responses to it alter social structure and culture?
The idea here is that individuals choose a particular technology that is the "path of least resistance", be it convenience, cost, or availability. It rejects the idea that users make conscious choices to support a particular technology or infrastructure. In each of the three cases, we can apply the concept of the user heuristic to determine how and why the technologies are adopted. On the Autobahn, users have no choice but to enroll in the user of the Toll Collect system, as it has been integrated into the roadway itself, and federal mandate requires commercial trucks to (1) within country, install the OBU, and (2) for trucks coming from outside of Germany, register at the Mautstellen and be tracked through the control bridges. The how and why is determined exogenously in the Toll Collect situation. In South Africa, the unbundling aspects of access to telecom provide individual incentives to use the technology. Users choose to enroll because it is one of the only means by which they can increase participation in a larger technological sphere, and by which local businesspeople can engage in "glocal' processes. In Japan, where the deregulation of mobile telephone services provides a free market for widespread adoption of mobile telephones. Users, then, can enroll in the services that best support their social and individual network needs.
The remaining two questions are addressed in other sections of this project.
Centralization and Decentralization
In each case, the role of the technologies that converge to support infrastructure have a range of centralized and decentralized features. In the case of Germany, the system relies on decentralized collection of data through the independent movement of the OBUs that are paired with trucks, and the multiple locations of the gantries and control bridges spread over the Autobahn system; however, the ultimate method of control in the system is centralized within the data processing department of Toll Collect in Berlin, from which analyses, billing functions, and communication with various external agencies takes place. In South Africa, due to the historical lack of cohesive telecommunications infrastructure across the country, the modality of mobile phone use in communities is non-uniform in function and highly decentralized - supporting heterogeneous uses such as inter-personal and familial communication, small business development, 'glocal' connections with the outside world and connection with existing technologically-enabled entities, and the in the case of the mobile phone devce itself, being often shared among individuals, is on the converse a point of social centralization, as it is a rival resource which must be coordiinated in its use and sharing. Japanese telecommunications infrastructure, as pointed out above, grew out of a strong national model of centralized service regulation. The privatization of pager, and later cellular telephone services, has contributed to the decentralization of govenrmental control of the emerging "messy" network of Japanese telecommunications culture.
Bottom-up and Top-down Construction
The "fit" each technology has achieved within its respective environment can be interpreted in terms of the histories through which they came into current use. According to Daniel Dennett (Dennett, 1996), all systems must have a designer, whether the designer is a being or a process (such as evolution, defined by rules and constraints of natural phenomena.) The Toll Collect system, arising from a centralized mandate by the Ministry of Transportation, was clearly a system with a designer. GPS technology was harnessed to become the first (and currently only) toll collection system of its kind. Since the system was one of specific design, it took into account a limited set of design factors - ostensibly, those of which the designers were cognizant. Being a design process of bounded rationality (Simon, 1996), not all contingencies could have been accounted for. As a result, we see the tensions - second order effects, revenge effects, negative externalities - arising from the implemented form of the technology. This top-down construction has yet to find a place in the society where it can effectively become a transparent component of the German automotive and social infrastructure. South Africa, being a technologically impoverished nation, historically speaking, is undergoing a rather rapid implementation process of telecommunications infrastructure. In this case, the technology is was not created specifically for the South African environment; rather, it is a set of systems and technologies that were created and matured in the western world, and are now being transferred as complete systems to Africa. The anti-competitive telecommunications structure in place in South Africa (Lewis, 2004) dictated a top-down approach until the privatization of telecommunications in the mid-1990's. Still, despite this top down structure, we see unique and and emergent uses of mobile telephony among communities, such as the sharing of resources designed for individual use. In South Africa, then, we see the "meeting in the middle" of a structuration process (Giddens, 1986) involving the bottom-up instantiations of the user-side of technology, and the historically top-down implementation that makes those technologies operable. Japan, on the other end of the spectrum, embodies the "bottom-up" approach to technology implementation in the case of mobile telephony. As an industrialized society, the availability of personal communications technology diffused through the population in several waves, beginning with ubiquitous ownership of pagers, and later moving to mobile telephones. Since the function of the technology was spread throughout the social strata, the "fit" of the technology was one of relatively friction-free and transparent suffusion. As a result, the social networks enabled by mobile technology and the rituals surrounding its use are, to the largest extent, transparent.
Cultural Contextualization
Each of the three projects takes place in a cultural context that is quite different from the others. As a mainstay concept of information science, technology does not exist independent of social processes and landscapes (Kling, 1982) In the case of Japan, a traditionally collectivist society, we see the emergence of individualist behaviors in mobile cell phone use. In South Africa, a clan-based social structure mirrors this behavior in the lower socio-economic classes, sharing mobile telephones among family and community members, or members of the clan. In the German case, a typial industrialized western culture, we see the concerns of an individualist nation reflected in equally individual concerns of information privacy and security as a result of centralized aggregation of personal movement data. We also see truck drivers evolving individualist strategies to minimize perceived personal costs by exiting the Autobahn before toll collection points.
