Digital Formations: On Not Being Blinded by Technology

The Friday keynote session at AoIR 2005 is by Saskia Sassen from the University of Chicago, speaking on the intersections of technical and social logics in electronic space. Her presentation will mainly focus on a project of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the U.S., exploring the question of how social science research can take IT seriously but not be governed by it. What are categories, like IT, actually obscuring when they are used? How would social science constitute the object of study, taking technology seriously but not being blinded by it? Especially in interdisciplinary research team s, it is important not to dilute one another's discourses, and instead to develop ways of working together which maintain the full depth of what each field has to bring to the table.

Further, how can the technology be taken seriously rather than be treated as an independent variable whose effects are studied? Technologies are constitutive of whole new domains; how can these domains, this 'black box', be entered by social science research? In addition, social scientists are interested in interactive domains, where new types of sociality (fr.: socialité) are being constructed by new technologies through interactivity? This is not about dealing with hypothetic, game-theoretic environments, but dealing with actual domains - which in this case are specifically located in 'e-space': electronic spaces.

For interactive domains, structured in interactive social network spaces, then, how does the presence of social logic(s) which shape(s) the social interaction in these domains alter the sense of interaction that can be derived from this interactive domain? How does social logic alter the technological logic hat can be derived from the capacities of the technology? Altering also very often means limiting the technical capacities in this case. Decentralised access, simultaneity, and interconnectivity are often put into action in such environments, but it is the social logic which activates (or conversely underutilises) such capacities.

So many of the predictions on ICTs have not been accurate, because outcomes have been inferred simply from the technological capacities - this is not a flaw of either technologies or of their users; this process of inference is simply too limited to make any useful predictions. Instead, a wider and more complex approach must be taken, and the research project looked at technologies in a range of electronic interactive domains.

The team developed three identifying aspects:

1. The relationship between fixity and mobility. These technologies are designed to neutralise space and enhance mobility. This is the engineering vision, at least, but the social vision still remains to be determined. Does fixity remain unaltered, though? We increasingly exist in domains that are governed by software, and these software systems contain theoretical models (but who decides on which? not social scientists…). So, entering the technology and understanding these models which guide the infrastructures of our everyday life is crucial - some of these systems may be highly problematic, and alter our activity and routine. How do social scientists assert a social logic in these technological domains?
2. Capital mobility is enhanced by technological tools and the digitising of the instruments used. The software instruments are now only about track-and-trade, and this makes a fundamental difference in the financial markets; technology is an actor which constitutes this domain. A softwaring of the financial instrumental model is at work here, and the technology alters the foundational institutional dynamics of the global capital markets. This can be seen as part of the new mobilities as well; for example, the recent understanding of real estate as capital investment has led to a new sense of mobility of bricks-and-mortar assets. The technologies have also disrupted institutionalisations by scope and space that have traditionally come from the national state - on the one hand this may be a loss of control by national governments, but at the same time there is also an amazing potential in such technologies for scaling up new models.
3. There are new cultures of use which are emerging. There is an analytic borderland, Saskia suggests, between apparently mutually exclusive conditions; an ambiguous environment in e-space which still needs to be analysed by the researcher. For example, studies of Internet use by Muslim groups have found that traditionalist scholars of the Koran have developed far more sophisticated and effective uses of the Net that young, modern, urban Muslims using the Net, who take a consumerist approach much like their Western counterparts. The scholars could pull out utilities of the technologies that the younger users simply did not recognise.

Back to the fundamental question of how social logics alter the outcomes of technical logics, then. What is happening right now, Saskia suggests, is a kind of 'barefoot engineering': an adjusting of technologies which require vast amounts of bandwidth to less technologically blessed environments. This is a mixing of technical and social logics which in good part happens in an electronic space. This is not just a question of digital divides of technological competence, but there is a third dimension of developing a technological capital which comes out of absence or poverty and enables a using of technology in such more technologically limited environments. The research team developed a new analytical category to address this, then: digital formations - an interactive domain structured electronically or digitally which contains technical logics but also shows social logics at work, and the interaction between the two is the constituting factor of these domains.