Month: February 2022

by Magnus Rust

 

This is a story of how the latest technologies have changed our way of collaboration, and why this change is invisible. The center of this study is a mundane object. An object millions of students worldwide have encountered. They weren’t confronted with the very same object every single time but with different expressions of the same idea. We are talking, how could it be otherwise, of the seminar handout. More specifically we will turn our attention to multiple iterations of a specific handout issued by the Viennese STS department in the last eight years—the handout of the annual course “Risky Entanglements? Theorising Science, Technology and Society Relationships”.

 

Brief History of the Viennese STS department

It was the year 2010 when the Viennese STS department took another important step in its history. After the English-language MA program had been established a year earlier, the department moved from a classic Altbau in Sensengasse 6, where it had been located since 1988, to its modern location, the NIG (Neues Institutsgebäude) in Universitätsstraße 7.

Since its dawn in 2009, an integral part of the master’s program “Science-Technology-Society” has been  the “case-based learning” approach. Newcomers are split into small groups and given an emerging topic in STS. Now it’s the group’s task to write a full-fledged research exposé that could (theoretically) be handed in in a real world situation. From zero to 100 in only one semester in a field not well known to all of the students. A challenging task but also quite rewarding when finished. Not surprising that this case-based-learning approach won the Teaching Award of the University of Vienna in 2014[1].

This cased-based learning phase consists of a bundle of seminars, lectures, tutorials and feedback sessions. One of the five core classes is the aforementioned “Risky Entanglements? Theorising Science, Technology and Society Relationships” first offered in WS 2009, this year taking place for the 14th time. The “Risky Entanglement” is one of the staples of the STS institutes. At the same time, the STS department had been in flux. After Helga Nowotny had founded the original STS department in 1988, Ulrike Felt became, after 10 years as an assistant, a professor in 1999. Maximilian Fochler became the second professor in 2012 and Sarah Davies has been holding a third professorship since 2020. Not to forget all the students, PhD candidates, postdocs, or secretaries who have worked at the institute over the last decades.

But not only has the staff changed but also technologies, societies, the zeitgeist. It would be of great interest to investigate the topics researched at this institute in the last decade. But it is also equally interesting to not just analyze the works of this institute but how those works worked; how work was done, and how the teaching was organized. All of this follows a key concept in STS called “symmetry”: the idea that reflexive modes cannot only be applied to a research matter but also onto your own research methods.

 

Changing layouts

Here, we finally return to the handouts, more specifically the handouts of the core course “Risky Entanglements” from 2013 to 2020. Upon closer inspection, they provide insights into how digitalization has shaped the production of those documents. Even if not visible directly, those eight handouts represent a curve from a collective to a collaborative praxis of writing.

A handout—sometimes also called syllabus—is a staple of a student’s life. Its purpose is to comprehensively communicate what a given seminar is about, what is expected for the seminar sessions and how the seminar will be graded. From my personal experience in the field of humanities, I can tell you that there is a big variety of handouts. Some are very precise, others just create confusion.

You can say the handouts of the Viennese STS department were quite solid right from the start, like one syllabus from 2000 shows:

 

This proven design echoes in the first handout for “Risky Entanglements” 13 years later:

 

The design in general has become ever clearer, a department logo has been introduced and color is used to communicate even more effectively. The next iteration of the course one year later lands with a surprise. All the established information bits are still there but the text direction has changed:

 

“Corporate amnesia” and its solution

But why was the text direction and design changed? That is not that easy to answer, mainly because “corporate amnesia” (Arnold Kransdorff) is at play. This is a classic problem of “organizational memory”[2] or of “tacit knowledge” (Michael Polanyi) to use an STS term. It assumes that for operating any institution—whether company or university—successfully, much more knowledge is needed than what’s in the manuals. Knowledge that might not even fit in a written manual and is thus at risk of getting lost easily. When people leave an institution, much of this tacit knowledge often leaves as well.

The idea of “corporate amnesia”, however, is much older than management literature. It has been discussed for a long time and has been problematized in many fields, for example, in the discipline of history. It was Jules Michelet, a patriotic French historian and popularizer of the word “renaissance”, who wrote in 1846: “My inquiry among living documents taught me likewise many things that are not in our statistics.”[3] What he meant was that he was not only trusting the dead paper documents for his historiographies, but also seeking contact with “living documents”, that is humans. He made Oral History a staple of his analyses, also collecting French fairy tales.

Why the design was tilted is not exactly known, but it might have something to do with the media situation in 2013. Maybe the handout was not only provided digitally but was also printed and hung on the institute’s walls? What is more telling is that such a drastic design change was even possible. In 2013 there were 4 competing handout designs and even more variations at the institute, differing among staff members or guest professors (though the content structuring was pretty much the same throughout).

 

A disruptive change

This hotchpotch ended in 2015. Even though the lecturer for “Risky Entanglements” stayed the same, the design was adapted once again. From that point in time all STS handouts would follow a corporate layout that seems to have stayed unchallenged to this day. The only adjustment was that from WS 2015 to WS 2016 when the handout font was switched from Calibri Light to Arial:

This very last change seems to be the most neglectable detail of all but is in fact an indicator for the most disruptive change in handout preparation at the institute yet. It was in WS 2016 that the handout production was converted from offline to online. In previous years, word documents were sent between administration and lecturers for pinning down dates, contents and synopses. A tedious process that can be even more annoying if the two parties operate with different software versions.

In 2016 the institute’s administration started using a cloud-based service for the creation of the handouts. It seems like the seminar “Science, Technology and ‘the Law’” by Xaq Frohlich in WS 2015 was the test run for this practice and was subsequently adapted for all handouts to come. It makes sense: Frohlich was a guest professor, so communicating dates was more difficult than just walking to the office next door.

 

From collective to collaborative writing

But what is the disruption here? It was the switch from a collective act of writing—people work in the same handout but send clearly distinguishable versions around—to a collaborative act, where, at the end of the day, nobody can trace back what person contributed which part [4]. Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is a prime example of collaborative writing (even if technically it is possible to trace every change made back to a specific user account).

That was the giant leap: from collective to collaborative. Simultaneous instead of linear. From server-bound to de-central. Internet instead of Intranet. This allowed organizational re-configuration. The cloud document can be shared with external lecturers, always allowing them to access the latest version without being constantly bombarded by the STS institute with edited work-in-progress pieces.

It’s a bit like Schrödinger’s cat on demand: If you want to know about current status you can access the online document. If not, you won’t know the latest version, or whether there is even a newer version available. And like Schrödinger’s cat, at one point in time the status’ uncertainty is resolved. The handout is finished. The cat is dead. Every new observation will deliver the same result.

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References:

[1] University of Vienna: Universität Wien verleiht Lehrpreis UNIVIE Teaching Award 2014, Blog (05.06.2014), https://medienportal.univie.ac.at/presse/aktuelle-pressemeldungen/detailansicht/artikel/universitaet-wien-verleiht-lehrpreis-univie-teaching-award-2014/)

[2] James P. Walsh & Gerardo Rivera Ungson: Organizational Memory, in: The Academy of Management Review 1(16), 1991 (pp. 57-91).

[3] Jules Michelet: The People, translated by C. Cocks, London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1846, p. 2.

[4] cf. Kathrin Passig: Schreibende Staatsquallen, in: Dorothee Kimmich et al. (ed.): Verweilen unter schwebender Last. Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur 2015, Künzelsau: Swiridoff, 2016 (pp. 69-86).

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Magnus Rust is a student at the Department of STS, University of Vienna, with a background in Cultural Studies and journalism. He is interested in historic developments of technologies big and small and their contemporary social ramifications.

by Carsten Horn

Vienna is beautiful, not only because of the historic buildings or the many parks and green spots in the middle of the city (and many other things could be mentioned). One particular aspect that lends the city its special atmosphere for me is the abundance of theaters. On any given day you can go out to see tragedies or comedies, classical or modern plays, amateurs, or professionals on the “boards that mean the world” (to imperfectly translate Schiller’s phrase into English). So, what better thing to do after a long day of racking one’s brains about STS than to go out, attend a play and get the mind off heavy STS stuff.

Thus, one Saturday evening I find myself in line at the entrance of one of the many theaters. Now, in Austria, given the implementation of a vaccination mandate and the so-called “2G-Rules” (stating you either have to be vaccinated (“geimpft”) or recovered (“genesen”), one has to present a certificate to prove that one meets the access requirements. Much could be said about the logic of this way of controlling access (Deleuze, 1992) not only to theaters but also restaurants, bars and museums, but remember, at least initially, the goal of this visit to the theater was to get my mind off STS. Conveniently, the Austrian Ministry for Social Affairs, Health, Care and Consumer Protection has introduced the so-called “Green Pass App,” a digital app that stores all your Covid-19-related certificates on your smartphone so you don’t have to carry them around in the paper format that is issued at the vaccination centers (or at pharmacies, but more of that later) or find a pocket large enough to fit the rather unwieldy, yellow vaccination pass, mine issued by the World Health Organization (WHO). As the line moves ahead, I collect what I need to be able to enter: the personalized ticket, my ID card to prove that I am indeed the person the ticket has been issued to and that I am indeed the person whose name is stated on the vaccination certificate I am about to present, and my Green Pass App-equipped smartphone. Opening the Green Pass App, I am not greeted by the familiar green checkmarks underneath the QR-code which signal that, yes, I may access museums, theaters or bars and restaurants. Instead, I see two bright red boxes: My vaccination certificate has been invalidated. In disbelief I scroll down on the screen — after all, I was vaccinated for the third time only little more than a month ago and even with the rapidly changing regulation there surely shouldn’t be any problem, right? But there it is, in black on white: My Green Pass App claims I have only been vaccinated twice, the last time in the summer of 2021, thus the invalidation. All my pleas to the theater employees that my app is clearly lying and that there must have been some type of technical error because I have been vaccinated three times are, rightfully, to no avail — and thus I find myself, contrary to the intention of attending the play, thrown right back into the midst of current debates in STS.

 

Of seams and cyborgs

Given the contemporary proliferation of digital infrastructures, “seamlessness” has become a virtue. The multiple, (not only digital) infrastructures we are constantly attached to need to fit one another so that, for instance, we can easily and almost automatically link the results of our latest run in the park, self-tracked by one of the many apps that exist just for this purpose, to our social media feeds for our digital social networks to, literally, cheer us on or to link our sensing devices to our smartphones and the corresponding apps (Williams et al., 2020). Janet Vertesi (2014) has shown that this is a more or less tedious task of what she calls “aligining,” that is, finding more or less creative ways of making heterogeneous infrastructures compatible. Nevertheless, especially in digital infrastructures, seamlessness, thanks to technologies such as Application Interface Programming (API), may seem rather easy to accomplish and at times may even be invisible to the user of such infrastructures. In this sense, what is at stake in the denied theater visit portrayed above is twofold. On the one hand, in the rather classical STS move to look for controversies or situations of breakdowns, Vertesi (2014, p. 276) argues that “[m]oments when actors fail to interweave their many systems successfully can be analytically useful for revealing otherwise invisible infrastructural components essential to the task at hand and surfacing sociotechnical orders and tacit social relations to analytic view.” On the other hand, there seems to be more at stake than just the alignment of however heterogeneous technical infrastructures — in this case, among others, the infrastructures that make the vaccination campaign of the City of Vienna possible and the digital infrastructure involved in the certification of the vaccinations. Perhaps even more pervasively, alignment here concerns the relationship between the digital world and the real world, especially salient in the times of the pandemic (Coeckelberg, 2020). To successfully enter the theater, I should have been a “cyborg” (Haraway, 1985), which in this situation comes to mean the entanglement of a vaccinated bodymind and a digital app. Only this entanglement of the real and the digital world would have made me “vaccinated” in terms of the official 2G-Rules. Because the latter component — the functioning app — was missing, I might have been a vaccinated bodymind but this was insufficient to grant me the desired access (thus the hopelessness of my pleas to the employees). In turn, this makes visible an often taken-for-granted dimension of the cyborg as the interweaving of organism and technologies: the seams “between embodied consciousness and socio-material fields, flesh and machines and body and society” (Freund, 2004, p. 277).

 

The work to make digital health work

As Vertesi (2014) points out, breakdowns of interconnected infrastructures as a methodological point of departure unveil the social relations that are obscured as long as these infrastructures hold together seamlessly, including the work of (re-)aligning them. This is an especially salient insight for the contemporary efforts of digitalizing healthcare systems ongoing in many countries. These efforts often have the alignment of digital infrastructures as their core. They entail questions such as how the socio-technical alignment is possible, who makes alignments work and who is responsible for failures and the corresponding repair of seamlessness. Such sociocultural questions need to be considered carefully to get a fuller picture of digitalized healthcare. Existing research into telemedicine, as one particular form of digital health, shows that it indeed goes along with a redistribution of work. Work that may subsequently become invisible in formal accounts of medical practice but is crucial for the workings of telemedicine (Nicolini, 2006; Oudshoorn, 2008).

How did things work out or, rather, had to be made to work out in my case? The recovery of the seamlessness between the digital and the real world took a detour: I had to align the medical infrastructure of the City of Vienna, with the built infrastructure of the city, the small alleyways of Vienna’s Inner City, and the infrastructure provided by the Global Positioning System (GPS) to guide me the way to an emergency pharmacy that was still open on a Saturday evening. There, a pharmacist could luckily print out my vaccination certification. This was made possible by the alignments between the technical infrastructure of the pharmacy and the Austrian electronic health record that the pharmacist thankfully created by using my insurance card. This impromptu printout, at last, granted me access to the theater. The solution disclosed an alternative pathway and a corresponding different configuration of the digital and the real world: The moment of breakdown and the distributed efforts to find a resolution make visible a vast analog and digital infrastructure that exists in parallel with the Green Pass App. This infrastructure and the types of work it implies tend to remain hidden in the seemingly inconspicuous analog sheet of paper that I was then able to present to the employees at the theater (although the QR-code printed on top of the certificate provides a trace of the digital world as a constant companion). In turn, this also shows that for me, in this situation the interconnectedness of infrastructures has been boon and bane at the same time: disruptive when it failed at the theater entrance, enabling in the concerted effort to repair the situation and save the day after all. Dealing with these ambivalence(s) of seamlessness will likely be one of the major challenges in the digitalization of healthcare systems in the near future. The play, an adaption of a recent French movie, turned out great in the end, by the way; I only missed the first couple of minutes.

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References:

Coeckelbergh, M. (2020). The Postdigital in Pandemic Times: A Comment on the Covid-19 Crisis and its Political Epistemologies. Postdigital Science Education, 2, 547–550.

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7.

Freund, P. (2004). Civilised Bodies Redux: Seams in the Cyborg. Social Theory & Health, 2(3), 273–289.

Haraway, D. (1985). Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Socialist Review, 15(2), 65–107.

Nicolini, D. (2006). The work to make telemedicine work: A social and articulative view. Social Science & Medicine, 62(11), 2754-2767.

Oudshoorn, N. (2007). Diagnosis at a distance: the invisible work of patients and healthcare professionals in cardiac telemonitoring technology. Sociology of Health & Illness, 30(2), 272-288

Vertesi, J. (2014). Seamful Spaces: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in Interaction. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 39(2), 264–284.

Williams, R., Will, C., Weiner, K., & Henwood, F. (2020). Navigating standards, encouraging interconnections: infrastructuring digital health platforms, Information. Communication & Society, 23(8,) 1170-1186.

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Carsten Horn is a second-year master’s student at the Department for Science and Technology Studies. He also works as a researcher in the research project “ICU4Covid” at Department. His research interests are situated at the intersection of STS, sociology and philosophy. Currently, he is writing his master’s thesis on the regulation of digital health technologies.