Megan Finn

The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society

In the last few years, a powerful consensus has emerged among scholars of digitally enabled peer production. In this view, digital technologies and social production processes are driving a dramatic democratization of culture and society. Moreover, leading scholars now suggest that these new, hyper-mediated modes of living and working are specifically challenging the hierarchical structures and concentrated power of bureaucracies. This paper first maps the assumptions underlying the new consensus on peer production so as to reveal the sources of its coherence. It then revisits Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy. With Weber in mind, the paper aims to expose analytical weaknesses in the consensus view and offer a new perspective from which to study contemporary digital media.

Imagining the Internet

This is the ninth time a special issue of Information, Communication & Society has featured some of the most exciting scholarship emerging from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). The papers in this issue were first reviewed for the 16th annual Association of Internet Researchers (IR16) conference and presented in Phoenix, Arizona, in October of 2015. IR16 included the presentation of 137 papers, several preconference events, plus many organized panels, roundtables, and fishbowls. Over 330 people from 24 countries were in attendance. Using the results of the conference review process, the conference executive committee identified papers that they considered exceptional. From this pool, the authors of selected conference papers were invited to submit full papers for this special issue. The full papers were sent out for double blind peer review again, and the papers you see here are the results of this lengthy selection process. We are thrilled that these authors persevered and were quick to turn around drafts when revisions were requested. We thank executive committee members Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Andrew Herman, Anna Lauren Hoffman, Lori Kendall, Sun Sun Lim, Annette Markahm, Kelly Quinn, and Michael Zimmer, for their hard work in bringing together an amazing conference. An extra special thanks also goes out to Alex Halvais, pastAoIR president and IR16 local conference organizer, who stepped down from AoIR committee work after a decade of service to the organization! The conference theme asked participants to reflect on networked technology imaginaries, as the conference call explained:

Information Infrastructure and Descriptions of the 1857 Fort Tejon Earthquake

In 1857 Californians experienced the largest earthquake in the state’s history. Few people lived near the earthquake’s epicenter, so the earthquake was small in terms of damage and loss of life, but it still was felt from San Diego to San Francisco. After the earthquake, Californians wanted to understand what had happened elsewhere. They circulated narratives about the earthquake by boat and horseback in letters and newspapers. Californians made sense of the earthquake without standardized timekeeping or modern scientific theories. The descriptions and explanations of the earthquake that surfaced were shaped by and reflected the 1857 information infrastructure.

Information determinism: The consequences of the faith in information

ABSTRACT We identify and examine the assumption of information determinism that is commonplace in policy arenas: that mere access to the “right information” will precipitate desired actions. Our analysis focuses on implications of information determinism in three cases: California disaster response plans in the 1980s, an Indian development project in the 1990s, and an education project directed at the Global South in the 2000s. Our analyses shows that planning based on information deterministic assumptions tends to overlook the sociomaterial circumstances of information production and circulation, including how social structures and materiality shape information in practice. Further, they imbue what we call “information” with the agency to bring about change. While we do not deny that “information” can be useful, we argue that policy needs to move away from information deterministic thinking and its singular focus on information access to address the needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations.

A Fundamentally Confused Document: Situation Reports and the Work of Producing Humanitarian Information

Situation reports, or sitreps, are documents commonly used by UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs involved in emergency response to disseminate information to and from relief workers in the field. This paper analyzes the information labor involved in producing sitreps, and how it can be used to understand why these documents are described by insiders as “fundamentally confused.” Drawing from document analysis and interviews with over one hundred people involved with sitreps, we examine humanitarian information labor in a decentralized, hierarchical, collaborative, political, and competitive work environment. From an empirical perspective, we contribute to CSCW by adding a case study about the situated practice of making humanitarian information, which includes our work as researcher/consultants in reconstructing the details of information gathering and sharing processes in order to improve them. We consider how the work of producing humanitarian information reproduces problematic humanitarian logics.

Information Infrastructure and Resilience in American Disaster Plans

Public information infrastructures are not only potential sites of enacting sociotechnical resilience but are crucial to the project of sociotechnical resilience. Following critiques of the broad concept of resilience as unspecific and neoliberal, this chapter contributes to the project of understanding sociotechnical resilience by emphasizing the complex institutional arrangements involved in the production of information infrastructures. The chapter grounds the concept of resilience in the definitions outlined in the United States’ contemporary infrastructure protection plans. Through an examination of historical examples of repair in California after disasters, this chapter asks what it means to reimagine public information infrastructure under the rubric of resilience, highlighting (1) the securitization of information infrastructure as a logic attempting to shape future sociomaterial entanglements; (2) the impulse to control uncertainty by rationalizing risk; and (3) that privately owned infrastructure does not conform to the modern infrastructural ideal.

Changing Publishing Practices in iSchools

iSchools are home to many researchers who study the practices of scholarly publishing, a significant number of whom also design, build, and evaluate innovative tools for scholarly publishing. Yet when it comes to our own work, many scholars at iSchools have been reluctant to try new modes of publishing, a trend this workshop aims to correct. Many researchers maintain an appropriate skepticism of the claims made by evangelists of the new modes of publishing; thus, this workshop starts with an understanding that current publishing paradigms are embedded in socio-material practices and institutional logics. Nevertheless, a growing number of scholars at iSchools, and iSchool-related programs are experimenting with new ways of publishing their own work. This workshop will bring together researchers of scholarly communication practice and designers of research publishing tools with those who are considering their own scholarly publishing projects. The aim is to encourage scholars considering experiments through an exploration of both the tools now available for experimentation, and expert insights into innovations in scholarly communication.