Michael Liegl

Nomadicity and the care of place:on the aesthetic and affective organization of space in freelance creative work

While information and communication technology enables freelancers to work “anytime anywhere”, it has become apparent that not all places seem to be equally suitable for their work. Drawing from CSCW literature on the practical accomplishment of mobile work and theoretical literature on creativity, insights from ethnographic studies in New York, Berlin and Wiesbaden are discussed. The paper follows workers in their everyday attempts to seek out and enact work environments, which enable them to be creative and productive. In these processes, mobility features both as a problem and a resource. The search for the right place makes these workers restless, but sometimes restlessness and nomadicity can inspire creativity. Similarly, new mobile, social and collaborative technologies allow a new balancing of solitude and sociality. I call this emerging nexus of practices which entails aesthetic, affective, social and socio-political dimensions the care of place. A conjoint theoretical and empirical analysis aims to draw attention to everyday lived practices of nomadicity and the care of place in a wider discursive and socio-political context to inform CSCW design.

Collective Intelligence in Crises

New practices of social media use in emergency response seem to enable broader ‘situation awareness’ and new forms of crisis management. The scale and speed of innovation in this field engenders disruptive innovation or a reordering of social, political, economic practices of emergency response. By examining these dynamics with the concept of social collective intelligence, important opportunities and challenges can be examined. In this chapter we focus on socio-technical aspects of social collective intelligence in crises to discuss positive and negative frictions and avenues for innovation. Of particular interest are ways of bridging between collective intelligence in crises and official emergency response efforts.

How to follow the information?:a study of informational mobilities in crises

This article discusses mobile methods of “following the information” to contribute to a new politics of sociological method and inform the development of new design philosophies for information technologies. The approach is motivated by the increasing informationalization of everyday life in general and crisis management in particular. At this juncture social and political principles of privacy and solidarity are being transformed in ways that undermine fundamental values of equality and freedom. Crisis management is a particularly important site for such transformations. By showcasing different ways in which we have followed information in different crisis management settings through tracking, retrospective go-alongs, shadowing and tracing, we show how technologies designed with the ambition to enable “direct interconnection,” “one stop” access and “collect-all” ambitions eliminate control for many data subjects. The studies we present contribute to alternative information system design philosophies that actively support human sensory and social practices of making and making sense of data.

Media assemblages, ethnographic vis-ability and the enactment of video in sociological research

Video recordings offer great opportunities for qualitative social science research; their epistemological status, however, has not been left unchallenged. The paper picks up on this methodological debate, sounding out the specific potential of this research medium. Yet instead of primarily participating in methodological debates, we particularly want to inquire into the underlying empirical notions, settings, actors, and sceneries, which inform methodological debates on video. Reviewing research on ‘professional vision’ in Science and Technology Studies we try to raise awareness of the constructive nature of the practices, which manufacture and transform visual traces into evidence. We then look at our own research practice and ask about epistemic topologies which enable video to become a research medium. We will thus try to identify the resources, practices, and things – epistemic mediators – that make other things (video recordings) act like epistemic objects, and, with the help of concepts by Hennion and Law, we look at these networks of mediators and their respective ways of mediation as ‘media assemblages’.

Is the research medium the message? On the performativity of media within social research

It is a well-established claim that media transform the way we experience, relate to, and know the world, and it has been demonstrated in innumerable studies in the sociology and history of the sciences that, notwithstanding (realist) attempts to achieve untampered with/unspoiled access to the objective world, this is also the case in the sciences (Alpers 1998, Crary 1990, Foucault [1973] 2003, Jay 1993, Kittler 1999, Latour 1999, Luhmann 1986, McLuhan [1964] 2011). It can therefore be plausibly argued that changes of existing, or inventions of new, media bring about transformations in (and of) the way we know the world. While science and technology studies (STS) have shown how instruments and media are vital for the production of facts in other disciplines (Lynch and Woolgar 1990, Pauwels 2006), the same kind of analysis, writes Michael Guggenheim, ‘has rarely been performed upon sociology [... ]. Hence the fact production of our own discipline remains largely unexamined and falls short of what can be learned from these studies’ (Guggenheim 2013, n.p.). This special issue wants to help to close this scholarly gap and contribute to the reflexive endeavour by asking how media figure in the process of research in social sciences and coconstitute its results. The methodology of the social sciences is interested in adequate procedures of research allowing for the formulation of validity criteria which should inform and regulate the sociological construction of social phenomena in research practices. This endeavour of adequate representation entails a certain attitude of epistemological realism, relying on adequate mostly textual or numerical representations of ‘reality’, to serve as a basis for reliable analysis. The blind spot of methodology, however, is more often than not the question of how sociology constitutes its representations of the world and how the media of research (data, materials, communication, networks) figure in the constitution of the sociological phenomenon under examination. It is this performative and constitutive role of media in research that will be the topic of the special issue. What, then, is a medium? Or are there several kinds of media? In attempting a definition of ‘media’, Stefan Münker shows, one is confronted with a wide range of different notions. Colloquially ‘the media’ refers to mass media such as newspapers, television, the internet, and the like. In sociology there is a wide range of different uses of the notion of media. Media could be nearly everything – from electric light to love (Luhmann 1986). Thus, media seem to be characterized by their indeterminacy (Koschorke 2012). Media appear as intermediary agents nearly everywhere where messages are transmitted. It could be an object, a person, a quality, or a capacity. Media theory within literature studies has for a long time emphasized that media add something to their messages and that there is no neutral transmission of independent content. Thus, Marshall McLuhan formulated his emphatic thesis that the medium is the

Emergency Ethics, Law, Policy & IT Innovation in Crises

Ethics, law, and policy are cornerstones for effective IT innovation in crisis response and management. While many researchers and practitioners recognise this, it can be hard to find good resources for circumspect innovation approaches. This paper reviews The Library of Essays on Emergency Ethics, Law and Policy 2013, a four Volume series edited by Tom D. Campbell, that presents a collection of 113 seminal articles and chapters on emergency ethics, law and policy, and emergency research ethics. Building on a selective summary overview of each volume, the authors draw out core themes and discuss their relevance to research concerned with the design and use of intelligent systems for crisis response and management. The series brings together important insights for information system design and organizational innovation, but there is a lack of attention to socio-technical dimensions of emergency response and management. The authors conclude by discussing research within ISCRAM and the related fields of science and technology studies and IT Ethics, showing that entering into a conversation would be highly productive.

„Raum am Draht“: Empirische Beobachtung zur Soziologie der mediatisierten Anmache am Fallbeispiel von Grindr

Uber zumindest eines scheinen sich soziologische Beobachter des „virtuellen“ Theaters der Anmache einig zu sein: in dezidiertem Gegensatz zu traditionellen Kennenlerntanzen, deren Parkett scheinbar nicht in unterscheidbaren ontologischen Seinsregionen verankert ist oder war (Werther etwa beobachtet Lotte zunachst beim Schwarzbrotschneiden; vgl. dazu Luhmann 1986, S. 43), ist Kontaktanbahnungen im Internet scheinbar ein zentraler Moment des Switchens einprogrammiert. „Denn schlieslich“, so formuliert das beispielsweise Jean-Claude Kaufmann in Sex@mour, „verlauft dank Internet die erste Begegnung in zwei sehr unterschiedlichen und voneinander getrennten Phasen: Vor dem ‚echten‘ Rendevous, dem Date im Real Life, wie man inzwischen zu sagen pflegt, haben die beiden Liebeskandidaten mehr oder weniger lang am Bildschirm miteinander geplaudert“ (Kaufmann 2011, S. 8-9).

Ethische, rechtliche und soziale Implikationen (ELSI)

Dieses Kapitel widmet sich ethischen, rechtlichen und sozialen Implikationen (ELSI) bei der Entwicklung von Krisen-IT-Systemen. Beim Krisenmanagement ergeben sich besondere Anforderungen durch das hohe disruptive Potenzial von IT vor dem Hintergrund der sensiblen Situationen, in denen sie eingesetzt werden. Dabei zeigen sich ELSI oft erst im Verlauf der Interaktion von Menschen und Technik im Kontext von Krisensituationen und sind daher nur schwer bei der Gestaltung vorhersehbar. Daher sollen Ansatze fur die Gestaltung von Krisen-IT vorgestellt werden, die ELSI in geeigneter Weise sichtbar und adressierbar machen. Nach einem Uberblick uber Problemstellungen beim Einsatz von Krisen-IT-Systemen sowie dabei relevanter ELSI-Aspekte werden bestehende Ansatze aus dem Bereich des Designs sowie der Technikforschung diskutiert. Anschliesend gibt das Kapitel methodische Handlungsempfehlungen fur ein „ELSI-Co-Design“ auf der Grundlage aktueller Erkenntnisse aus der Kriseninformatik.

Managing Visibility and Validity of Distress Calls with an Ad-Hoc SOS System

The availability of ICT services can be severely disrupted in the aftermath of disasters. Ad-hoc assemblages of communication technology have the potential to bridge such breakdowns. This article investigates the use of an ad-hoc system for sending SOS signals in a large-scale exercise that simulated a terrorist attack. In this context, we found that the sensitivity that was introduced by the adversarial nature of the situation posed unexpected challenges for our approach, as giving away ones location in the immediate danger of a terrorist attack became an issue both for first responders and the affected people in the area. We show how practices of calling for help and reacting to help calls can be affected by such a system and affect the management of the visibility and validity of SOS calls, implying a need for further negotiation in situations where communication is sensitive and technically restrained.