Noortje Marres

Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics

What is the role of things in political participation? This book, now in paperback, develops a fresh perspective on the role of everyday objects, technology and settings in engagement, proposing that they enable a distinctive form of involvement: material participation. The book contributes to wider debates about democracy and materiality, but it also offers empirical analyses of particular objects and devices of material engagement: smart energy meters, environmental show homes and sustainable living gadgets. Material Participation brings social studies of science and technology (STS) into conversation with political theory in order to develop a novel approach to the analysis of specifically material forms of participation. In doing so, it explores the next steps to be taken in studies of participation, technology and the environment, focusing our critical, empirical and creative attention squarely on the materials and devices of the public.

Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

Abstract This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.

The redistribution of methods: on intervention in digital social research, broadly conceived

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of digital social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods, and this paper explores the phenomenon in relation to two specific digital methods, online network and textual analysis, arguing that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with their distribution, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the redistribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a redistributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, and both, I argue, involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm, namely critiques of the authority effects implicit in citation analysis. As such, these methods offer ways for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, to endorse and actively pursue the redistribution of social methods online.

The costs of public involvementEveryday devices of carbon accounting and the materialization ofparticipation

Abstract This paper seeks to contribute to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are currently put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper considers whether and how these technologies can be said to ‘materialize’ public participation. It argues that the materialization of engagement entails a particular codification of it: as participation is located in everyday material practice, it comes to be defined in terms of its doability and the investment of effort. Material participation, then, does not refer just to its mediation by things: it involves the deployment of specific legitimatory tropes associated with liberal theories of citizenship and the domestication of technology, in particular the notion that the engagement of everyday subjects requires things to be ‘made easy’ (Pateman, 1989; Schwartz Cowan, 1983). To make sense of this confluence of political and technological ideals, the paper takes up the notion of ‘co-articulation’ (Callon, 2009). A distinctive feature of the everyday devices of accounting under consideration here, I argue, is their ability to ‘co-articulate’ participation with other registers: those of innovation and economy. In this respect, the spaces of participation organized with the aid of these technologies can be qualified as spaces of ‘multi-valent’ action. Different carbon-accounting devices do this, however, in different ways, and this has consequences for how we understand the wider normative implications of the ‘materialization’ of environmental participation. In some cases, materialization entails the minimization of social, material and political changes, while in others it enables the exploration and amplification of precisely these modes of change.

Tracing the trajectories of issues, and their democratic deficits, on the Web: The case of the Development Gateway and its doubles

This article explores the ways in which actor‐network theory (ANT) invites an alternative account of democratic process, namely in terms of issue‐formation, which is particularly well suited to the study of democratic practices facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Engaging with arguments that have been made in political theory in favor of the re‐invigoration of institutional and extra‐institutional forms of democratic debate, this article argues that a re‐valuation of issue‐politics is more than timely. In this respect, actor‐network theory is a particularly fruitful approach, since it provides the conceptual and methodological equipment to account for democracy in terms of processes of issue formation. Such an account of democracy, it is argued, is particularly appropriate to the study of ICT‐based democratic processes, since in the context of ICT distributed networks that configure around particular issues can be seen to emerge as the carriers of democratic process. Moreover, ANT provides the conceptual and methodological tools for the development of a research practice of tracing public controversies as they are enacted in such networks on the Web. In tracing a particular controversy on the Web, around the Development Gateway, a portal for development information set up by the World Bank, one begins to articulate an alternative understanding of the significance of ICT for institutional as well as extra‐institutional forms of democracy. A number of requirements on effective democratic action, as facilitated by ICT, are derived from the case study, which move beyond the requirement of social networking, i.e. the building of partnerships, and informational networking, i.e. the exchange of knowledge and opinion. Issue‐networking here comes to the fore as indispensable to democratic politics.

Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method

This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society (STS) and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter.

SCRAPING THE SOCIAL

This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure research in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks introducing ‘alien’ analytic assumptions such as a pre-occupation with freshness. Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices and devices enabled by online media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with analytics already built in. The pre-ordered nature of captured online data is often approached as a ‘problem’, but we propose it may be turned into a virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the practices under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘live’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. We demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter and Google to track the issues of ‘austerity’ and ‘crisis’ over time. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).

On Some Uses and Abuses of Topology in the Social Analysis of Technology (Or the Problem with Smart Meters)

This paper examines the limits and possibilities of topological approaches in the social analysis of technology. It proposes that topology should be considered not just as a theory to be adopted, but equally as a device that is deployed in social life in a variety of ways. Digital technologies help to make clear why: these technologies have facilitated the spread of a topological imagination, but they have also enabled a weak form of topological imagination, one that leaves in place deterministic ideas about technology as the principal driver of social change. This paper examines this situation and alternatives to it through an empirical case, that of smart electricity meters. On the one hand, these technologies enable only a limited ‘expansion of the frame’ on technology, one in which the primacy of technology is maintained. But they are also used to render relations between technology and society more complexly. I explore topological devices deployed in this second way, such as the digital visualization tool of tag clouding and propose that this device enables an empirical mode of critique: here, topology does not just help to foreground the entanglement of the social and the technical, it also helps to dramatize the contingent, non-coherent unfolding of issues.

Why political ontology must be experimentalized: On eco-show homes as devices of participation

This article contributes to debates about the ontological turn and its implications for democracy by proposing an experimental understanding of political ontology. It discusses why the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies has proved inconclusive for the study of politics and democracy: the politics of non-humans has been assumed to operate on a different level from that of politics and democracy understood as institutional and public forms. I distinguish between three different understandings of political ontology: theoretical, empirical and experimental. Each of these implies a different approach to the problem that non-humans pose for democracy. Theoretical ontology proposes to solve it by conceptual means, while empirical ontology renders it manageable by assuming a problematic analytic separation between constituting and constituted ontologies. This article makes the case for the third approach, experimental ontology, by analysing an empirical site, that of the eco-show home. In this setting, material entities are deliberately invested with moral and political capacities. As such, eco-show homes help to clarify two main features of experimental political ontology: (1) ontological work is here not so much relocated from theory to empirical practice but distributed among relevant actors and registers and (2) normative variability does not just pertain to the enactment of things but can be conceived of as internal to political objects. From these two features of experimental ontology, something follows for democracy as an ontological problem. This problem does not dissolve in empirical settings, but these settings make possible its articulation by experimental means.

SCRAPING THE SOCIAL?: Issues in live social research

This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure research in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks introducing ‘alien’ analytic assumptions such as a pre-occupation with freshness. Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices and devices enabled by online media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with analytics already built in. The pre-ordered nature of captured online data is often approached as a ‘problem’, but we propose it may be turned into a virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the practices under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘live’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. We demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter and Google to track the issues of ‘austerity’ and ‘crisis’ over time. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).