[Air-l] Re: Internet History/Stages, was Internet in Everyday Life (Frank Thomas)

[Frank Thomas]

   Maria,
I am somewhat uneasy to call something like a technoinfrastructure an 
"actor". For me, an actor is someONE you has the capacity and the will 
to act. Artefacts can not act by themselves but have inbuilt rules. The 
question for me then is: who built which rules in the artefact, who was 
ecluded in using it, which are the "costs"=efforts to use it, who covers 
for the cost, etc. So, in any case, the artefact is a socially 
constructing being, not an actor by itself.
Of course, artefacts shape the opportunity and constraints structure of 
humans (and organisations)  that use them. But this is not the result of 
an independent will. This is the result of social decisions about the 
use (or non-use) of specific material characteristics.

Also, I would add to your list economic factors, for instance business 
models, user tariffs etc. and operational guidelines. The latter is 
often not considered in sociological discussions of the construction and 
use of an artefact but it may become the most important part of it as 
the rules decide how to use the artefact. And, of course, there 
sometimes is a nice struglle about the rules. Think of the French 
telecom engineers who conceived the minitel as a centra server model and 
who were surprised that users linked terminals not to the  server for 
database retrieval but to link through to communicate with other end 
terminal users. This was the birthday of the messager services on 
minitel which had their strongest use when someone invented minitel rose 
(I guess you have to translate "someone" into: male, below 30 years, 
single, trained in science or engineering, ...)   . So, the fellow 
enginners were strongly against this morally incorrect use of a marvel 
of communication technology. I don't know who made the decision to allow 
messenger services even when they transported porn, I guess, no 
prejudice, this must have been people from the finance department. Look 
into the works of Volker Schneider and his comparison with the British 
videotext and the German Btx services (together with Graham Thomas and 
Thierry Vedel).

Did you integrate the videotext services as a precursor in your 
description ?

Cordialement
Frank

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