[Air-L] Decommissioning Online Infrastructures

Sun Feb 19 22:44:02 PST 2017

Hi,

I can nothing else but join the chorus of the recommenders of Pearce. Inspired by her work (hmm, probably mostly after I started my ‘fieldwork’ and really found it relevant), I studied Google Lively (anyone recalls, probably not :-) and found some similarities and dissimilarities in what happens when an infrastructure is not sustainable in another kind of a context

Huvila, I. "We’ve got a better situation": the Life and Afterlife of Virtual Communities of Google Lively
Journal of Documentation, 2015, 71(3), 526 - 549. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JD-09-2013-0116?af=R Preprint at http://www.istohuvila.se/node/455

thumbs up with your work,

Isto

Professor
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On 17 Feb 2017, at 21:28, sally <sally at sally.com<mailto:sally at sally.com>> wrote:

Hi Josh,

I second Ceila Pearce's work on this.

You might also consider dwindling communities ("not dead, yet!") such as the Amiga users groups.

There is also resurrection - as evidenced by the Web 1.0 movement:

http://gizmodo.com/the-great-web-1-0-revival-1651487835

^^ Not an academic reference, but there is some evidence around that nostalgia incites recapturing, or simulation at the very least.

Good luck!

Sally

Sally Applin, Ph.D.
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
School of Anthropology and Conservation
Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing
..........
Associate Editor, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
Associate Editor, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
Member, IoT Council
Board Member: The Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Foundation
..........
http://www.posr.org
http://www.sally.com
@anthropunk
I am based in Silicon Valley

On Feb 17, 2017, at 10:48 AM, Nathaniel Poor wrote:

Hi Josh-

As I just did on the list yesterday, I’d suggest…..
Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
As it looks at the *community’s* response to a system being shut down — but this might be tangential to what you are looking for.

I agree though, failures aren’t sexy and so don’t get covered. For instance, companies made a lot of fuss when moving into Second Life, but not so much when they stopped using it.

I thought I had articles from a special journal issue from years ago that focused on failure from an STS perspective, but those might discuss the framing of the techs and not the dismantling, and I’m not finding them.
It might be the issue that this article is from:
Braun, H.-J. (1992). Symposium on “failed innovations.” Social Studies of Science, 22, 213–230.

I’d also suggest you poke at the Videotex literature, although I’m not aware of studies that quite looked at any dismantling of those systems (I did a dissertation chapter on it).
I feel that good lit starts, for both citations to and from, could be these:
Kyrish, S. (2001). Lessons from a predictive history: What videotex told us about the World Wide Web. Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 7(4).
Mosco, V. (1982). Pushbutton fantasies: Critical perspectives on videotex and information technology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

I look forward to seeing what others suggest!
-Nat

---------------------------
Nathaniel Poor, PhD
http://github.com/natpoor <http://github.com/natpoor>
http://natpoor.blogspot.com <http://natpoor.blogspot.com/>
http://sites.google.com/site/natpoor/ <http://sites.google.com/site/natpoor/>
http://www.underwood-institute.org <http://underwood-institute.org/>

On Feb 17, 2017, at 12:24 PM, Joshua Braun <jabraun at journ.umass.edu> wrote:

Hi All,

I'm looking for literature suggestions. I'm currently starting work on a
research project looking at Twitter's dismantling of the Vine video
service. In line with the observation made in excellent essays like
Steven Jackson's "Rethinking Repair" [1] and Marisa Cohn's "Engineering
Obsolesence" [2], there seems to be a lot of research in both media
studies and STS on how new technologies, products, and services get
created, but not nearly so much on how older ones get dismantled,
decommissioned, or enter into maintainership.

I would welcome your recommendations of literature that touches on these
areas. I'm interested in the topic broadly, but papers on the
decommissioning of software and digital infrastructures would be
particularly helpful.

Many Thanks,
Josh

P.S. Nathan Ensmenger's "When Good Software Goes Bad: The Unexpected
Durability of Digital Technologies" [3] is another paper I'd recommend
to other folks interested in this topic.

[1]
https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/RethinkingRepairPROOFS(reduced)Aug2013.pdf
[2] http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2014/04/21/engineering_obsolescence/
[3] http://themaintainers.org/s/ensmenger-maintainers-v2.pdf

--
Josh Braun, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies
Journalism Department
University of Massachusetts Amherst

@josh_braun
Skype: wideaperture
http://wideaperture.net/
new book: http://wideaperture.net/?view=book

"Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain.  An inheritance of wonder and nothing more."
William Least Heat-Moon

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