[Air-L] Decommissioning Online Infrastructures

Mon Feb 20 11:05:00 PST 2017

I'd encourage people to carefully unpack what they mean by 'decommissioning
online infrastructures' -- there's a vast difference (both practical and
theoretical) between turning down a public service ('retiring' it so folks
can't use it anymore - which might be a one line change in someone's
load-balancer config...) and turning down the underlying machines and
services (disposal - both of data, physical gear, leased space, et
cetera...).

Rarely do I see any nuanced discussion of the practical end of things.  It
is rough work.

--e

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 12:44 AM, Isto Huvila <isto.huvila at abm.uu.se> wrote:

>
> 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
> Department of ALM | Institutionen för ABM
> Uppsala University | Uppsala universitet
> (t) +46 18 471 34 20
> (m) +46 70 167 94 70
> (e) firstname.lastname at abm.uu.se<mailto:firstname.lastname at abm.uu.se>
> (w) www.istohuvila.se<http://www.istohuvila.se/>
>
> 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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