[Air-L] Decommissioning Online Infrastructures

Mon Feb 20 12:16:10 PST 2017

Agreed, Elijah

I did a presentation at a recent EDUCAUSE Information Security Professionals conference, focusing on applying system life-cycle concepts to "infrastructure". IT folks are accustomed to thinking of things in functional layers, where a particular layer assumes that everything below it is "infrastructure", from the application all the way down to the hardware and cables. Viewing infrastructure as the "next layer down" allowed framing the question: should protocols on which we rely for basic service also be viewed with a system life-cycle lens that includes an end-of-life stage? How to think about the retirement of infrastructure services? So for that particular audience (being network/security geeks), the discussion parsed itself pretty well into layers of the stack. SDLC is applied pretty commonly to applications we write, but rarely to services that those applications consume.

Steve

===================
Steven Lovaas
Information Security Officer
Colorado State University
steven.lovaas at colostate.edu<mailto:steven.lovaas at colostate.edu>
970-297-3707
===================
________________________________
From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Elijah Wright <elijah.wright at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2017 12:05:00 PM
To: Isto Huvila
Cc: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Decommissioning Online Infrastructures

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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