Varieties of Cooperation: Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making 3658390360, 9783658390365

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Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation

Clemens Eisenmann · Kathrin Englert  Cornelius Schubert · Ehler Voss Editors

Varieties of Cooperation Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making

Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation Series Editor Erhard Schüttpelz, Philosophische Fakultät, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

Digital vernetzte Medien werden als kooperative Werkzeuge, Plattformen und Infrastrukturen gestaltet, die bestehende Öffentlichkeiten transformieren und neue Öffentlichkeiten ermöglichen. Sie sind nicht mehr als Einzelmedien zu verstehen, sondern verlangen eine praxistheoretische Auffassung der Medien und ihrer Geschichte. Alle Medien sind kooperativ verfertigte Kooperationsbedingungen. Ihre Praktiken und Techniken entstehen aus der wechselseitigen Verfertigung und Bereitstellung gemeinsamer Mittel und Abläufe. Darum verläuft die Erforschung digitaler Medien quer zur gängigen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsteilung und verlangt eine gezielte Engführung von Medientheorie und Sozialtheorie. Digital network media are designed as cooperative tools, platforms and infrastructures which transform existing publics and give rise to new ones. Digital media can no longer be understood as individual media, but demand a practicetheoretical perspective on media and their history. All media are cooperatively accomplished devices of cooperation. Media practices and techniques evolve from the mutual making of shared resources and joint processes. That’s why the study of digital media disturbs our scientific division of labour and remains a challenge for the intersections between media theory and social theory.

Clemens Eisenmann · Kathrin Englert · Cornelius Schubert · Ehler Voss Editors

Varieties of Cooperation Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making

Editors Clemens Eisenmann SFB Medien der Kooperation Universität Siegen Siegen, Germany Cornelius Schubert Universität Siegen Siegen, Germany

Kathrin Englert Arbeitsbereich Erwerbslosigkeit und Teilhabe Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung Nürnberg, Germany Ehler Voss Universität Bremen Bremen, Germany

ISSN 2520-8349 ISSN 2520-8357 (electronic) Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation ISBN 978-3-658-39036-5 ISBN 978-3-658-39037-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Contents

Introduction 1

Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making. An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clemens Eisenmann, Kathrin Englert, Cornelius Schubert, and Ehler Voss

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Prescriptum 2

Reinventing the Wheel of Media Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Erhard Schüttpelz

Part I 3

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Implementing Information Systems

Meta-Infrastructure: Pneumatic Tube Systems, Infrastructural Entanglements and Cooperation in Enterprises from the Late 19th to the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Meneghello Patents and Licences: Basic Elements of Cooperation in the Early History of Electronic Data Processing in Europe . . . . . Christian Henrich-Franke

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Part II Doing Dasein 5

Intimate Pictures: Mediating Absence and Presence in Senegalese Transnational Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simone Pfeifer

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Mainstreaming Zoom: Covid-19, Social Distancing, and the Rise of Video-Mediated Remote Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . Axel Volmar, Charline Kindervater, Sebastian Randerath, and Aikaterini Mniestri

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Part III Cooperating Corpora 7

The Passport as a Medium of Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Asko Lehmuskallio and Paula Haara

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Entangling Bodies and Objects in the Air . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Larissa Schindler

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Part IV Participating and Privacy 9

Information Control and Trust in the Context of Digital Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thilo Hagendorff

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10 Mutually Designing Domestic IT Applications with Older Adults . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claudia Müller, Marén Schorch, and David Struzek

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Introduction

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Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making. An Introduction Clemens Eisenmann, Kathrin Englert, Cornelius Schubert, and Ehler Voss

The “varieties of cooperation” empirically investigated in this volume shed light on historical formations, essential foundations, stabilisations and consequences of mutual accomplishments in cooperative practices. Considering the histories of technological artefacts and infrastructures, such as the passport or the pneumatic tube system, as well as the current use of widespread everyday media practices, such as video conferences, air travel or domestic IT applications, we understand cooperation in a broad and yet very specific sense: as any form of mutual makings, in which common goals, means or procedures have to be achieved in concrete practices of concerted activities (Schüttpelz, 2017). From this analytic perspective “practice takes precedence over all other (social or technical) explanatory variables” (Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017, p. 156; own transl.). This radical praxeology allows us to investigate media, technologies and infrastructures with regard to two central and foundational dimensions. Firstly, it makes it possible C. Eisenmann (B) · C. Schubert · E. Voss SFB Medien der Kooperation, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] C. Schubert e-mail: [email protected] E. Voss e-mail: [email protected] K. Englert Arbeitsbereich Erwerbslosigkeit und Teilhabe, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Nürnberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] E. Voss Contradiction Studies, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_1

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to explain how even “relatively finished objects” (Garfinkel et al., 1981, p. 135) are achieved in mutual makings in situ and how “the question of what is produced as media in use thus depends on the situation and opportunity, the goals, interests or even the problem” (Thielmann, 2012, p. 96 f.; own transl.). Secondly, empirical historiographic and ethnographic investigations of the cooperative production of media as media enable us to show how cooperative media are the result of mutual achievements and simultaneously produce the very conditions of cooperation itself: mutually making the conditions of mutual making. This volume originated from the conference “Varieties of Cooperation. Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making” (2017) organised by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. The CRC brings together researchers interested in studying the diverse realisations of cooperative media and cooperative practices from a variety of scholarly backgrounds. From the exchanges of goods or information to the interactions between bodies or organisations and the coordination between colleagues, competitors, friends or foes. Mutually making the conditions of mutual making entails mediating heterogeneous interests, negotiating conflicting values and articulating distributed activities. On the one hand, the individual contributions of the volume cover different notions and concepts of cooperation in diverse fields of study: from the mundane cooperation of everyday life to collective endeavours within specific domains and institutions. On the other hand, they share a focus on the practices of making cooperation possible through cooperatively creating the conditions for cooperation itself. Seeing cooperative media as both a condition and a consequence of cooperation, the volume sheds light on a general feature of media, technologies and instruments that both enable and constrain the collaboration between heterogeneous social worlds, with and without consensus. The contributions in this volume follow and refine the approach of the Collaborative Research Center in Siegen, which, in studying media against the current background of pervasive networked media, moves away from the overemphasized role of “individual media”. Instead, considering how the production, distribution and reception of digital media constantly overlap and are intertwined with data practices, our perspective emphasizes the role of practices preceding the media that always emerge cooperatively through and in specific practices. Thus, it allows us to mediate between the past and the present and invites multidisciplinary research as represented in this volume. This not only involves historiography, anthropology, sociology, (socio-)informatics and media studies, but also uses ethnographic perspectives that highlight the incremental processes and in situ accomplishment of cooperation (cf. Schubert & Röhl, 2019).

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It is in this sense that the studies of cooperative production, use and maintenance of media in this volume draw on heterogeneous research data such as field notes, recordings, films, archival materials, etc. The applied historiographic, ethnographic, digital and design-oriented methodologies as well as the data practices themselves have to be viewed as mutual makings, in which the researchers “actively participate in, the detailed organization of each other’s action” (Goodwin, 2018, p. 7).1 Studying contemporary media often relies heavily on the very infrastructures and media practices that are under scrutiny, created by predecessors, part of everyday life, transformed and adapted for their specific use in situ (cf. Eisenmann et al., 2019). Consequently, a particular methodological reflexivity is required when addressing the conditions of mutual makings in this volume. One approach that offers such a praxeological reflexivity is ethnomethodology, i.e., in radically grounding research practices in everyday cooperative accomplishments: “doing sociology, lay and professional” (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii). Therefore Garfinkel (2002, p. 175 f.) highlights the “unique adequacy requirement of methods” that calls for applying methods of investigation that are a part and component of the very field under study: “That is, for instance, the observation of a field takes up the observation procedures practiced in that field itself” (Bergmann, 2005, p. 645, own transl.). Along these lines, praxeological descriptions can be viewed as being part and parcel of what they describe. In taking such a perspective, methods and theories are not seen as external and independent elements added or even existing a priori to the research, but have to be respecified by explaining their role in the ongoing mutual makings of social objects (Eisenmann & Lynch, 2021). Thus, in order to connect the varieties of cooperation – the variety of “public social practices that human beings pervasively use to construct in concert with each other the actions that make possible, and sustain, their activities and communities” (Goodwin, 2018, p. 7) – we put an analytic focus on cooperatively creating the conditions of cooperation, that is, the cooperative work that itself is a condition of cooperation. We propose three analytic dimensions to interrelate these cooperative practices: scaling, composing and monitoring. These dimensions do not frame cooperation as a neatly defined unit, but allow for empirical and conceptual comparisons of diverse and multi-layered, sometimes consensual and sometimes conflicting, occurrences of cooperation. They also help to relate

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Compare the book review symposium to Charles Goodwin’s (2018) publication “Cooperative Action” in Media in Action. Interdisciplinary Journal on Cooperative Media 2 (1) 2018, p. 171–244.

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the contributions to this volume to each other, as they are situated on different scales, analyse heterogeneous compositions and address multiple forms of monitoring. • SCALING. Cooperation varies depending on its size and duration. Some forms of cooperation occur in short sequences, in physical co-presence and with no more than two entities involved. Others span decades and are performed on a global scale by states and large organisations. Of course, many forms of larger-scale cooperation depend on forms of smaller-scale cooperation – e.g. the relevance of physical co-presence for global cooperation (Heintz, 2014) – and vice versa. Depending on its scale, cooperation requires and produces different media of cooperation. The temporal and geographic scales of cooperation therefore are an important dimension, along which cooperative practices can be compared and analysed. • COMPOSING. The second dimension relates to the first. Cooperation also varies depending on the entities it is composed of and their relationships. There are elementary forms of cooperation – such as embodied practices – that form the basis of every social interaction. They occur whenever two individuals encounter each other and begin some form of mutual adjustment. Other forms of cooperation may be strategically planned, involving many heterogeneous entities that need to be aligned along a specific cooperative purpose. Again, occurring naturally, ad hoc cooperation and purposefully created cooperation often run alongside each other just as they produce and rely on different cooperative media. In the context of this volume, the media of cooperation of course take centre stage, and so we note that the compositions of cooperation found in the following contributions are never pure or homogeneous, but multi-layered and diverse. • MONITORING. Cooperation necessarily includes multiple ways of mutual monitoring. The cooperative activities may be open and transparent, but they may also be incidental, unnoticed or clandestine. This also encompasses the question to what extent participating in cooperation is deliberate, unwitting, unwanted or even possible. If cooperative media support forms of cooperation that lack shared goals and allow for cooperation without consensus, this opens our perspective, on the one hand, towards questions about control, domination and power inscribed in media as a consequence and condition of cooperation. On the other hand, monitoring also focuses on the (media) practices of specific mutual monitoring by participants. Therefore, this dimension also focuses on whether participants are considered as competent members or lack possibilities and are excluded from cooperation, which also depends on the fulfilment

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of required trust conditions and their mutual recognizabilities within social practices (Turowetz & Rawls, 2020). These three dimensions hinge upon and are based upon the practice-theoretical revision of interdisciplinary media research to which this volume contributes. In this vein, Erhard Schüttpelz opens the book with an analytic and conceptual reevaluation and praxeological re-specification of what he calls Classical Media Theory. Schüttpelz’ foundational contribution to this volume systematically questions the “media first” approach of Classical Media Theory used to investigate and attribute societal changes, as well as new practices and ways of being-inthe-world in reference to the development of new media technologies. Schüttpelz illustrates why such an approach is inadequate for the digital world and shows how cooperative media practices have to be considered as prior and foundational to historical media and contemporary digital technologies alike. Drawing on the symmetry postulate of Science and Technology Studies and on the history of computing and computer programming, Schüttpelz explains how such a praxeological shift towards the cooperative foundations of media practices enables and allows us to theoretically and conceptually account for current digital media and computing devices alike. In this sense Schüttpelz’ contribution can be read as a continuation of this introduction and offers a praxeological perspective on media development and entangled varieties of cooperation (Prescriptum). Following this theoretical outline, the other eight contributions to this volume illustrate the diversity of cooperation and are divided into four parts: I) Implementing Information Systems; II) Doing Dasein; III) Cooperating Corpora and IV) Participating and Privacy. In their respective sections, the authors discuss cooperation on a large and small scale; in different compositions and varying patterns of monitoring cooperation; incidental and volatile as well as planned and durable cooperation in its historical and contemporary forms; and how they all can be seen through the lens of mutually making the conditions of mutual making. Historical perspectives on interorganisational cooperation through patents and licenses or on pneumatic tubes, the use of photos to make absent spouses present, the evolution of video conferencing as a cooperative event, issues of data security and privacy, the cooperative practices of travelling by commercial airplane, passports as a medium and result of cooperative practices, as well as difficulties of cooperation in participatory design projects – all these topics shed light on distinct varieties of cooperation from different disciplinary backgrounds. In summary, they provide a nuanced picture of cooperative practices and cooperative media, while interrogating and elaborating the very conditions of mutual makings in these varieties of cooperation.

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Part I: Implementing Information Systems The contributions in this part focus on cooperation in and between companies from a historical perspective. Cooperation is in multiple ways key for a company’s economic success. On the one hand, divisions of labour in the sense of cooperation between or within companies are of major importance for the globally connected world and, on the other, the importance of internal cooperation within particular (transnational) corporations should not be underestimated. The internal communication and structure of a company is, among others, influenced by media technologies and their specific practices. Media support and enable cooperation between staff members without them necessarily having to agree on specific motives, goals and beliefs. In this regard, media can be viewed as an embedded resource of professional work that can be meaningfully analysed only in these contexts (cf. Bergmann, 2006: 391 f.). Furthermore, it is useful to consider to what extent these forms of media and cooperation have structured everyday media practices and therefore also to reconstruct how historical trajectories of achieved conditions of cooperation have disseminated throughout society. In her contribution, Laura Meneghello sheds light on the implementation of pneumatic tube systems and on how the tubes (re)defined the conditions for working and living together during the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pneumatic tubes have been, and partly still are, an important element in both communication and transport infrastructures. Their main purpose was, and to some extent still is, to carry letters, official documents, small objects and specimens in a fast and reliable way. While administrative structures influenced the way the networks were planned, these, in turn, shaped working environments and the employees’ identification with their company. Based on historical sources, the author explores in depth the role pneumatic tubes have played in private companies and state-owned enterprises. She also examines the meaning attributed to the tubes in the organisation of the working environment and its (relational) space and places infrastructures as frameworks for cooperation in a historical context. The ability of pneumatic tubes to transfer both messages and material generated new possibilities of cooperation within and between enterprises and above all led to the combination of pneumatic tube systems with other infrastructures, therefore enabling cooperation and creating new kinds of collaborative practices – or hindering them in the case of technical problems (and consequently leading to the emergence of other forms of cooperation). The author uses the concept of meta-infrastructure as an analytical tool to shed light on the entanglement of pneumatic tubes with other systems and on how different infrastructures as well as communicative and organisational practices co-constitute each other.

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In the following contribution, Christian Henrich-Franke traces the cooperative relationships involved in patents and licenses in the early history of electronic data processing in Europe. He addresses the question how cooperative media such as magnetic data storage are created through cooperative practices. To this end, he follows the careers of two pioneers of electronic data storage and processing: Konrad Zuse and Gerhard Dirks. While Zuse was mainly working on programmed control and arithmetic elements, Dirks focused on magnetic data storage and applied for patents early on during World War II. This allowed him to cash in on licenses after the war, while Zuse’s financial benefit from his endeavours was much more limited. Despite their differences, Dirks and Zuse’s stories highlight the importance of studying how early electronic data processing and storage were invented and marketed during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and later at a global scale. The patents and subsequent license agreements played a major role in the technical progress and later in market success by leading the transformation of ground-breaking ideas into tradable products, hence organising the shift from invention to innovation. As the early history of data processing and storage shows, the technologies’ success is deeply intertwined with the success of the companies and the careers of Konrad Zuse and Gerhard Dirks. It also highlights that cooperation was a necessary condition at a time when inventors and companies were developing products for an emerging field with only limited application. However, cooperation was also embedded in fierce competition, forming temporary alliances rather than long-term relationships. Part II: Doing Dasein The contributions in this part illustrate how establishing “Dasein” can be viewed as a co-operative process and thus focus on elementary intercorporeal and mediated relationships in establishing co-presence within social practices. How do “infrastructures” (including bodies) and “publics” (including micro-interactional settings) work together to effect different varieties and degrees of “being there”? By elaborating temporal and material forms of absence and presence, the very distinction of technical and embodied mediation is challenged. Against the background of persuasive mediatization of everyday practices, the narrow analytic focus on physical co-presence in interaction requires further questioning (cf. Meyer, 2014; Hirschauer, 2014). In these two contributions, the authors therefore take a perspective that allows them to show how the everyday taken-for-granted practices of “being-in-the-world” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002) – an achievement and a condition for cooperation – include socio-material arrangements and how agencies and co-presence can be mediated and distributed among participants (cf.

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Eisenmann, 2020; Voss, 2021). Therefore, the authors consider notions of copresence, intercorporeality, cooperation, interaction and participation in relation to the production of presence and absence, inviting us to perceive, distinguish, compare and relate the multiple intercorporeal and material-semiotic constellations, relationships and practices on display in order to gain insights into the ways in which presence and absence are collaboratively enacted and thus cooperatively achieved in situ. Simone Pfeifer explores how wedding images are circulated and appropriated by Senegalese migrants and their families and friends, showing how local notions of absence and presence are strongly linked to wider societal configurations. Migration occasions a broad variety of cooperative practices. Pfeifer provides an anthropological account of marriages across long distances. Based on fieldwork in Senegal and Germany, she traces how the absence of spouses is cooperatively managed by the families and how the distant partners are made present through sets of different media. Wedding albums play a central role in these arrangements, as images can be curated by montage and collage to assemble a mutual presence of husband and wife. Videos of the wedding ceremony can be circulated to allow distant partners to partake in the event. The images not only become a prominent media for managing absence and presence within a local and global network of friends and relatives, even more so, they are essential elements in establishing and maintaining transnational social relationships and intimacy across continents. The cooperative aspects of this practice highlight the multiple parties involved, not only the spouses, but their parents and siblings, their relatives and friends. Media such as photos in wedding albums and video tapes remain important even in times of digitally networked media, as they are circulated by mail or carried by travellers. As the photos and videos are increasingly transferred to digital media, they create new and gendered spaces of mobility and immobility as they become more mobile themselves. The media of cooperation are thus deeply entangled in wider configurations of love, care and responsibility. Axel Volmar, Charline Kindervater, Sebastian Randerath and Katerina Amniestri address the sudden increase in the use of multipoint video conferencing applications seen in many countries since the spring of 2020 as a result of measures taken against the spread of the novel coronavirus. They wonder why the usage only became so widespread in the wake of the so-called lockdowns, even though videoconferencing was readily available and could have brought significant benefits in cooperation between people even before the pandemic. In answering this question, they turn to conversations on Twitter and, drawing on collaborative media theory, explore the extent to which the boom in videoconferencing can be linked to fundamental shifts within the infrastructures of everyday practice,

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concluding that the heightened use of videoconferencing is less a turn toward new forms of remote communication than the mainstreaming of video-mediated remote cooperation. In their exploratory mixed-methods approach the authors use a focus on infrastructural “breakdowns” as an analytical lens to study the formation of videoconferencing as a media practice on three levels: first, as part of a general socio-technical process of re-infrastructuring disrupted ecologies of everyday practices by means of remote technologies; second, as part of a collective learning and teaching experience; and third, as part of a transformation of technical features and supposed modes of use of videoconferencing. Part III: Cooperating Corpora Cooperation emerges from concrete material entanglements between and among human bodies and (technical) artefacts. Exploring elementary practices of cooperation in greater depth, this part focuses on the various forms of materiality that are foundational for the mutual achievement of conditions of cooperation (cf. Gießmann et al., 2019). Bodies, things and technologies not only function as media of cooperation, but are themselves cooperatively produced. The body is often conceived as the primordial medium of cooperation, e.g., when practices require working hand in hand to finely and mutually adjust grips, gestures and movements. Likewise, bodily cooperation often entails the use of cooperative tools and the cooperative use of tools, motivating the skilful articulation of diverse sequences of action and sparking divisions of labour. However, following the perspective on cooperative (and mediated) accomplishments of “being-in-the-world” of the previous part, this part also respecifies our understanding of embodied cooperation in terms of cultural historicity, intercorporeality (Meyer et al., 2017), and by questioning the divisions of bodies, socio-material arrangements and technical artefacts: considering the entangled body, its skills and practices instead as a “technical object” (Mauss, 1979, p. 75). Such ‘embodied’ conditions of cooperation can be especially perspicuous and fruitful when considering in detail various forms of mobility from walking down the street to mass migration. This is illustrated by the following two contributions that examine the historical formation and cooperative practices of passports and how the vehicular unit of the “flying body” in air travel is established. This part therefore brings together two empirical contributions that analyse conditions and instances of cooperation based on their material embodiments in humans, objects and technologies. Passports are the key for individuals to move across borders and enable decisions on who is allowed to pass through ports and who has to stay within specific jurisdictional areas. In their contribution, based on empirical research in Finnish archives, museums and among passport developers, Asko Lehmuskallio and Paula

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Haara identify four regimes within the history of Finnish passports that all rely on distinct modes of cooperation among applicants, issuers, registers and border officials. While in the nineteenth century passport holders had significant agency in negotiating who they were at border crossings, slowly but surely the ability for the physical body to speak for itself has diminished. Instead, over time, centralized registers were built, which need to be continually updated before any changes in passport documentation can be made. In the nineteenth century, passport documents were mainly letters of reference, indicating the importance of the issuer; later, and increasingly since the First World War, they also became a means of identification. Today, the body is read and deciphered, increasingly with automated means, and the results need to match the information found in electronic data. Identification in electronic form is crucial today, which is why centralized and widely standardized registers such as the Finnish Population Information System have become mandatory points of passage for passport development. The passport, as a medium of movement, is both consequence and condition of heterogeneous collaboration or, in other words, a perfect example for a mutually made condition of mutual doings. And it is continually modified and developed over time as the infrastructures for supporting and inhibiting human movement change. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen limitations and restrictions imposed on free movement, with state-ordered curfews and lockdowns over the entire world. This shows the contingency of the current passport regime, one that has been altered since the beginning of 2020 to include health information in order to contain and gain control of a globally spreading disease. Embodied cooperative practices of mobility and their intertwinement with material infrastructures and technologies are also central in Larissa Schindler’s contribution: “Entangling Bodies and Objects in the Air”. Based on an ethnographic study of air travel, the author focuses on the embodied dimensions of technically augmented mobility. Drawing on participatory ethnographic logbook entries, Schindler shows in praxeological detail how the complete flight sequence – from preparation and boarding, being on board during the flight to disembarking – is in various ways shaped by and entangled with the materiality of the vehicle, its participants and objects. Using the analytic perspective of cooperation (Goodwin) and following Mauss and Goffman, Schindler analyses in minute detail the social life within the aluminium shell. From culturally shaped ways of sitting to the specific restrained forms of immobility, and from cooperative practices of civil inattention to raging conflicts over armchairs and overhead compartments, this contribution illustrates how a “vehicular unit” and “flying body” are constituted. Material cooperation and the achievement of its conditions are therefore explained as the entanglement of bodies and objects participating

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in situated concerted actions within the ongoing accomplishment of social practices. Moreover, analysing the co-operative practices of air travel sheds light on how dense and relevant such material entanglements can be and to which extent participants make a concerted effort to enact them. Part IV: Participating and Privacy Cooperation seldom comes easy. On the one hand, modern digitally networked media in particular open novel arenas of cooperation, even up to the point of unwanted collaboration in the case of large-scale data collection by social media platforms. On the other hand, some groups, for example the elderly, tend to be excluded from using digital media. Cooperative practices in digital media can therefore be desired or undesired, extending to questions of participation and control. Since such media are both a consequence and a condition of cooperation, they create specific asymmetries of power and access. The volume’s fourth part addresses these tensions in two different fields: the problematic issues of privacy and data security in online communication and the challenge of creating participation for older users in collaborative technology design. Privacy issues arise from the largely “undesired” collection and inclusion of personal information in corporate databases and thus evoke critical reactions from users and scholars alike (see for instance Zuboff, 2019; Couldry & Mejias, 2018; Englert et al., 2019). In contrast, the involvement of users in technological design, actively situating them as co-researchers in collaborative projects that construct new applications, offers new modes of inclusion for those who are often excluded. Design researchers therefore transgress the boundaries between development and use, they are situated at the nexus where cooperative media and cooperative practice are mutually created. Thilo Hagendorff’s contribution deals with the increasing interconnectivity of technical devices. Modern information societies are characterized by an unbroken trend of networking increasingly technical artefacts. Among other factors, this trend is illustrated by the proliferation of the Internet of Things and associated phenomena such as “pervasive or ubiquitous computing”. In contemporary digitally networked media, questions of mutual monitoring arise in a particular way: The desired possibilities of data collection and use of online applications in various contexts are accompanied by possibilities of unwanted data mining by (not seldom technologically and/or institutionally superior) third parties, which results in a loss of information control and poses great challenges to the assurance of data protection and privacy. Hagendorff states that the technical methods for controlling the collection, processing and dissemination of personal data in the context of digital media have largely failed (as security gaps, institutional

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surveillance or cyber-attacks show), causing a loss of trust in digital services and platforms among users. This distrust fosters the implementation of more and more security techniques, the non-use of actually useful services or cutting links between technological artefacts. Attempts to maintain control over information by implementing more and stronger IT security measures make the use of digital media more complex and cooperation more difficult. So the loss of trust comes at a considerable prize. Hagendorff therefore argues for complementing “technical approaches” with what he calls a “social approach” to dealing with the loss of information control. Grounded in socio-informatics and participatory ethnography Claudia Müller, Marén Schorch and David Struzek offer such a social and multidisciplinary approach in the concluding chapter of this volume: “Mutually Designing Domestic IT Applications with Older Adults”. They do not only provide a methodological reflection on the deployment of cooperative IT research and design processes with older and non-tech-savvy adults, but also a detailed ethnographic analysis of the very conditions of mutual achievements of cooperation. Drawing on classical concepts of applied computer science, Müller, Schorch and Struzek place the praxeological appropriation and incremental cooperation of infrastructures at the forefront of their study. Thus, showing how participation and active involvement of older participants helps to understand socio-cultural contexts and to build bridges between the imaginary worlds of designers and future users. Involving their target group as competent co-researchers allows the designers, on the one hand, to find methods that provide joyful and meaningful paths to technology. On the other, it allows the authors to analytically ground and extend the scope of concepts of “Empirically-based Participatory Design Workshops” (EbPDW) and “Technology Probes” as cooperative processes of mutually developing actual and future IT usage. This praxeological reflexivity of specific research practices opens pathways for a cooperative process of mutually creating modes of cooperation between this group of IT researchers and a group of older research participants that provides a model for future research of different groups. Furthermore, it sheds light on a key concern of this entire volume by considering the methodological foundations and consequences when addressing varieties of cooperation as mutual making of the conditions of mutual making. This volume is itself a manifestation of cooperation on different levels and over a longer time period. Its starting point was the conference “Varieties of Cooperation. Mutually Making the Conditions of Mutual Making”, conceptualized and organized by the editors of this volume together with Laura Elsner, Christian Erbacher and Bina Mohn as the second annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University

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of Siegen held in November 2017. In publishing this volume, we aim to document this conference. Simultaneously we transcend the time and place of the conference and widen the scope: therefore, we combine contributions situated in the context of the conference with further contributions of scholars who share our common interest in practices of cooperation. Thus, in adjusting our cooperative practices as editors to a larger scale in terms of duration and entities involved, we were able to include the time of the COVID-19 pandemic that produced a remarkable shift in the conditions of cooperation, and we can emphasize the interdisciplinary potential for revealing cooperative practices. The varieties of cooperation are reflected in the variety of historical, sociological, socio-informatic and ethnographic research approaches that can be found in this publication. So, consider the conference as a pathway to this volume and this volume as a pathway to the conference and beyond. We would like to thank all student assistants (especially Özge Sahin, Sonja Schöpfel, Philipp Schubert, and Jenany Vethanayagam), Susanne Kokel and Anja Höse from the CRC coordination team for their support before and during the conference as well as all participants of the conference for the animated discussions. Special thanks, of course, to all the participants who further processed these discussions and contributed to this collaborative project with their chapters: we have appreciated the mutual exchange of ideas and the patience shown in answering of all our questions during the review process. Grateful thanks go to Daniela Gieseler-Higgs and Robin Cackett for proofreading the contributions. And we cordially thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for funding the conference and the printing of this volume.

References Bergmann, J. R. (2005). Studies of work. In Handbuch Berufsbildungsforschung (Ed.), Felix Rauner (pp. 639–646). W. Bertelsmann. Bergmann, J. R. (2006). Studies of work. In R. Ayaß & J. R. Bergmann (Eds.), Qualitative Methoden der Medienforschung (pp. 391–405). Rowohlt. Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2018). Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336–349. Eisenmann, C. (2020). Soziotechnische Intimität und wechselseitige Wahrnehmung in der familiären Videotelefonie mit Kindern. In J. Wiesemann, C. Eisenmann, I. Fürtig, J. Lange, & B. Mohn (Eds.), Digitale Kindheiten (pp. 79–105). Springer. Eisenmann, C., & Lynch, M. (2021). Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the phenomenal field. Human Studies, 44(1), 1–17.

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Eisenmann, C., Peter, J., & Wittbusch, E. (2019). Ethnomethodological media ethnography: Exploring everyday digital practices in families with young children. Media in Action, 3(1), 63–80. Englert, K., Waldecker, D., & Schmidtke, O. (2019). Un/erbetene Beobachtung: Bewertung richtigen Medienhandelns in Zeiten seiner Hyper-Beobachtbarkeit. In J. Kropf & S. Laser (Eds.), Digitale Bewertungspraktiken: Labore der Grenzziehung in vernetzten Welten (pp. 215–236). Springer. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (2002). In A. W. Rawls (Ed.), Ethnomethodology’s program. Working out Durkheim’s aphorism. Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, H., Livingston, E., & Lynch, M. (1981). The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11(2), 131–158. Gießmann, S., Röhl, T., & Trischler, R. (Eds.). (2019). Materialität der Kooperation. Springer. Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press. Heintz, B. (2014). Die Unverzichtbarkeit von Anwesenheit. Zur weltgesellschaftlichen Bedeutung globaler Interaktionssysteme/Personal Encounters. The indispensability of face-to-face interaction at the global level. In B. Heintz & H. Tyrell (Eds.), Interaktion – Organisation – Gesellschaft revisited: Anwendungen, Erweiterungen, Alternativen (pp. 229–250). De Gruyter. Hirschauer, S. (2014). Intersituativität: Teleinteraktionen und Koaktivitäten jenseits von Mikro und Makro. In B. Heintz & H. Tyrell (Eds.), Interaktion – Organisation – Gesellschaft revisited: Anwendungen, Erweiterungen, Alternativen (pp. 109–133). Lucius & Lucius. Mauss, M. (1979). Body techniques. In Sociology and psychology: Essays (pp. 95–123). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. Meyer, C. (2014). Metaphysik der Anwesenheit. Zur Universalitätsfähigkeit soziologischer Interaktionsbegriffe. In B. Heintz & H. Tyrell (Eds.), Interaktion – Organisation – Gesellschaft revisited: Anwendungen, Erweiterungen, Alternativen (pp. 321–345). Lucius & Lucius. Meyer, C., Streeck, J., & Jordan, J. S. (2017). Intercorporeality: Emerging socialities in interaction. Oxford University Press. Schubert, C., & Röhl, T. (2019). Ethnography and organisations: Materiality and change as methodological challenges. Qualitative Research, 19(2), 164–181. Schüttpelz, E. (2017). Infrastructural media and public media. Media in Action, 1(1), 13–61. Schüttpelz, E., & Meyer, C. (2017). Ein Glossar zur Praxistheorie. „Siegener Version“ (Frühjahr 2017). Navigationen - Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften, 17(1), 155–163. Thielmann, T. (2012). Taking into account – Harold Garfinkels Beitrag für eine Theorie sozialer Medien. Zeitschrift Für Medienwissenschaft, 6(1), 85–102. Turowetz, J., & Rawls, A. W. (2020). The development of Garfinkel’s ‘Trust’ argument from 1947 to 1967: Demonstrating how inequality disrupts sense and self-making. Journal of Classical Sociology, 21(1), 3–37.

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Voss, E. (2021). Hospitality and proof: Human mediums, technical media, and controversial knowledge in ghost hunting practices in the United States. In D. Espirito Santo & J. Hunter (Eds.), Mattering the paranormal: Technologies and the realm of the unseen (pp. 132–152). Routledge. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs.

Prescriptum

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Reinventing the Wheel of Media Theory Erhard Schüttpelz

“The wheel is reinvented so often because it is a very good idea; I’ve learned to worry more about the soundness of ideas that were invented only once.” (David L. Parnas)

Abstract

The paper deals with the history of media theory before and after digital networked media. It identifies the premises of Classical Media Theory (CMT), which is based on an invariant combined with both dependent and independent variables. The independent variable of CMT was and is media technological innovation, the invariant being the human body. The dependent variables are social relationships and the training of the senses. CMT argues from the asymmetry of variables and ignores agency of the invariant that in CMT partly overlaps with the dependent variables. The media history of CMT is written in the asymmetrical manner of arguing from “Media first” and attributing changes in the dependent variables to changes of media technology. The text gives an account of the demise of CMT and its inability to deal with digital media and computing devices, by drawing on the symmetry postulates of Science and Technology Studies, and a pertinent account of computer programming. Cooperative media practices are assumed to be prior to both historical media and current digital devices. E. Schüttpelz (B) SFB Medien der Kooperation, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_2

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2.1

Classical Media Theory

When media theory finally broke through the shell of communication theory at the end of the 1950s, Marshall McLuhan defined the agenda for decades to come in his opening sentences of the “Report on Project on Understanding New Media”: Our media have always constituted the parameters and the framework for the objectives of our Western World. But the assumptions and parameters projected by the structures of the media on and through our sensibilities have long constituted the overall patterns of private and group associations in the West. The same structuring of the forms of human association by various media is also true of the non-Western world as of the lives of preliterate and archaic man. The difference is that in the West our media technologies from script to print, and from Gutenberg to Marconi, have been highly specialised (McLuhan, 1960, p. 1).

Media theory, as we can tell from these classical sentences, was looking for structure: the constitution of different “forms of human association” and “sensibilities” by the structures of media. And media theory was based on a structure of its own: there is an invariant, namely the invariant potential of human interaction that manifests itself in oral cultures, and in its pure form is not as “highly specialised” as in postliterate cultures, or rather, not specialised at all. There is an independent variable, namely the historical sequence of media innovations, happening “in the West” and diffused from the West. And there are dependent variables, the “forms of human association” and “the parameters and the framework for the objectives” of our and other worlds. The aesthetic and perceptive “sensibilities” have a special role in this functional equation, because it is “on and through” them that the structures of media are projected. Thus, in McLuhan’s version of media theory, they are both part of the dependent variables and the medium of media, as one could say. In the corpus of media theory derived from this framework, media practices could only be secondary to media. Media theory was based on the assumptions that social practices were contingent upon the “forms of human association” structured by different media, and that epistemic practices were contingent upon “the parameters and the framework for the objectives of our Western World” being constituted by media in the first place. And even apart from social and epistemic practices, in this version of media theory, media are “primary” in a very general sense – at least McLuhan gives no clues how they derive from non-media or act as dependent variables in other theoretical contexts. McLuhan’s three sentences summarize the position of a highly successful strand of media theory that could be called “Classical Media Theory” (CMT).

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The invariant, the independent variable and the dependent variables remained in place, and so did the primacy of media. Classical Media Theory turned out to follow an eastbound and mostly North Atlantic trajectory in the Cold War: from Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan in Canada (starting in 1954) to Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio in France (converting to Media Theory after May 1968), and finally to Vilem Flusser (in the 1970s) and Friedrich Kittler (in the 1980s). In Germany, Classical Media Theory had a lasting impact on media studies and media history, especially in the guise of Kittler’s media archeology; not so much because it was the dominant theory (which it never was), but because the international success of German Media Theory seemed to be focussed on this local brand of Classical Media Theory – to the detriment of the internal diversity of German media theory that was largely ignored in its international reception since the 1990s. In the U.S., the center of media innovations and pacemaker for their global diffusion, classical media theory was bound to remain a controversial and surprisingly exotic position – which made its adoption all the more challenging or even romantic. Three major accomplishments of Classical Media Theory, in Germany and elsewhere, may be named as follows: • stressing the “materiality of communications”, in other terms: • looking for the “infrastructural realities” of information and communication technologies, and localizing the medium in their material and immaterial infrastructures; • and – last but not least – acknowledging “the Medium as the Message”, the medium as the main message that can neither be corrected nor effaced by more messages, because it is already made irreversible by practising the conditions of its techno-legal constitution. Thus, early on, media theory and Classical Media Theory as its pioneering series achieved a level of theoretical complication that overturned the reductions of functionalism. And functionalism is mistaken, because media are made for different purposes in one situation, and for the interventions of go-betweens and their unfinished business. And even if McLuhan’s formula for one reason or other seems slightly obsolete today, we would certainly wish to keep the three accomplishments of early media theory and their challenges: the materiality of communication, the infrastructural focus of media theory, and the medium as message.

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Classical Media Theory in the Digital Age

Classical Media Theory may not be dead, but after more than fifty years, it has begun to smell funny. There is more than one reason for this change: theory has moved on, but media have changed as well. To characterize the stakes of media theory today, we have to reflect both changes. On the one hand, digital networked media came as a surprise for media theory, though both networks and computers had been objects of theoretical curiosity from the start, and in spite of the fact that McLuhan’s media theory had its own impact on the world of computing, for instance with Alan Kay and his concept (inspired by a reading of McLuhan’s work) of both the computer and its user turned into reciprocal media (Kay, 2001). CMT could inspire the digital world, but once computing encompassed all former media, CMT was at a loss for what to say in structural terms. It seems that the asymmetries of CMT were not made for the new circumstances. Digital media have become primary indeed, and more primary than all former media, but with a vengeance, or even an irreducible paradox: The success and the versatility and volatility of computing technologies have made the causal or historical impact of media, of digital media, and even of something called digital media technology highly problematic. As a consequence, the whole idea of distinguishing media as independent variables from practices or messages or forms of human association as dependent variables seems to lead into contradictions, at least in three respects: concerning the processes of digital innovation; the problems of focussing the medium and the computer; and the fundamental blurring of the technical and social. 1. Do media form social practices, or are they determined by their social or rather socio-technical modelling? If apps for instance are designed for their messages, or even for their social patterns and practices, does the message now configure the medium? Come to think of it, it will be hard to deny, although of course any software will give rise to new tasks and thus escape its functionalist definitions. But it has become very difficult if not downright impossible to make media practices secondary to media now, because on a practical and material level, all we have are different bundles of operational chains across several networked hardware and software artefacts. Choosing a medium is choosing a practice first, an interactional sequence for operational chains assembling different media genres for preliminary services. Old media and new media alike have turned into media genres run by combinations of software packages, by bundles of operational chains and their algorithms.

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2. There are lots of digital media, but where exactly are the media of platforms, apps, or data mining? When computing pervades everything, even the computer disappears as an identifiable entity. Cars, washing machines, security locks are special-purpose computing devices, and so are mobiles or e-books – and some of them are called computers, some of them are called media, some of the displays are computer interfaces, other interfaces conceal that fact, and the differences are quite arbitrary, to say the least. Right after growing up before the computer, we suddenly woke up to live after the computer, and there was no Turing machine to guide us either – because digital networked computing devices never were Turing machines, and because the Turing myth has been thoroughly debunked (Bullynck et al., 2015). Thus, neither will the medium define the computer nor vice versa, it seems. 3. In defining the media of computing or, indeed, in defining what digital media are, paradoxically, we refer more and more to sociotechnical categories, and these categories turn out to be quite arbitrarily socially defined categories. For instance, if we define or reconfigure what a computer is or what it is not; or what Digital TV is, or why to call it TV at all. Neither the computer nor the TV set nor the TV genre are defined by technology nor by the past of TV or of computing, but by convenience and institutional design. And this difficulty nowadays applies basically to all old media turned digital, and to all digitally-born media, software and data flows. To summarize, Classical Media Theory was ill-prepared for the digital world, and the asymmetrical structure of CMT seems to be ill-suited for digital networked devices. Of course, we have to concede that CMT suspected that much, and predicted a future where the media would no more be the media of the past, or not be media at all – anymore, nevermore. But even these earlier predictions of a digital media convergence or of a digital end of media turned out to be inadequate. At least for the time being, media have not gone away and the terminal equipments of end users have not converged. Worse than that, it has become completely arbitrary which digital artefacts or digital interfaces are called media or not; digital networked interfaces with interactive communication facilities being so ubiquitous that calling them media has become both a scientific necessity (to understand the everyday world of work, pleasure and infrastructure) and a statement without theoretical clues (once that all technological artefacts participate in digital networks and the one network that is called an internet).

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The Challenge of Symmetry in Media Theory

Classical Media Theory is not dead, but it smells funny. Media have changed, and theory has moved on. Concerning theory, we can take a short-cut by comparing CMT to a line of research on modern technology that was developed slightly later, the “Science and Technology Studies” (STS) since the 1970s. STS and media theory never really converged or even intersected until after their formative periods; with one telling exception that will be used as the exception that proves the rules of both fields. Classical Media Theory was based on McLuhan’s structural assumptions, that is, on a set of strong asymmetries: media innovations vs. a timeless invariant, independent vs. dependent variables, West vs. Rest. These asymmetries were to prove their point in media history, which in Canadian, French and German versions remained a success story of technological innovations, of media impact, and of The Rise of the West. In comparison with the theoretical development of STS and related fields, these asymmetries were the strengths of media theory when it seemed strong, and they appear as weaknesses in alternative historiographical strategies, and in more sophisticated theory-building. In “We have never been modern”, Bruno Latour summarizes three methodological accomplishments of STS (and ANT), expressly named as three principles of symmetry: a) David Bloor’s principle of symmetry, the heuristic maxim to describe and explain successful and failing developments in the same terms and by the same factors (a principle unfailingly ignored in popular histories of science, technology and media); b) a heuristic principle of symmetry for the contributions of human and nonhuman agencies (which is ignored in a purely sociological explanation of technological decisions, or in purely technological explanations of social processes, but can resort to both types of explanations in zig-zag); c) and a principle of symmetry between modern and non-modern collectives, running counter to the assumptions of the singularity of modern collectives (Latour, 1993). A quick glance at McLuhan’s statement (see above) or a more thorough look at the corpus of CMT reveals that CMT has never bothered to revise any of those asymmetries:

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a) CMT was written as a technological success story, the technological innovations being due to cognitive advances, and the failures due to cognitive failures or social resistance. b) Media innovations constituted the basis for new “group associations”; thus (and in distinction to many other theory developments) the non-human agency of media was characterized as stronger than any human agency. c) And concerning the West and the Rest, the theory and historiography of CMT was unabashedly Eurocentric: “the difference is that in the West our media technologies […] have been highly specialised”, as McLuhan wrote in the beginning, and as Kittler confirmed to the end (Kittler, 1993). This striking contrast between the symmetries of STS and the asymmetries of CMT may explain why CMT may appear old-fashioned or even exotic to historians of technology, media technology included. But the shortcomings of CMT may appear curable: CMT was bound to a history of accumulating innovations from the West – both conditions may be revised, and innovations from the Non-West included, and cognitive and social failures acknowledged to equal amounts. And the asymmetry of non-human over human agency may appear as a virtue of CMT; after all, this asymmetry (of “technological determinism”) was the rule in popular histories of technology (and thus a vice), but unusual in sociological representations of material culture and material innovation (and thus a virtue, or at least a virtual virtue). It might even seem that the asymmetry of non-human agency is exactly the factor that had been missing in “Social constructions of technology” and in sociology in general, and has to be embraced, in order to enable social science accounts of media to become symmetrical by complementing one type of asymmetry with its counterpart. But the three principles of symmetry are not easily attained, and the asymmetries of CMT are not easily cured. Bruno Latour’s seminal article “Drawing Things Together” is a case in point, because Latour takes up one of the lasting challenges of CMT, the debate about the Great Divide between oral and literate societies, and proposes a different and much smaller divide based on the symmetry of human and non-human agency, and on the heuristic symmetry of success and failure, and striving for a possible symmetry of “West and Rest”. Latour’s description of Western innovative writing techniques and inscription devices looks deceptively similar to its sources in CMT and its cognates; but its preconditions and consequences are dissimilar and set it apart from the reasoning of CMT. “Drawing Things Together” takes a practice-theoretical approach to the problem of the so-called Great Divide, though this fact may easily be overlooked in a reading informed by the premises of CMT. Whereas McLuhan and his followers take

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it for granted that “the assumptions and parameters projected by the structures of the media […] have long constituted the over-all patterns of private and group associations”, Latour’s theory of “immutable mobiles” aims at a “binocular” of social practice and technological innovation, or – to make it more symmetrical – of technological practice and what he calls an “agonistic situation”. He writes: My contention is that writing and imaging cannot by themselves explain the changes in our scientific societies, except in so far as they help to make this agonistic situation more favorable. Thus it is not all the anthropology of writing, nor all the history of visualization that interests us in this context. Rather, we should concentrate on those aspects that help in the mustering, the presentation, the increase, the effective alignment or ensuring the fidelity of new allies. We need, in other words, to look at the way in which someone convinces someone else to take up a statement, to pass it along, to make it more of a fact, and to recognize the first author’s ownership and originality. This is what I call “holding the focus steady” on visualization and cognition. If we remain at the level of the visual aspects only, we fall back into a series of weak clichés or are lead into all sorts of fascinating problems of scholarship far away from our problem; but on the other hand, if we concentrate on the agonistic situation alone, the principle of any victory, any solidity in science and technology escapes us forever. We have to hold the two pieces together so that we turn it into a real binocular. (Latour, 1986, p. 5)

Latour thus rejects both the premises of Classical Media Theory and of the Social Construction of Technology school and other sociological schools: neither is technology shaped only to the demands or interests of social organisations or institutions (in this case, administrative and colonialist institutions and scientific organisations and networks), nor are media shaped according to a series of purely technological innovations (because their success and their shape depend on “the effective alignment” with social organisations that adopt and transform them). Only a “binocular” of social and technical factors, of human and non-human agency, and of the contingent history of success and failure, can explain – or describe – why media have turned out to be what they are. And by studying this binocular, we also find out how many of those media innovations are of Non-European making, for instance print and paper and a host of print and paper media.

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After the Practice Turn: Media History

Thus, Latour’s theory of “immutable mobiles” may be read as a paradigmatic case study for a media theory that strives to turn the asymmetries of CMT into the symmetries of STS (or of ANT). Obviously, this theory and its historiography leaves Classical Media Theory behind, but in which direction? If we take Latour’s insistence on a binocular between the “agonistic situation” and the techniques of visualization employed – being part, resource and object of an agonistic situation – seriously, it is definitely a matter of practical concerns which decides about the socio-technical arrangement and the conjunction between human and nonhuman agencies, between Western and Non-Western innovations, and between success and failure. There are no a priori considerations that could shift the balance once and for all in the favour of the social situation or the technical resources, or of Western or non-Western, successful or failing media innovation. Latour’s “binocular” of agonistic situations and visualization techniques explains the success and failure of specific media through the success and failure of their practices of innovation, distribution and use. The inverse position – to explain media practices via the affordances of existing media – now seems not only clumsy, but runs counter to what we know about the instability of current and of historical media, and the material and personal efforts that were and are necessary to stabilize and standardize media and scientific instruments in the past and present. The consequences of this historiographical revision can be summarized in three respects: i. Classical Media Theory was often indistinguishable from a philosophy of history or an evolutionistic scheme of stages and steps taken by a privileged part of humanity for the rest of humanity to join via the diffusion of innovations. Because diffusion and colonization were indeed part of modern media history and early modern history, it is all the more necessary to decolonize the narratives and assumptions of media theory. And one of the ways of decolonizing media history and media theory consists in the acknowledgment that European media history (and European Settler colonial history) ever after Gutenberg was based on philosophies of history or even religious and secular salvation histories put into practice. Classical Media Theory, from this perspective, was no explanation of the indigenous philosophies of history documented between Gutenberg and Marconi and in computerization movements and their propaganda, but had the weakness of falling prey to variations of the genre (Johns, 2012). The focus on the contingencies of media practices promises to resolve this conundrum, and maybe even the fascination

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of CMT philosophies of history. After all, arguing with a philosophy of history or salvation history was a long-standing habit of media histories told by missionaries, engineers, politicians, marketing people and administrators alike, deeply ingrained into the contempt of for instance illiterate populations abroad and at home. But if the belief in and the spreading of this assumed philosophy of history is and was a practical matter, it has to be studied in its practical circumstances and consequences, and in most cases history will tell that a philosophy of history, and a media philosophy of history will fail to live up to its own promises and aspirations. For instance printing after Gutenberg was lauded for its ability to print scale-free quantities of identical copies, but it was only in the nineteenth century that these promises made sense – there was no media practice between 1450 and 1750 that could live up to this utopian wish, and there was no progress of skills or equipment that could fulfil these promises (McKenzie, 1969). The “Printing-Press as an Agent of Change” was definitely linked to its promises of salvation history and philosophies of history, but the history of these changes developed in contingent ways that ran counter to the official doctrines, propaganda or marketing strategies. Thus, spelling out the promises and campaigns of philosophies of history reveals a whole set of modern media practices and enables a more precise history (and especially prehistory) of CMT that relativizes the evolutionistic frameworks that were both used and frustrated in colonialist, imperialist and Eurocentric history. There is no media evolution to explain the history of mankind, but evolutionism certainly was a factor in modern ideas of diffusion, distribution and innovation. The new historiographical position could be summarized as follows: ii. It is not one development or evolution that explains the history of media and media innovations. On the contrary, it is the unique history of human societies and their manifold media practices that explains the transformations of media and their development, including the asymmetries of power built into media or sustained by media practices and other social practices, and including discourses of one development. And if media technologies are partly built in an incremental fashion, or by accumulating and combining existing devices, the history of this accumulation is not self-explaining, but needs the full story of accumulating devices and non-accumulative skills, and of accumulation and loss, for instance of empires breaking down and their scribal, linguistic and artisanal skills being lost or radically transformed. In this respect, the core argument remains the same: it is not the history of accumulations that explains the history of media innovations, but the unique

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history of incremental or non-incrememental media practices that explains the sequences and asymmetries of accumulation. iii. This history is non-linear, non-evolutionistic, non-Eurocentric, and it bypasses all dogmas of CMT, including the assumption of media primacy. Media may have been primary in many respects concerning practices developed after the fact of existing artefacts and communication channels, but they are neither primary to media practices, nor necessarily primary to non-media practices. Media infrastructures may be built upon and in conjunction with non-media infrastructures; and they may even have been the dependent variable in configurations of necessarily pre-existing independent variables. Before writing, there was the Neolithic Revolution followed by Urbanization; before modern media, there was the Industrial Revolution followed by a control crisis that gave rise to new management methods and the Visible Hand of new administrative hierarchies. Again, it is not a scheme of stages or steps that explains this sequence, but the unique history of specific towns and regions that explains the retrospective appearance of steps and their indigenous representations in the mission statements of local and translocal philosophies of history, CMT included (Beniger, 1989).

2.5

After the Practice Turn: Theorizing the Computer

For reasons already outlined above, the computer has a special place in this revised media history, and in media theory too. Computers became media in the 1960s (and with reference to early CMT), and they became “the medium” in the 1980s and 1990s, but they did not fit the expectations of CMT. Is a media theory of computing possible at all? And if we assume it has to be possible (after all, many computing devices are media-born or made for media), how is it possible to derive a theory of digital computerized (and networked) media either from computing devices, or from the medium concept, or from both? At present, I can summarize only a few preliminary ideas that will be unfolded in the near future, and will find a definitive version in the writings of experts for the history of computing and digital machines. These remarks are only meant to prove that Media Theory after the practice turn will be able to deal with many of those difficulties of a media theory of computers that could not be resolved by Classical Media Theory and its unbroken allegiance to 1950s information theory, cybernetics and the theory of Turing machines. Instead of following any of these genealogies, we have to start from the premise that the computer is a machine

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without strong intrinsic qualities. There is and there was no theory, neither in physics nor in mathematics – no set of axioms, no specific set of mathematics, no finite set of rules – on which the computer was built. The computer is history, and nothing but history. As in Michael S. Mahoney’s succinct summary: The first electronic digital computers were variations on the protean design of a limited Turing machine, which described not a single device but a schema, and which could assume many forms and could develop in many directions. It became what various groups of people made of it. The computer thus has little or no history of its own. Rather, it has histories derived from the histories of the groups of practitioners who saw in it, or in some yet to be envisioned form of it, the potential to realise their agendas and aspirations. What kinds of computers we have designed since 1945, and what kinds of programs we have written for them, reflect not so much the nature of the computer as the purposes and aspirations of the communities who guided those designs and wrote those programs. Their work reflects not the history of the computer but the histories of those groups, even as the use of computers in many cases fundamentally redirected the course of those histories. (Mahoney, 2005, p. 1)

This statement has become the conditio sine qua non for any serious history of computing, and it seems to be mostly negative, saying what the computer is not. But many of the qualities of the computer in its development from mainframe to PC, and from stand-alone machine to networked computer, and of programming and software, of digital devices and of digital platforms, may be deduced from Mahoney’s basic statements. If the computer is a protean machine, it is also a mimetic machine that adopts whatever instructions it can give or take until it replaces the instructing and/or instructed machine, operation or process. If the computer as a both instructing and instructed machine cooperates with a second machine, or a tool, or a person, these items will be conscripted by the computer. The mimetic machine will act as a third party to existing relationships, it will thrive as a parasite on relationships, processes and artefacts it can mimic (or simulate and approximate), instruct or interact with. Improving on this mimetic relationship, slightly different versions of computing (of artefacts, of programs, of software, of platforms) will emerge, and they will thrive as para-sites oriented towards other para-sites. A possible cycle of “creative destruction” will emerge: computers being combined with others, or software, or programs, or computing styles copying and finally replacing each other. (And maybe this characterization of the computer is a good guideline for the historiography of media in general, one would have to find out.) Thus, naming and unfolding the “character-less-ness” of computing does help to elucidate the cycles of invention and innovation, and it helps to name the basic sociotechnical, i.e. the both technical and social relationships: protean adoption,

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mimetism, competition and assimilation, mutual parasitism, creative destruction. Still, this characterization and its list offers no explanation or no strictly technological reasons for this series of characteristics. All kinds of media are and were characterized by the same traits as the computer or computing devices. Once computers become media, they turn out to ubiquitous but highly unspecific even in this respect. How would Classical Media Theory have resolved this question, and what can we learn from the Old School period of New German Media Theory in this respect? Luckily, we can give some technological reasons and in doing so, may observe how the classical question of Classical Media Theory (what is the independent variable?) leads to an insight into the practice of computing. When David L. Parnas left the American SDI program (the Star Wars program of beating the USSR by designing a complete destruction of Soviet atomic bombs in the air and on the ground, luckily acknowledged to be impossible in the course of the 1980s), he wrote very short and succinct memoranda on what software and computing had become and what to expect and not to expect from computers (Parnas, 1985). These memoranda are short introductory summaries of the practical knowledge of programmers on software (and programming). Parnas (ibid.) wanted to make sure that politicians and military ranks understood his message about the unreliability of computers, so he had to make sure he was not only heard but understood. That’s why he tried to write completely straightforward answers to the following questions: How do we explain that computing is not governed by the necessities of mathematical or logical consistency or rigour, but by testing an arbitrary complexity of different solutions, and by the programming and detection of bugs and their debugging? What is the historical a priori of the computing of computers? The year is 1985, but what Parnas (ibid.) says is still valid. There are several ways to answer the question, and Parnas takes several routes even in one article. For instance: Parnas starts his article with a meticulous reductio ad absurdum of the idea that programming the computer as a finite state machine or conceiving it as an ideal Turing Machine would ensure perfect or successful or just any sort of convincing computing. Programming the computer or a piece of software, programmers are forced to think for and with the computer, to make sure that the computer can do what it is instructed to do. Programmers strive to “think like a computer” (ibid., 1330), but this effort inevitably runs into trouble once programmers “have to start remembering what data mean and under what circumstances data are meaningful” (ibid.). The complexity of algorithms leads them not only into possible errors, but calls for cooperative definitions of goals and means. The emerging negotiations

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of meaning have to be decided by external testing, because no programmer can decide about his own proposal. Thus, the practical modality of programming turns out to be a necessarily cooperative task. Necessarily cooperative, even if the computer is conceived to act like an ideal Turing machine (which no computer does). Second, the mathematical constitution of computing, from an engineering point of view: Software systems are discrete state systems that do not have the repetitive structure found in computer circuitry. [...] The mathematical functions that describe the behavior of these systems are not continuous functions, and traditional engineering mathematics does not help in their verification. This difference clearly contributes to the relative unreliability of software systems and the apparent lack of competence of software engineers. It is a fundamental difference that will not disappear with improved technology. [...] Dividing software into modules and building each module of so-called ‘structured’ programs clearly helps. When properly done, each component deals with a small number of cases and can be completely analysed. However, real software systems have many such components, and there is no repetitive structure to simplify the analysis. Even in highly structured systems, surprises and unreliability occur because the human mind is not able to fully comprehend the many conditions that can arise because of the interaction of these components. [...] The large number of states and lack of regularity in the software result in extremely complex mathematical expressions. Disciplined use of these expressions is beyond the computational capacity of both the human programmer and current computer systems. (Parnas, 1985, p. 1328)

Thus, there are good technological and mathematical reasons for the lack of technological and mathematical rigour in software, and in computing in general. Third, concerning the non-linearity of actual computers and of networked computers: In many of our computer systems there are several sources of information and several outputs that must be controlled. [...] If the sequence of external events cannot be predicted in advance, the sequence of actions taken by the computer is also not predictable. The computer may be doing only one thing at a time, but as one attempts to ‘think like a computer’, one finds many more points where the action must be conditional on what happened in the past. [...] When there is more than one computer in a system, the software not only appears to be doing more than one thing at a time, it really is doing many things at once. There is no sequential program that one can study. Any attempt to ‘think like a computer system’ is obviously hopeless. There are so many possibilities to consider that only extensive testing can begin to sort things out. [...]

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How can it be that we have so much software that is reliable enough for us to use it? The answer is simple; programming is a trial and error craft. People write programs without any expectation that they will be right the first time. They spend at least as much time testing and correcting errors as they spent writing the initial program. Large concerns have separate groups of testers to do quality assurance. Programmers cannot be trusted to test their own programs adequately. Software is released for use, not when it is known to be correct, but when the rate of discovering new errors slows down to one that management considers acceptable. (Parnas, 1985, p. 1330)

The consequences of the historical a priori of computing, wherever one might wish to start – from the mathematical or logical side, from the engineering side, or even from the Turing machine side – are univocal: because of the inevitable arbitrary complexity of programming and the inevitability of errors and their corrections, the elementary tasks of recognising the same task, the same operation, or a useful variation of programming – require the “trial and error craft” (Parnas, 1985, p. 1330) of a community of practice and its cooperative assessments of skill, of method, and of accomplishments, and they require verbal discussions of meaning and demonstrated knowledge. In computing, practices and skills define what computing and computers are about, and what they do and should do. This, it turns out, is the communis opinio of programmers once they describe what they do, instead of imagining a world without bugs (Parnas, 1985; Knuth, 2011; Naur, 1992). Classical Media Theory never really applied to computing: there were no media prior to media practices in computing, and in software and in hardware alike. But even under the circumstances of CMT and even sticking to Turing machine terms (in “thinking like a computer”), spelling out what computing is and how it operates leads directly into acknowledging an irreducible “arbitrary complexity” and the negotiations of practical skills and skilled practice. There are good technological, mathematical and social reasons for Mahoney’s “protean machine” and the failure of Classical Media Theory in the digital age. And, if I may add one point that my father-in-law1 told me: science and nature have not become digital, because up to now at least, the sensors for the primary data of the sciences are analogue, and cannot be digital. Which makes digital data or even “the digital” everything in between: digital computing happens after the transformation of analogue data into digital data. And because mathematics in the sciences is all about approximation, and there is no common basis for mathematical approximations in dealing with nature, approximation being a matter of 1

Johannes Sievert, formerly physicist at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (Braunschweig).

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trial and error, of modelling and re-modelling, of a patchwork of different mathematical strategies, we should not be surprised that the calculation and computing of digital media, their simulations and exchange formats are approximations only too, and do seldom achieve that perfection of sound, colour, graphics, layout or typography that was achieved in the analogue past or promised to us during the Dawn of the Digital. Digital media are “good enough for all practical purposes”, and not much else: the common denominator of digital mass media is their imperfection or “Eternal Beta”, their arbitrary complexity, and their protean nature.

2.6

After the Practice Turn: Theorizing the Media

Thus, from the history of computing as understood by its protagonists and by its experts, there is little surprise once media are defined as “bundles of practices”, and if we treat media artefacts as the transitory results and sites of media practices. It was only a matter of reading the more trustworthy sources and not getting confounded by the idealist construction of the Turing machine or rather by the Turing myth. Obviously, computing was never compatible with Classical Media Theory (5.), and neither was media history (4.) nor the history of technology (3.). So after the practice turn what happens to media theory? After the practice turn, all media are defined by their practices, or are “bundles of practices”. Thus, the “classical formula” is reversed: media artefacts are but the transitory result of media practices, i.e. they are now the dependent variable. Looking closely at media history, media artefacts have always been but the transitory result of media practices. And if media practices are prior to media artefacts, the three asymmetries become epistemological obstacles, even for the accomplishments of CMT we should keep: A) CMT was built on and for the technological success story of mankind; but Longue Durée history contradicts the “primacy” of media and its Eurocentrism, and the primacy of media practices inevitably refocuses the role of human skills. The materiality of communication has to be understood as a materiality of cooperation. B) Technology does not explain the history of skills; non-human and human agency are mutually defined in practices; as in the case of software outlined by David Parnas (1985). The materiality of infrastructure includes the bodily physicality of skills, but also the dependence on these skills being trained

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and recognised within a community of practice. There is nothing really automatic about our infrastructures and especially about our digital infrastructures, because they require permanent maintenance and repair, and an updating to remain the same that entails incessant human intervention. The success of automation and even of artificial intelligence depends on human programming skills and their continuities of defining meaning, purpose and reference, especially in the basic processes of emulation. C) If the medium is the message, and this is and remains the credo of media studies, it is easy to acknowledge the medium practice as the message, including the fact that the contents of a medium practice are other media practices. Of course, there are drawbacks. Yes, a practice theory of media may be less popular than Classical Media Theory, because popular histories of technology are bound to be success stories with strong asymmetries, which CMT did offer, and the three symmetries complicate any straightforward storytelling. But the success of digital media and digital devices makes a practice theory of media as urgent as necessary. The recent vogue of practice theory probably is based on shifts related to this change, and even as an academic vogue, it may correspond to economic changes, for instance to a shift in perspective that categorizes the distribution and reproduction of “skills” as the ultimate economic resource of global competition. After the practice turn, the theory of social practices and the theory of media should meet – but where? Media theory has been slightly unlucky in this respect, because in its beginnings, at least some innovative research on interaction (especially the discovery of the “non-verbal” or rather non-written aspects of language) and innovative ideas about media differences (especially speculations about orality and literacy) were part of the same enterprise. A future practice theory of media may return to the common origins and sources of media theory and practice theory, still discernible for instance in the first years of the Canadian journal “Explorations” edited by Edmund Carpenter (and to a lesser degree by Marshall McLuhan). This common ground of media theory and practice theory eroded as early as the end of the 1950s, when both sociologists and media scholars stressed the contrast between “face-to-face communication” as a non-media phenomenon vs. telecommunicative media as a non-face-to-face phenomenon, so that it finally became codified as a quite dogmatic dichotomy and division of labour in the 1960s. The impact of this dichotomy is still strong and can be easily discerned in sociological definitions and descriptions of face-to-face interaction vs. media studies definitions and descriptions of telecommunications and mass media. A common

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field of interest, research on the common grounds of language, interaction and collective media, had been given up for the sake of this dichotomy of media-inabsence and presence-without-media. It was only in exactly those fields where language, interaction and cooperative media met that the dichotomy was ignored and refuted since the 1960s: Studies of Work, Workplace Studies, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis. Today, the dichotomy of face-to-face interaction vs. telecommunications has become a serious epistemological obstacle in the age of digital media, especially after the ubiquity of georeferential media (or “devices” and “interfaces”) and digital workplaces. Classical Media Theory took up two more dichotomies that seemed to characterize media in general, and enabled the separation of interaction and telecommunication: the distinction of “information” and physics and the separation of what happens inside the “Black Boxes” from human agency. Moreover, CMT stressed the technical and institutional separation of media from each other; to the point that separate media appeared to embody different “languages” or “media grammars”. These distinctions were part of the strength of media theory when it was strong, and they seem to have become weaknesses now, after georeferential mobile media and networked digital devices. After all, media theory was not developed to deal with the Internet and computing, but in the age of “mass media” and distinct “telecommunication technologies”. Classical Media Theory was built on good infrastructural reasons; but both infrastructures and their reasons and consequences have changed. In the 1950s and early 1960s, North American media were indeed as separate as never before and after, i.e. separated by institutional fiat and technological standards. This seemed to be the order of media, or even the order of things. Of course, even then, there were media, and indeed, ubiquitous media, that did not conform to the theoretical dichotomies and practical separations of face-to-face communication and telecommunications. There always were administrative and other workplace media, in fact, all kinds of media and inscriptions to get things done on the shopfloor level, or, for want of a better term: “infrastructural media”. “Infrastructural media” were constituted in and bound to workplaces and their action chains; whereas “Public media” were made for anonymous reception. Public media or “mass media” and telecommunications were or seemed to be made for the separation of media exchange and face-to-face-interaction, for a well-designed “anonymity” and/or “privacy”. “Infrastructural Media”, i.e. all the media used in workplaces, seemed to be the opposite of “public media” or “mass media”, and thus, they seemed not to be “media” at all. Even now, the use of the word seems slightly inappropriate in the English-speaking world (and to a much

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lesser degree in Germany, where at least scientific instruments and other technical instruments or inscription devices are acknowledged to be “media”, and in fact without inverted commas). And because all public media are also based on infrastructures of production and distribution, they are based on infrastructural media too: on workplaces, administrations, improvisations, paper trails and operational chains of work. Thus, infrastructural media are basic, but remain understudied and undertheorized, even when “the media” are concerned. Infrastructural media were not and are not based on the separations of human and non-human agency, of interaction and telecommunications, of bodily skill and semiotic processes, of “information” and “materiality” (or deictic space–time), or of linguistic and non-linguistic resources. On the contrary, these separations will be impossible to make during their work, and instead of distributing and classifying work procedures along human vs. non-human, interaction vs. telecommunications, bodily vs. semiotic, or immaterial vs. material processes, there will be systematic and well-organized “matching procedures” instead. The places and episodes of “infrastructural media” will be linked by identification and registration techniques (which are media), and by cooperative narratives, scenarios, plans, coordination tools and their media. Whereas public media were built with the explicit possibility and even the express design of anonymous and private reception, of not knowing who the individual addressee will be, the modern forms of work entail identification and registration techniques and cannot do their work (their contracts, their property, their accountability and delivery) without these media techniques of identification and registration. Computing devices and digital media were built as infrastructural media; later, some of them turned into a completely new type of infrastructural media and they have remained infrastructural media ever since. The formula of “Computer Supported Cooperative Work” defines what work is today, but it also defines what computers do: Cooperative Computers Supporting and semi-constituting Work, Leisure, Biographies and social relationships. This is why the classical separations of media theory have failed in the digital world, and they have failed to prepare us for the world in which we live now, in which identification and registration techniques have reached an intensity and density never accomplished before, and in which coordination devices operate and are operated in real time, both in face-to-face interaction as in long-distance simultaneity, to coordinate long-distance relationships by face-to-face and face-to-interface interaction; and to coordinate or monitor face-to-face interaction by long-distance supervision. As in former and current administrative and workplace media, face-to-face interaction and long-distance cooperation are mutual resources for each other, and they

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are attuned by matching procedures and in technological terms (by programming and software).

2.7

Conclusion

To come to a conclusion, it took a very long time for media theory, and especially for Classical Media Theory to wake up from its dogmatic slumber, and to confront the principles of symmetry emerging from Science and Technology Studies. But it is exactly these symmetries that are desperately needed to cope with digital media, digital workplaces and digital data; and the most surprising aspect of this fact is the urgency of a heuristic symmetry of human and non-human agency when dealing with digital media. Digital networked media are neither automatic nor simulated nor non-human, but semi-automatic, semi-mechanical, semi-simulated, semi-referential and semi-dependent on human skills. A future practice theory of media may lack the splendid illusions and the somnambulistic force of Classical Media Theory, but on all accounts it will be a better companion for digital media, and for an assessment of media in their shifting historical and structural roles as invariants, dependent and independent variables.

References Beniger, J. R. (1989). The control revolution. Technological and economic origins of the information society. Harvard University Press. Bullynck, M., Daylight, E. G., & De Mol, L. (2015). Why did computer science make a hero out of turing? Communications of the ACM, 58(3), 37–39. Johns, A. (2012). Gutenberg and the Samurai: Or, the information revolution is history. Anthropological Quarterly, 85(3), 859–883. Kay, A. (2001). ‘User interface: A personal view’ (1989). In R. Packer & K. Jordan (Eds.), Multimedia: From Wagner to virtual reality (pp. 121–131). Norton. Kittler, F. (1993). Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien. In J. Huber & A. M. Müller (Eds.), Raum und Verfahren (p. 169–188). Stroemfeld/Roter Stern. Knuth, D. E. (2011). The art of computer programming, volumes 1–4. Addison-Wesley Longman. Latour, B. (1986). Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together. In H. Kuklick & E. Long (Eds.), Knowledge and society, studies in the sociology of culture past and present (Vol. 6, pp. 1–33). Jai Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press. Mahoney, M. S. (2005). The histories of computing(s). Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 30(2), 119–135.

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McKenzie, D. F. (1969). Printers of the mind: Some notes on bibliographical theories and printing-house practices. Studies in Bibliography, 22, 1–75. McLuhan, M. (1960). Report on project in understanding new media. National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Naur, P. (1992). Computing: A human activity. ACM Press. Parnas, D. L. (1985). Software aspects of strategic defense systems. Communications of the ACM, 28(12), 1326–1335.

Part I Implementing Information Systems

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Meta-Infrastructure: Pneumatic Tube Systems, Infrastructural Entanglements and Cooperation in Enterprises from the Late 19th to the 21st Century Laura Meneghello Abstract

Pneumatic tube systems have been, and partly still are, an important element in both communication and transport infrastructures: their main purpose is to carry letters, official documents, small objects and medicines in a fast and reliable way. This contribution analyses the role they played in private companies and state-owned enterprises; it also takes into consideration the meaning attributed to the tubes in the organisation of the working environment and its (relational) space, and places infrastructures as frameworks for cooperation in a historical context. Based on historical sources originating from different actors and fields, such as administrative documents, staff magazines and publications by the manufacturers of pneumatic systems, the contribution shows how the tubes (re)defined the conditions for working and living together during the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century. Involving flows of both information and material, they generated new possibilities of cooperation within and between enterprises. Above all, the ability to transfer both messages and material led to the combination of pneumatic tube systems with other infrastructures, enabling cooperation and creating new kinds of collaborative practices – or hindering them in the case of technical problems (and consequently leading to the emergence of other forms of cooperation). This contribution considers infrastructures, space and cultural representations as being constructed by different material and human actors with different concerns such as technicians, workers and company owners. L. Meneghello (B) Historisches Seminar, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_3

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The concept of meta-infrastructure will be used as an analytical tool to shed light on the entanglement of pneumatic tubes with other systems and on how different infrastructures as well as communicative and organisational practices co-constitute each other. While administrative structures influenced the way the networks were planned, these, in turn, shaped working environments and the employees’ identification with their enterprise.

3.1

Introduction

Pneumatic tube systems have been, and partly still are, an important element in both communication and transport infrastructures: their main purpose is to carry letters, files, official documents, small objects and medicines in a fast and reliable way (cf. for instance Delucchi, 2020; Meneghello, 2020; Farman, 2018; Harris, 2017; Schabacher, 2014; Bettel, 2012). Their role in private companies and stateowned enterprises and the significance attributed to them both in the context of organisation, modernisation and rationalisation of work and of relational spaces, employee cohesion and identification with the enterprise will be the object of this contribution. To explore the role and significance of pneumatic tube systems, I will use examples from sources originating from different actors, such as manufacturers of pneumatic mail systems, staff magazines and administrative offices. I will refer to concepts like translation (Callon, 2006 [1986]), social and relational spaces (Bourdieu, 1984, 2006 [1989]; Löw, 2001), and entanglements of technology, power and society (Bijker & Pinch, 1987; Engels & Schenk, 2014). Rather than defining modernity as an abstract concept, I will seek to understand how the historical actors defined themselves as “modern” (that there are many varieties of modernity has been discussed by Eisenstadt, 2000). In addition, I will apply the concept of meta-infrastructure as an analytical tool to shed light on the entanglement of pneumatic tubes with other systems, infrastructures, and communication and organisation practices. The concept of meta-infrastructure is used by architects, engineers, and geographers, but within their respective disciplines its meaning is generally taken for granted. Heller (2002, p. 50) uses it to describe “infrastructure interdependencies”, while Parks (2013, p. 62) writes about “satellite meta-infrastructure” and Bratton (2015, p. 3) refers to “planetaryscale computation as metainfrastructure”. I suggest that historians and cultural researchers appropriate this concept in order to focus on and understand precisely how infrastructures are intertwined and linked. This question is often neglected by historical research on media and infrastructures. I will apply the concept of

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meta-infrastructure to analyse the relationships between infrastructures, in the sense of entangled infrastructures. It is precisely these relationships or connections that enable the other infrastructures and networks to exist and function. One could argue that this is the core function of every infrastructure (cf. Larkin, 2013, p. 329). In fact, meta-infrastructure, in the meaning intended here, is not simply an object of study, but it requires a certain attitude from the researchers, namely that they are interested in the relationships between systems (whether technical or social) rather than in the systems themselves.1 In this way, pneumatic tube systems can be understood both as prerequisites for and products of cooperative practices.2 I argue that not only political and administrative structures shaped the way the networks were planned, but these very networks also shaped the image of modern cities, enterprises and employees’ sense of community. I therefore focus on the entanglement of technology, real and imagined space, with space being defined, among other factors, by infrastructure and its cultural representations – not as an abstract concept, but as the result of negotiations between different actors with different concerns: engineers, citizens, politicians, workers, and company owners.3 Of course infrastructural entanglements in the sense of meta-infrastructure are not limited to pneumatic mail systems, but they are a constant feature of infrastructure and infrastructure in the making. This has already been highlighted in the case of the “networked city” and of “networked infrastructure” (cf. Graham & Marvin, 2001). By focusing on entangled infrastructures, I want to place the interdependence of technical systems and the way they provide a framework for cooperation in a historical context. For this purpose, pneumatic mail systems are a perfect example, as both their use and existence depended on many other infrastructures since their conception: their engines were fuelled by coal, later by electricity, and the capsules travelling through the tubes were “translated” telegrams in the sense of the actor-network theory (cf. Callon, 2006 [1986]). In fact, considering the short distances within cities and between post offices, it was easier and much cheaper to send them as paper messages than through the telegraph, which required expert and well-paid operators (cf. Beckmann, 1927, 1

For a “relational understanding” of infrastructure cf. also Graham and Marvin (2001, p. 185). On “infrastructural assemblages” cf. Höhne (2012). 2 On infrastructures and practices cf. Shove (2016). 3 On relational conceptions of space cf. Bourdieu (1984 and 2006 [1989]), Foucault (1986), Soja (1980), Löw (2001) and Lefebvre (2000 [1974]). On the lack of reflection about space in the history of technology cf. Heßler (2014, p. 51), Dinçkal (2013, p. 23). On the spatial turn cf. Döring and Thielmann (2009), Bachmann-Medick (2011, pp. 284–328).

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p. 37 f.). What occurred was a translation from one system, its practices and language (telegraph and electricity, Morse code) into another system, practice and language (pneumatic tube cards and written words). Pneumatic tubes emerged as a peripheral infrastructure of the stock markets and the telegraph: the first line was built between the stock exchange and the telegraph office in London in 1853 (cf. Anonymous, 1877, p. 385). While pneumatic mail systems eventually became autonomous from the telegraph and not only telegrams, but also letters and postcards or small packages were sent through the city networks, they still relied on many other infrastructures, for instance the infrastructure of the labs they delivered samples to for analysis or the postmen and their bicycles in the city. Simultaneously, the tubes themselves constituted a kind of (meta-)infrastructure for hospitals, parliaments, stock exchanges or customs offices – an infrastructure that contributed to organising their daily activities. In this contribution, I will show how and to what extent pneumatic mail tubes were intertwined in a network of infrastructures and, more generally, of material objects, human actors, institutions, norms and rules, as well as scientific, practical and implicit knowledge. I will also focus on how these elements were shaped, in their turn, by technical systems like pneumatic mail tubes. It is precisely these infrastructural entanglements I want to highlight here, using the term meta-infrastructure to describe the activity of organising and structuring infrastructures through infrastructures. Rather than establishing a hierarchy of technical systems, I will analyse the ways in which they combined with other systems (whether technical or social), generating new systems, new practices (Reckwitz, 2003; Weber, 2009), new interactions and new (social) spaces.

3.2

Varieties of Pneumatic Tubes

Pneumatic tubes were first introduced in urban contexts during the second half of the nineteenth century: cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague and Rome all adopted them between the 1850s and the 1920s, primarily to connect post offices with each other and to send letters and telegrams in a fast, secure and inexpensive way. The citizens of several metropolises in Europe, North and South America had the possibility of sending their urgent letters within the city directly via pneumatic mail: they simply had to drop them into the right mailbox or take them to the post office, and the letters would travel through the tubes built underground in the “invisible” city (cf. Latour & Hermant, 1998; Steenson, 2011; Schabacher, 2015; Matern, 2016, p. 13), in the sewers, through

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bridges and under buildings. In fact, Schabacher (2013, p. 84) describes “infrastructures as invisible, embedded sociotechnical processes of connectivity”. Because pneumatic tubes were often built alongside pre-existing infrastructure, Schabacher (2014, p. 211, 216) emphasises their parasitic character. The pneumatic post infrastructure was created for institutions and enterprises such as telegraph companies, ministries, parliaments, and the stock exchange. Not only in London, but also in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and many big cities with a public pneumatic mail network the first tubes connected the telegraph offices with the stock exchange. In Germany, only Munich (since 1922) and Berlin (since 1876) had a pneumatic mail network open to the public (cf. Täubrich, 1997, p. 221 f.). These networks were in use approximately until the 1960s or 1970s, when motorised transport, telephone and telefax completely substituted the functions of urban pneumatic tubes. Since then, tube systems within individual buildings or connecting several buildings have become the predominant type of this technical system. Schabacher (2014) describes pneumatic mail as a communication infrastructure in “delimited spaces”, involving a restricted community of users. The delimited spaces of buildings and their connections to the city via pneumatic tube are my subject here – more specifically, pneumatic tube systems used within private companies or state-owned enterprises and their connection with the public network of pneumatic tubes and other systems of transport and communication. In fact, telegraph companies and postal administrations soon realised the importance of a direct connection between the pneumatic tubes systems of cities and individual companies. In 1924, the German Minister of Postal Services oversaw this procedure and thereby sealed the monopoly of the state postal administration on these issues.4 The companies taking advantage of these direct connections were predominantly banks and insurances, but also newspapers (Schwaighofer, 1916, p. 179, 217, 223). Malls often enjoyed a direct tube connection to the public network in major European cities such as Prague, Lausanne, Zurich, Frankfurt, and Cologne. In Switzerland, banks in particular used the opportunity to connect to the city pneumatic mail network.5 They were able to forward pneumatic mail to and receive it from the main telegraph office, but also to send and receive normal mail: their staff simply had to pack it in a pneumatic mail box, for which a fee 4

Rohrpostordnung vom 30. Mai 1923 (Reichsgesetzbl. I S. 303) mit Ausführungsbestimmungen. Berlin: Reichsdruckerei 1924, § 13 Nebenrohrpostanlagen, p. 9 f. Staatsarchiv München (StAM), Bayerische Post 613. 5 Cf. Beckmann (1927, p. 42 f.); PTT-Archiv (Bern), P-05A-PAA00808:07, P-05APAA00782:03, P-05A-PAA00802:03, Tele 012 A0039 1.

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was payable irrespective of the number of letters it contained.6 In Zurich, the shopping mall Schmidhof, interested in having its own pneumatic mail connection, was offered the possibility of joining the city network in 1939, enabling it to send capsules not only to the post offices, but also directly to banks and other enterprises connected to the tube system.7 In this way, companies and banks were able to communicate and cooperate with each other via pneumatic mail without the need of any intermediary: they could send each other documents and letters through the private and public network, which was a prerequisite for sharing information and agreeing or disagreeing. The network itself was of course actively created by the enterprises, the postal, telegraph and city administrations, and constantly shaped and reshaped through practices of maintenance, repairing and daily use. This shows the reciprocal making and remaking of conditions of cooperative work. In contrast to the citywide pneumatic mail networks, the tubes within individual buildings only started to suffer from competition with other means of communication when the information era began: motorised transport in particular was increasingly used to carry mail within cities, while within buildings the tubes remained the fastest way of sending objects. This is the reason why these infrastructures were a source of pride for many enterprises, and why they were (at least until the information era) represented as a sign of a successful and rationally organised company. In its staff magazine, the Bayerische Vereinsbank proudly informed that its 8.5 km long pneumatic mail system, built from 1950, was the second largest in Germany (after the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg) and the third largest in Europe (after an unnamed Italian company, possibly FIAT).8 The article is entitled “2800 Schüsse [sic] pro Tag”, meaning “2800 bullets [or shots] per day”, which indicates the system’s enormous potential to send 2800 capsules per day, and at the same time has militaristic overtones. Another article, entitled “Mehr Schüsse [sic] durch weniger Störungen!” (“More shots through less disruption!”) and dating from 1964, takes up the same terminology and highlights one of the most significant innovations in the development of pneumatic mail systems, namely the installation of an automatic electronic control system, capable of tracking individual capsules and their 6

This amount was not due in case the box contained at least one express letter, since this was subject to higher taxation and had priority, i.e. transport per pneumatic tube was already included (cf. Beckmann 1927, p. 43). 7 PTT-Archiv (Bern), T-00 A_5071. 8 Cf. Hauszeitung der Bayerischen Vereinsbank. Historisches Archiv der UniCredit Bank AG, München: D-BV-KOM-PUB-382: Hauszeitung Nr. 13, 1963, p. 6f. I thank the archivist, Christian Schuck, for making copies of this journal available to me.

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routes.9 The article reports that the number of capsules sent daily had already reached 3000, but the system could easily process up to 3600; besides, the technicians would be happy to demonstrate the new control system to any interested member of staff. This attitude means that the technology was used as a way to strengthen cohesion rather than as a “black box” only technicians could access. A curious attachment to this article shows that the pneumatic mail tubes were also used for unofficial communication, although this was neither their purpose nor was it welcomed by the technicians. In one particular case quoted by the staff magazine, a lady sent her “sweet greetings”, but entered the wrong code and the capsule ended up by mistake with the technicians in the pneumatic mail central control room. The infrastructure of cooperation was more than just a tool for the rationalization of work. Before the emergence of current information technologies, companies were using the tubes mainly for transmitting written information: at the railway logistics centre near Essen, they were used from the 1920s to send information for directing railway traffic (cf. Beckmann, 1927, p. 159), while in newspapers’ offices they were essential means for rapidly communicating, writing, checking, proofreading, printing, and distributing news. In the latter case, the tubes were a meta-infrastructure of information, in the former, they were part of the railways’ “networked infrastructure”. The same applied to airports: in 1967, Schiphol Airport announced the opening of a 7 km pneumatic mail network, the longest in any airport.10 Oil transportation infrastructure used pneumatic mail tubes to send special forms from the truck driver to the member of staff responsible for filling the tank and back11 – in this case, again, the tubes were supporting bureaucratic practices. During this time, the tubes and the capsules transported through them were considered as nothing short of magic: the previously mentioned article published in 1963 described them as “technische[s] Wunderwerk” – a “technical wonder”.12 Descriptions of this kind may have contributed in making staff feel part of the same “wonderful” enterprise. However, technical systems such as pneumatic mail tubes were not only a cooperative medium (“Vereinfachung und Beschleunigung der Verständigung im Betrieb”, i.e. simplification and acceleration of corporate 9

Cf. Hauszeitung der Bayerischen Vereinsbank. Historisches Archiv der UniCredit Bank AG, München: D-BV-KOM-PUB-389: Hauszeitung Nr. 20, 1964, p. 14. 10 Cf. Buizenpost op Schiphol zeven km. De Telegraaf 70/24693 (1967), 15 March 1967, p. 7. 11 Cf. Transport von Mineralölen. Brand Aus 8 (1968), p. 269. 12 Cf. Hauszeitung der Bayerischen Vereinsbank. Historisches Archiv der UniCredit Bank AG, München: D-BV-KOM-PUB-382: Hauszeitung Nr. 13, 1963, p. 6 f.

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communication, were its explicit aims according to Thommen, 1981, p. 95), but they themselves required considerable pre-existing cooperation. The same article noted that most of the failures in the system were due to incorrectly packed capsules or content sent without a capsule, as sometimes happened by mistake or even on purpose. At the Bayerische Vereinsbank, for instance, during carnival employees sent pieces of glass, sausage skin and sweets that got stuck in the tubes, causing the whole system to fail. As a result, the staff did not only hinder communication, but also put their colleagues, the technicians, in danger, who were often hurt while attempting to reset the system. Hospitals set out particularly detailed rules to follow when sending blood and tissue samples to prevent them from being separated into different components, coagulating, being contaminated or contaminating the envelopes and the staff touching them or even the capsules and tubes themselves. In fact, samples must not freeze or open accidentally during transport and, in certain cases, they have to be properly refrigerated.13 The worst case would be sending these materials without any capsule, leading to contamination and failure of the whole system. A whole set of social practices staff needs to be familiar with are therefore both a prerequisite for and a consequence of technical systems such as pneumatic tubes: the willingness and ability to learn how to use them and the acceptance of a set of norms are as necessary for the system to work correctly as the tubes themselves. Consequently, it is justified to speak of “mutual makings” in the sense of a co-constitution of technology and society14 : social practices continuously shape and reshape technology, while technology continually shapes and reshapes social relations, practices and spaces. The cooperation with non-human actors is at least as important: not only humans, but also material objects are involved in processes of mutual dependence and mutual construction. On the one hand, pneumatic tube systems often rely on the electricity grid for functioning (as mentioned above in the nineteenth and early twentieth century their engines were instead fuelled by coal), on the other hand, they can host other infrastructures such as fibre-optic cables.15 In addition, in the “modern office” pneumatic tube systems were a complementary tool to telephones, lifts, punch cards, typewriters, and later computers, control panels, and programs; they both required the presence of other infrastructures and allowed for cooperation in the enterprise. On 13

For an updated version of detailed packing rules see for example the website of the university hospital in Ulm (Universitätsklinikum Ulm, 2017). 14 On the notion of “co-construction” of technology and society cf. Misa (2003, p. 3, 10, 12) and Brey (2003, p. 54). 15 Peter Haub (Leiter Instandhaltung) and Axel Hegemann, Achenbach Buschhütten GmbH, Kreuztal (Interview, 14 December 2017).

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the urban level, their infrastructural entanglement included, among others, the telegraph wires and offices, the mail carriers, the sewers with their vaults where mail tubes were often laid and the signs indicating mailboxes and post offices with a connection to the pneumatic network. For instance, the engines producing compressed air for the mail tubes had the additional function of a heating system: in nineteenth century Berlin, the heat generated by them was used to keep warm telegraph cables and the sleeping quarters of the postmen during the night (cf. Beschreibung der Rohrpost [1900], in Krüger, 2016, p. 30 f.). Even today, at the University Hospital of Hanover, the system is still used to preheat water for the bed cleaning service (cf. Bandel, 2006, p. 13). While large hospital networks (such as the one in Innsbruck, which I will come back to later in this article) use the latest technology and software capable of keeping track of the capsules, some companies still rely on systems installed in the 1960s. This is the case with the pneumatic mail tubes at Achenbach Buschhütten, a company producing rolling mills and foil slitting machines in Kreuztal, Germany. The system connects all company sites and functions, from production to sales and human resources; there are still elevated tubes crossing the street that previously connected other buildings of the same company. The tubes are also in use to carry fibre-optic telephone cables: in this way, the infrastructural entanglement and the new uses of old infrastructure, which do not replace, but just superpose the old ones, become most evident. Old and new infrastructures not only coexist, but also benefit from each other, and the old traces, paths and networks are reproduced and reinforced by new infrastructure.

3.3

Varieties of Enterprises

The public institutions that adopted pneumatic tubes as a means of communication and transport include parliaments, customs and postal administrations, telegraph and railway services. Hospitals, supermarkets, steelworks, banks and insurance companies have also been using pneumatic tube systems within their buildings or between several buildings. Connections between newspapers and public pneumatic networks were built, for instance, in Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt from the 1920s. As mentioned, in the same period insurance companies and banks in Switzerland were connected to the urban pneumatic tube network. In this way, pneumatic mail networks dissolved the boundaries between private and public areas and inscribed the private into the public urban space as an integral part of the city. The mail

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tubes and their connection to both private companies and public institutions can be understood as instances of meta-infrastructures. The hybridity of pneumatic tubes – that is, their ability to transfer both messages and materials – was one of the reasons why they were presented as a necessary step on the path to rationalisation, modernisation and economisation at the customs office in Frankfurt in the 1960s: staff could send original documents with signatures and stamps, but also small objects and the stamps themselves.16 This is another example for the pneumatic tube as a meta-infrastructure – that is, as an infrastructure of the customs office’s infrastructure. Pneumatic tubes were associated on the one hand with bureaucracy and legality due to the systems used at the customs offices or in banks, and with scientificity and knowledge production on the other: a connection with a laboratory in a steel works allowed to verify the quality of steel and produce a purer and better end product. In fact, as early as the 1950s special tubes were installed in German steelworks to connect the production sites with laboratories: the labs received steel samples in their different stages and sent the results of their analyses back to the production site (cf. Heinze, 1956, p. 90 f.). Today, a connection with the laboratory in some hospitals allows medical staff to receive real-time results directly in the operating theatre. Here, the tubes are also a meta-infrastructure, i.e. an infrastructure of the hospital’s infrastructure. Even in this case, the possibility to send “real” objects and not just data or messages is the decisive argument for installing pneumatic tube systems. It is also the reason why banks, shops and supermarkets as well as administration offices use the tubes systems: they send money and original documents with signatures and stamps. Until the 1980s, both objects and papers travelled via pneumatic mail. In contrast, the main function of pneumatic mail systems in the “digital era” is, indeed, to send materials that can only be transported physically. For this reason, institutions that required the installation of new pneumatic tube systems since the 1990s were mainly hospitals that rely on them for sending blood and tissue samples to the lab, but sometimes even medicines and other objects. For instance, the University Hospital in Innsbruck, part of the public service and managed by a state-owned company in Tyrol (tirol kliniken GmbH), currently has a pneumatic tube network of about 50 km, connecting its most important buildings and, within them, the central laboratory with surgical operating theatres, the central administration with the individual departments and these with the pharmacy. Papers, results of patients’ examinations, medicines, blood and tissue samples usually travel through its tubes. It is precisely the possibility of sending 16

Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHStAW), Abt. 488, Nr. 17.

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both objects and papers that is today the greatest advantage of pneumatic tube systems, even though they may be perceived as slow and old-fashioned compared to electronic information systems. By the 1980s, pneumatic tubes within buildings were perceived as outdated technology, particularly when they malfunctioned. This was the case in the hospital in Innsbruck: the failure of then newly installed pneumatic mail systems which connected several buildings led a number of technicians to doubt the efficiency of pneumatic transport in general. Evidence of this is the intense correspondence between technicians, engineers, architects and medical staff preserved in the archives of the Tyrol government17 and the hospital’s own documentation. The technicians took photographs to document the capsules that did not reach their correct destination.18 During the same period of time, the head of the psychiatric department refused to have any pneumatic tube stations installed within its buildings.19 When the hospital planned the construction of new buildings in the 1990s, it was decided to install a new pneumatic tube system despite the problems that had occurred a decade earlier, most likely because of the hybrid nature of the tubes, allowing both mail and objects to be transported. The new system is completely automated and controlled through software: not only the technicians, but every member of the hospital staff who has access to the information system is able to track where each capsule is heading to. This shows an intertwinement of digital and non-digital technologies. In addition to their ability to transport objects and messages, the reliability of pneumatic tube systems is perceived as another advantage. In this regard, the differences between the old and new technologies and their perception become evident: in the case of Achenbach Buschhütten, a manager and the technician 17

Protokoll Nr. 134, 137, 140, 143 (Projektleitung Zentrales Versorgungsgebäude) and Technische Abteilung to Direktion des Krankenhauses, Innsbruck, 17.11.1987: Tiroler Landesarchiv, Innsbruck (TLA), Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung, Abt. VI d 1 (Hochbau), Karton Nr. 232: 1246, XI 1987 (Lds. Krankenhaus Ibk. Zentrales Wirtschaftsversorgungsgebäude, XI. Teil). I wish to thank the archivist Martin Ager for helping me with the initial search for these largely unresearched documents in the Tiroler Landesarchiv. 18 I am much obliged to Wolfgang Tautschnig, chief engineer at the Tiroler Landeskrankenhaus Innsbruck, for making these documents available to me (cited here as TILAK), as well as for showing me and explaining pneumatic tube systems and their intertwinement with the hospital’s infrastructure. On the interaction of technology and human actors in hospitals cf. Schubert (2006). 19 Cf. Prof. Dr. Hartmann Hinterhuber (Univ.-Klinik für Psychiatrie Innsbruck) to Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung, Landesbaudirektion: Anschluß an das Rohrpostnetz. Innsbruck, 20.01.1986: TLA, Amt der Tiroler Landesregierung, Abt. VI d 1 (Hochbau) Karton Nr. 223: 1245, XXV 1986.

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responsible for the mail tubes described them as “old technology” – which also implies that the company itself has a long tradition. At the same time, both agree that, in a way, the tube system is more reliable than new computer technology.20 In fact, while pneumatic mail tubes will need maintenance, they neither require constant software updates nor a program for deciphering the content of their information: the information and the material are by nature fully present and do not need “technologies of presence” (Milne, 2010) or signs to replace them. This means that, to be readable, they are not dependent on any IT tool that is likely to become obsolete. The functionality and reliability of technical systems are therefore perceived as fundamental preconditions of cooperation, even more so than speed. A nurse who had trained in two German hospitals – a smaller one with a system of pneumatic tubes and a larger one without them – similarly emphasised the importance of reliability: she commented that it was better to deliver the material in person and know that it had reached its destination than to send it by tube, fearing it may have got stuck somewhere.21 Interestingly, in this case it is the lack of reliability that is used as an argument against pneumatic tubes and in favour of the traditional method of personally hand-delivering documents and objects. This indicates that technology does not work autonomously, but requires constant attention, which in turn creates new work. Finally, maintenance and repair are the most salient aspects of the “mutual makings” of technology and work: infrastructures not only shape the working environment, but are themselves the product of constant work that keeps them operating.22 In summary, pneumatic tube networks have been, and partly still are, a prerequisite for communication and cooperation – both horizontal and hierarchical, transmitting both orders and messages or objects in need of a response, with results and consequences still open. Pneumatic tubes were at one point considered so important that, in the 1940s, the staff magazine of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf was called De Buizenpost, i.e. pneumatic post. In its first issue, it explained that pneumatic mail was not only an essential means of communication within the company, but also a democratic tool allowing everyone to play their part in the company. In this sense, it stated, pneumatic mail was a symbol 20

Peter Haub (Leiter Instandhaltung) and Axel Hegemann, Achenbach Buschhütten GmbH, Kreuztal (Interview, 14 December 2017). I would like to thank Axel Hegemann and Peter Haub for showing me the pneumatic mail system at Achenbach Buschhütten and providing me with important information about its use, history and functioning. 21 Lena (anonymized) (Interview, Siegen, 9 May 2018). 22 This aspect of technical systems has recently become a focus of technology studies: cf. the contributions in Krebs et al. (2018) as well as the essay by Russell and Vinsel (2018).

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for working together and feeling part of the “great family” of De Telegraaf.23 As Alexander Badenoch (2010) and Högselius et al. (2015, p. 270) have observed, on the transnational level, infrastructures and the representations of their networks are also political tools performing (the wish for) peaceful cooperation between nations. On a smaller scale, pneumatic tube systems were, on a symbolic level, considered as a sign for cooperation between different departments of the same company and their staff. In this section, I have shown that pneumatic tube systems shaped the working space of both public and private enterprises; that their hybrid character, allowing the circulation of both material objects and information, and their reliability are described as their main advantages; and, finally, that they became the symbol for key concepts of modernity such as bureaucracy, scientificity, and democratic institutions. In the next section, I will illustrate that they were associated with various and sometimes ambivalent or even contradictory perceptions and interpretations of modernity.24

3.4

Interpretations of Modernity

Manufacturers of pneumatic mail systems saw everyone from secretaries and accountants to any company handling large amounts of paper as a potential client. “Rationalisation”, “acceleration” and “simplification” were the keywords in advertising pneumatic tube systems to companies, hospitals and even hotels; they formed part of the discourse of the manufacturing companies, but also of most engineers and technicians (e.g. Hardegen, 1924; Beckmann, 1927; Heinze, 1956). In the early twentieth century, pneumatic tube systems embodied various positive notions about modernity. Grand hotels, representing the quintessence of modern (luxurious) living, were also equipped with telegraphic connections, all kinds of audio-visual signals for calling staff or indicating fire danger, lifts for people, food, beverages and other materials, and tubes allowing people to speak with each other, communicating from different rooms (an acoustic equivalent of pneumatic tubes within buildings) (cf. Knoch, 2016, p. 234). As early as the 1870s, the Grand Hotel de Rome in Berlin offered its guests a pneumatic mail system alongside other “modern” communication and leisure infrastructures such 23

Cf. De Buizenpost. De Buizenpost, Bedrijfsblad “De Telegraaf” 1/1, 1 December 1942, p. 1. 24 On the “co-construction of technology and modernity” cf. Edwards (2003, p. 191).

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as a luxurious swimming pool and lifts (cf. Knoch, 2016, p. 97). The Hotel Cumberland on Berlin’s prestigious boulevard Kurfürstendamm installed a pneumatic mail system connecting the most disparate locations such as the kitchens, the storage rooms and offices on each floor, the mail delivery and the concierge. The kitchen, café and grill could communicate with each other (cf. Hardegen, 1924, p. 20). Efficiency was then considered as an essential feature of modernity (cf. Matern, 2016, p. 13), of which pneumatic tubes were a visible sign. By 1924, Paul Hardegen GmbH in Berlin, a manufacturer of pneumatic tube systems and other kinds of office technology, had installed these systems in dozens of institutions in Germany, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, including banks, insurance companies, sanatoria and department stores. Banks included the Deutsche Bank in Berlin, the Reichsbank Mannheim, Württembergische Vereinsbank in Ulm, Skandinavska Kredit-Aktiebolaget in Stockholm, Banca Comerşului Craiova (in Romania) and the Russian Bank for Foreign Trade in Kiev (Hardegen, 1924, p. 6, 10); among the libraries were the Royal Library and the University Library in Berlin as well as the Royal Library in Bucharest (Hardegen, 1924, p. 29). The company also offered systems with special boxes for sending large papers such as contracts, which could or should not be bent. These boxes looked like square, flat containers (Hardegen, 1924, p. 11). The insurance company “Nordstern” in Berlin-Schöneberg had a mailing system with 26 stations that was able to send more than 1000 heavy boxes (420 × 120 mm) per day, this being, according to the company, the first pneumatic system with these dimensions on the whole continent. The buzzword in this period was “Wirtschaftlichkeit” (“economic efficiency”), the main virtue in political economy besides “Rentabilität” (“profitability”) (cf. Calame, 1928, p. 315): the energy consumption of the system, working 8 h per day, was “only ca. 60 KW/hour” (Hardegen, 1924, p. 12). A lamp signalled when the tubes were occupied, which indicated that the users had to wait before sending their boxes. Rationalisation was considered as another essential feature of modernity (cf. van Laak, 2001, p. 376–377), which pneumatic tubes were supposed to foster. The mechanical and chemical industries adapted pneumatic mail systems to their own production needs: from Warsaw (pharmaceutical company Ludwik Spiess and Son) to Ludwigshafen (Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik), from Augsburg (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg) to Lyon (Automobiles Berliet) and St. Etienne (Manufacture Française d’Armes et Cycles, Loire), pneumatic mail systems seemed to meet the industry’s need for the rational organisation of work and administration perfectly (cf. Hardegen, 1924, p. 22–25). However, the manufacturers and installers of these systems also considered aesthetic features: rational

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organisation was not yet synonymous with squared profiles, but pneumatic mail tubes looked rather grand – like the organ in the temple of industriousness and productivity (Hardegen, 1924, p. 23 f. published some impressive pictures). Finally, speed was conceived as the quintessence of modernity (cf. Schivelbusch, 2000), and pneumatic tubes were a typical feature of this and of technical progress. Even before 1900, the newspapers in the provinces of the Habsburg monarchy saw the new ways in which news travelled through newspapers’ offices as a reflection of the accelerating pace of the information society and an ultramodern emblem of American progress. In 1894, the Bukowinaer Rundschau wrote: The development of newspapers in America is well known; their editors and publishers go out of their way to provide their readers as fast as possible with column-long reports about events that happened only a few hours before. The newspaper editors in Chicago just had the most grandiose idea […], they had a pneumatic mail tube installed at their joint expense. It runs underground through the city, connecting the individual participants both with each other and with the theatres, the postal and telegraph offices. In this way, a news report about an event that happened on the street can be handed in by the reporter somewhere via mail tube, reaching the newspaper’s editorial team within one minute to be printed immediately.25

There was not only enthusiastic coverage. Other news reports characterised the tubes highlighting negative attributes of “modernity”: another newspaper described the pneumatic tube system in Berlin as “noisy” – so noisy that the inhabitants were disturbed in their homes by the sound of mail carried in these underground capsules.26 In 1931, the Salzburger Wacht reported on huge pneumatic tubes in national banks, listing them as an example of how mechanisation and automation was

25

“Welche Entwicklung in Amerika das Zeitungswesen hat, ist bekannt; Redaction [sic] und Verleger bieten dort alles auf, um ihren Lesern so schnell wie möglich spaltenlange Berichte über Ereignisse zu bringen, die sich vor wenigen Stunden zugetragen. Das Großartigste haben sich nun […] die Zeitungsverleger in Chicago geleistet, welche auf gemeinschaftliche Kosten eine unterirdische pneumatische Rohrpost durch die Stadt haben legen lassen, welche eine Verbindung der einzelnen Teilnehmer unter einander sowohl, wie auch mit den Theatern, den Post- und Telegraphenbureaux [sic] gestattet, so daß z. B. eine Notiz über ein Straßenereignis von einem Reporter irgendwo der Rohrpost aufgegeben, innerhalb einer Minute im Besitz der Redaction [sic] ist und sofort zum Druck gelangt.” Bukowinaer Rundschau 13/1519, 19 April 1894, p. 4. The translations in this article are my own. 26 Cf. Pilsner Abendpost 1/30, 26 March 1877, p. 3. For the sensorial turn in the history of technology cf. Parr (2015).

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replacing workers, in an article on “the automatic bank […:] pneumatic mail makes runners unemployed”: Today, the headquarters of our major banks are huge complexes, with a number of staff similar to the population of a small or even medium-sized town. It is therefore not surprising that such a complex, which usually consists of several buildings connected by diaphragm arches, houses a 14 km long pneumatic tube. It has 45 stations and the distance to the furthest station is 4 km. Every day, 36,000 mail units pass through the tube system that is operated by 5 or 6 people. For this reason, all the runners previously needed to deliver these 36,000 mail units are now unemployed.27

Pneumatic tubes were, of course, not the only element of the feared mechanisation: they came with punch cards, which contributed to the automation of the accountants’ and bankers’ work. Punch cards played a key role in the rationalisation and automation of office work (cf. Vahrenkamp, 2017). Pneumatic mail was therefore part of a whole network of human and non-human actors that changed the way people worked during the twentieth century. Rationalisation was just one of the ways of structuring cooperative work; however, in the twentieth century it was interpreted as a fundamental sign of modernity: organising work “rationally” was the main tool of Fordism, Taylorism and related movements with the aim to establish a working order that would improve the workflow and increase production. As Jany (2015, p. 43) has shown, from the last decades of the nineteenth century, buildings were designed to foster productivity and to allow a smooth exchange of information. Depending on when and where the tube systems were built, they – together with other factors – changed the conditions for cooperation in working environments and the very shape of architecture: office buildings in a modernist architectural style would have been unthinkable without lifts, telephones and pneumatic tube systems, which enabled the communication between different floors without the need to send runners through the buildings. The two quotes above are an example of the fascination for pneumatic mail as an instrument of progress on the one hand and of the fear of the technicization of the 27

“Die Zentralen unserer großen Banken sind heute Riesenkomplexe, die die Bewohnerzahl einer Kleinstadt beherbergen oder gar einer kleinen Mittelstadt. Es ist deshalb kein Wunder, wenn in einem solchen Hause, das übrigens meist aus mehreren Häuserkomplexen besteht, die durch Schwibbogen miteinander verbunden sind, eine Rohrpost von 14 km Länge existiert. 45 Stationen hat diese Rohrpost und vier Kilometer lang ist der Weg bis zur entferntesten Station. 36,000 Sendungen passieren täglich di[ese] Rohrpost, die von 5 oder 6 Leuten bedient wird, und die all die Boten brotlos gemacht hat, die sonst notwendig waren, um diese 36,000 Sendungen an Ort und Stelle zu bringen.” Die automatische Großbank. Zweierlei “tote Buchhalter” – Die denkende Buchungsmaschine – Rohrpost macht Boten brotlos. Salzburger Wacht 33/248, 29 October 1931, p. 6.

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working environment and its consequences for unemployment on the other, as is also evident in a report published in the Neues Wiener Journal in 1894.28 Pneumatic tube systems were therefore part of a rationalisation project that is typical for modernity, which also implies, of course, that they were subject to criticism of modernity, automation and mechanisation.

3.5

Conclusion

Pneumatic tubes can be considered as a technical system that contributed to changing the conditions for working and living together, but also altered the very shape of architecture and, hence, the city’s skyline. Therefore, both the social and physical space were shaped by and dependent on technology and communication networks. “Successful” pneumatic tube systems – with “success” being defined by a broad and growing network and by a long lifespan – were characterised by a complex network, connecting different transport and communication systems. In this sense, it was their (meta)infrastructural nature that was essential for them to function. The concept of meta-infrastructure therefore seems to be fruitful for understanding the interfaces where practices and technologies meet. Having become an essential element in the working space of modern office buildings during the twentieth century,29 pneumatic mail made present what was previously absent and made objects travel while staff could remain at their workspace. In this way, it fostered a new perception and a new configuration of space as well as a new kind of cooperation: the tubes transported objects that were far away and replaced workers, but at the same time they required other workers to pick up the mail whenever the system failed to deliver it. Behind the regular rows of secretaries, pneumatic tubes created also new and unexpected situations demanding a change in well-defined roles. On the one hand, it is easy to imagine that both physical movement (walking to deliver objects or mail) and social contacts with colleagues from other departments were probably reduced with the introduction of the tube systems, at least in certain companies. On the other hand, tasks such as picking up the mail that was stuck somewhere or delivering it in person when the tubes were not working correctly had to be integrated in the daily work: secretaries in companies and nurses in hospitals assumed this task, since the runners 28

Cf. Die Forderungen der Dienstmänner. Neues Wiener Journal 369, 2 November 1894, p. 5 f. 29 Examples are administration buildings such as the ones designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. On office organisation in administration buildings cf. Schnaithmann (2012).

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who had previously transported documents and samples had been substituted by technical systems such as the mail tubes. The hybrid character of pneumatic mail tubes made them a technical system that was (and partly still is) used for multiple purposes and on diverse occasions, situations and locations; this probably contributed to the fact that pneumatic tubes were never thoroughly standardised (on standardisation, cf. Yates & Murphy, 2019; Henrich-Franke, 2018; Kaiser et al., 2014, p. 128–134). Above all, the ability to transfer both messages and material led to the combination of pneumatic tube systems with other infrastructures, enabling cooperation and creating new kinds of collaborative practices – or hindering them in the case of technical problems (and consequently leading to the emergence of other forms of cooperation). In terms of infrastructural entanglements, pneumatic mail tubes in enterprises can be understood as meta-infrastructure on several levels: firstly, they were part of a network of technical systems, operational spaces, material objects, acoustic and optical signals, assembly lines, information technologies, other transport infrastructures and, last but not least, human actors. Information technology in terms of software is, in fact, a necessary element in newer versions of large pneumatic tube systems, for instance in hospitals, since it allows for tracking and tracing the capsules and ensures that the capsules travel through the right tubes to the correct destination. In this sense, digital and analogue systems not only co-exist and cooperate, but also integrate each other. Secondly, the tubes create (or created) new constellations of space and communication. As historian Monika Dommann (2016) argues, flows should become the object of historical research, particularly flows of material and, I would add, flows of information. Pneumatic mail tubes involve flows of both information and material, and these flows shaped and shape not only urban and social spaces, but also the possibilities of cooperation within and between enterprises. Pneumatic tubes were, and partly still are, an element of a network of human and non-human actors that (re)defined the conditions for working and living together in the same city or in the same building during the nineteenth, the twentieth and even the twenty-first century.

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Patents and Licences: Basic Elements of Cooperation in the Early History of Electronic Data Processing in Europe Christian Henrich-Franke Abstract

This paper will consider the role of patents and licences for scientific and economic cooperation in the early history of electronic data processing in Europe. Questions to be answered are: In how far did patents and licences impact different varieties of cooperation that were necessary to develop cooperative media (technologies)? Which role did patents and licences play for technical progress and success on the markets with innovative products respectively turning inventions (and ideas) into innovations and marketable media technologies? While answering these questions the paper will demonstrate that the ‘use and exchange of patents’ (via licence cooperation) were important for technical progress as well as for different companies’ success on the markets. It will pick up the example of the patents for magnetic storage of data, which were held by the German Gerhard Dirks since 1943. Germany was among the most important breeding grounds for the development of electronic data processing and early computer technologies in the 1930s and 1940s. Probably, the two most outstanding German inventors were Konrad Zuse (programme control and arithmetic elements) and Gerhard Dirks (magnetic storage of data). Both had groundbreaking ideas at the forefront of research, however, Dirks (in contrast to Zuse) made a lot of money with his ideas because he applied for numerous patents early on.

C. Henrich-Franke (B) Universität Siegen/ Plurale Ökonomik/ Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_4

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4.1

Introduction

“Like me, also Schreyer had missed the opportunity to apply for a patent for his decisive ideas on electronic and programme-driven calculators in good time. … Dr. Dirks, in contrast to that, had consigned all his patent applications in Darmstadt after the war. These were composed of hundreds of applications. … His patents enabled him and Siemag to make financial claims which pose a risk to the existence of our small company.” (Zuse, 2010, p. 98/127)

This quote taken from the memoirs of the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse demonstrates the importance of patents and licence agreements for technical progress and economic benefits in the early history of computing and electronic data processing. Translating the quote and its content into the wording of media theory, we might say: Patents and licences were juridical media of cooperation shaping the scientific and economic cooperation that was necessary to develop cooperative media technologies. (Patent) Law protected knowledge and made it a tradeable basis for cooperation, for example, within a licence agreement. This paper will consider the role of patents and licences for scientific and economic cooperation in the early history of electronic data processing in Europe. Questions to be answered are: In how far did patents and licences impact different varieties of cooperation that were necessary to develop cooperative media (technologies)? Which role did patents and licences play for technical progress and success on the markets with innovative products respectively turning inventions (and ideas) into innovations and marketable media technologies? While answering these questions the paper will demonstrate that the ‘use and exchange of patents’ (via licence cooperation) were important for technical progress as well as for different companies’ success on the markets. It will pick up the example of the patents for magnetic storage of data, which were held by the German Gerhard Dirks since 1943. Germany was among the most important breeding grounds for the development of electronic data processing and early computer technologies in the 1930s and 1940s. Probably, the two most outstanding German inventors were Konrad Zuse (programme control and arithmetic elements) and Gerhard Dirks (magnetic storage of data). Both had groundbreaking ideas at the forefront of research, however, Dirks (in contrast to Zuse) made a lot of money with his ideas because he applied for numerous patents early on. Neither media history nor the history of technology had paid much attention to the role of patents or made patents and licence agreements a topic to be focussed in analysing the early history of electronic data processing (Hanewinkel, 2014; Mahoney, 2011; Petzold, 1992). Patents and licence agreements are mostly

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only cursorily mentioned to underline the high economic value they can sometimes acquire (Fickers & Griset, 2019; Berg 2016; Griset, 2013). However, that patents and licence agreements are a key issue of cooperation (and noncooperation) between research and the exploitation of media (technologies) often is not mentioned (Zuse, 2010; Zellmer, 1990; Müller, 2014).

4.2

Patents, Licences and Cooperation

If we understand patents and licences as juridical media that are shaping cooperation in the development of media technologies we should start with some general considerations on patents, licences and cooperation. A patent, which was granted by a national agency for a national market, can be seen as a first step into ‘cooperation’ (in this case regarding a technology for magnetic storage of data). It forces all potential users of a particular invention (researchers, companies etc.) to cooperate in one way or another with the patent holder if they want to exploit the invention. A patent can be seen as a necessary but not sufficient condition of cooperation because the patent holder gains a temporary monopoly on his idea and is also open to exploit the patent by himself. A patent holder, of course, might decide not to cooperate with others. In this understanding, cooperation refers to the exploitation of a patent (and of the invention it covers), however, the simple acceptance of the right of patent protection is not seen as a form of cooperation but rather as compliance with national law. Patents are often contested especially when they might turn out to cover a profitable invention that deserves a patent’s protection of knowledge. The application for a patent is, therefore, often followed by a long procedure of testing and evaluating during which a patent’s granting and economic value is uncertain (but protected). A licence agreement (based on a patent) goes a step further regarding cooperation. It is a sufficient condition of cooperation as it defines how an invention can be used in further research or by turning the invention into an innovation and marketable products. There are different types of licence agreements ranging from informal consultations to formal contracts. Such an agreement contains quite different subject matters: Technical cooperation: division of labour to produce technical equipment based on the patent’s idea (also the exchange of knowledge or patents to build complex technologies). Juridical cooperation: (mutual) help to enforce the patent or prevention of a legal dispute (reduce uncertainty).

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Economic cooperation: exploitation and sale of products; negotiating sublicences to make money. Cooperation on the basis of a licence agreement (and a patent) can take place between organisations and individuals.

4.3

Background of Magnetic Storage of Data

4.3.1

Gerhard Dirks: A Non-professional Inventor with Practical Needs

Gerhard Dirks was born in 1910 as a son of Gerhard Dirks sen., who was an engineer with a small engineering office in Leipzig. His father was not able to finance his son to study engineering at a university outside of Leipzig, due to financial difficulties in the context of the Great Depression. Dirks junior therefore decided to opt for economics and legal sciences where he graduated in 1934. A PhD in legal sciences followed in 1939. Since the early 1930s, however, Gerhard Dirks also assisted his father in the engineering office, which was renamed into ‘Engineering office Gerhard Dirks’ in 1942 and moved to Rostok in Czechoslovakia. At that time, it was unofficially put under the auspices of the punched card company Powers. Father and son discussed a number of technical issues and were both keen on applying for patents for their ideas. Usually, both applied together, at least until 1944, when the father died, and Gerhard Dirks took over the engineering office thorugh the back door.1 In his main profession Dirks made a career as head of accounting departments and as administrative expert for several companies, among them the ‘Mercedes Büromaschinenwerke’ in Zella-Mehlis. At the outbreak of the Second World War Dirks entered the AG Reichswerke ‘Hermann Göring’ that produced weapons and mechanical engines. In 1943 these were incorporated into the Skoda company. In the chaos of the war and the postwar years Dirks and his family twice fled from the Soviet army, 1945 from Prague to Langensalza and in 1948 from Langensalza to Frankfurt am Main in the American occupied zone. He could avoid being imprisoned by the Soviets between 1945 and 1947 as he was able to successfully sell rectifiers (an electrical devise to convert alternating into direct current), which he built from scrap war material around Langensalza. Nevertheless, Dirks lost nearly all his property and money (Rimmer, 1983). When he restarted his life in 1

Biography in the inventory for the estate, Gerhard Dirks (NL 124), Archives of the German Museum, Munich.

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Frankfurt, Gerhard Dirks was a poor refuge. However, by relying on his pre-war professional contacts he continued his professional career very fast. He became head of the department for accounting at the ‘Verein Deutscher MaschinenbauAnstalten’ in 1948 (Mechanical Engineering Industry Association), in 1949 he reopened the ‘Engineering office Gerhard Dirks’ and managed to acquire some consulting jobs, for example for the ‘Bundesverband der deutschen Industrie’ (Federation of German Industries).2 Since the 1930s Dirks’ focus was on the development of office communication equipment. In contrast to those engineers that did research on complex electronic data processing (with programme driven calculating machines) for scientific or military purposes, Dirks approached the topic from an economist’s angle, who was interested in increasing data processing in the companies he worked at. He was particularly looking for new methods to increase the capacities for data storage during complex accounting procedures. His focus was on the administration of data storage rather than on accelerating processing times. His ideas, therefore, never spread across engineering communities or companies in Germany and abroad (Billing, 1977, 1997). Remarkably, Dirks and Zuse – the two most important German inventors in the field – did not know each other’s work throughout the war. It took until 1954 for both to meet in person for the first time.

4.3.2

The Patents D 91,234 IX/43a (Storage Equipment) and D 91,194 IX/43c (Storage of Data)

Much by coincidence – a punch card system and a (magnetic) tape recorder were placed next to each other in Dirk’s office in Prague – he had the idea to combine both technologies: to store data magnetically. For this idea (invention) he applied for a patent at the Reichspatentamt in Berlin in 1943, which in the long run turned out to be his main invention. Due to the war and the bombing of Berlin the Reichspatentamt never published the application nor started a granting procedure. The application was a decisive step as Dirks was the first among a number of researchers across Europe and the US who were considering magnetic data storage to apply for a patent. This application put him into an advantageous position when, later, technologies using magnetic data storage were about to be built and used. During the last two years of the war and his lengthy refugee journey, he 2

Internal Report of Siemag on Gerhard Dirks, 24.04.1954, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis A6 4 276.

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further considered magnetic data storage and laid down several new ideas, for which he applied for additional patents at the German patent office in 1947/48. His applications were mostly approved and granting procedures initiated, which took nearly a decade. Among them were the two important ones: patent D 91,234 IX/43a for storage equipment and patent D 91,194 IX/43c for the storage of data (Zellmer, 1990).

4.3.3

Magnetic Storage of Data – Plural Research and Uncertain Patents

Storage became a major issue soon after the war, when the vacuum-tube computers ENIAC and Colossus were already operating and a few companies in the US and the UK also began to explore different types of storage. Some researchers, like the US engineer Billing, started research on magnetic storage in the late 1940s without knowing anything about Dirks’ patents. However, during military government the allied troops had made photocopies of all German patents, which made Dirks’ application of 1943 visible also in London and Washington.3 What is more, in the late 1940s Dirks also applied for corresponding patents in the UK and the US. Through his father’s engineering company, he had been in contact with the punched card company Powers that became part of Remington Rand in 1949 and motivated him to apply for his patents on magnetic storage of data even abroad. At that time, the Allied High Commission prohibited independent German research in a number of fields, among them electronic components. It was foreseeable that German researchers and inventors would lose their leading role in many high technology fields in the post-war years. This prohibition was a further motivation for Dirks. Patents abroad promised to be an important step to defend his competitive advantage and make money. It must be underlined, however, that Dirks’ patents were still in the granting procedure throughout the first half of the 1950s when magnetic data storage turned out to become a viable technology. Therefore, it was not clear if Dirks’ ideas would withstand a complaint against the granting of the patents.4

3

Inventory for the estate, Gerhard Dirks (NL 124), Archives of the German Museum, Munich. 4 Report on a telephone conversation with Mr. Eckhardt/Zuse KG, May 1954, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis A6 4 276.

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4.4

Negotiating Patents and Licences

4.4.1

Prior to 1954: Turning A Patent Application into a Licence Agreement

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In Germany, research on electromagnetic processing and storage of data restarted in many places in the first half of the 1950s. Gerhard Dirks’ patents became suddenly valuable for a number of companies, however, uncertainty and the risk of complaints against the patents by the industry also increased. The changing environment made Dirks search for a partner to exploit his patents (based on a licence agreement). The first company in Germany with an interest in Dirks’ patents as early as 1951 was the ‘Definitiv-Kontrollbuchhaltung’ in Frankfurt. The prospect of automatic accounting with the help of magnetic storage of account balances or personal identification numbers within an accounting process promised a remarkable rationalisation of administrative work. However, practical demonstrations with a first prototype failed in 1951/52 leading to a subsequent loss of interest by Definitiv. Notwithstanding, Dirks took things forward by developing further prototypes to demonstrate the practical value of his patents. He travelled around Germany advertising his ideas to the producers of typewriters and accounting machines after Definitive had withdrawn. The more the industry got to know about Dirks’ ideas on magnetic storage, the more it triggered competition among different producers of typewriters and accounting machines which recognized the technical potential of the patents. In an informal memorandum, for example, the management of Siemag underlined that they expected “a revolution on the markets for office and accounting machines and that the technical developments of Kienzle, Exakta, Conti and our own will become obsolete in a foreseeable future.”5 Dirks, however, had to outbalance different strategic options. An important issue was his lack of a personal financial basis. He had lost all his belongings when he fled from the Soviet occupied zone of Germany to the American one. Dirks needed a partner who offered (economic and juridical) support in all the legal disputes, which were looming. At the same time, he wanted to remain the single researcher to further develop the ideas behind his invention. His father’s engineering office should be the place where new ideas and products should be developed. The big (international) companies were not an option for Dirks as he

5

Internal report, 22.07.1954, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis A6 4 276.

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feared these were only out for his patents in order to continue their own ongoing research for magnetic storage on safe legal ground. Dirks intended to split the whole complex of patents into several areas of application like office equipment (typewriter and accounting machines), larger programme controlled machines, telephone or telex equipment. This would enable him to negotiate several different licence agreements. Dirks wanted to keep all options for making money and for exchanging knowledge on the basis of licences open.6 This strategy also reflected the market situation because companies and markets for office equipment (typewriters, accounting machines etc.), telecommunications and early (programme controlled) computer producers were still separated at the time. In 1953/54 nearly all German producers for office equipment like Adler, Olympia, or Siemag negotiated with Dirks to exploit the patents. That Dirks finally opted for a general licence agreement (for office equipment) with Siemag in 1954 had different reasons. Siemag fulfilled all necessary criteria. It was big enough to defend the patents against competitors and at the same time it was technologically inexperienced enough to rely on the technological knowledge and capabilities of Dirks and his engineering office. On top of it, it guaranteed a ‘patent peace’ with Konrad Zuse and the Zuse KG, the second major inventor (and patent holder) in the field of electronic data processing and storage technologies in Germany because Siemag and Zuse were already cooperating. Dirks intended to allocate future markets between himself (accounting and calculating machines) and Zuse (programme controlled machines for scientific purposes).7 Siemag and Dirks concluded a licence agreement starting from 1st July 1954. Siemag got the primary right to economically exploit the patents in the field of office equipment (typewriters, calculating or accounting machines). Moreover, it was to participate with 50% in all licences and sublicenses to other companies, in case Siemag would abstain from exploiting the patents themselves. Dirks, on the other hand, got legal help regarding all complaints that were handed in to courts in continental Europe, he remained independent, he received basic funding (monthly salary and technical equipment) and became Siemag’s development and research centre, also for designing marketable products, while Siemag was responsible for the marketing itself.8 6

Report for the Siemag management on the ongoing negotiation with Dirks, 10.06.1954, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis A6 4276. 7 Report of Siemag on the licence agreement with Dirks, June 1954, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis A6 4276. 8 Report of Siemag on the licence agreement with Dirks, June 1954, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis A6 4276.

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The licence agreement laid down a very specific style of cooperation: Technologically, Dirks’ engineering office became the sole development and research centre of Siemag and didn’t allow the company independently to carry out technological research on magnetic storage or similar applications. Juridically, Siemag became responsible to defend the patents against objections. The granting of further licences was based on compromises between both partners. Economically, Siemag could exploit the patent but it had to provide the basic funding for Dirks’ engineering office and a consultancy agreement at a comparatively high level for himself.

4.4.2

1954–1957: Monopoly Agreement Dirks/Siemag

Cooperation between both partners soon was full of tension, especially on the side of the Siemag management, which got increasingly dissatisfied with the cooperation. They invested a lot of money and enabled Dirks to finance his engineering office, the research carried out there and the fees for his numerous patents. But Dirks and his engineering office failed to turn the invention into innovations and marketable products. They got the impression that Dirks put more energy into improving his ideas and applying for further patents than into for innovative products that would break into new markets and make profit. Siemag was in a difficult situation only two years after the contract was concluded. They had left the technological development of their products, especially accounting machines, to Dirks, who didn’t come up with convincing innovations, while their current products (the models Saldoquick and Multiquick) became technologically more and more outdated.9 In 1957 both partners, finally, agreed to renegotiate the licence agreement and put their cooperation on a new basis. Dirks renounced the right to be the sole technological research centre for Siemag and instead focussed on selling his patents (together with Siemag), searching for new partners and licence agreements. Remarkably, the only product that was launched out of Dirks’ research activities – the Dataquick – was a flop with only 12 machines sold, even though, it was technologically of high standard in 1960 (Stähler, 1986).

9

Annual Report on the activities of Siemag 1957/58, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis 01 01 21 22.

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Since 1958: Changing Environments – Plural Agreements

A renegotiation of the licence agreement between Dirks and Siemag had also become possible because the patent granting procedure was successfully concluded and the patent published by the German patent office in 1957. The granting of the patent came as a shock for all those companies – including the big computer producers – that built products based on magnetic data storage equipment, as it had become a standard in the second half of the 1950s. Dirk’s patents were now perceived as a major issue and they rose dramatically in value, even though a number of companies formally raised an objection at the German patent office claiming that the level of inventiveness was too low. This was, of course, a threat to the patents, nevertheless, the whole industry across the Western world now had to deal with Dirks/Siemag and find ways of cooperation. Against this background Dirks had been able to shift priorities from technological research for Siemag to selling his patents. However, due to the licence agreement he had to do this in cooperation with Siemag.10 Within three years a dense network of licence agreements (and cooperation) took shape in Europe with Dirks and Siemag as spiders in the net. Mass use of magnetic storage resulted in numerous cooperations and sub-licences with companies from the Western world. Some of them concerned the exchange of knowledge while others simply fixed licence fees. Dirks and Siemag made a lot of money, which Siemag invested to build its own research centre (also making use of technical knowledge they gained from the licences and sub-licences). The first licence agreement was concluded with Zuse KG in 1957, which built their famous Z 22 with magnetic storage on the basis of Dirks’ patents (Zuse, 2010). The most important one, however, was the agreement with British Tabulating Machines in July 1958 (in September succeeded by ICT/International Computing and Tabulating).11 The agreement with ICT was mostly brought about through ICT and Siemag, who had an interest in each other’s technologies and wanted to cooperate on the international markets as sales partners. This cooperation was also a consequence of the formation of the European Economic Community in 1958, which excluded British companies from the benefits of the internal EEC-market.12 10

Report on Siemag’s licence agreements, January 1963, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis 05 A6 1 35. 11 Transcript of a presentation for the Siemag management, 24.06.1960, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis 05 A6 1 35. 12 Report on the future of Siemag’s cooperation with ICT, 19.05.1961, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis 05 A6 1 35.

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The licence agreement between Dirks/Siemag and ICT was only to be the springboard for a deeper company cooperation, which, however, only lasted for three years. Both partners simply wanted to use the others’ technological knowledge (patents) but failed to cooperate in other fields. Nevertheless, the agreement with ICT further pushed the industry to act because ICT was one of the big players at that time. Remington Rand and Bull followed suit in 1960. Much more important was that the agreement with ICT also grabbed the attention of the global market leader IBM (Stähler, 1986). IBM realized that the Dirks patents might become an expensive problem and, therefore, contacted him directly in 1959 in order to negotiate a licence agreement (Cortada, 2019). This was an enormous (economic) opportunity for Dirks, who had reached the peak of his career. Dirks started negotiations with IBM without informing Siemag. The cooperative partnership, which since its beginning had been going through a permanent crisis, now completely collapsed. From Dirks’ perspective, Siemag was too small and insignificant compared with a company like IBM. For Siemag, in turn, the Dirks’ patents subsequently lost their value as they got more and more technologically outdated and generated ever higher costs to be enforce in court.13 IBM and Dirks reached an agreement that IBM should only pay a low direct sum for the licence but instead give Dirks a consultancy agreement and pay him a monthly salary in the US (Billing, 1977). Siemag (and also ICT) were informed just a day before Dirks was about to sign the agreement, however, they insisted on a renegotiation of the contract. In the case of Siemag the licence fee was determined at one million German mark annually,14 which was a lot of money for Siemag but only a small sum for IBM reducing a great uncertainty. The money enabled Siemag to balance the costs for building an independent research centre and service network, which transformed the company into an important producer for midrange computers in the 1960s (Henrich-Franke, 2021).

4.4.4

1960–1966: The End of the Patent

In the 1960s Dirks’ patents for magnetic storage of data soon lost their value. In Germany, the Federal patent court ruled that the complaint had been upheld and the patent was withdrawn. The court confirmed the plaintiffs’ argument of a too 13

Correspondance between Dirks and Siemag, July 1959, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis 05 A6 1 33. 14 Protocols of the supervisory board meetings, 1960–1962, Archives of the SMS Group Dahlbruch, S-Eis 01 01 21 23.

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low level of innovativeness. Dirks made an appeal at the Federal Constitutional Court, which confirmed the patents court’s rule in 1966 (Zuse, 2010). Remarkably, Zuse’s patents suffered the same fate in 1967. The licence agreements on magnetic storage of data became useless and everybody was free to use the technology. Just three years later IBM terminated the contract with Dirks who had moved to Los Angeles with his whole family in 1961. Instead Dirks founded the ‘Dirks Electronic Corporation’ and issued several ideas for new data processing systems, which never entered serial production.

4.5

Conclusion

The patents D 91,234 IX/43a for storage equipment and D 91,194 IX/43c for the storage of data for a decade had been the core of a changing network of cooperation (laid down in a number of licence agreements) to exploit Dirks’ ideas on the magnetic storage of data since the signing of the first agreement with Siemag in 1954. Their power to arrange and rearrange such a network of cooperation depended on a mix of the patents’ legal status (applied, granted, rejected) and the chances of their economic exploitation. The granting of the patent at a time when the technology became valuable made it a solid starting point for building a dense network of licence agreements, however, the withdrawal of the patents at a time when technological progress advanced dramatically devaluated the patents enormously in the 1960s and let the network of licence agreements become obsolete. Cooperation was necessary to exploit the patent, defend it against complaints and develop marketable innovative products out of the patent. However, the case of the patent for magnetic storage of data has shown that the form and styles of cooperation differed remarkably between an applied patent (in the patent granting process), a granted but disputed patent, and an accepted granted patent. These different conditions remarkably impacted the patent holder’s power in negotiations about licences. Licence agreements were often perceived by the actors as simple (temporary) strategic alliances were both partners needed the other’s skills as long as juridical uncertainty remained. The particular situation of companies and researchers in Europe (and Germany) made cooperation an urgent matter. The companies involved in electronic data processing (or the production of office equipment) were comparatively small in the early 1950s. Neither the patent holder nor the individual companies were able to gain ground in the market. The technological knowledge, administrative equipment, legal departments and financial power necessary to turn the patent into

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innovative products were split over too many stakeholders. They had to join into licence agreements and cooperate, however, there was hardly a common understanding or goal but only very different motivations. Cooperation was terminated as soon as other options (or cooperations) promised higher gains. In general, cooperation based upon a licence agreement to exploit a patent is fundamentally shaped by the economic power of the actors that are involved. On the one hand, it is costly to maintain, monitor and defend a patent. On the other hand, the market value of a patent is subject to uncertainty and impacts the cost for non-cooperation. However, whether or not cooperation regarding the exploitation of patents in the early history of electronic data processing generally followed the rules of rational choice by actors, selfishly serving individual needs, requires further research. Remarkably, the patents and licence agreements protecting the inventor (Dirks) and his partner (Siemag), as economically and technologically valuable as they were, only partially impacted the technological development of magnetic storage of data. This technology had also been discovered and invented elsewhere, without knowledge of Dirks, his patents, or his ideas, especially in the US. Nevertheless, the patent made Dirks a rich man and enabled Siemag a successful company development, even though it was finally rejected. Siemag was put into a position to negotiate contracts enabling the company to put together a combination of licences (and technological knowledge) that was unique in Europe and that subsequently fostered further technological progress in the 1960s and 1970s.

References Berg, C. (2016). Heinz Nixdorf. Eine Biografie. Schöningh. Billing, H. (1977). Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der digitalen Speicher. Elektronische Rechenanlagen, 5, 213–217. Billing, H. (1997). Ein Leben zwischen Forschung und Praxis. Selbstverlag F. Genscher. Cortada, J. (2019). IBM: The rise and fall and reinvention of a global icon. MIT Press. Fickers, A., & Griset, P. (2019). Communicating Europe. Technology, information, events. Palgrave MacMillan. Griset, P. (2013). Das europäische Patent. Ein europäischer Erfolg im Dienste der Innovation. Europäisches Patentamt. Hanewinkel, L. (2014). Computerrevolution. Mein Weg mit Konrad Zuse und Heinz Nixdorf . Kleine. Henrich-Franke, C. (2021). Innovationsmotor Medientechnik – Von der Schreibmaschine zur ,Mittleren Datentechnik‘ bei der Siemag Feinmechanische Werke (1950–1969). Zeitschrift Für Unternehmensgeschichte, 1, 93–117. Mahoney, M. (2011). Histories of computing. University Press.

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Müller, A. (2014). Kienzle. Ein deutsches Industrieunternehmen im 20. Jahrhundert. Steiner. Petzold, H. (1992). Moderne Rechenkünstler. Die Industrialisierung der Rechentechnik in Deutschland. Beck. Rimmer, B. (1983). Die Flucht des Dr. Dirks. Bundes-Verlag. Stähler, H. (1986). Frühe Innovationen im Siegerland: Programmgesteuerte Systeme der Elektromechanik und der Elektronik. Siegen. Zellmer, R. (1990). Die Entstehung der deutschen Computerindustrie. University Press. Zuse, K. (2010). Der Computer – Mein Lebenswerk. Springer.

Part II Doing Dasein

5

Intimate Pictures Mediating Absence and Presence in Senegalese Transnational Relationships Simone Pfeifer Abstract

This contribution explores how wedding images are circulated and appropriated by Senegalese migrants and their families and friends in Senegal. Tracing how absences are ‘cooperatively’ acknowledged and presences constructed by means of montage and collage in wedding albums and videos demonstrates the fundamental significance of images—and sometimes their absence—during processes of migration and in everyday life in translocal settings. The images are essential for establishing and maintaining transnational social relationships and bring together local and global image practices to show the intimate relationships of (transnational) couples, family members and friends taking part in the celebrations. In relating the practices of presence and absence during ritual practices and transnational social relationships to discussions on (mediated) co-presence, the contribution shows how local notions of absence and presence are strongly linked to wider configurations of love, care and responsibility, and do not always relate to the ideal of being physically present. Focusing on transnational sibling relationships and transnational marriage it demonstrates, based on ethnographic research carried out in Berlin and Dakar, how images of absent people travel with people, become digital and mobile, and create gendered spaces of mobility and immobility.

S. Pfeifer (B) GRK „anschließen-ausschließen—Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks“, Global South Studies Centre (GSSC), University of Cologne, Köln, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_5

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Introduction

Portrait photography and videos of life cycle ceremonies are central for transnational social relationships in Senegal, particularly for women who feature prominently in these images. Large numbers of images travel from Dakar to Berlin and other migrant destinations, both as material objects and digitally on Facebook. Besides phone calls, these images are essential for establishing and maintaining transnational social relationships. They bring together local and global image practices to show the intimate relationships of (transnational) couples, family members and friends taking part in the celebrations. During my ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar,1 I took part in many lavish weddings and was included in some wedding albums and videos. In one of the two-hour long wedding videos, a typical three-minute introduction establishes the bride and groom as the centre of attention: the moving images of the bride are edited into various template scenes of city walls, modern living rooms or on city buildings and the tableaux are combined with visual effects such as asterisks, dazzle or wipes with various patterns. Professional videographer Abdoul Karim worked with an editing studio and used film montage techniques to connect the local wedding ceremony to a global image repertoire, emphasizing the role of the bride and the newlywed couple. At first glance, it appears that the groom was prominently pictured next to the bride in the first minutes of the video. And yet, on closer examination it becomes clear that he was not physically present for most of the wedding reception. The groom was in fact attending other parts of the celebration at his parents’ house. In the video, he was represented by a ‘stand-in groom’—a close friend who was leading the bride onto the stage and posing with her (Fig. 5.1). The real groom’s presence in the video was increased through the repetition and the focus on the images taken during his brief visit and images of the ‘stand-in’.

1

This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Berlin (8 months) and Dakar (6 months) for a PhD project on social media practices and transnational social relationships between Germany and Senegal. I would like to thank the German Research Foundation for their generous support of the Research Training Group “Locating Media” at the University of Siegen and the project “Media Related Configurations of Transnational Social Spaces between Africa and Europe” at the University of Cologne. My warmest thanks go to the participants in my research and the members of “Locating Media”, the SFB “Media of Cooperation” and the editors of this volume who gave feedback on various drafts of this contribution.

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Fig. 5.1 Still image and photograph of “stand-in groom” and groom with bride, photos by Abdoul Karim Sané

This contribution is based on my ethnographic fieldwork on the cooperative making of presence and absence and their different forms both during ritual practices and in wedding videos.2 I will use my observations as a starting point to reflect on culturally specific notions of mediating absence and presence in transnational social relationships. These notions of absence and presence can be conceived as cooperatively produced conditions of future cooperation in local as well as transnational marital and family contexts. In other words, these notions act as important instances of “mutually making the conditions of mutual making” (see introduction of this volume). This applies in particular to the different practices of cooperatively doing ‘presence’ and dealing with the absence of socially close individuals. Tracing the different practices of ‘cooperatively’ acknowledging absences and the mutual making of presences by means of representation, montage and collage demonstrates the

2

Some of the ethnographic descriptions and related thoughts have already been published in connection with discussions on the videography of transnational wedding videos (Pfeifer, 2021) and personal archives of transnational migration (Pfeifer & Neumann, 2021).

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fundamental significance of images—and sometimes their absence—during processes of migration and in everyday life in transnational settings (cf. McKay, 2008; Kea, 2017). Images of absent individuals travel with people, become digital and mobile, and create gendered spaces of mobility and immobility. In relating the practices of presence and absence during ritual practices and transnational social relationships to discussions on (mediated) co-presence (cf. Baldassar et al., 2016), I will show how local notions of absence and presence are strongly linked to wider configurations of love, care and responsibility, and do not always involve the ideal of being physically present. Focusing on transnational sibling relationships (Coe, 2013; Pauli, 2013) and transnational marriage (Charsley, 2012), I consider absence and presence in visual media and transnational social relationships not as discrete, but as highly entangled fields. The focus on mediation and experiences in and with images in transnational social relationships can help to understand the “complex assemblage of movement, social imaginaries and experience” (Salazar, 2017, p. 6). Senegalese mobility to Germany has to be seen within the wider context of migration from Senegal to Europe (Pfeifer, 2020, p. 132). Since the 1960s, France has been the primary destination country within Europe due to its colonial and post-colonial ties (cf. Manchuelle, 1997; Timera, 1996; Adams, 1977; Diop, 2008). With stricter immigration policies in France (cf. Trauner, 2005; Raissiguier, 2003) and imperialistic systems of regulating migration in Europe (cf. Carter, 1997, p. 35), migration to Europe diversified into Spain and Italy in particular (cf. Riccio, 2008; Carter, 1997; Rosander, 2004; Heil, 2014) as well as other countries with smaller Senegalese communities and no colonial links such as Germany (cf. Marfaing, 2003; Salzbrunn, 2002). Despite the relatively small number of Senegalese residing in Germany,3 there is a vibrant transnational social life and a considerable number of associations and clubs in Berlin (cf. Faye, 2007, p. 4; Marfaing, 2003, p. 96). Their aims are both the integration of migrants (cf. Glick Schiller & Çaglar, 2009) and the promotion of transnational social connections and networking with absent kin and friends.

3

According to the Federal Office of Statistics, there are roughly 4000 registered Senegalese nationals residing in Germany (Statistisches Bundesamt, 2015, p. 148), with about 400 of them living in Berlin (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2017). These numbers do not include naturalised, non-registered or so called ‘irregular’ migrants.

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Absence, Presence and Transnational Social Relationships

Recent scholarship on ‘the anthropology of absence’ has suggested that “absence has a materiality and an agency which exists in spaces where sociality is performed and which augment daily practices and experiences” (cf. Farrelly et al., 2014, p. 3; see also Bille et al., 2010). The materiality of ‘absent presence’ or ‘present absence’ recognises the effect of absent individuals and things on everyday social relationships that are only made meaningful if the absence is “performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes” (cf. Meyer, 2012, p. 107). According to this view, absence and presence are not seen as opposites, but as closely related – absence matters and is also produced through different forms of media practices (cf. Dang-Anh et al., 2017; Schüttpelz, 2016, p. 4). In the following examples, I will discuss how different media practices ‘make present’ and how they relate to culturally specific forms of presence and absence in transnational social relationships. Transnational social relationships between Senegal and Germany as well as other European countries are characterised by sometimes prolonged physical separations of socially close individuals over long geographical distances. Some scholars argue that ‘ICT based, virtual or mediated co-presence’ is “constructed through various communication technologies and acts as a surrogate for physical proximity, touch and contact” (cf. Baldassar, 2008) and creates “a sense of being there” (Baldassar et al., 2016). Yet, physical distance or constant contact does not always equate to social closeness in these relationships, as Dinah Hannaford points out: […] we should be wary of equating intense and rapid communication between migrants and those left behind with a kind of sharing of experience, mutual understanding or intimacy. Contact and connection are not the same thing (Hannaford, 2014, p. 4).

Hannaford disputes studies on transnational migration which state that audiovisual and digital technologies allow for the compression of time and space and for overcoming distance (cf. e.g. Kolar-Panov, 1996; Zillio˘glu & Özdemir, 2011; Vertovec, 2004). Following Hannaford, I will focus on the cooperative making of absence and presence and show that the production, circulation and appropriation of these media ‘objects’ do not magically transport the ‘content’ and associated relationships from one locality in time to another. They mediate the individuals, events and ideas involved and structure experiences, memories and imaginaries

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of absence and presence in transnational social relationships in specific and also in culturally specific ways (see also Sobchack, 1999). Through this lens, I will also question the different modalities and forms of mediated co-presence such as ‘ambient’, ‘ordinary’, ‘imaginary’ or active and passive (cf. Baldassar et al., 2016, p. 137; Madianou, 2016; It¯o & Okabe, 2005). As the introductory description of the wedding video has indicated, it is necessary to think beyond the binary opposition of absence and presence, particularly in the West African context of Senegal. Face-to-face interaction is highly valued in Senegalese social relationships. Yet, in rituals and also in transnational contexts, absence and presence have specific meanings that sometimes interfere with this ideal. They act as a ‘substitute’ for face-to-face interaction, but also reproduce expectations and obligations, in particular in transnational social relationships such as between couples or siblings living in different countries. Using two ethnographic examples of transnational relationships, one between siblings and the other between a couple, I will attempt to carve out local notions of ‘doing’ presence and dealing with absence cooperatively by looking at wedding images in videos and photograph albums. These images and the social relationships attached to them continuously provide the space for jointly creating the conditions of cooperation between those present and those absent. This also combines the different image practices of photography and “home videos” (Chalfen, 1987) or “vernacular media” (Savage, 2012, p. 17) in transnational settings and transcends the notion of these media being purely formats of self-presentation or social prestige (cf. Schulz, 2012, p. 92; Behrend, 2014, p. 191).

5.3

‘Participating’ while Absent in Transnational Sibling Relationships

Tony and his sister Marie connected with each other via Facebook only in recent years. They often stress how close they are as siblings and friends – even though Marie still lives in Dakar and Tony has been living in Europe for the last 10 years. After meeting several times in a Senegalese restaurant in Berlin, 40-year old Tony sat down with me to tell me about himself and his family in Senegal. At the time of our conversation, Tony had lived in Berlin for only a few months. The German capital was one of the many stops on his migrant journey through North Africa and Europe. His cousin had invited him to Berlin and smoothed his arrival in the new city and the urban quarter of Schöneberg. When talking about his sister who lives in Dakar, Tony became very lively and shared his thoughts about his sister’s wedding.

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Like my sister, when she was getting married at the church, I wasn’t there. The only thing I could have done is to forward some money to participate in the celebration. I wish I could have been there too, because she is my only sister. And I couldn’t be there. At least they made a video, a DVD. And when my father was coming to visit me in Norway, he brought the DVD. And I was like, afterwards I sat down with my father and to me it was so nice to see that, I was happy to see her in that white dress. And I was making a joke out of it, me and my father. I wish I could have been there and gonna laugh over it, make jokes with her, pull her leg just to give her like ‘let her go’. But at the same time, I was happy and proud. Cause if you see all over Africa and mostly at this time, to reach that age to be a woman, to reach the age of a women without [marrying and] having children, before getting married, is getting bigger and bigger. In Europe it is something normal. But in Africa it’s like a disappointment of the parents and a dishonour of the family. And people they just take it like something really big. You shouldn’t play with it. You have to make sure before you get a child you should be with your husband, in all religions, Christians or Muslims. (Tony, 9 October 2011).

Tony’s detailed commentary on the wedding video highlights different levels of mediated memories as well as of transnational and gendered social relationships. First, for Tony, the video is evidence that the wedding really took place and that his financial contribution was actually spent on the event. It is often only through migrant workers’ cash flows that Senegalese families can afford the typically lavish celebrations.4 Secondly, as he was absent from the wedding celebration in Dakar, the video is a ‘first hand’ experience for Tony and triggers shared memories and longing, not only for his father and sister, but also for other people in the video, including the deceased ones. In his commentary, the fictionalised illusion of the mediated experience enabled by the video allows Tony to relive and reconnect to feelings of longing and belonging. Thirdly, this excerpt reveals that physical presence is appreciated more than just giving money. Yet, only on further inquiry it emerges that a physical presence without the gift would not be possible for either side. As I will explain later, neither the wedding nor the social closeness would be possible without the financial ‘participation’. Tony’s participation in the ceremony is mediated through the money he sent. His financial support expresses emotional closeness to his sister, which is reactualised and experienced when the images of the celebration travel to Tony on his father’s visit in Norway. In a way, the video is the exchange value for his monetary support. In Senegalese social relationships, emotional closeness and

4

For details on the meaning of lavish wedding ceremonies in Senegal see Buggenhagen (2011, 2012). For a perspective on moderate and invisible wedding ceremonies in Dakar see Hann (2013).

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financial support cannot be separated. Both have to been seen in the greater context of love, care and responsibility as other authors have pointed out (see Hann, 2013). In transnational sibling relationships, such entanglements are further complicated through the images that travel through time and across borders as well as the emotionality and the experiences that they release and provoke between absent and present individuals. By watching the wedding video with his father in Norway and later telling me about it in Berlin, the social relevance of the video and the event was extended to the present in the different locations that unfold their specific meanings. The social meaning of memory or reminiscence connected both the different locations and times associated with the wedding and the viewing of the video. The primary reasons why Tony was not able to attend his sister’s wedding were his continuous mobility and his financial situation while working in Norway. Yet, in our conversation, he mentioned another reason why he did not make the travel arrangements. Before the wedding, his sister Marie had two children out of wedlock from her now husband. This violated normative moral claims, disappointing and shaming the whole family and her parents in particular. Premarital romantic and sexual relationships are morally and socially heavily sanctioned in Senegal. Nevertheless, these relationships are widely practiced, especially in Dakar (see Eerdewijk, 2007). Only through marrying the father of her children and having a lavish wedding celebration, documented on video, Marie was able to rehabilitate her own and her family’s status and rebuild the relationship with her brother. By sending the video, posting and reposting digitised images of her wedding on Facebook and stressing the sibling relationship to her brother, Marie also invokes her social success and status as a married ‘full’ woman. The cooperative efforts to restore the family’s damaged social status are therefore the foundation for the wedding. The money transferred by Tony, the aesthetics and the mobility of the still and moving images and the (platform) technologies of Facebook are the cooperative conditions that lie at the core of successful transnational social relationships.

5.4

Absent Presence through Photographic Practices in Transnational Marital Relationships

Khady carefully crafted her wedding album shortly after the splendid two-day celebration in 2004. She meticulously clipped and assembled various images on the first page of her album, highlighting her dress and outfit as well as her relationship to her husband (Fig. 5.2). What I only discovered after several conversations

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Fig. 5.2 First page of Khady’s wedding album, photo by Simone Pfeifer

with Khady and what is not immediately visible in this montage, is that her husband was not present at the wedding. She had, in fact, inserted his image into the album to fill in the void of his absence. In one of our conversations, I asked Khady if she had known her husband Amdy before the wedding. She answered: No, no, I knew his little brother. He [Amdy] was in Italy the whole time. We didn’t know each other before. It was his brother who saluted [asking for the hand of the bride] the family. He [his brother] said that Amdy had seen my picture, that he had shown my picture to Amdy. And then he [Amdy] asked me [laughing]. Afterwards he [Amdy] called me. After that he [Amdy] told his father that he wanted to marry me. His father asked my father and my father asked me. I said yes and then we celebrated the wedding. It’s like that here, exactly like that. (Khady, 10 February 2012).

It is quite common in Dakar that the families of the bride and the groom play a prominent role in the wedding negotiations. For some of the most important parts like the religious ceremony, the couple itself is usually not present but represented by male family members. Yet, in situations such as Khady’s, the absence is reinforced by the geographical distance and the transnational marriage initiation and living arrangement. Khady’s husband only got to know her through photographs and phone calls. Likewise, Khady only knew her husband through

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the stories told by his younger brother, some images and later phone calls. Even for the religious wedding ceremony and the lavish celebration afterwards, Amdy was not physically present. This was one of the reasons Khady inserted the few images she had of her husband into the wedding album (Fig. 5.2), as she recalled in one of our conversations. For Khady, the absence of her husband was obviously visible in the album. An attentive observer would also immediately be able to detect how the montage disguises the absent presence of the migrant groom, as not one photograph shows the couple together. In the images assembled by Khady, the bride and groom always feature in separate portraits. The groom is not wearing a ceremonial outfit, but everyday clothing in photographs taken at his residence in Italy or for ID purposes. In her montage, Khady had concealed these differences in time and location by carefully ordering the images on the page and selecting similar image sizes and portraits, manually cutting and clipping them to look as if he was present and interacting at the ceremony. The activities of selecting, ordering and clipping have the purpose to ‘make present’. The mediated presence of the groom ties the couple closely together and emphasises their relationship as spouses. Through the visual presence in the album – the memory object of the event – the absent person also becomes part of the processes of commemoration and eventually of the memory itself. Khady explained to me “that through the images it was as if her husband was there (teew)”. In the Senegalese language Wolof, the verb teew is comprehensively used for being physically present, but also to express that someone is present with his thoughts or through images and phone calls (cf. Diouf, 2003). This also applies to religious contexts and image practices. An example of this is baraka, a form of divine force or aura, that is mediated through the images of spiritual guides: […] images of the Saint are produced rather than reproduced, and they present rather than represent […] every portrait is the Saint. The physical relationship that Mourides share with images of Amadou Bamba and the people closest to him establishes an intimate, bodily association between Mourides and the holy ones whose baraka they seek (Roberts & Nooter Roberts, 2003, p. 27 emphasis in original).

In this sense, through the montage and the images, her husband ‘was there’. Creating this form of presence eases the painful separation and longing of couples (to change their status, for instance by establishing their own household) during the period of migration. The album creates a vision of ‘togetherness’ and expresses a wish for the future.

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The use of photography and manual editing is a continuation of what Liam Buckley (2000, p. 72) has called “scissors for seeing” in the Gambian context. The manipulation and montage of the images form an aesthetic of attributing and accessorising that conjures up an individual or in this case the couple. The couple materialises through the social repair work of the closeness in the images, the analogy and the “double impact” (cf. Buckley, 2000; Pinney, 2013). A shared memory of togetherness and presence is created when people look at the album later: it shows how Khady wanted to see herself together with her husband as a romanticised ‘global’ couple. When her husband finally returned to Dakar in 2006, the view on the album changed with the new living arrangement: it now only revealed a glimpse of the suffering experienced while being separated and leading a transnational marriage.

5.5

Conclusion – Mediating Absence and Presence

The examples I discussed in this contribution illustrate different practices of cooperatively doing ‘presence’ and dealing with the absence of socially close individuals in transnational settings. In all cases, wedding images are highly crafted to bridge geographical distance and to allow for a re-actualisation at different points in time. I follow Baldassar et al. (2016, p. 135) whose aim was to demystify “physical presence as an inescapable condition for social relationships to exist”. However, I do not only see the images as a substitute for face-toface interactions. The ethnographic descriptions suggest that the local notions of absence and presence detailed in the example of the wedding video are also transferred to transnational settings and thereby reproduce the ties, obligations and expectations associated with close social relationships between couples and siblings. While the status of absent siblings and spouses is treated very differently in both local and transnational settings, the forms of cooperatively mediating presence are similar in both cases. First and foremost, the mediated presence stems from the ‘imaginary copresence’ (cf. Robertson et al., 2016) of assembling individuals in the frame of a video or album. Secondly, the viewers’ ‘handling’ and experience of the images releases an emotional and affective power that makes the images an essential part of constituting transnational social relationships. Additionally, the ideal of faceto-face interaction can be seen in a more nuanced way. As the examples clearly show, while the norm of being physically present is appreciated more, it may not be the preferred way of being together in the ritual and also in the transnational

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context. Financial contributions are one of the preconditions for being physically, but also socially close. In all the cases I explored for this contribution, the women stay in one place, while the men are geographically mobile. The gendered perspective of immobility (cf. also Prothmann, 2017) does not mean that these women were not moving – they did so in meaningful ways through the wedding and the image production. The wedding images allow the young women to present themselves as socially and financially successful and to carve out a limited ‘safe space’ for themselves that protect them from the dominance of the older generation and the strict surveillance sometimes put in place by their spouses and relatives using mobile phones (cf. Hannaford, 2014). As material objects, the images become part of the long-term strategies of gift exchange used to overcome financial insecurities (cf. Buggenhagen, 2011, p. 216, 2012) and to secure the support of transnational family members within their networks. The videos and photograph albums of the weddings in Dakar become a “ritual of second order” (cf. Wendl, 2015, p. 28) or a “second real-time event” (cf. Schulz, 2012, p. 92). The events are carefully crafted for specific groups of viewers. By watching the video in a transnational setting, the social relevance of the event is disseminated to different locations and points in time. The mobile images therefore not only serve to overcome the lack of physical movement, but also create shared imaginaries with their own temporality. Through the techniques of repetition, cutting and pasting as well as financial transactions, absent individuals and the wider social configurations are made present to be watched anytime and anywhere and thereby embedded in different contexts and events. Rather than just capture one location and one moment in time, the mobile images extend the reach of one event or situation over time and geographical distance. Through the mutual making and the wider socio-technical delegation (cf. Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017, p. 158; Schüttpelz & Gießmann, 2015), they enable intimate transnational social relationships by relating in meaningful ways to culturally specific notions of presence and absence.

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Mainstreaming Zoom: Covid-19, Social Distancing, and the Rise of Video-Mediated Remote Cooperation Axel Volmar, Charline Kindervater, Sebastian Randerath, and Aikaterini Mniestri Abstract

In spring 2020, the measures taken against the spread of the coronavirus caused severe restrictions of public life in many countries, triggering an inflationary use of multipoint videoconferencing applications. In this paper, we study the formation and mainstreaming of videoconferencing as a widely used media practice by analyzing conversations on Twitter and ask why videoconferencing, despite having been technologically available, had not already become a ubiquitous media practice before the pandemic. Taking cooperative media theory as a point of departure, we examine to what extent the boom of videoconferencing can be linked to fundamental shifts within the infrastructures of everyday practice. We use an exploratory mixed-methods approach focused on infrastructural “breakdowns” as an analytical lens on three levels: first, as part of a general socio-technical process of re-infrastructuring A. Volmar (B) · C. Kindervater CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] C. Kindervater e-mail: [email protected] S. Randerath Institut für Sprach-, Medien- und Musikwissenschaft / Abteilung für Medienwissenschaft, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Mniestri Medienwissenschaftliches Seminar, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_6

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disrupted ecologies of everyday practices by means of remote technologies; second, as part of a collective learning and teaching experience that involved the sharing of resources, guides, and other instructional material about establishing remote practices and the use of videoconferencing tools; and third, as part of a transformation of technical features and use cases of videoconferencing due to a reciprocal dynamic of adaptation between users and the providers of the videoconferencing application Zoom. Based on this tripartite approach, we understand the rise of videoconferencing less as a turn toward new forms of remote communication than as the mainstreaming of video-mediated practices of remote cooperation.

6.1

Introduction

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 led in many countries to previously unfathomable restrictions of public life, which severely disrupted daily routines and impaired habitual practices of social interaction. These fissures in the fabric of the everyday triggered a remarkable change in media usage, crystallizing in the inflationary use of multipoint videoconferencing applications, such as Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, and Jitsi. The boom in videoconferencing as a quotidian media practice has already provoked a burst of reactions in which the rise of Zoom in particular came to stand for a “new normal” (see Due & Licoppe, 2021) of networked, synchronous online sociality. Media and film scholars, among others, have discussed the aesthetics and affordances of videoconferencing tools (Distelmeyer, 2021; Hagener, 2020), the production of new self-relations (Zimmermann, 2020), the centrality of the face for modern forms of labor (da Silva Machado, 2020), physiological effects such as “Zoom fatigue” (Della Ratta, 2021 Gallagher, 2020; Lashbrook, 2020; Lovink, 2020; Wiederhold, 2020), and privacy issues (Aiken, 2020; Ovide, 2020; Paul, 2020; Pitt, 2020) including malicious practices like “Zoombombing” (Lorenz & Alba, 2020; Young, 2021). Researchers rooted in a tradition of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis of “video-mediated interaction” (Sellen, 1992; Finn et al., 1997) took the pandemic as a prompt for further research on the interactional organization and sense-making practices of videoconferencing (Due & Licoppe, 2021). Few studies have asked, however, why the pandemic—or more specifically, the political measures taken to prevent the spread of the virus—effected such a sudden boom in videoconferencing applications. Of course, it comes as no

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surprise that measures of social distancing resulted in practices of distant socializing as a response and workaround. Yet, tools for video-mediated interaction had been readily available already long before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic but had—apart from Skype and FaceTime video calls—rarely been used outside specialized areas of application, such as transnational organizations and environments like the tech industry, which were already used to working with geographically dispersed or remote workforces prior to the pandemic. While some authors have indeed inquired about what may have spurred the popularity of Zoom as a particular application in the early phase of the pandemic (Carman, 2020; Evans, 2020), the sudden boom in videoconferencing raises the more general question of why video-mediated remote interaction had not yet become a more widely used media practice long before the pandemic. Given the fact that the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe were already highly saturated with digital devices, this question seems particularly pertinent for understanding the complex entanglements of digitally networked media and everyday practices against the backdrop of digital change. German media theorist Erhard Schüttpelz has drawn attention to the close interdependency between media technologies and everyday practices and claimed from a praxeological perspective that “all media are cooperatively developed conditions of cooperation and have evolved as such” (Schüttpelz, 2017, p. 14). In this paper, we take this praxeological understanding of media as a starting point to examine to what extent the mainstreaming of videoconferencing during the Covid-19 crisis can be understood as a way to overcome disruptions that occurred within existing ecologies of everyday practices by developing new conditions of remote cooperation. To this end, we argue that videoconferencing as a media practice can also be regarded as an expression of fundamental shifts in the infrastructures of the everyday. According to Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, the term “infrastructure” refers to both technological and non-technological support systems, which are “built and maintained” and then sink, over time, into an “invisible background” of habituation (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 112). Infrastructure thus only “becomes visible upon breakdown” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113). In bringing daily routines to a halt, breakdowns prompt practices of repair—both literally and figuratively—but they can equally lead to attempts to re-infrastructure them, for instance, by means of workarounds or the development of entirely new solutions, both of which may cause lasting “changes in infrastructural relations” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113). Using the focus on breakdowns as an analytical lens, we directed our attention toward the onset of the pandemic in March and April 2020 and aggregated a corpus of social media data and other related online sources,

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such as online guides and blogs about remote work. Based on this material and time frame, we investigated what kinds of everyday practices had been compromised or otherwise affected by the measures of social distancing and how attempts to reorganize these practices by using digitally networked technologies contributed to the mainstreaming of videoconferencing as a media practice. This study has itself been fundamentally shaped by the circumstances of the global pandemic. As students, instructors, and parents, we too had to deal with the challenges posed by measures of social distancing, travel restrictions, and the shutdowns of childcare facilities, universities, and workplaces. As researchers, we saw our choice of methodologies reduced as, for instance, location-based ethnographic methods in the field became almost impossible to apply. Moreover, as we met in countless Zoom calls to discuss the state of play and to work collaboratively by using shared text documents, spreadsheets, and slides online, we too experienced both the potential and the difficulties of distributed forms of collaboration. One result of these circumstances is that our approach to studying the mainstreaming of videoconferencing applications is rather eclectic and exploratory. In order to approach the recent shift to video-based remote practices from different angles and on different levels, we combined three different methodological avenues. In the first section, we qualitatively analyze Twitter content on the level of single tweets regarding the overall shift to remote practices and examine how disruptions of everyday practices led to a collective process of socio-technical re-infrastructuring of new conditions of cooperation during the first wave of the pandemic. In the second section, we use a close reading of guides, how-tos, and other instructional material shared by Twitter users about the use of videoconferencing to show that the formation of videoconferencing as a ubiquitous media practice was itself cooperatively developed, as it unfolded as a cooperative yet uncoordinated endeavor in the form of a collective learning and teaching experience. Finally, in the third section, we analyze the conditions that shaped the sudden rise of the Zoom videoconferencing software. Additionally, we ask how Zoom has changed in response to the skyrocketing numbers of users and various new uses and demands. Through an empirical study of the different appearances of the software’s website between 2018 and 2021, we trace Zoom’s transformation from a special purpose solution for business communication into a widely used general purpose application. Based on this tripartite approach, we argue that the boom in videoconferencing represents less the rise of a new means of communication than the mainstreaming of video-mediated practices of remote cooperation, the basic features of which had to be collectively installed, negotiated, and learned. Moreover, we argue that

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one of the reasons that cooperative practices had not been subject to a general process of digital transformation was the fact that collaborative practices generally rely on specifically designed shared spaces, such as offices, schools, universities, clinics, and gyms, as their infrastructural base and media of cooperation.

6.2

Re-Infrastructuring Disrupted Conditions of Cooperation

The Covid-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented proliferation of remote interaction and, particularly, of videoconference applications. This situation, however, raises the question as to why the imposed contact restrictions during the pandemic became visible at all in the form of a noticeable change in the use of digital media. To put it differently, it seems surprising that remote practices, despite the growing ubiquity of enterprise resource planning platforms and collaborative software across organizations in recent years, had not already been more common prior to the pandemic. We therefore started our inquiry by examining what kinds of everyday practices were affected by Covid-19-related restrictions and what may have previously prevented them from being performed remotely. We turned to Twitter as our main data source, which was mainly due to its twofold openness: First, Twitter is a public medium with a diverse user base with, for instance, journalistic, commercial, and private actors on the platform. Although the Twitter-sphere is, of course, by no means representative of the general population, studying Twitter as a platform for a specific online public (Marres, 2015, p. 657) enabled us to observe social media content regarding the shift toward remote interaction from a wide range of perspectives and to identify a number of issues toward remote interaction in these tweets. Second, compared to other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter is relatively open to the accumulation of research data as posts are public and the platform allows access to its application programming interface (API) for data extraction (Borra & Rieder, 2014). To access data from the Twitter platform, we used the Digital Methods Initiative’s Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (TCAT), a server-based software tool that allows the collection, analysis, exportation, and visualization of preformatted Twitter data (Borra & Rieder, 2014). The data set we studied was collected via a query for the search term “remote” in the period from February 27 to April 23, 2020. Since this query resulted in a data set with close to 110,000 tweets, a further reduction had to be made to assess individual tweets. For this purpose, we created a sample with the most popular content of the dataset, which comprised all tweets that had been retweeted at least 30 times. This sample consisted

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of 230 individual tweets, which, in total, represented 36,000 tweets—or roughly one third—of the original data set. We also explored the long tail of the dataset via a number of random sets of 1000 posts each. While we were able to qualitatively identify certain issues toward remote interaction within the dataset, we do not claim completeness.

6.2.1

Interruption of Cooperative Practices

The content of the tweets in the sample mainly originated from a number of distinguishable social domains—mainly work, education, health, and recreation— and covered a wide range of topics and issues that revolved around remote technologies and practices. A large proportion of the tweets in our sample stemmed from the educational sector, especially universities, which announced temporary shutdowns and a switch to remote teaching in early March 2020. For instance, Indiana University Bloomington stated on March 10: [@IUBloomington, 10.03.2020:] “To ensure the safety of the IU community, IU has released the following update on the coronavirus (COVID-19). Following spring break, students on all IU campuses will be taught remotely (not in-person) for 2 weeks” (Indiana University Bloomington, 2020).

Tweets like this remind us of the fact that learning and teaching activities are usually performed in shared spaces and in spatial synchronicity of the individuals involved. Although online platforms, such as Moodle, have become frequent supplements to teaching activities, face-to-face instruction in the classroom remained the nexus of teaching experiences in both schools and universities. In the domain of work and most notably office work in consulting, journalism, and management, the practices that were disrupted and that thus motivated the use of videoconferencing also largely turned out to be location-based practices. Moreover, Covid-19 measures led to new forms of videoconferencing practices beyond educational and work-related contexts, which involved video-based recreational activities like ballet and yoga classes as well as remote forms of socializing in the shape of Zoom dinners, game nights, and birthday parties. These initial observations suggest that the practices that were most affected by the pandemic and that people sought to reestablish through technological means were primarily synchronous collective and/or collaborative practices in shared spaces. Since the onset of the pandemic, it has become a much-discussed fact that simply not all collaborative tasks or jobs can be performed remotely, since a lot

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of them depend not only on shared space but, to a varying degree, on simultaneity and physical (co-)presence (Miller, 2020; Distelmeyer, 2021). These include, in particular, areas that are bound to specific sites or spaces, such as construction, manufacturing, maintenance work, and transportation, and tasks that involve physical contact, such as hair dressing, nursing, and care work. Already before the announcement of Covid-19 related lockdowns, Twitter users addressed the class stratification of different forms of labor bound to specific locations or spaces and, thus, the class-related distribution of the risk of being exposed to Covid-19. One user writes, for example: [@mathewi, 05.03.2020:] “If you really want to scare yourself about COVID-19, think about how many people in the US can’t afford to call a doctor or get tested, can’t do their jobs remotely, can’t afford to take even a day off, and work in the food service and/or hospitality industries” (Ingram, 2020).

Statistics, for instance in Germany, have shown that lower-income neighborhoods indeed suffered from higher numbers of Covid-19 infections—and fatalities, for that matter—and thus proved the sad truth of such initial hunches (Behörde für Arbeit, Soziales, Familie und Integration, Statistikamt Nord, 2021). In this sense, the question of what jobs can or cannot be done remotely seems indeed to be socially stratified. And yet, we should not forget that not all remote jobs are “white-collar jobs” but that there is also—and always has been—a certain financial and social precariousness to digital remote jobs (van Doorn & Bosma, 2020). Especially, jobs in the context of online services, such as click work or call center jobs, which had already been pushed toward remote execution before the pandemic, are often performed under socially and financially precarious conditions of major gig or crowd work platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (see, for instance, Irani, 2015). This merits the question regarding the differing motivations to deliberately organize or not organize certain tasks or jobs remotely.

6.2.2

Between Ad hoc Infrastructuring and Infrastructural Inertia

Even before the first lockdowns in North America and Europe in early March 2020, many Twitter users, including journalistic and business actors, speculated about whether the pandemic would have long-lasting effects on the dissemination of remote applications. The author of a widely shared Forbes article, for instance, predicted that the pandemic would lead to a “watershed moment” for

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the proliferation of remote technologies (Arruda, 2020). In such techno-solutionist speculations, the pandemic was often portrayed as a sort of catalyst that would lead to a short-term proliferation of remote technologies, which would then, in the long run, make apparent the general advantages of remote applications over existing forms of office work on location. The techno-solutionist use of metaphors from the domains of physics or chemistry already points to the fact that in this understanding, the potential and thus assumed dissemination of remote technologies seems to have been obstructed in certain ways prior to the pandemic. And indeed, despite having been marketed for decades as a medium of the future, video calling never really caught on before the advent of Skype (see Noll, 1992; Schnaars & Wymbs, 2004; Lipartito, 2003). This historical reluctance to use videoconferencing in everyday settings reverberates in a number of tweets about the future prospects of remote technologies and reveals certain forms of resistance against the wide adoption and normalization of such technologies. Some tweets, for example, suggest that the reservations against the use of remote tools in the workplace might be related to particular hierarchies and social norms within organizations: [@WellPaidGeek, 09.03.2020:] “Remote working due to the corona virus could end up showing businesses that devs sat alone at home with a computer and an internet connection could produce better than being sat in an office with some middle manager constantly interrupting them” (Well Paid Geek, 2020).

Techno-solutionist tweets like this emphasize the role of space-bound mutual activities for the establishment of accountability (e.g., with regard to work performance). This is also underlined by a German newspaper article, which reported complaints of employees about intrusive requests of their superiors, such as demands to keep a Skype video link open during their entire workday in order to always be ready for possible inspection (Moorstedt, 2020). In the context of office work, the supposed advantages of mediatized remote work contrasted with established location-based practices of social control. Another form of a pre-pandemic disinterest in remote technologies touches upon broader questions of participation. The most retweeted post in our data set, for instance, which was shared 5156 times, criticized the fact that students with disabilities had already been demanding opportunities for remote participation way before the pandemic but were never heard: [@unicornthorn, 06.03.2020:] “[CW COVID-19] So what you’re telling me is that remote learning for disabled students was possible all along then—it was just deemed too inconvenient until the ableds needed it?” (Nico, 2020).

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Another user writes: [@rfarrowster, 11.03.2020:] “every time I see another institution move to remote work/instruction because of COVID19 I am reminded of every single tweet from disabled people pointing out that it wasn’t until abled people were threatened that institutions seemed to be willing to make these changes” (Farrow, 2020).

These comments, which show that people with disabilities have long seen their needs ignored, also point to a more general form of infrastructural inertia, which is characterized by the fact that existing ecologies of practices, be they based on conventions or inscribed in technologies, usually get established with a normalized majority of standard users in mind. Pondering upon the creation of digital research infrastructures, Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder (1996, p. 113) already pointed to the significance of path dependency in infrastructural developments: “Infrastructure does not grow de novo; it wrestles with the ‘inertia of the installed base’ and inherits strengths and limitations from that base.” The effects of infrastructural inertia may further point to the presence of external stakeholders as, for instance, insurance companies who determine the form of medical consultations. In our Twitter data set, a user complained that while video consultations with his psychotherapist were technologically feasible, they weren’t immediately accepted by insurers as a reimbursable service: [@matthewtgreens, 20.03.2020:] “My psych just had to cancel our in-person appointment due to exposure to coronavirus. She has offered to do it via Skype however Medicare won’t cover remote sessions so it’ll be over $200” (Thompson, 2020).

Although the technical resources and the willingness of both doctor and patient were present, the potential of online consultations was hampered by regulations that were specifically tailored to on-site treatment. In a similar way, people with disabilities voiced their frustration about the fact that the limitations of the “installed base” of cooperative practices did not turn out to be of a technological nature but rather resulted in a certain unwillingness to create opportunities for participation for users with special needs that diverged from the usual practices of the able-bodied majority. After all, it was only after the pandemic had presented this majority with a comprehensive need for remote forms of interaction and cooperation that forms of remote participation became widely accepted. In order to function, new cooperative practices that make use of new technological infrastructures must therefore be successfully aligned with existing socio-technical networks that, in turn, often display a certain inertia that reflects a set of normalized conditions and assumptions.

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How to Infrastructure Remote Collaboration: The Role of Guides

Such instances of social or administrative resistance against the infrastructuring of remote practices (such as the perceived need for accountability among superiors and the reluctance of institutions to meet the infrastructural needs of marginalized populations) emphasize the fact that it requires conscious efforts and major investments to overcome the so-called “inertia of the installed base” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113) and change existing ecologies of cooperative conditions and practices. This raises the question of how the turn to video-mediated remote interaction actually took place and what side effects might have accompanied this process of going remote. Led by Star and Ruhleder’s dictum that breakdowns may render invisible infrastructures visible, we realized that breakdowns of quotidian collective activities, which had been caused, for instance, by the shutdown of institutions and workplaces, triggered collective practices of gathering and sharing information and know-how. Indeed, our data set featured a considerable number of tweets that were related to both the search for and supply of advice, resources, and instructional material regarding the choice and use of videoconferencing tools. For example, Lisette Sutherland, coauthor of the book Work Together Anywhere: A Handbook on Working Remotely—Successfully—for Individuals, Teams, and Managers (Sutherland & Janene-Nelson, 2018) tweeted on March 9: [@lightling, 09.03.2020:] “My inbox has been FLOODED with people asking for tips on how to work remotely during #coronavirus I created this resource for those finding themselves suddenly remote” (Sutherland, 2020).

Sharing knowledge was present across all domains of tweets in our data set and materialized, for instance, in the form of education-related hashtags and open-source documents. Under the hashtags #covidcampus and #remotelearning, information was compiled collectively and collaboratively. For instance, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, a program specialist in digital humanities, tweeted on March 8: [@hralperta, 08.03.2020:] “I was bookmarking tweets about teaching college during the coronavirus, but then I thought why not make a collective resource? I’m using #CovidCampus in the hopes that we can crowdsource some resources on remote learning, surveillance, race, and accessibility” (Alpert-Abrams, 2020).

Another user set up a collaborative spreadsheet called “Remote Teaching Resources for Business Continuity,” which comprised of about 450 entries “with

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links to remote teaching resources from dozens of universities to respond to #COVID19” (Stanford, 2020). Apart from collective resources, such as hashtags and shared documents, Twitter users also shared authored guides, how-tos, and other instructional material. Our sample data set of the 230 most-shared tweets contained six different guides on how to use videoconferencing and remote tools. These guides, which consisted of both existing and newly produced material, were distributed across the four domains of work, education, health, and recreation (three of the six were work related) and were retweeted 360 times. Not surprisingly, the remote work experiences shared by the authors of the guides frequently predated the pandemic. This became particularly evident in the work-related guides. At the onset of the first lockdowns, for instance, IT engineer Alice Goldfuss invited Twitter users to read her blog post “Work in the Time of Corona”: “With the spread of COVID-19, many tech companies are sending employees home to work remotely. As someone who has worked remotely for multiple companies, in different setups, I wanted to offer some assurances and tips for maintaining your mental health while adjusting to this new life” (Goldfuss, 2020).

As an engineer in the tech industry, Goldfuss had been able to draw on a wide range of work-from-home experiences to compile her guide. The two other workrelated guides we examined also originated from the tech industry. The first one, a ten-part Twitter thread (compiled by Twitter user @svblxyz), similar to Goldfuss’s blog entry, shares personal experiences regarding working from home. The second one, the “GitLab Guide to All-Remote” (Sijbrandij & Murph, 2016), which was marketed by its authors as a “remote manifesto,” turned out to have been around since 2016 and even included a separate “Remote work starter guide for employees” (Murph, 2020). The fact that all authors drew on pre-pandemic experiences suggests a certain industry dependency of both remote forms of work in general and shared instructional material in particular (at least in our data set, the Twitter users who created and shared workplace-related guides all came from the tech industry). This fact raises general questions regarding the extent to which established work practices and cultural values of specific fields may have shaped the general practice—and also what may be considered new standards—of videoconferencing. To answer these questions, we examined the guides with respect to implicit assumptions and requirements they might entail.

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Staging the Tile View or How to Prepare for Video Calls

It struck us that the guides we analyzed frequently requested users to perform various forms of infrastructural work in order to harmonize the behavior of users and the appearance of their surrounding conditions with assumed requirements for successful videoconferencing. For instance, all work-related guides advised remote workers to establish at home a work routine that mimics work practices and activities in shared office spaces. Goldfuss, for instance, urges readers to recreate the temporal patterns of the workday, which are in themselves affected by the spatial topology of the workplace environment: “Life in an on-site office has a rhythm to it. You take breaks, chat with coworkers, and eat lunch in an environment carefully tended by a team of office managers, coordinators, caterers, and cleaning staff. And now you have to recreate that rhythm by yourself” (Goldfuss, 2020).

Similar advice can be found in GitLab’s “Remote Work Starter Guide for Employees,” which suggests “to formulate a routine that closely aligns with your prior routine” (Murph, 2020), while the Twitter thread by @svblxyz advises to synchronize working from home to the working hours at the office (Svbl, 2020). Alongside other guides, the Twitter thread further proposes to set up a dedicated workspace to “minimize distraction and overlap of private and workspace as much as possible” (Svbl, 2020). When it incorporates the office or the classroom, domestic space becomes part of a shared environment during video calls, which inevitably creates overlaps between the private and the public. Erving Goffman reminds us that keeping the two apart represents a vital aspect of impression management: “Since the vital secrets of a show are visible backstage and since performers behave out of character while there, it is natural to expect that the passage from the front region to the back region will be kept closed to members of the audience or that the entire back region will be kept hidden from them. This is a widely practiced technique of impression management” (Goffman, 1956, p. 70).

During a videoconference, the “actors” almost inevitably reveal parts of their private “backstage” area to the public audience. Not surprisingly, many guides therefore suggest to recreate on-site working conditions, such as by wearing “work clothes” in the home office (Goldfuss, 2020), and to separate the workspace and domestic space in order to keep the private “back region” as

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concealed as possible. In other words, the guides suggest adopters of videoconferencing tools to perform a sort of “boundary work” (Gieryn, 1999, p. 27) in order to create and maintain a professional sphere within the private environment. Although participants in a video call are physically separated from each other, they come together in the same virtual space that manifests itself through the affordances of the interfaces of the individual videoconferencing applications, such as the tile view or the “talking head” configuration in which usually only the head and the upper part of the torso are visible (Due & Licoppe, 2021). This configuration not only underlines the normative prioritization on facial visibility as the default content of video-mediated interaction but also contributes to specific forms of spatial work to prepare for videoconferences. Given that people in workrelated videoconferences usually sit in front of desks and other tables, attempts to stage the tile view often focus only on those parts of the body and the background that are visible to the camera. To facilitate the users’ impression management during video calls, developers introduced new software features, such as digital video filters such as skin-smoothing—also termed “the Zoom effect” (Leskin, 2020)—and virtual backdrops to digital videoconferencing apps. Moreover, many users invested in additional video, audio, and lighting gear, underscoring not only the transformation of the domestic environment into a public space but also into an increasingly staged and hence cinematic space. Moreover, this process of staging what may be visible to the camera is mirrored in attempts to optimize the behavior of video call participants. In midMarch 2020, an increasing number of newspaper articles on videoconferencing etiquette were published. Reminiscent of the “netiquette” of the 1990s, articles with headlines such as “7 Things You Need for Better Video Calls” (Pinola, 2020) and “How to Look Your Best on a Webcam” (Lasky, 2020) particularly addressed the behavioral dimension of video-based interaction in the form of dos and don’ts. These examples show that the establishment of new infrastructures to a certain degree depends on or can be facilitated by processes of standardization. This is, of course, not a new insight. Star and Ruhleder already termed infrastructures an “embodiment of standards” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113), which allows them to interconnect and interoperate seamlessly and largely unnoticed. However, standardization understood as a tendency toward normalization may yield unintended side effects, such as the formation of a certain behavioral etiquette around new media practices.

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New Methods, Formats, and Procedures for Video-mediated Remote Cooperation

In addition to the preparation of the videographic situation, some of the guides suggest adjusting the workflows and procedures of cooperation in question to the new conditions of remote interaction. In early March 2020, for instance, various institutions and individuals on Twitter shared the guide “Coronavirus: how to keep teaching if schools are closed” (Moreno, 2020), which was published on the UKbased education platform tes.com (formerly The Times Educational Supplement). The guide suggests using “online tools that allow teachers to collaborate with students remotely” but also encourages readers to consider the concept of flipped learning (also called a flipped classroom), a teaching method developed in 2012 by Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams. Flipping the classroom reverses the traditional teaching situation—in which teachers convey knowledge to students in class and give homework to review the subject matter—by having students learn the didactic content independently at home (for instance, with the help of videos and worksheets) and reinforce it in class, with the aim of reducing synchronous face-to-face interaction to an optimized minimum. The medical guide “10-min consultation. Covid-19: a remote assessment in primary care,” distributed by Trisha Greenhalgh and her team (Greenhalgh et al., 2020), is another prime example for the re-infrastructuring of procedures and the development of new standards in our dataset. Published on March 25, 2020, in British Medical Journal, the paper covers relevant steps involved in a video-based medical consultation. It also anticipates potential technical and interpersonal problems and offers tangible solutions. The visual component of videoconferencing seems to be particularly helpful in reducing anxiety and for more severely ill patients: “Video may be appropriate for sicker patients, those with comorbidities, those whose social circumstances have a bearing on the illness, and those who are very anxious,” while people with mild symptoms can usually be managed by telephone (Greenhalgh et al., 2020, p. 1). Greenhalgh and her team suggest that videoconferencing may offer additional benefits for patients with hearing impairments (Greenhalgh et al., 2020, p. 1). As an addendum to the written explanations, the paper includes a step-by-step infographic that physicians and caregivers can print out and use as a reference during video consultations. The easy-to-follow diagram in itself functions like a manual that makes it easier for medical staff to integrate newly mediatized practices into their regular workflow. Although a shift to remote collaboration via video link is only feasible to a limited extent in the context of medical consultation, it may nevertheless serve

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as a first step to determine whether or not an on-site physical examination is advisable. The guide for video-mediated remote consultations reflects the highly standardized workflows present in healthcare, which are informed both by international standards of medical examination and the obligations of physicians with regard to documentation. Standardization in general and the use of formats in particular can, corresponding to the analyzed guides, be assets as they orient the parties involved in cooperative activities (see Jancovic et al., 2020). Formats like the “flipped classroom” and manuals, such as the one by Greenhalgh and her team, reduce the need for experimentation when creating one’s own procedures for online cooperation. The benefits of standardization can therefore also, if only partly, explain the power and persistence of infrastructural inertia, the difficulty of changing existing cooperative conditions: as more or less fixed sets of infrastructural relations, the “installed base” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113) of an infrastructure provides a common ground for heterogeneous actors involved in mutual cooperative activities. Similarly, our analysis of guides suggests that the mainstreaming of videoconferencing was not merely an issue of technological infrastructuring (such as, for instance, of installing videoconferencing software and acquiring additional equipment) but also one of changing and re-infrastructuring the “installed base” of common knowledge, procedures, and behaviors in the form of a self-organized process of collective appropriation through mutual learning and teaching.

6.4

Zoom Builds Cooperation and Cooperation Builds Zoom

As we move forward, we should keep in mind that the institution of remote forms of cooperation does not only affect the practices but also, crucially, the technologies they mobilize. The videoconferencing app Zoom is a striking example. Zoom found itself at the helm of the socio-technical turn to videoconferencing during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, swiftly rising above rival software from Skype, Google, and Microsoft alike. As the provider of a cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, complete with additional features (such as chat, webinars, and a marketplace) and even boundary resources (access to the platform API and software development kits (SDKs) for third-party developers) open to those who wanted to extend its uses, Zoom Video Communications has seen an explosive growth in market share (Wyld, 2020). This Zoom moment translated into $328 million in revenue during the company’s February–April quarter 2020,

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which far surpassed the $122 million they had made over the same quarter the year before (Kastrenakes, 2020), catapulting the application to the top of the US App Store list by March 2020 (Warren, 2020). These events have had many commentators marvel at the entrepreneurial genius of Zoom but, going forward, we would like to offer a different view: emphasizing the success of Zoom as a company distracts attention from the collective—and largely unintentional—processes of cooperation, which have played a key role in its evolution to its current form. In the words of journalist David Wyld (2020), Zoom has come to inhabit every aspect of everyday life, and its uses are “only bound by the imaginations of an ever-growing—and loyal—user base.” In order to break down this hypothesis, we ask two questions: Why seemed Zoom to be the platform of choice for many to overcome the “breakdown” of habitual practices of cooperation? Additionally, how did Zoom change, and how did these changes transform the concept of videoconferencing itself? We address these questions in two interconnected subsections. First, we explore journalistic coverage of the Zoom boom in order to understand what is currently known about the prominence of Zoom over its competitors. We complement this review with an analysis of the “spatial distribution” (Tucker & Goodings, 2014, p. 277) of cooperation as it has been facilitated by the Zoom platform. This topological understanding of the digitalization of cooperative communication further encourages us to shed the illusion that Zoom’s communication affordances are uniquely digital; rather, they should be understood as a re-spatialization of cooperation practices that have long been dominant in everyday life and analog communication. In a second subsection, we employ The Wayback Machine, a digital tool operated by the nonprofit Internet Archive (2014), to retrieve historical content from Zoom’s corporate website (https://zoom.us) in order to trace how Zoom’s understanding of both their services and their user base changed over time.

6.4.1

The Topological Reorientation of Cooperation Through Digitalization or How Zoom became a Household Name

Zoom’s success in 2020 prompted many to wonder what exactly separates the videoconferencing app from its competitors. Journalists like Wyld (2020) suspect that Zoom has achieved its growth through the combination of three key features. First, the software allows for free calls of up to 40 min with over 100 attendees across different devices. Through the “Gallery” feature, one can view up to 49

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participants at once, whereas Google Meet’s “Tile” view only shows 16 participants, and Facetime has a 32 person limit. Second, another selling point for Zoom is its accessibility through a wide range of devices (for instance, users can access meetings through phones, computers, and mobile devices). Third, users do not need an account to access conference calls and the interface of the calls is fairly intuitive, with buttons and settings that ring familiar. These features create a common effect: they afford cooperative practices in a digital environment. Affordances encompass the wide range of potentialities and constraints that objects open up and impose on structurally situated subjects. Davis and Chouinard (2016, p. 246) explicate that affordances play a central analytic role when it comes to “navigating the tenuous space between subject agency and technological efficacy.” That is to say, whereas technologies do not determine the interaction between user and technology, they set in motion mechanisms to demand, encourage, request, allow, discourage and even refuse facets of a subject’s relation to technology within socio-technical systems. Therefore, when Zoom offers the option of free long-duration calls, this affords family members to catch up during lockdown. When Zoom designs an extensive gallery of participants, then it enables schoolteachers to view everyone in their class. When Zoom offers compatibility and interoperability across a host of devices, one colleague might be stationed on their home office while another one joins the same meeting from their tablet on the train. Already, it is evident that these affordances and potential combinations of them have set Zoom apart and given them an edge over their competitors. The company’s promise to keep “you secure wherever you are” (Zoom, 2021), however, has raised some eyebrows, even attracting the attention of the FBI (2020). Crucially, the affordances driving Zoom’s popularity also appear to compromise user privacy (Carman, 2020). Affordances, as has been remarked by James Gibson, the originator of affordance theory, are what an environment “provides and furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). For example, Vice reporter Joseph Cox (2020) revealed that the Zoom “Company Directory” setting could compromise user security by leaking user emails and photos. Originally designed to facilitate contact among coworkers, the directory automatically added other people to a user’s contact list if they shared the same email address domain. As many Zoom users signed up to the service with personal email addresses, Zoom pooled them together with numerous others under the assumption that they all worked together, thus exposing their personal information (Cox, 2020). An affordance designed to encourage workplace cooperation by facilitating connections among colleagues thus inadvertently turned into a design flaw that

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compromised the security of users. Another example is Zoom’s call ID system. Every call has a randomly generated ID number ranging from nine to eleven digits, which participants can procure to access a meeting. Essentially, this affordance creates a low barrier for entry into a meeting, allowing participants easy access. At the same time, cybersecurity research company Check Point Research raised concerns with their automated tool with which they successfully identified valid Zoom meetings by randomly generating ciphers 4 per cent of the time, and they were even able to join some without scrutiny (Lyons, 2020). Check Point’s head of cyber research, Yaniv Balmas, compared the tool to a game of roulette, insinuating that, with no screening process in place, meetings with hundreds of attendees may be hosting bad actors and giving them access to the cameras and microphones of other attendees with no awareness of this even taking place (Lyons, 2020). Furthermore, randomly generated ID access has fueled the “Zoombombing” phenomenon (Warren, 2020). Zoombombing refers to unauthorized parties infiltrating calls and broadcasting offensive material including pornography. Said actors took advantage of Zoom’s default settings to grant access to calls without a password and to the screen-sharing feature without permission from the host. Even though these settings are no longer default, many users still do not use a password in their Zoom calls (Warren, 2020). This indicates that, whereas users are allowed to password protect their meetings, convenience pushes them to opt for a less secure option. In summary, we observe that the design of videoconferencing software can afford multitudinous possibilities for users. By considering Zoom’s technological design as a product of entrepreneurial success and their security breaches as an inherent flaw in the system, we miss out on the nuance of affordances. Instead, we suggest looking beyond the technical apparatus of Zoom to the space where affordances manifest and to the subjects who come to be situated in this socio-technical system as a result of pressing historical events. As the above examples demonstrate, Zoom allowed users to “move” through the platform with exceptional ease, rendering digitized communication convenient. Psychosocial movement is pivotal in the work of psychologists Tucker and Goodings (2014). The authors expound that, as per their interpretation of Kurt Lewin’s topological psychology, psychological events “shift, morph and alter according to the connections and relations actualized within a given set of possibilities” (Tucker & Goodings, 2014, p. 282). If we conceptualize remote cooperation as a shared psychological event, then we must ask what spaces do these movements take place in and why is Zoom especially well equipped to conduct remote cooperation.

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Tucker and Goodings, in their theory, frame space through the concept of topological “regions,” separated by “cuts.” The cuts structure information flows, leading to either connected or separate paths, and thus, they determine how easily information can cross from one region to another. What stands out in this theory is that a cut does not necessarily result in a “closed region” (Tucker & Goodings, 2014, p. 282) but rather is a symbol for the conductivity of information across regions. In other words, while some cuts facilitate information flows from one region to another, other cuts obstruct them. If we consider online and offline as separate spaces—not to reinforce a false binary but to single out digitization as the path leading from one to the other—then a cut is a medium of cooperation that becomes a successful conduit of offline communication practices into online domains. Therefore, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and social distancing measures rendered online cooperation necessary for a wider demographic, some users sought the path of least resistance in order to reestablish disrupted conditions of cooperation as conveniently as possible. This is not to say that users did not reflect on their privacy—after all, users jump through hoops online or even abstain from particular social media services to protect their data (Trepte & Dienlin, 2020). However, it is crucial to understand that during this migration to videoconferencing applications, it was not the technology that users sought out, nor was it ignorance that drove them there, but the experience of seamless cooperation, taking place in a short time span and more broadly than ever before. Zoom’s combination of affordances allowed for the least obstructive cuts, and hence the easiest passage of information flows, becoming a prime candidate for online cooperation.

6.4.2

Under Construction: Zoom’s Precipitous Transformation and the Evolution of Videoconferencing

On April 1, 2020, Company founder and CEO Eric Yuan (2020) specifically addressed “Zoom users around the world” and explained that since Zoom usage “ballooned overnight,” it has been a struggle to support the influx of users. He furthermore insisted that Zoom was primarily built to service “enterprise customers,” i.e. “large institutions with full IT support” rather than “consumer use cases” (Yuan, 2020). Therefore, when social distancing drove customers from all walks of life to Zoom, numerous unforeseen challenges arose (Wakefield, 2020). Yuan’s retort to journalists underlines that Zoom, as a platform, was not conceived to cater to the needs introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic; rather, the platform

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has a history, hidden in the nooks and crannies of internet archives. These “underutilised archived web sources” (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2019, p. 7) pose a historiographic challenge, and media researchers and web historians are put to the test in order to make invaluable cultural, historical, and evidentiary information accessible (Belovari, 2017). Noting that “most web archives remain largely unknown and underused as a primary source for researchers” (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2019, p. 8), Helmond and van der Vlist (2019, p. 23 f.) argued in their proposal of platform historiography that critical histories of the platforms can shed light on “data and privacy scandals” and changes of corporate strategies by opening up a platform’s “multi-sidedness and multi-layeredness” for reconstruction and reconstitution. Led by this insight, we used materials from the Wayback Machine archive to further investigate the claims of Eric Yuan and determine how Zoom has evolved as a platform to facilitate going remote during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Wayback Machine was introduced by the Internet Archive in 2001 to help resolve “the problem of 404s” (Bowyer, 2021, p. 2) by creating an archive for web pages. At present, it stands as the largest web archive available to the public, with 424 billion web pages. In addition, it is a “general archive,” meaning that, in any particular moment, “any user can choose to add a webpage … to its holdings” (Bowyer, 2021, p. 2). The content derived through the Wayback Machine will help break down Yuan’s statement and allow us to explore the following hypothesis: the Covid-19 pandemic not only revealed the gaps in Zoom’s security policies but also fundamentally transformed the conditions in which Zoom operates, thus creating a demand for a radically different approach to user security. This leads us to the question: How did Zoom adapt to the needs of its shifting user base during the Covid-19 pandemic? To answer this question, we sampled the main page of Zoom—as a first impression of the company’s business strategy—at four distinct points in time (April 2018, April 2019, April 2020, April 2021) and examined to what extent the changes to the company’s home page reflect the evolution suggested by Yuan. This by no means is a full reflection of the company’s self-presentation and marketing concept but rather a very limited snapshot of its history. Nevertheless, we still found it to contain valuable indications for researchers aiming to chart the evolution of remote cooperation. In 2018, Zoom experienced a veritable surge in growth in the niche field of video and web conferencing. The company’s home page during that year reflects this growth (Fig. 6.1), as the creators of Zoom chose to feature that the leading IT research and forecast advisory firm Gartner had named Zoom “A Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions” (Zoom, 2020). The Gartner Magic Quadrant research methodology indicated already in 2017 that

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Zoom was envisioned to be a “leader” for meeting solutions, meaning that the platform showed promise for “digital workplace [applications]” (Gartner Inc., 2021). Yuan’s message in 2020 implied that Zoom was not in high demand until the breakout of Covid-19. However, in 2018 Zoom was already advertising itself as a pioneer in cloud-based web conferencing, boasting partnerships with over 750 thousand companies and rave reviews. This is also evinced in Zoom’s “2018 Year-End Rundown” (Zoom, 2018a), where the company celebrated numerous new features whose explicit purpose was to develop Zoom into a “one-of-a-kind, video-first unified communications platform” and the celebration of the second year of Zoomtopia, a dedicated conference where the company broadcasted their services and showcased their ability to truly integrate with a diverse set of industries. All in all, these insights reveal that by 2020, Zoom was less of a dark horse and more of an established tech innovator with a vision to expand beyond videoconferencing. At the same time, Zoom was clearly interested in business-tobusiness communication and carefully crafted their messaging to appeal to new clients, offering a wealth of reviews from current partners in the form of quotes and even offering interested parties “1-to-1 demos” (Zoom, 2018b) with product specialists. There were some noteworthy changes from 2018 to 2019. By 2019, Zoom recognized itself as an autonomous brand; there were no explicit references to reviews from large clients or IT firms on its homepage unless one scrolled all the way to the bottom, where some user ratings were listed (Fig. 6.2). Another change to point out is that Zoom had by now branded itself as the “#1 video communications solution” ready to support users who are “doing big things” (Zoom, 2019). Whereas this slogan was still quite general, there were a few hints that the platform saw their target audience to be organizations and particularly larger corporate settings. For instance, in order to sign up, the page visitor was asked for their “work email.” A little further down, the website advertised that “your employees will love that they only have to navigate one tool” (Zoom, 2019). These markers delivered the palpable message that video communications are a special purpose medium with a niche use, a tailored solution for the effective management of distance work and business communication that remains relatively irrelevant to the general public. By April 2020, Zoom had, indeed, changed their tune. Their slogan had changed to “In this together. Keeping you connected wherever you are” (Zoom, 2020), alluding to the mass migration from office spaces to the home office (Fig. 6.3). Zoom was still asking for a “work” email in 2020; hence, the interface still addressed an audience of professionals and did not account for private use. This was further accentuated by a statement that followed further down in

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Fig. 6.1 Zoom company homepage on April 4, 2018. (Derived from the Wayback Machine on April 10, 2021)

the interface, describing Zoom as “One Consistent Enterprise Experience,” with the emphasis on “enterprise.” It was the first observable instance of Zoom failing to keep up with the fast-paced transitions that going remote entailed, making the scandal of compromised private email addresses (Cox, 2020) appear like an inevitable disaster, which awoke the company to a new understanding of dealing not merely with their habituated target group of enterprise customers anymore. In 2021, it appears that Zoom has learned from this misstep. While the core of their software mentality remains the same—versatile software that can adapt to all the needs of video communications—the demographic that this software is catering to has diversified. Keenly aware of this, the company calls attention to uses of the software outside the workplace in a reel of changing stock images

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Fig. 6.2 Zoom company homepage on April 2, 2019. (Derived from the Wayback Machine on April 10, 2021)

showing, among other settings, an online yoga class, a cartoon educational setting in which someone wearing a headset sits in a park next to a large stack of books, and a cartoon collage representing professional video communication (Fig. 6.4). Emphasizing that the company has dealt with their privacy issues, their main headline has evolved into the phrase: “In this together. Keeping you securely connected wherever you are” (emphasis added). Moreover, Zoom now advertises specific features in tandem with uses in different settings. For instance, the “OnZoom” hosting service is visually connected to workout classes as a use of “online experiences that are easily monetized and scalable to new audiences” (Zoom, 2021). What is more, diversifying the types of cooperative features available (including different types of subscriptions and billing functionalities) has

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Fig. 6.3 Zoom company homepage on April 2, 2020. (Derived from the Wayback Machine on April 10, 2021)

aided the “infrastructuring” (Star & Bowker, 2006, p. 230) of videoconferencing into a general purpose medium to correspond to the evolving conditions and practices of remote cooperation. The above findings do not justify the security breaches on the part of Zoom, but they corroborate Yuan’s testimony that Zoom’s growth overwhelmed the company as partly accurate. However, Zoom’s confirmation to The Intercept that video calls on the app do not support end-to-end encryption despite contradictory claims on their website reveals an additional dimension to the privacy violations that goes beyond an inability to keep up with user appropriations of Zoom’s affordances (Chin, 2020). Our analysis demonstrates that it was not Zoom’s growth per se that left the company unprepared but rather the radical transformation of

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Fig. 6.4 Zoom company homepage on April 2, 2021. (Derived from the Wayback Machine on April 10, 2021)

their user base and the general conditions of cooperation caused by the measures of social distancing. Thus, returning to Schüttpelz’s theory of cooperative media, even though Zoom was already advanced as a solution for video-mediated forms of online collaboration in the domain of office work, the company strategically adapted their software to a new reality of universal remote cooperation. This move, in turn, demonstrates that media users are not only the recipients of products and services but that they actually represent an integral part of the infrastructural setting itself. The evolution of Zoom, studied through the lens of Schüttpelz, once again represents a tangible case of how media have been “cooperatively developed” (Schüttpelz, 2017, p. 14) during the pandemic. Overall, Zoom has evolved greatly since its conception. The Wayback Machine captures

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this evolution and allows us to discern key points of change. While Zoom originally supported cooperation in a closed, corporate environment, the pandemic and a growing user base put pressure on the company to not only make modifications in the application’s user interface but also transform its modus operandi. By changing their language, imagery, affordances and governance system, Zoom is now capable of stretching their influence much further, keeping up with the times and participating in the ubiquity of video-mediated cooperation.

6.5

Conclusion

In this paper, we considered the boom in videoconferencing during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020 by examining different processes of socio-technical re-infrastructuring. We were particularly interested in surveying what kind of practices lay at the basis of the recent boom in video-mediated remote interaction and why those practices had, for the most part, not been subject to a wider digital transformation prior to the pandemic. As our qualitative analysis of Twitter content in the first section suggests, the practices most affected by measures of social distancing, according to the analyzed tweets, were practices that typically involved forms of collaboration or other cooperative activities, such as working, learning, instructing, and counseling. Moreover, we observed that the majority of these practices had been performed in shared spaces at designated locations, such as offices, schools, universities, clinics, and gyms. Many tweets showed that, deprived of the possibilities to meet in such specialized common spaces, people turned to videoconferencing and other applications for remote collaboration with the desire and need to maintain or reestablish cooperative everyday practices by mobilizing distributed forms of mediated presence. Prior to the pandemic, practices of on-site cooperation proved to be remarkably resistant to digitization or, more concretely, telemediatization. Conversations on Twitter, for instance, pointed to local practices of social control and steady habits, but they also criticized a longstanding reluctance, particularly of institutions, to offer opportunities of participation in collective activities for demographics with disabilities and other special needs. One reason for such reservations could be the fact that collaborative practices in physical co-presence—as, for instance, in classrooms, offices, and gyms— greatly benefit from the possibility of verbal and nonverbal attunement in the form of micro-coordination between the people involved. Such feedback processes at the microlevel, or what Charles Goodwin (2018) has termed “co-operative

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actions,” seem to be particularly crucial for the successful unfolding of cooperative practices. The fact that these are hard to come by through technological mediation could explain why practices of remote cooperation and collaboration had been dismissed in many domains of application, even despite demands for remote participation voiced by people with special needs. In disrupting the routines of quotidian, location-based practices, the measures of social distancing surfaced forms of social resistance against the digitization or “virtualization” of such cooperative practices, which had already been in place before the pandemic but went mostly unnoticed. Even in situations where it would have been possible and presumably beneficial to perform tasks remotely, on-site cooperation in co-presence had largely remained the norm—hence the talk of the pandemic as a possible “watershed moment” for the dissemination of remote technologies. One of the main reasons for this might just be the very nature of the physical locations for cooperative practices in co-presence. Designated shared spaces are convenient cooperative media not only because they facilitate meeting and other collective activities but also because they often feature specific structural arrangements or allow for storing tools and other materials. Moreover, shared spaces can provide safe spaces and have an equalizing function since they provide the same spatial conditions for people with a range of different backgrounds. Consequently, these locations seem to ground collective practices in spatial synchronicity and thus create what could be called socio-material centers of gravity for such practices. The increased use of remote tools thus demonstrate the desire to restore spatial synchronicity through technological means in a time when meeting in shared physical locations was no longer an option—with the effect that it more or less worked in general but produced a number of collaterals, which were due to not only the mediality of remote interaction but also the unequal economic and domestic situations of the individuals involved. Following Star and Ruhleder’s talk of the “inertia of the installed base” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 5), we consider these forms of resistance against the mediatization of cooperative practices to be part of a general infrastructural inertia to capture the rather complex situation that technological innovation may be appreciated and welcomed in general but rejected in specific cooperative constellations. As we have shown in the second section of our analysis, videoconferencing itself represents less a technology that is ready to hand and ready to use but rather a bundle of socio-technical elements and practices that had to be cooperatively installed, negotiated, and learned, not least through the creation and circulation of collective resources and practical knowledge in the form of guides and other instructional material. Our analysis of a small sample of such guides taken from different domains of application revealed that shifting collective practices to

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remote settings generally involved various forms of preparation and adaptation. The guides suggested, for instance, to create in the home office a routine modeled after the daily routine at the workplace, and to set up a dedicated workspace to separate private and professional matters. The guides further proposed alterations to the domestic environment as well as the personal appearance and behavior of the users in ways that contributed to a transformation of cooperative settings into cinematic situations. To the extent that the private home was staged as an office or learning environment, it also became both a public and a mediated space. Moreover, the guides also suggested changing the formats of cooperative practice—for instance, by using the “flipped classroom” method to facilitate distant learning or by applying formalized workflows to conduct video-based medical consultations. As these examples show, the formation of new cooperative relations was not so much of a technological nature but unfolded as a multilayered process of socio-material adjustments and—both coordinated and uncoordinated—sociotechnical standardizations. The mainstreaming of videoconferencing as a widely used everyday medium must therefore be understood as mutually made. Nevertheless, the instructions we studied revealed strong tendencies toward normalization, as they often conveyed advice or codes of conduct that were clearly tailored to the experiences and living conditions of the able-bodied upper middle classes. The application Zoom is particularly linked to the rise of videoconferencing as a cooperative media practice during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, in the third section, we centered on a specific process of application-specific infrastructuring by analyzing the ways in which Zoom—as a digital tool, a brand, and a company—was affected by a shift toward what we call video-mediated remote cooperation. We were particularly interested in understanding more clearly why a software solution previously relatively unknown to the general public was able to become both the most used and most mentioned videoconferencing app. We showed how different features of Zoom afford cooperative practices in a digital environment and how these affordances and their combinations have set Zoom apart from and given them an edge over its competitors. Following Tucker and Goodings (2014), we argued that these affordances enable topological movements inside the platform. In a similar way, we aimed to develop a topological understanding of remote everyday practices by conceptualizing the mainstreaming of Zoom and similar video-mediated meeting applications to organize and perform home office work, distant learning, and remote medical consultation as an evolving process of the spatial distribution of cooperation. By means of a web historiography of Zoom’s company website, we further traced how the company reflexively adapted their software to afford for new uses of remote communication and collaboration. In this regard, we have shown that Zoom, in response to

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pandemic-related changes in infrastructural relations, underwent significant alterations and transformed from a special purpose business-to-business solution into a widely used general purpose application. We would like to argue that Zoom as a technological artifact was subject to a reciprocal design process of mutual making as well, although not in a direct but rather indirect sense of a collaborative dynamic between users (the public) and developers (the company). Based on our observations regarding the formation of videoconferencing as an everyday media practice—first as a general socio-technical process of reinfrastructuring disrupted quotidian practices by means of remote technologies; second, as a collective learning and teaching experience that involved the sharing of common knowledge about remote practices and videoconferencing applications; and finally, as a transformation of technical features and supposed modes of use of the videoconferencing application Zoom—we argue that the mainstreaming of Zoom and its competitors should be regarded as an expression of fundamental infrastructural shifts of cooperative conditions, which would not have happened without the specific circumstances of the Covid-19 crisis. Given the fact that the Zoom application was used during the pandemic not simply as a conversational medium but as a way to reestablish disrupted routines within the ecologies of everyday cooperative practice in different societal domains, we suggest to equally conceive the heightened use of videoconferencing less as a turn toward new forms of remote communication but more particularly as the mainstreaming of video-mediated practices of remote cooperation. Our approach has been exploratory with an aim to probe the material from different angles and with different methods. Further research on the infrastructuring of video-based remote applications could include an expanded time frame to trace the development of different narratives and socio-technical configurations. Moreover, studies could focus more closely on the functionalities, infrastructures, and interface logics of different videoconferencing solutions, not least by considering their APIs and SDKs, especially with regards to recent technological and promotional investments into the vision of the Metaverse, which promises even more rigorously shared digital space as a foundation and resource for practices of remote cooperation. Acknowledgements This research has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—Project-ID 262513311—SFB 1187 as part of the A01 project of the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation.” We would like to express our gratitude to Carolin Gerlitz for her generous support in granting us access to her digital research infrastructure and providing guidance, encouragement, and feedback throughout the research process. We would like to thank Daniela van Geenen, Danny Lämmerhirt, Tatjana Seitz, and other colleagues from the CRC for valuable suggestions regarding

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approaches to the data set and we are especially indebted to Fernando van der Vlist for critical remarks on a draft version of this paper. We would also like to thank our copy editor Jon Crylen and the editors of this volume for their support and helpful comments.

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Svbl. [@svblxyz]. (2020). A lot of people are now working from home (WFH) / remotely, either voluntarily or forced due to #coronavirus. I’m WFH full-time since over a year now and want to use this thread to share some tips and experiences that might help some people who are new to this. 1/n. [Tweet] https://twitter.com/svblxyz/status/123731566225 2511232. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Thompson, M. [@matthewtgreens]. 20.03.2020. My psych just had to cancel our in-person appointment due to exposure to coronavirus. She has offered to do it via Skype however Medicare won’t cover remote sessions so it’ll be over $200. How are ppl going to access these services during the pandemic? This needs to be fixed. [Tweet] https://twitter.com/ matthewtgreens/status/1240822717307215873. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Trepte, S., Scharkow, M., & Dienlin, T. (2020). The privacy calculus contextualized: The influence of affordances. Computers in Human Behavior, 104, 106115. Tucker, I., & Goodings, L. (2014). Mediation and digital intensities: Topology, psychology and social media. Social Science Information, 53(3), 277–292. van Doorn, N., Mos, E., & Bosma, J. (2020). Disrupting “Business as Usual”: How Covid-19 is impacting platform-mediated labor and social reproduction. Platform labor. https://pla tformlabor.net/blog/disrupting-business-as-usual. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Wakefield, J. (2020). Zoom boss apologises for security issues and promises fixes. BBC news. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52133349. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Warren, T. (2020). Google and microsoft chase after Zoom with new features and free services. The verge. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21240942/google-meet-freezoom-response-microsoft-teams-features. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Well Paid Geek. [@WellPaidGeek]. (2020). Remote working due to the corona virus could end up showing businesses that devs sat alone at home with a computer and an internet connection could produce better than being sat in an office with some middle manager constantly interrupting them. [Tweet] https://mobile.twitter.com/wellpaidgeek/status/123 6803190701654017. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Wiederhold, B. K. (2020). Connecting through technology during the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic: Avoiding “Zoom Fatigue.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(7), 437–438. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.29188.bkw Wyld, D. (2020). Zooming ahead: The explosive growth of Zoom during the pandemic. Medium. https://medium.com/swlh/zooming-ahead-the-explosive-growth-of-zoom-dur ing-the-pandemic-34f55b1f13e8. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Young, S. (2021). Zoombombing your toddler: User experience and the communication of Zoom’s privacy crisis. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 35(1), 147– 153. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920959201 Yuan, E. S. (2020). A message to our users—Zoom blog. Zoom blog. https://blog.zoom.us/ a-message-to-our-users. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Zimmermann, Y. (2020). Videoconferencing and the uncanny encounter with oneself: Selfreflexivity as self-monitoring 2.0. In P. D. Keidl, L. Melamed, V. Hediger, & A. Somaini (Eds.), Pandemic media: Preliminary notes toward an inventory (pp. 99–103). meson press. Zoom. (2018a). 2018 year-end rundown: Zoom’s annual progress. Zoom blog. https://blog. zoom.us/2018-year-end-rundown-zooms-annual-progress. Accessed 2 Aug 2021. Zoom. (2018b). Zoom company homepage. https://web.archive.org/web/20180801000000/ https://zoom.us. Accessed 2 Aug 2021.

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Part III Cooperating Corpora

7

The Passport as a Medium of Movement Asko Lehmuskallio and Paula Haara

Abstract

Passports are integral for bodies to move across borders and enable decisions on who is allowed to pass through ports and who has to stay within specific jurisdictional areas. In the nineteenth century, passport documents were still mainly letters of reference, indicating the importance of the issuer. Only later, and increasingly since the First World War, they also became a means of identification. Today, identification in electronic form is key for passport development, which is why centralised and widely standardised registers such as the Finnish Population Information System have become obligatory points of passage for passport development. In this paper, based on empirical research in Finnish archives, museums and among passport developers, we identify four regimes within the history of Finnish passports that all rely on distinct modes of cooperation among applicants, issuers, registers and border officials. While in the nineteenth century passport holders had significant agency in negotiating who they were at border crossings, slowly but surely the ability for a physical body to speak for itself has diminished. Instead, over time, centralised registers were built, which need to be continually updated before any changes in passport documentation can be made. Today, the body is read and deciphered, increasingly with automated means, and the results need to match the information found in electronic form. The passport, as a medium A. Lehmuskallio (B) · P. Haara Visual Studies Lab, Comet Research Centre, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] P. Haara e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_7

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of movement, is only temporarily stabilized for a limited period of time. It is continually modified and developed as the infrastructures for supporting and inhibiting human movement change. Different passport regimes are therefore tied to different modes of cooperation, and only their description allows us to gain an understanding of passports as a medium of movement.

7.1

Introduction

The movement of increasing numbers of people, travelling further, more frequently and at an unprecedented scale became one of the major trends of the twentieth century. It affected investments, life plans and the fabric of social relationships. In introducing the new mobilities paradigm at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006, p. 207) highlighted how this success story is reflected in different forms of movement: All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces—these and many others fill the world’s airports, buses, ships, and trains [...]. This is so even after September 11, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), multiple suicide bombings of transport networks, and other global catastrophes, and the fact that many grand projects in transport do not at first generate the scale of anticipated traffic.

As we write this paper, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen limitations and restrictions imposed on free movement, with state-ordered curfews and lockdowns over the entire globe, in order to contain and gain control of a globally spreading disease. At first sight, these recent developments appear to suggest a curtailment of the success story of global movement, at least according to the terms set out by Sheller and Urry. Even if in the near future state-led efforts to control a disease that is hard to track halt the expansion of global mobility, the new mobilities paradigm—particularly when applied in connection with research on infrastructure—has provided arenas for discussing some of the main sites where mobility is negotiated, such as airports, urban centres and the infrastructures on which they rely. In our contribution, we will explore the role of official documentation required for movement, with a particular focus on the history of the passport. This focus allows us to view movement as heavily mediated, with specific focusing media (Grasseni & Gieser, 2019) being more relevant than others for the ability to move.

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In this paper, we will discuss the pivotal role that passports play as a medium of movement. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which they have been used to assess the movability of human bodies from one location to another. The empirical basis of our work are materials collected from various archives in Finland, the main national setting of our project,1 and interviews we have started conducting with people involved in the development of Finland’s passports from political, technological and other angles. While more general overviews (e.g. Keshavarz, 2019; Häkli, 2015) provide breadth, the focus on a single country affords a more comprehensive in-depth examination of a coherent spectrum of passports all from a single locale. At a later stage, this may pave the way for a comparative study with identification documents from other settings, such as the US (see Robertson, 2010), the UK (Lloyd, 2003) or historical states that no longer exist (e.g. Jansen, 2009) and with other types of documents in particular environments—for instance credit cards in Germany (Gießmann, 2020). In addition, the Finnish material can inform studies of scaling processes, in particular research on which elements of passports have historically achieved a ‘global’ recognition by conforming with interoperability standards (such as ISO/IEC 19794-5) and which have remained idiosyncratic—i.e. ‘local’. Our findings reveal how, at particular points in time, specific and varying constellations of bodies, documents and archives offered blueprints for permission to travel. For example, at many border crossings in the 1800s, the person’s identity, the correspondence between the body carrying the document and the body referenced by the document was confirmed via a speech act from the body questioned, involving details of identity such as the person’s name, profession, residence and travel arrangements, alongside the way in which the everyday had become inscribed within the body of the person wishing to pass (Caplan, 2001). In these days, while selfsameness was read from the body, the person’s moral character was attested in writing by authorities such as a church minister or, later, the relevant municipality (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020). As the First World War unfolded, the speaking body was beginning to receive less credit than its correct documentation amid fears of spies, traitors and fraudsters (Robertson,

1

Our study focuses on the history of the Finnish passport. We are particularly interested in how different elements of the Finnish passport have evolved, including archives and registers. The passport provides a good example to gain an understanding of how technologies of tracking and surveillance emerged. This ties to a broader interest within the exploration of the relationship between the banalisation of surveillance and the history of surveillance technologies, and as such part of the broader research project Banal Surveillance, funded by the Academy of Finland.

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2010). Soon, photographs were introduced. At first, these were used in accordance with ideals of mechanical objectivity (Daston & Galison, 1992) to connect physical bodies to material documents. Only much later did they become visually ordered in a similar vein to forensic portraits of criminals, which also showed wide representational variety in its early days (Regener, 1999). Technologies of identification have gained increasing importance in the decades since, such that identification based on electronic biometrics has in recent years nearly become a global norm. In our discussion, we will examine the development of bureaucratic procedures required to apply for and receive a passport. Then we will explore the specific ways in which bodies are inscribed in passport documents. We have identified four periods that frame these developments in Finland: (1) a pre-photographic period, before the First World War; (2) the introduction of the applicant’s photograph and signature; (3) the visual structuring of the face from 1960 to 2005; and (4) the current period, characterised by the introduction of electronic machinereadable passports. These periods will be considered alongside four modes of cooperation, which evolved roughly in parallel with the periods. We will discuss the variety in cooperation in relation to passport developments, but with a greater focus on the assemblages required to produce specific passports, including application procedures, register practices, archives and others. Our understanding of cooperation therefore refers particularly to the research on cooperative practices among library, museum and computing professionals (e.g. Star & Griesemer, 1989; Bowker & Star, 1999), which has since also been adopted for research on practices in the field of media studies (e.g. Gießmann & Taha, 2017). We will show in our paper how mobility, identified as central within the mobilities paradigm, is crucially mediated by technologies such as the passport and the infrastructural elements on which it relies. We will limit our focus on mobility within the mobilities paradigm on the movement of people across borders, and specifically on how this movement has been curtailed historically both within and between states by introducing passports as a requirement to cross the border. This focus allows us to point out how, within different periods of passport use, variations of cooperation developed, which each put a different emphasis on what elements in situations of inspection are deemed trustworthy. In hindsight, these different varieties of cooperation were only temporarily stable, but enough so to call them distinct passport regimes in relation to the history of the Finnish passport. Of special interest in our discussion is that the actors imbued with agency in these cooperation patterns change significantly as passport regimes change.

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Hence, the passport as a medium is a highly specific type of document, transmitting and translating mobility differently, depending on the passport regime in which it is, albeit only temporarily, embedded.

7.2

Bureaucracy as a Means of Negotiating Cooperation: From Local Agreements to Central Registers

Since the 1980s in particular, media theorists and social scientists have focused on the question of how knowledge is translated between social worlds, with special attention to the cultural techniques and material artefacts employed in this transfer. Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law have named the translation of knowledge from one social world to another interessement, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which non-scientists’ concerns become entwined in scientists’ interests (Callon & Law, 1982; Latour, 1987). Their work has been especially useful for highlighting obligatory points of passage (Callon, 1985): the nodes in a given network where all actors need to be engaged if they wish to participate in that particular (actor-)network. In the history of technological infrastructure, competing actors have regularly attempted to establish and maintain obligatory points of passage of various types, from the gauge of railroad tracks or the size of overseas freight containers to the telecommunication standards for mobile phone network interoperability. In international travel, the passport is the quintessential artefact required for passing through ports today, one that people have to apply for and collect upon completion of the correct procedures. The applicant has to fill in several forms and consult authorities to request positive assessments, which are sent, in turn, to other authorities for verification and then returned with the inscriptions required for the person to travel. As this description highlights, the passport epitomises a cooperatively produced document. In further stages of cooperation, the document can be shown to others and inscribed again to allow the human body in question to move from one jurisdiction to another. Each joint operation necessarily leaves its traces in the document itself or in the registers that, by supporting and enabling the issue of passports, transform the legal, political and social status of its bearer. Bruno Latour (1986) has used the term ‘immutable mobiles’ for objects of this nature, since they are sent out to others (or carried in a jacket pocket). Hence they are mobile and yet hold unchanging fundamental parameters and therefore can be carried back to an original location as documents that have a verification function. However, as the history of passports shows and many of Latour’s examples attest, these documents are not truly immutable. Far more

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malleable than such a notion would admit, these objects get tinkered with, may be inscribed with new material, and have fields that may be either left blank for completion later or changed outright. In short, these documents have not always been used as originally planned—their use has often been renegotiated. Extending beyond the scale of an individual passport, the mutations have also demonstrated evolution over time at an institutional level. We will consider these patterns and their emergence below. Changes in the passport application procedures demonstrate the kinds of cooperation that historically have been deemed necessary to verify one’s identity when requested by municipal or state authorities. They also point to variations and changes in what Alfred Gell (1998) refers to as agent-patient relationships within these settings. In the most profound of these, alluded to above, the sense that the speaking body is able to provide evidence of itself has inevitably given way to automatons that read evidence directly from the body inspected. In the following, we will provide a short overview of the history of passport usage and application processes in Finland. This shows that, as local registers were superseded by centralised ones, the passport’s main function also changed. While a passport was initially mainly a letter of reference, over time, as passports were issued and regulated more centrally by the state, it became predominantly a means for identification which required the document to match the records in the central registry it is based upon.

7.2.1

The Passport as a Letter of Recommendation

In medieval and early modern Europe, diverse entities (e.g. guilds and churches) were responsible for establishing the identity of their members in domestic contexts and abroad. While a passport in today’s sense may serve as sufficient proof of its holder’s identity, relatively few people possessed any such document. Rather than a means of identification, the passports they carried were basically letters of recommendation, each of which was only one travel document among several (Fahrmeir, 2001, p. 218 f.; Groebner, 2001). The person’s appearance, manner of dress and ability to demonstrate proper behaviour were long considered as appropriate signs of belonging to a suitably high class (Einonen et al., 2016; Fahrmeir, 2001, p. 218; Robertson, 2010, p. 161). Members of the kinetic elite (Wood & Graham, 2006) who enjoyed heightened mobility had these marks of differentiation written into their bodies, as part of their habitus. Conversely, travellers who were not well-off members of elite or

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bourgeois circles needed to carry numerous documents to prove themselves harmless and free to travel, often when travelling within their own municipality or even merely wishing to leave the estate where they worked. Travel permits were issued on the basis of first-hand knowledge of the individual from the time the issuer and the traveller spent in the same locality. Hence, the passport issuer exercised discretion rather than making a decision based on comparative documentation. Passports, as a medium of movement, were therefore used for socially categorising citizens and foreigners alike, producing regimes of differential mobility, correlated with the social category travellers happened to belong to. In this respect, passports are not only akin to a ‘key for travel’, allowing travellers to move from one jurisdiction to the next, but also a means for issuers to state and reinforce social preferences and value hierarchies. In Finland, the first modern passport regulation, passed in 1862, made stateissued passports compulsory for all who wished to cross the country’s borders. The motives stated were similar to reasons given by other European states at the time: to prevent discontented parties and spies from entering the country and congregating and to help suppress vagrancy, banditry and crime (Fahrmeir, 2001, p. 219). In the nineteenth century, travelling was still considered a privilege, reserved for only a few, except in cases of compulsory migration. Freedom of movement was tied to social status, as was reflected in the various travel permits that Finns needed both for crossing the border and for domestic travel. For example, under the 1862 regulation, senior officials and bishops were to be issued passports for travelling abroad only with the permission of the Finnish Senate, and students at Alexander University in Helsinki required a certificate from the rector before becoming eligible to apply for a passport. The lower classes were more place-bound than the upper classes. For instance, a member of the former who needed a certificate to travel abroad had to obtain it from the local police, which enabled tighter control. Furthermore, a household servant had to carry written permission from the master of the house whenever leaving the premises. The propagation of differentiation was visible also among young people, who needed permission from their parents when they wanted to leave the vicinity of their permanent place of residence to seek employment. If the parents were illiterate, they asked a literate friend or acquaintance to write the letter of permission. Those who had learnt the cultural techniques of reading and writing therefore played a significant role in facilitating their acquaintances and relatives’ mobility by acting as witnesses and scribes.

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The Importance of Citizenship in Modern Nation-states

Wartime and other states of emergency brought stricter requirements pertaining to foreign passports and permits for internal travel. During the time of the First World War, detailed bureaucratic procedures for issuing passports were set forth by law. The strengthening bureaucracy altered relationships between ordinary people and state officials, facilitating the shift that was underway from feudal regimes to nascent nation-states. International passports were introduced in Finland, as in the rest of Europe, with reference to other certificates issued by the state. In the 1920s, the League of Nations held conferences and meetings on passports and customs formalities, impacting future standardisation practices. These reflected the immense importance of citizenship as the world became one of modern nation-states, as Andreas Fahrmeir (2001, p. 218) has pointed out—a concept which is defined and applied in highly country-specific ways. At this point, an individual’s words, reputation or appearance were no longer sufficient for obtaining a travel permit. Evidence contingent on local knowledge or community memory was not deemed appropriate anymore for socially categorising those allowed to travel from those could not. With the aid of bureaucratic documents, authorised by designated officials, the importance of individual-level judgement and beliefs was reduced. The difficulty of acting and deciding from a distance necessitated chains of action, in which officials working in a central office—the bureaucracy’s so-called centres of calculation (Jons, 2011; Latour, 1987)—had to rely on local actants to provide trustworthy certificates regarding the applicants. Rather than situated principally in a single physical location, the centres of calculation that presided over determining an applicant’s adequacy were multi-nodal entities dispersed over a range of people and practices of inscription. All of these had to be mobilised to participate in, or at least not actively hinder, the processing of each specific passport application. In the early twentieth century, applying for a passport was a two-step process. First the applicant needed to obtain a certificate of non-impediment from the local police. The police officer who provided this was also charged with identifying the applicant. The state church also kept track of all its members and granted a certificate of the applicants’ reputation and of their registration within a specific parish. Before freedom of religion became enshrined into Finnish law in 1923, the church registers covered nearly the entire population. Often, the priest’s certificate vouched for the person being duly vaccinated, confirmed in the faith, a regular participant in communion and enjoying civic confidence (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020, p. 15). Sweeping political changes in the status of Finland, from being a

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part of Sweden to an autonomous duchy of the Russian Empire and then, in 1917, to becoming a republic did not eliminate the church’s role with regard to population records. While the government changed considerably, the church’s centrality in record-keeping remained. It held significant power in making judgements of citizens’ health information, decency and freedom of movement. In the years following the Finnish Civil War of 1918, applicants needed to provide additional evidence of political credibility, because passports were not issued to those who had been Finnish Red Guard members—i.e. on the losing side. Such evidence could be issued, for example, by a certificate from ‘a wellknown trusted person’, someone whose political allegiance seemed beyond doubt (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020, p. 29). In addition to a certificate of reputation, those assessing suitability to receive a passport found importance in materials that documented that passport applicants were no threat to public order, had fulfilled their national service obligation and had not been criminally convicted. A certificate stating that the passport applicant had no outstanding taxes due was required until 1922. This certificate was required for advancing tax collection, and it demonstrates that belonging to a state was still perceived in terms of a subordinate relationship encompassing tax, military and other obligations. As for the national service obligation, a man of military age had to present a certificate from military headquarters that his service obligations did not prevent him from travelling abroad. This requirement is still in force today, to enforce military service and to ensure that Finland has sufficient armed forces in the event of war. It serves as an excellent reminder that passports are granted only under certain conditions and are not given automatically to all citizens of a country. Once the applicant had gathered all the certificates required as evidence of having fulfilled all obligations to the state and being of good repute, they had to be attached to the passport application. One applied for a passport from the provincial government or another designated authority, which then issued the passport. It was the upper-level bureaucrats representing these bodies who were deemed capable to issue passports, with the aid of the police and other local actors. Passports were used to control the movement of both people and money, partly to protect the national economy. Indeed, the way in which passport issuance was handled reflected the economic policy of the day and a country’s economic circumstances. In extreme cases, states could use passports to encourage the emigration of specific citizens or groups at certain points in history (Lucassen, 2001, p. 249), with emigration providing relief for national challenges related to unemployment or poverty. The reverse mechanism has also been employed: in times

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of labour shortages, for instance, passports were denied. In the late 1940s, some applicants in Finland were refused a passport for working abroad, because the country needed a strong workforce following the Second World War (Haara & Lehmuskallio, 2020, p. 33).

7.2.3

The Demand for Central Registers and Methods Standardisation

The application process has been consolidated with one official authority since 1960, when the Finnish police started to issue passports. This required the establishment of central registers, which the police could use to compile, compare and verify the information provided by applicants. Before, passport-related registers were scattered across multiple locations and maintained by local government entities, which often presented bottlenecks to centralisation. The local police, for example, kept their own registers of passports and certificates of non-impediment that they had granted. In addition, filing systems were not yet highly developed, and some officers made notes by hand in notebooks or simply by modifying the original forms. Although the passport application forms were very similar from one province to another, there were idiosyncratic ways of completing them. Via the introduction of standardised forms, with clear completion instructions aiding interpretation, it became possible to collect and store data consistently, then transmit a coherent set of data to a larger archive. Standardised forms are an important mechanism for methods standardisation (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 411): they are instrumental for the efforts to convey unchanging information and overcome local uncertainties. As our empirical material shows, methods standardisation is less straightforward than often assumed. Local negotiations related to proper use practices can be identified in our data for quite some time after further standardisation work. The next key development came in the 1980s, when the requirement for separate documents attesting to one’s reputation were eliminated. This simplified applying for a foreign passport. The applicant now only had to fill in one form instead of several and bring two photographs and in the case of renewal an old passport. At this stage, the police still lacked direct access to the personal data in the population registers, but the local registrar, usually the vicar of the parish or a person appointed by the church’s general chaplain, copied an extract from the register onto the back of the application. As Marjo Rita Valtonen (2005, p. 173) has outlined, the 1960s had seen the police administration in Finland move from a ‘pen and paper’ culture to using typewriters for completing forms, but the

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passports issued at that time were still filled in using handwriting. Early forms of national information processing were introduced in the 1970s. In the 1980s, mechanical typewriters were replaced by electronic models, and electronic information and communication technologies came into wider use in work settings. Irrespective of the forms’ standardisation, lack of policy guidelines led to an eclectic mix of software and workstation environments within police departments. The police devoted considerable resources to technology and the development of information systems throughout the 1990s. Before the end of the decade, bespoke software and specific ICT devices were adopted force-wide. The number of workstations used in the police administration grew from roughly 200 in 1990 to 8500 just ten years later. While paper trails still remained, electronic registers now formed the backbone for correctly issuing passports.

7.2.4

The Centrality of the Finnish Population Information System

Today, after the introduction of machine-readable biometric passports, one can apply in Finland for either a standard passport or a seaman’s passport via the Internet. A separate printed extract from the population register is no longer needed, as the police now have constant access to it. Even a physical visit to a police licence-service desk is no longer required, as long as certain conditions for application are met and the applicant’s fingerprints and signature are on file from a previous passport, issued no more than six years earlier. Usually, applicants need to provide a new photograph, as the one submitted with the application must be no more than six months old. The photograph can be supplied electronically, however, and the police systems convert it into machine-readable format complying with the standards set for biometric face prints, including those issued by international bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Organization for Standardization. The police receive the information for the passport directly from the Finnish Population Information System, which is the blueprint for the information required on each citizen and cannot be circumvented. It is a computerised national register that contains basic information about Finnish citizens and foreign citizens residing in Finland, whether on a permanent or a temporary basis. The personal data recorded in the system are the person’s name, personal identity code, home address, citizenship, native language, family relations and date of birth (and, where relevant, death) (Digital & Population Data Services Agency, 2020).

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The Finnish Population Information System’s centrality for issuing passports has influenced the types of information collected about citizens and hence the data that can be shown on passports. Some previous identifiers, such as academic qualifications, work position and even height, have been deemed too variable and overly difficult to confirm from a distance for bureaucrats working at the centres of calculation. This is one of the major ways in which the development of centralised bureaucratic systems becomes visible in the passports themselves: several types of information included previously are not considered useful anymore for individuation, and officials find little to be gained from the erstwhile symbolic value of the passport as a token of mobility reserved for the upper classes. Standardising the collection and management of information about citizens and storing it in a centralized archive has led to uniformity in previously disparate passport documents. Prior to this, information collection practices and the functions of passports were firmly rooted in the cooperation of local actors, including the applicant, with signs of these local negotiations visible in the official documents. Central electronic information systems and data processing have brought significant changes to the passport issuance process and, accordingly, to the control over individuals’ movement, largely because the authorities now receive information directly from a computing system without having to consult human intermediaries. Furthermore, the expansion of passport control mechanisms continued even when they were transferred from the municipal to the national level; with the arrival of the European passport (introduced in Finland in 1997), they reached EU level. Since the terrorist attacks on 11th September 2001, the US authorities have had a particularly significant impact on these once-local travel documents, succeeding in their push to get machine-readable biometric identifiers implemented beyond the US, including in EU passports. Traditionally, passports guarantee that the bearer receives support from the issuing state, which is why passports continue to serve in a sense as letters of reference. An EU passport extends this right, giving its holder a specific transnational EU-wide citizenship that allows travel in a wider area than a national passport (as per the Schengen Agreement). This passport regime harmonised the parameters of the passport documents (Salter, 2003, p. 85), after transnational arrangements for the control of movement emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, as the various border closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have demonstrated, individual nation-states’ borders still matter as do some local or municipal ones. For example, restrictions of movement in 2020 followed county borders, when the Finnish government closed the border between the Uusimaa region and the rest of Finland, evoking travel restrictions familiar only from the nineteenth century and times of war.

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Bodily Traces in Passports

We have outlined how changes in bureaucracy have significantly affected the way passports are applied for, who is invited to assess an applicant’s credibility, and the kinds and nature of the information collected, thus presenting evidence of considerable variety in the co-operation involved. Now, we will address how the human body has been called upon to participate in the creation of a passport for enabling movement across borders. A passport can only fulfil its function of opening doors across borders, if the human body is linked to it in a reliable way. As identification methods have evolved and control increased, the body’s relationship to the passport has been in a constant state of flux.

7.3.1

The Pre-photographic Period—Nineteenth Century to First World War

Early passports were intended to guarantee unrestricted passage for travellers. They were permits that allowed the holder to travel from one geographical area to another. While the prestige of the entity issuing the permit and the importance of the document were highlighted by the use of stamps and signatures, the information on the passport holder was relatively scarce: often only the name and place of residence featured in the passport, stated by the issuer. Therefore, the traces of bodies that had to be visible were those of the issuers, since they were considered as most important, attesting to their authority to issue a passport. As stated above, early passports were first and foremost a recommendation letter, anchored in the authority and weight behind the issuer. Until the late nineteenth century, passport holders were rarely identified by visual means: their personal details were mostly limited to their name, occupation and academic standing (if any). People with a higher social status or in certain positions enjoyed preferential treatment and possessed greater freedom of movement. It was therefore important for applicants to indicate their social class, even if only implicitly. Under these circumstances, it was very difficult, if not impossible, for officials at border crossings to identify the passport bearer and to verify the correspondence of the traveller’s body with the accompanying documents based on these alone. When a situation required the identification of a person, their physical appearance, clothing and other external attributes were scrutinised in addition to the documentation they carried. Border officials paid particular attention to

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speech acts—not just what was said, but also how it was said. When an individual travelled with a Finnish passport, the bearer’s name needed to match a specific style and possibly dialect, and knowledge of Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German and/or French may have been expected, in line with the occupation stated in the travel document. Passports were also heavily gendered and predominantly issued for male travellers, who were thought to possess embodied skills and a specific habitus, depending on their social position. This knowledge was not restricted to specific individuals, but it was social and class-based. Members of the same class may well have been able to use each other’s travel documents without detection. According to Finland’s first passport legislation, dating from 1862, anyone crossing state borders had to carry a passport, and issuing passports for international travel was restricted primarily to the counties’ administrative boards.

7.3.2

The Introduction of Photographs—First World War to the 1950s

After the outbreak of the First World War, the identification of individuals became key. The passport remained a document intended to enable travel and trade, but distrust against foreigners caused by the war heightened the importance of distinguishing between trustworthy people and spies or other undesirable individuals. Rather than focusing on the bearer’s physical attributes alone, the scrutinising gaze shifted to the passport, which now had the function of an identification document, confirming that the individual was who they claimed to be. The race to ensure the authenticity of passports and to prevent their misuse had begun. To link the right person to the document, the passport had to include the holder’s signature, a physical description and a photograph as proof of the close connection between the body and the document. Passports still displayed great variety of forms. Some photographs emphasised the person’s prestige or presented an idealised portrait instead of primarily enabling accurate recognition. A studio portrait, a picture taken by the village photographer and a face clipped from a wedding photograph were equally acceptable passport photographs.

7.3.3

1960–2005: Structuring of the Face

In the early 1960s, the visual representation of the face in the passport became simpler and more standardised. It was therefore easier to match the individual

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to the document, which was of particular benefit when the official checking the document had very little time for the task. Passport photographs now more closely resembled ‘mugshots’ taken of those arrested by the police: cropped to show only the face, with a neutral expression and the gaze directed at the camera (for historical takes on police photography, see e.g. Regener, 1999; Meyer, 2019). Just as much as the form, the text used to document a person’s physical appearance was standardised in this period. For instance, hair and eye colour had to be selected from a list. However, the strict categories presented problems and, during this early period of implementation, it was not unusual to find that two or even three colours had been chosen in an effort to convey a more accurate colour match. Physical descriptions of this kind were used alongside the photograph, until passports became machine-readable towards the end of the 1980s. Identity numbers had been added to Finnish passports in the late 1970s, tying them to a broader system first developed for social welfare. With the inclusion of identity numbers, officials could unambiguously confirm the identity created by the state and retrieve data relating to the person from digital records.

7.3.4

2006 and After: The Machine-Readable Biometric Passport

Since 2006, every new Finnish passport features a biometric faceprint in digital form, and biometric fingerprints have been included since 2009 (except for children under 12 years). In this period of electronic machine-readable biometric passports, the face is an increasingly important element for personal identification. Accordingly, strict instructions are given about the background allowed in the photograph, the person’s head measurements and positioning. The facial features—particularly the eyes—must be clearly distinguishable within the photograph. The issuer’s name or signature is no longer shown in the passport, while that of the passport-holder is. A specimen signature is provided electronically via a writing surface at the application office, stored in the national passport register and laser-engraved into the passport. Hence, the applicant is not allowed to physically alter the document in any way, even by signing it in the way customary since the post-war years. The standardisation of the facial photograph makes visual identification of the person easier, but it also affords machine-assisted facial recognition, based on a face image stored on a microchip embedded in the passport and respective

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biometric data kept in a passport register maintained by the police. The computeraided facial recognition now used at borders, but also by smartphones, access control to buildings and the like raises the question whether the biometric identification linked to passports is helping to normalise machine-assisted surveillance in society (for a discussion on the wider societal spread of facial recognition technologies, see Gates, 2011; Norval & Prasopoulou, 2017; Introna & Nissenbaum, 2017). This is one factor in countries’ varying solutions for the data stored within passports and kept in passport registers, as some countries tend to curb the use of these technologies for other societal purposes, or have decided to not have passport registers at all.

7.4

Discussion: Four Modes of Cooperation

The interrelations among bodies, traces, documents, and official registers have shifted throughout the history of the Finnish passport, depending on the passports’ main uses and on whose gaze and whose bodily traces had to be connected to them as documents and thereby enabled these to act as a viable medium of movement. In the discussion below, we will highlight the ways in which specific practices of cooperation have been upheld and, at times, enforced in the four periods outlined above, as revealed by our empirical research. These remain visible today in the traces left in passport application forms and the passport documents themselves. In the pre-photographic period, when passports were mainly letters of recommendation rather than means of identification, there was no uniform passport design. Their main commonality in form was that they were made with paper printed specifically for passport use. These passports bore diverse stamps and seals that implied the presence of representatives of the state, who had held the stamps in their hands and affixed seals to specific parts of the passport for purposes of representation (see Fig. 7.1). Some stamps were applied by the issuer of the passport, serving as the signature of a social body and also as tokens of hierarchical and other social relations among issuing entities. Other stamps testify to the passport holder’s movement and were added upon the presentation of the passport to a border guard or other officials during the holder’s journey. These stamps informed other authorities that the passport had been presented to an individual representing a larger social body and, hence, that the bearer had a right to travel or stay by virtue of a connection to that social body. These markings provide a concrete example of a passport’s function as a portable register of

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sorts, holding information about the social relationships in which the individual continues to be embedded while travelling. Also of relevance are the additional inscriptions required in the early twentieth century for both Finns and foreigners. For instance, the police or another authority made a note on the passport attesting there were no impediments to the individual leaving Finland, and this note received a stamp. Likewise, stamps were required for arrivals in Finland. The Aliens Decree of 1919, for instance, required foreign arrivals to have a visa stamp for travel to Finland in their passport, obtained from a Finnish diplomatic representative in their country of origin. From the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War, Russia and its Grand Duchy of Finland were one of the few places in Europe where strict passport and visa requirements restricted travel (Lucassen, 2001, p. 236; Salter, 2003, p. 40; Leitzinger, 2008). Restricting issuing visas was a means of barring entry to any person suspected to be a spy or criminal, or to those considered to have insufficient funds to sustain themselves during their visit, even if they had a passport from their country of origin. The state wanted to avoid both threats to public safety and any potential burden to the social welfare system. More generally, it wanted control over the terms under which individuals would be allowed into the country. In that period, the only signatures in passports were from representatives of social bodies, identifiable by their handwriting as specific individuals. Importantly, in our empirical material, the body of the traveller for whom a passport was issued did not sign it and was therefore physically absent from the passport document. The bodies who left their traces in the document were those of state officials, either anonymous representatives of a social body present via stamps and seals or specific individuals who had climbed high enough on the professional ladder to be symbolically present via their handwriting as a specific person. With the outbreak of the First World War, connecting a particular body to a passport document became a key motive for further passport development. Now not only the bodily trace of representatives was of concern, but also the question how to ensure that the passport was carried by the right person. In light of this priority, techniques for recording traces of a passport holder in a passport became—and continue to be—an important area for development. From 1914, Finns were required to have a photograph attached to their passport if they wished to travel abroad. To cross state borders, the passport applicant had to hand in two photographs to the state authorities, one to be retained in the local archives and one for the passport document itself. The photograph requirement was made permanent by a government decree on Finnish passports in 1919, on account of the value associated with the photograph as an assumed direct connection

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Fig. 7.1 Early passports were letters of recommendation rather than means of identification. Therefore, they contained more information about the issuing authority than about their holder. This passport from 1863 contains only the holder’s name, profession and citizenship (“Finnish subordinate”). Recording of person’s physical characteristics in a Finnish passport was not very common in the nineteenth century, although some passport formulae had allotted space for doing so. Source The National Archives in Oulu, the archives of the magistrate of Raahe

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between the passport and its holder. It tied the traveller’s body, mediated via a camera, to its bureaucratic representation. The requirement of a photograph also responded to international rules for travel, as during the First World War an increasing number of countries began to ask for photographs within passports they would accept as official travel documents. In contrast to the photographs taken of criminals, there was no requirement for passport photographs to adhere to a strict visual form. The pictures used came in various sizes and showed a host of poses, some of which made the person depicted impossible to identify. The mechanical objectivity conferred by the camera as a specific technical device was deemed proof enough of having created this particular connection between body and document. Another new requirement was the applicant’s signature. It became easier for people to sign once everyone had both a first name and a surname after the law on surnames was passed in 1920, which harmonised the various surname practices in Finland. This was prompted by the need for a more rigorous identification of citizens, not least because of the damage caused during the Finnish Civil War and the First World War. The Finnish population had taken opposing sides during these wars, so that after Finland’s independence in 1917 the winning side had great interest in identifying their earlier enemies. Moreover, considerable investments in education had brought literacy to the majority of the population (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2020). In early passports, such as the one shown in Fig. 7.2, from 1917, the applicant’s name was signed across the photograph provided. This was one mechanism for ensuring, through handwriting, that the photograph indeed showed the person described by the passport. Additionally, the photograph received the police commissioner’s stamp as a proof that a representative of the commissioner had physically inspected and touched both the photograph and the document. Finally, the signed and stamped photograph was given a seal, which made it more difficult to change the photograph that was now part of the passport. Such tampering had been commonplace with the first passports containing photographs. It took quite some time before the signature penned by the applicant was allocated a specific space in the document. This change, which our empirical material places at roughly the same time as the advent of passport photographs, is significant in terms of the bodies coming into contact with the document used as a medium of movement. While the holder’s traces on the document gained importance, the largest signatures found in the passports of the day were still those of issuing authorities, such as those of representatives of the provincial government and the police commissioner. The authorities began to collect bodily traces of passport applicants for

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Fig. 7.2 In the early twentieth century, issuing passports was centralized to upper level bureaucrats working at provincial governments. However, the police was still responsible for identifying the applicant correctly, verifying that the applicant was who they claimed to be. The passport depicted is issued in 1917, containing a separate sheet of paper glued on it, where an officer from the Helsinki Police Department has verified the authenticity of the bearer’s photograph and signature. In addition, the passport holder has written his signature on the passport photo, thus contributing to the validation of his identity in both handwritten and photographic form. Source The National Archives in Helsinki, biographical material

the purpose of individuation, but the passport was still principally a letter of reference provided by established authority representatives whose physical touch needed to be visible on the document (see Fig. 7.3). Only in the 1960s both the form and the visual content of the passport photograph had become sufficiently standardised to assist the authorities in identifying and remembering individuals in identification situations. The apparent simplification of the photograph was designed to draw attention to the features that distinguished an individual from all others, emphasising the use of biometrics for individuation rather than for representative purposes. Our empirical evidence disproves the common assumption in related literature that conventions for visual identification in passport photographs, as outlined perhaps most famously by

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Fig. 7.3 In the beginning of the twentieth century, physical description, signature and photograph became central techniques for bridging the gap between the body, identity, and its representation in passports. In this passport issued in 1948, an officer from the Helsinki Police Department has verified with his signature that the photo and the signature of the passport holder are genuine. The National Archives in Helsinki, biographical material.

Bertillon, were adopted relatively early (for Bertillon’s image logics, see Ellenbogen, 2012). It was only in the 1960s that highly specific regulations regarding passport photographs were issued, and the requirements have been tightened ever since. Various actors with little understanding of identification techniques were required to conform to the stricter standards for passport photographs (see Fig. 7.4). For instance, specific instructions for ‘correct’ photographs in line with this aim were sent to the photography studios that usually provided these images. The studios and later (with advances in camera technology and greater affordability and ease of use of appropriate cameras) people taking their own passport photographs at home had to be able to learn how to take photographs correctly, without learning details of identification. For this reason, the guidelines provided needed to be standardised, stringent and simple (see Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 406).

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Fig. 7.4 A person must be registered in the population information system in order to obtain a personal identity number. It distinguishes an individual from all other individuals and makes it possible for the authorities to receive personal data directly from electronic computing systems. The personal identity number (“social security number” or “code”) has been documented in the Finnish passport since the mid-1970s. Source The National Archives in Helsinki, biographical material

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With the introduction of machine-readable passports in Finland in 1987, stamps and other hand-made inscriptions began to disappear from passports, with the exception of those added during travelling, notations about the amount of stamp duty or about exceeding the predefined space allocated for a particular item of necessary information. The demand for machine-readability has also led to a preference for the general anonymisation of the people involved in the process of applying for, verifying and issuing passports. Absent too are any specific issuer names or signatures within the passport, which were included right up until the introduction of machine-readability. Since 1987, the passport has been issued by a social body, such as the Helsinki police department, rather than by its individual representatives, such as a police commissioner known in society by a personal name. While the applicant’s body has been increasingly included into physical passport documents with the integration of photographs and signatures (during and after the First World War), the move to machine-readability has distanced the issuers’ bodies from these documents and added several mediating steps between the applicant’s body and representation in the document. Since electronically machine-readable passports were introduced in Finland in 2006, adding material invisible to the human eye, the applicant’s body is inscribed in a novel form into the document (see Fig. 7.5). Although the passport still contains, in visible form, the same information offered by machine-readable passports issued since 1987, the microchip containing biometric information on the passport holder allows the use of machines to decipher information identifying the bearer, such as a digital face image stored in a machine-readable form and digitally decipherable fingerprints. The body of the passport applicant has been turned into a marker, which can be sensed by ‘smart cameras’ (Kember, 2014). This body surveillance (Lyon, 2001) adds a fourth mode of cooperation in the history of the passport as a medium of movement as outlined above. Through the biometric verification of travellers at borders, the image continues to fulfil both representational and operational purposes, while still serving as the principal way of connecting passports to those carrying them upon examination. Visual technologies therefore play an important role for inscribing means of symbolic bordering (Chouliaraki, 2017) into material documents and normalising practices of social sorting.

7.5

Conclusions

Increasingly, document controls and other bureaucratic procedures designed to prevent unwanted migration are being strengthened and rationalised (Torpey,

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Fig. 7.5 E-passports, such as this model passport design from 2012, has an embedded electronic chip which contains the bearer’s biometric information. A digital photograph of the face and digital fingerprints are also stored in the national passport register. Source The Police Museum’s collection

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2018, p. 192). Central to this has been the standardisation of travel documents, including regular technology upgrades intended to facilitate comparisons across numerous registers and databases and to make it difficult to counterfeit or manipulate passports. Unified databases and centralised data processing have produced greater uniformity in passport documents, enabling certain locally developed solutions to be scaled up for global use. The centres of calculation have also become more uniform, relying ever less on human operators to handle the data during transfer from one point to another. Today’s Finnish passports contain only information on the passport holder that can be obtained directly from the Finnish Population Information System, so neither applicants nor issuers can make changes to the information in the document without these changes already present in the system. For instance, if there is an error in the Population Information System data, the necessary changes need to be recorded in a database before the passport can be issued. Ultimately, the printed passport is just a visible token of a much broader, vast information infrastructure, in which the various intermediate societal bodies handling the documentation are no longer visible as individuals. In addition to storing information in computerised databases and providing access to it, the development of information technology has facilitated increased information sharing across a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Globally interoperable systems are needed for processing data obtained from other kinds of systems, in use by other countries, that encourage trust over greater distances. Hence, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a transnational actor, has issued standard specifications for passports, and there are ISO standards developed for operations such as capturing faceprints and fingerprints (e.g. the above-mentioned ISO/IEC standard), with the aim of sharing them among a variety of systems independently of any single provider. Consequently, international standards, in particular those defined by the ISO and ICAO, specify general properties that passports must possess, such as certain ones for the biometric elements of the ‘ePassport’. Accordingly, developers, designers and suppliers of passport-related technology must take into account international standards and regulations related to these elements (e.g. security features) while participating in their continual development. Passport standards (alongside data protection laws) smooth the friction between viewpoints; after all, the main interests of passports’ developers and manufacturers lie not in regulating mobility or protecting privacy as such but in providing means of cooperation among various stakeholders who may not agree with each other (see also Häkli, 2015). The associated perspective on mediation as negotiation among several stakeholders has been developed by scholars interested in the negotiation of work (e.g. Bowker et al., 2016; Schüttpelz, 2017;

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Schüttpelz & Thielmann, 2013)—negotiation that we have laid bare through archival documents and interviews that we have begun conducting on the history of the Finnish passport. While the notion of immutable mobiles as well as that of boundary objects are helpful in considering the roles that passports play in social lives, passports are first and foremost media of movement, used within varying regimes of negotiating a right to travel. As our brief history of Finland’s passports has shown, the passport as a medium of movement has not been as immutable as one might assume, but neither has it allowed for excessive localisation. Its history has witnessed both practices that have long remained relatively fixed as well as frequent variation in ways of applying for, issuing, and controlling passports. In Finland, these can be traced from the early nineteenth century to today in terms of four modes of cooperation or four passport regimes, along the following development lines: how citizens apply for a passport, with whose consent, and how the means of demonstrating qualifications for receiving a passport have changed. It has been a slow, but inevitable process from emphasising the visibility of the issuers’ actual handling of the documents to inscribing the applicant’s body within the passport, in tandem with slowly but surely removing any trace of an individual issuer and then refusing to let the applicant touch a passport without the touch having been registered via a biometric identifier and verified as authentic by an additional step of mediation. Reflecting on the passport as a medium of movement allows one to gain a more thorough understanding of the kinds of mobilities outlined by Sheller and Urry, by pinpointing the constraints, the rerouting and the negotiations in which one has to be involved if wishing to travel at all. Equally, our reflections function as an empirically grounded example of the landscape of variations in which practices of cooperation are embedded. They therefore remind of the contingency of our current passport regime, one that has already been ‘rewired’ since the beginning of 2020 to include health information in response to the COVID19 pandemic, a response echoing restrictions in the 1940s due to tuberculosis, scabies and diphtheria. However, just as COVID-19 is traced and verified today at border crossings in novel ways, in the future passport regimes may be verified by actants we cannot even yet imagine.

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8

Entangling Bodies and Objects in the Air Larissa Schindler

Abstract

In the context of recent discussions on co-operation within media studies, this contribution focuses on material co-operations, i.e. on the entanglement of bodies and objects as participants in situated concerted actions within the ongoing accomplishment of social practices. More specifically, I am concerned with the empirical case of air travel, addressing material co-operation with regard to boarding, accommodating to the plane, and finally detaching oneself from the entanglement when leaving the plane. Viewed from this perspective, sociality on board turns out to be a complex social process that depends on different participants like the crew, passengers, their bodies, objects, and material infrastructure. Not only flying, but also boarding and disembarking are clearly shaped by the materiality of the vehicle. While accomplishing an utterly material co-operation of bodies and infrastructure on board, passengers contribute to a culture of “civil inattention”, only occasionally interrupted by polite conversation. Even conflict is more often covertly than overtly acted out. However, the same infrastructure that contributes to the mostly friendly and peaceful atmosphere on board can also turn into a medium of conflict: overhead compartments, seats, arm rests, food, drinks, the bodies of other passengers and their smells or noises, all this can be perceived as part of an exciting experience, as hardly relevant to one’s own situation, or as annoying. Co-operation proves to be a fruitful concept to understand not only how material dimensions of the social are interwoven with the interactions of persons, L. Schindler (B) Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Methoden der Empirischen Sozialforschung, Universität Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_8

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bodies, objects, and infrastructure; the concept furthermore delineates how thick such material entanglements can be and to what extent all participants have to make a concerted effort to put them into effect.

8.1

Introduction1

Cooperation is a widely used term. Recently, it has been taken up in media studies in order to conceptualize a practice-oriented approach that is particularly informed by ethnomethodology (cf. Gießmann et al., 2019; Schüttpelz, 2017). Replacing communication as the key concept, it aims to re-conceptualize media studies by delineating it as an investigation of how social situations are accomplished by different participants, among them media, in ongoing concerted actions (cf. Gießmann et al., 2019). The volume at hand boils this account down to an essence of mutually making mutual making. With largely socio-linguistic ambitions, Charles Goodwin (2018) has introduced the hyphenated term co-operative action in order to emphasize that most human action is built on (transformations of) earlier accomplishments of others. In what follows, I refer to these concepts, suggesting they provide a promising starting point for treating a particular analytical gap within discussions of the materiality of the social: In the last four decades, numerous studies have shown that we cannot fully understand social processes, if we ignore the contribution of objects (cf. Latour, 1996; Law, 1999; Knorr Cetina, 2000), since they considerably contribute to the course of social processes. At the same time, (human) bodies have gained the attention of the social and cultural sciences (cf. Shilling, 2005, 2007) since they appear to be shaped by social processes as well as contributing to them. People’s intentions do not always correlate with their body’s activities that may interfere, support or stay neutral to these intentions. Accomplishing a practice, however, deeply depends on our bodies. This is evident for physical practices like dancing or sport, yet it also applies to activities that prima facie are regarded as cognitive. Working with a computer, for example, not only requires a body in front of the display operating the keyboard, but consists of many different embodied activities (cf. Schmidt, 2008). Both strands of discussion, i.e. studies on objects as well as on (human) bodies, have produced important and innovative contributions to social theory and to empirical research. However, they have not yet been systematically tied to each other. The modern demarcation line between humans and non-humans seems to impede thinking 1

This contribution largely builds on and rethinks previous work on this topic, particularly Schindler (2021), where parts of it have appeared in different form.

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about the relationship of bodies and objects, attributing a kind of guest-status in social theory to both. Only a small number of studies have overcome this analytical restraint by focusing on the relation as well as on the entanglement of bodies and objects (e.g. Hirschauer, 2004; Kalthoff, 2014; Schmidt, 2008; Rammert & Schubert, 2017). In this vein, my contribution focusses on material co-operations, i.e. on the entanglement of bodies and objects as participants of situated concerted actions within the ongoing accomplishment of social practices. I adopt Goodwin’s spelling with a hyphen in order to emphasize the common ground of action, i.e. its character as a joint operation. However, focussing on material entanglements (not on speech), I observe coincident rather than sequential co-operations. With this focus, co-operation is not understood as unconditionally harmonic, but, as I will elaborate in the fifth section, conflict and failure are also co-operatively accomplished (cf. Messmer, 2003; Röhl, 2019). For these ambitions, I will seize upon an empirical case, which is certainly not a unique case to reflect on this topic, but a promising one: air travel, and particularly the question of how bodies and objects get entangled during air flights. The practice of flying might be considered as the technically most advanced way of traveling since it enables human bodies to move in a way they otherwise could not. It requires a tight entangling of passenger’s bodies with the flying vehicle in order to build a vehicular unit (Goffman, 1971, p. 26–40). The paper is structured as follows: Before I start with the topic of material entanglements, I briefly introduce the methodology of my study (Sect. 8.2). I then focus on the question how human bodies and objects (including the vehicle) make up a vehicular unit able to fly through the skies (Sect. 8.3). I reconstruct how passengers accommodate to the setting (Sect. 8.4) and how difficulties in co-operation are dealt with (Sect. 8.5). Finally (Sect. 8.6), I focus on how individuals detach from the vehicular unit again in order to build one of their own: a pedestrian who walks away from the plane through the airport towards the destination of travel. In the course of these sections I hope to impart not only a deep description of material entanglements as an ongoing co-operative accomplishment, but—in addition—an impression of the material density of such co-operations.

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Methodology

The empirical data for the following analysis comes from an ethnographic study on air travel, which I conducted between 2016 and 2020.2 It focussed on the embodied dimensions of technically augmented mobility. Following an ethnographic approach (Breidenstein et al., 2013), the methodology was based on context-sensitive methods as well as on the combination of different data. The corpus consists of field notes of 47 short-, middle- and long-haul flights (including photos and some short videos), 22 qualitative interviews with passengers, flight attendants and pilots, and 21 “logbooks” (see below). As the research period indicates, this research was conducted before the corona virus outbreak. This obviously facilitated research conditions while on the other hand limiting the analysis to the pre-corona practice of flying. It neither takes into account new regulations (like face masks or further health controls) nor the uncertainties of looming lockdowns for travel planning. However, these changes do not fundamentally challenge the analysis: Although the new regulations have undoubtedly changed the practice of flying in some respects, they do not replace or remove all the other corporeal challenges that flights have always presented. Like most fields of investigation, airplanes provide a particular setting for applying and combining different methods. As a semi-public field, air travel is relatively easy accessible for a western academic: One needs financial means and technological skills to buy a ticket as well as adequate travel documents. Since the design of most planes forces passengers to sit down and accomplish only relatively still activities, one can even write field notes while traveling. Thus one’s own embodied experience can be reconstructed quite well. Also, participant observation in general offers good possibilities to approach tacit dimensions of the social (Hirschauer, 2006). However, these reconstructions are limited to the restricted view that the narrow seat rows of airliners provide. (Photos and videos unfortunately, are restricted in the same way.) In addition, participant observation in general is limited to what is present in the situation (cf. Scheffer, 2002). Interviews broaden the scope, since they provide the researcher with different perspectives and different background knowledge. Not only do other passengers perceive flights differently, but the crew’s and other staff’s perspectives, which otherwise are not as easily accessible, can also be included. Interviewees can report on events that took place before or after the flight. These data are, however, 2

The ethnographic study “Air travel: On the Embodied Accomplishment of Technically Augmented Mobility” was funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under research grant number 271437443 (principal investigator: Larissa Schindler).

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limited to the informant’s ability of reporting and to the different dynamics of the social interaction of interviewing (cf. Cuff & Francis, 1978; Deppermann, 2013; Hester & Francis, 1994), inter alia interviews suffer from a time distance to the event.3 In the interviews I conducted, interviewees also tended to speak about air travel in general rather than narrating about the particularities of one flight. To sum up, participant observation as a “mobile method” (Büscher et al., 2010) provides the researcher with deep insights into tacit and embodied experiences of air traveling. At the same time, such observations suffer from the narrow view in the plane and are restricted to present events. Interviews, on the other hand, can considerably widen the perspective of the study, since they include the views of other passengers and staff. Also, they can provide background knowledge and report about events before and after a flight. At the same time, interviews are restricted to informants’ abilities of reporting and are usually conducted after flights. Having this methodological gap in mind, I have used a less prominent type of data: I have asked passengers to write about their experiences while or shortly after an air travel. By now, I have collected 21 such “logbooks” on short- and long-distance flights.4 Like interviews, these are invited stories (Cuff & Francis, 1978) as they would not have been produced without my request. However, they are less influenced by the researcher due to her absence from the writing process. Also, logbooks are closer in time to the actual flight than interviews. They can be characterized as a “mobile method” (Büscher et al., 2010). As such they add further perspectives to the field notes of my participant observations, which is crucial particularly for all areas where access for participant observation is limited as e.g. at the security check (for a detailed discussion: Pütz, 2012). Data was analyzed according to the principles of qualitative research, which were paradigmatically formulated in Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Iterative gathering and analyzing of data lead to adapting the analytical focus and thus ensures a continuous quality control. The combination of different data is

3

Interviews on board could be a solution for this problem. However, in the setting of an airplane severe ethical problems arise: Since both (interviewer and interviewee) cannot escape from the situation, reluctant potential interviewees will have to reject the request of the interview explicitly, since implicit and therefore socially easier forms of rejection (like repeatedly postponing or not answering) are impossible. This might create a more than unpleasant situation for them. 4 A detailed discussion of logbooks in this research on air travel can be found elsewhere (Schindler, 2020).

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particularly influenced by Herbert Kalthoff’s (2010) considerations on triangulation. Since different methods generate different phenomenal domains, he suggests using the emerging differences prolifically.

8.3

Building a Vehicular Unit

While objects and (human) bodies are mainly discussed in different theory strands of the material turn, as I have mentioned in the introduction, we find a somewhat more nonchalant dealing with the demarcation line between humans and nonhumans in the work of some classics. For example, Marcel Mauss in an often quoted remark (1979, p. 75) declared the body to be man’s first technical object. Erhard Schüttpelz (2010, p. 111) persuasively concludes from that, from this perspective, a strict separation of (human) bodies and technique is implausible. Rather there is a continuum from (1) embodied skills (like running or sleeping) to (2) skills of using tools to (3) replacing human activities by objects (e.g. traps). Decades later, Erving Goffman (1971) challenges the same demarcation line. In his famous book “Relations in Public” he investigates different forms of interaction the modern individual can engage in. One of these is taking part in urban traffic as a “vehicular unit”, a term that immediately associates the individual with technique. Actually, in Goffman’s account a pedestrian can just as well be a vehicular unit as a car. He defines a vehicular unit as “a shell of some kind controlled (usually from within) by a human pilot or navigator” (Goffman, 1971, p. 26) that participates in road traffic. Compared to cars, pedestrians are described as vulnerable, since they only have a soft shell of clothing and their own skin. Yet, they are very flexible in moving around. Colliding between pedestrians is unlikely to happen, and if so, a collision has rather social than physical consequences. Concentrating on the body, Mauss does not mention mobilities or traffic. Yet, he picks up mobility-related practices like swimming and walking albeit from the standpoint of the individuals’ culturally shaped skills. Goffman explicitly handles road traffic; in his account, however, vehicular units are observed from the outside, i.e. as parts of interactions and negotiations among different participants of road traffic. Taking Mauss’ and Goffman’s approach as a starting point, in what follows I am focussing on the airplane as a vehicular unit. In contrast to Goffman’s approach, however, I will not observe it from outside, say from the standpoint of another plane or a control tower. Rather, I try to conceptualize the airplane from within, as a (vehicular) unit composed of different (human and non-human)

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participants with their particular social and material characteristics. Thus, I concentrate on the social life within its aluminum shell, trying to understand how different participants (passengers, their bodies, objects, vehicular infrastructure) co-operatively build this mobile unit by accomplishing different practices, i.e. by mutually making mutual makings. These practices are, as Lin rightly emphasizes, culturally shaped (cf. Lin, 2015a, b). It goes without saying that air travel does not start at the door of the plane. Rather, it usually begins months before with booking a ticket. Detailed information has to be passed on to the airline, documents have to be prepared, and luggage has to be packed according to transport regulations. In some cases, the traveler also needs vaccinations or other medication in advance. On the day of travel, a vehicular unit fit to travel has to be built, composed of body and travel objects. It leaves the house, reaches the airport and passes through it to the gate. En route different controls take place, in which the vehicular unit has to dissamble and ressamble its components (cf. Schindler, 2015). Sometimes the body too needs small transformations like food, drinks, chewing gum, tranquilizers or other medication to prepare for the flight. Once this is completed, passengers usually have to wait in a queue before they can enter the plane. This queue results from the typical design of airliners with their narrow doors, tight seat rows and long aisles. Finding one’s seat, storing hand luggage and accommodating into the seat is a sluggish procedure, especially in a full plane. It slows down the movement in the aisle and thus extends the queue at the entrance even more. In a way, this waiting anticipates the time of immobility passengers are going to spend during the flight, being part of the vehicular unit airplane. Several authors have emphasized the emotional entanglement of vehicle and passenger. In her studies on “auto-mobility”, Mimi Sheller (2004) finds a close relation between motion and emotion. In a similar line, Ole Jensen and Philipp Vannini (2016) emphasize the difference in kinaesthetic sensations coming up in airliners and small “bush planes”. Thomas Alkemeyer (2006) delineates how a particular gestalt emerges, accomplished by the entangled movement of a vehicle and a human body (or various bodies) in a given environment. These entanglements, however, do not exist per se, but have to be initiated, accomplished and detached. In planes, building the vehicular unit starts (at latest) with boarding the plane and looking for the appropriate seat. As I have mentioned, this can be a sluggish, inconvenient procedure. The following two fragments from my field notes highlight how different this stage can be: Right after the queue in front of the airplane comes the queue inside. The aisle is full of people and the overhead bins are full—there is no place for my suitcase. I ask my

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seat neighbours to put my jacket and my bag on my (window) seat, looking for a solution for the suitcase. A lady with a suitcase is coming along the aisle towards me, that is from the rear to the front. I look at her and at her suitcase and then I say “funny problem”—she doesn’t react. (…) I ask my seat neighbours in English to get up to let me put the suitcase onto my seat. They squeeze out of the row—the lady with the suitcase doesn’t move. A little annoyed, I tell her that I will put my suitcase into the row in order to let her pass, hoping she will understand that we are doing a favor to her (although I would honestly prefer not to do so if I only saw a chance to escape the situation otherwise). (Fieldnotes, short-haul, Frankfurt to Gothenburg, November 2013). This time, entering the plane is extraordinarily easy. There is nobody behind me, as I was the last one to come in. Also, those who are seated in the front of the plane, board from the front, while I have come in from the rear. I put my jacket into the overhead bins and sit down on my aisle seat: Nobody has to get up for me, I don’t have to squeeze into the seat row. (Fieldnotes, short-haul, Berlin to Vienna, November 2016).

Both fragments describe the same situation of moving inside an airplane to one’s seat. However, the first one highlights the troubles that can come up, while the second one reports unusual ease. In general, the aisle of an airliner is just wide enough for one person. Moving in more than one lane, as we are used to in urban traffic, is not possible. Additionally, the way to one’s seat is full of obstacles: the seat rows on the side, other passengers and their luggage. Being in a semi-public place however, everybody co-operates in accomplishing “civil inattention” (Goffman, 1963, 83–88) and—as a crucial element of it—passengers co-operate in avoiding physical contact with other humans and (preferably) with other’s personal items as well. In the first fragment, this turns out to be a little complicated, carrying some potential for a conflict. As a consequence of physical density the situation is socially fragile. Compared to boarding a train or an underground, many little problems have to be solved, sometimes by giving up civil inattention for a short conversation, as in the first fragment. Still, the passenger is a vehicular unit of his or her own, a pedestrian moving into a motionless plane, albeit this has to be accomplished under relatively dense circumstances.5 However, settling in one’s seat one begins to become part of a bigger vehicular unit that soon will roll over the runway to take off into the skies. Storing hand luggage and taking one’s seat is the first step towards this transformation, fastening the seatbelt the second.

5

See Peter Adey (2006) for an impressive analysis of the relation between mobility and immobility.

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175

Accommodating

Taking a seat in an airplane is often a complicated procedure. Unless one has the aisle seat, one has to squeeze into the seat row carrying all objects one will use during the following hours. Squeezing into the row and taking a seat, however, does not happen without practical knowledge. Indeed, sitting is a culturally shaped activity. Marcel Mauss (1979, p. 81) proposes to distinguish squatting mankind and sitting mankind. In western cultures, sitting in chairs or seats is a more than common activity. As David Bissell (2008, p. 1702) states: “For all the attention that walking has and continues to receive, (…) it is the case that the chair is frequently the site of the practice of everyday life”. The practice of sitting in a chair or a seat is a well established technique of the body in western cultures that can be found in different forms of mobility as well as in professional and mundane activities. Most adults associate sitting with comfort, yet this feeling derives not only from the object, but also from their embodied techniques of sitting. Bissell (2008, p. 1704) emphasizes that the whole body, i.e. the back, the neck, the arms and legs, are enlisted in producing a comfortable sensation while sitting. “(T)he seated body is constantly refiguring and becoming refigured through the cultivation of a sensibility of comfort”, he (2008, p. 1704) argues. These embodied techniques of sitting are usually learnt early, in the first years of our lives. Thus, they become an everyday routine, a mostly tacit knowledge, we hardly ever reflect or talk about. Explicitly, we rather make use of strategic knowledge about the conditions of remaining seated over a longer period. Since air passengers are supposed to stay in their seats for most of the time on board, they develop strategic knowledge about what to carry with them and what to leave in the overhead bins. They calculate what will be needed in order to be able to stay immobile in their seats for the given time. Although seats usually have a convenient design, as long as one fits into physical norms of the average body,6 many passengers feel the need to actively accommodate to the setting, which includes using different objects. The following fragment of a logbook reports on such an activity: This time, I don’t want to miss the take-off. So I get myself situated (get out book and iPad, put on socks, unpack blanket, stow headphones in the seat pouch, put on silk scarf, place cardigan on lap) while keeping an eye on the safety instructions. They’re 6

See Joyce L. Huff (2009) for discourses against overweight people on airplanes. There are numerous groups of people who do not fully conform to the norm of seats, being taller or smaller than the average, children and babies; they all have to find a specific way to accommodate to the given setting.

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done in a funny way to keep you waiting for the gags and make you pay a bit more attention. We taxi to the runway. It’s freezing cold, why does everyone have their air vents open that are blasting ice-cold air? I wrap into my blanket and hope the others are going to get cold as well. (Logbook N, intercontinental flight, September 2015).

The author of the logbook had missed the takeoff of the last flight, because she had fallen asleep. The entry slightly suggests that her activities are to prevent her from falling asleep again. Clearly, she reports on the difficulties of not feeling cold, since she cannot control the other passengers’ activities. She has brought various items with her (and has gotten others as part of the airline’s service) that she uses to prevent getting cold and bored. These items also serve to declare (and defend) “territories of the self” (Goffman, 1971, pp. 51–86) that are potentially contested in the narrow space of the plane’s seat rows. Thus she materially accommodates herself to the specific situation on board, using different “plane items” as media to fit her own body into a vehicular unit that is going to fly. Some of these items (like the blanket) are typically provided by the airline that thereby also contributes to the process of accommodating, albeit in a somehow limited way: blankets and earphones are typically available on long-distance flights but not pillows or books. Such processes of accommodation have also been analyzed for the practice of using wheelchairs: Myriam Winance (2006) has focused on the interaction of people suffering from neuromuscular diseases and their wheelchair when adjusting it to their specific needs. She argues that the relation to other entities (like a wheelchair, for instance) shapes the identity of a person. With a new or newly adjusted wheelchair, new possibilities and new disabilities emerge. In this line, accommodating to an airplane seems to be a necessary activity in order to create a “flying body” (Schindler, 2015) with airliner-specific abilities and disabilities. For safety reasons, such a body and its objects have to be part of a formation that prevents them from converting into projectiles in case of severe turbulences. For economic reasons, such a body should occupy as little space in the airplane as possible. For humanistic reasons, however, the demarcation line between humans and non-humans is accomplished inter alia by conceding more space than the material body alone would need. The following fragment of a logbook reports on accommodating for an overnight flight: Having reached our row, we stow our carry-on luggage above our seats, take off our shoes and store them as well, and put on thick socks. In my seat, I place my own pillow against the window and open the bag with the blanket. (Logbook B, intercontinental flight, May 2014).

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Similar to the other fragment, the author of this logbook has brought plane items with her. However, in her description the work of immobilizing the body seems to be even more obvious: Taking off her shoes and storing them, slightly suggests that she does not anticipate having to get up again soon. Putting a pillow between head and window imitates a sleeping position. Thus, the logbook entry develops a further notion: It gives the impression that bodies are stored into the plane almost like objects. To sum up, transferring human bodies in airplanes requires an ongoing entangling of bodies and material infrastructure. Thereby different participants continuously reconfigure each other in a sophisticated co-operative process. Travelers thus become passengers and objects at hand become flying items that are used for accommodating. Some of these objects are made available by the airline, others have to be brought in by the passengers. Thus they leave room (and an imperative at the same time) to accomplish “individuality” while co-operatively adjust to the setting.

8.5

Difficult Co-operations

Accommodating into the flying vehicular unit is neither easy nor does it come without problems. Rather, as I have mentioned in the introduction, conflict, disputes, breakdowns, and failure are essential aspects of co-operation. Common sense has it that conflict and dispute are opposites of cooperation. However, a closer sociological analysis exposes that these are co-operative practices, accomplished by different participants, just like any other practice. Heinz Messmer (2003) e.g. has elaborated in detail that dispute can only co-operatively be maintained since both sides have to keep disputing. If not, the conflict may by closed with a misunderstanding instead. Tobias Röhl (2019) has shown that breakdowns create very specific ways of being made public and commented upon. In doing so, normative expectations and concerns are often explicated, which is also a co-operative doing. Conflicts may thus create irritation, yet they are essentially co-operative in their accomplishment. Within air travel, different forms of difficulties and conflicts can be found. Inter alia they are based in its specific entangling of bodies and infrastructure. Traveling in general, and in planes in particular, requires to consider specific needs of human bodies, or, as Gillian Fuller (2009, p. 70) puts it: “In order to travel, in order to deterritorialize, to move in a way that a human body normally couldn’t, one must first become the most basic of bodies—a body with

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organs—a body that runs on metabolic time. This body needs sleep, food, air and a modicum of physical activity to keep the blood pumping.”

Airlines consider these needs of a basic body in the infrastructure, they provide: Seats are built in a way that allows different activities like sitting, eating and (albeit inconveniently) sleeping, since they are usually cushioned and adjustable with armrests and a removable tray table. Flight attendants serve food and drinks. Also, they work on establishing a friendly atmosphere, and are trained to pacify rogue passengers in different ways. In any kind of conflict, however, they have to follow strict rules regarding the interaction with a passenger. In addition, there is a “pacification by design” (Frers, 2006): the close seat rows are rather built for quiet activities than for moving around, oxygen supply and light in the cabin are regulated, and there is very little space for movement within the narrow aisles. Also, many airlines provide music and movies as entertainment on middle- and long-haul flights, earphones and a blanket. Yet, this infrastructure for basic needs is not perfectly adapted to everyone. Rather, passengers have to adjust their needs to the infrastructure by accommodating to the given setting. This is not done once for the whole flight but seems to be an ongoing co-operative accomplishment, as there is a certain potential of failing at any time. The following logbook entry gives an impression of the ongoing work of accommodating: It’s kind of difficult to get situated in the narrow seat: I’m still cold, so I wrap into the blanket. But I still have a beverage and snacks on the tray table in front of me, so I can barely manage to get the blanket draped around my legs. It is also difficult to reach my backpack under the seat in front of me to get to my headphones for the movie. (Logbook N, intercontinental flight, September 2015).

Airplane seats are designed to be used for very different activities: reading, listening to music, watching movies, eating and sleeping. As a “design of compromise” they do not cater to every need in the same way.7 Eating might appear easier than sleeping. However, as the fragment reports, these activities are not in a clear sequence—as long as the tray table is not cleared, the passenger is even more immobile. With the opportunity to eat comes a particular restriction of movement. In addition to these material restrictions, certain activities have a sequential order: Finally boarding starts. (…) I’m incredibly tired and annoyed that I’m not allowed to recline my seat until we’re in the air. I get out my sleeping equipment, inflate the 7

Here, I borrow from Jörg Potthast (2016, pp. 143–44), who characterizes airports as “architectures of compromise”.

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neck pillow. After what feels like an eternity, we take off, and as soon as we’re at altitude I recline my seat, put on my sleeping mask, and sink into a comatose sleep from which I only wake three hours later. Everything hurts and I’m terribly uncomfortable. (Logbook N, intercontinental flight, September 2015).

In this fragment, different time-demands seem to conflict. The body’s (metabolic) time does not coincide with the airplane’s safety procedures, which are an often ambivalent concomitant of air travel. While most passengers presumably agree with high security norms, safety procedures are also a frequent object of mockery and anger. Flight attendants embody them in several ways: They perform safety instructions in a predefined way, control security belts, seat rests, and tray tables before taking off and landing. To be part of the flying vehicular unit thus demands from the passengers to subject one’s body’s needs under the vehicle’s rules. In Susan Leigh Star’s (2004) terms, we find “cooperation without consensus” here, accomplished in a sophisticated interaction between passengers, flight attendants, material infrastructure and explicit rules. In a way, this continues when the passenger finally sleeps. Although the infrastructure of the plane provides a seat that allows for sleep, this way of sleeping considerably differs from western habits of slumber (cf. Elias, 2000; Crook, 2008). Neither are we used to sleeping while seated nor in the middle of a crowd—even though seat rows do provide passengers with a bit of privacy. Here again, the body has to adjust to the given infrastructure. Available “flying items” like an inflatable cushion or a sleep mask do not always suffice to avoid pain. In addition, airliners are a medium of mass transport par excellence, at least in economy class. In contrast to most of our everyday life experiences airliners often transfer hundreds of passengers. Within this crowd, different interests emerge. Some prefer cold air, others eat things they have brought with them or bring along noisy or crying children. Although the atmosphere is mostly quiet and friendly, there is a potential for conflicts among passengers. Often, these conflicts unfold covertly rather than overtly, as a frequent flyer in one of my interviews reported: And the thing is, you sit next to each other and there are armrests on the outside, but you have to share one in the middle. So, when I’m sitting next to someone, it’s often the case that this is some kind of conflict, fight, or negotiation that isn’t verbal. Instead it’s somehow physically, especially with men. I see it like this: okay, we’re both men. Masculinity, dominance, we both want to put our arm on the armrest now, even if we don’t really need to, and make it clear that this is my territory, I’m taking this, just

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because I can, because I’m manlier than you. (Interview with a frequent flyer, March 2015).

Here, the material infrastructure provides an opportunity for overt and covert conflicts that concern questions of social distinction between men. However, having such a conflict (overtly or covertly) still requires a basic co-operation between the squabbling opponents. In the above fragment, the conflict remains somehow covert, but can be activated at any point. The armrest thus provides not only an infrastructure for comfort, but also an infrastructure for acting out conflict. The armrest may be a popular topic regarding airplane conflicts, but it’s not the only one, and it is not restricted to men, as the following fragment from an interview with another frequent flyer reports. She told me: What often bothers me are the smells of fellow travelers. Ugh, one time there was this old lady. She was wearing this really strong musk perfume, it was terrible. To me, it feels like the senses are on a wholly different level. And odors are the worst part. (…) And the fight for the armrest. When you’re next to someone who takes up a lot of space, it can be really unpleasant. Especially on a long-haul, you’re completely helpless. (Interview with a frequent flyer, June 2016).

In this fragment, the whole presence of other bodies, presumably the tight presence of many other bodies, provides a ground for conflict and for a feeling of vulnerability. Not only do passengers accommodate to the infrastructure of the airplane, they also have to find a way to co-operate (with or without consensus) with the other passengers on board along with their bodies that may smell, make noises and claim territory. Numerous studies have shown that a large part of flight attendants’ work consists in establishing a friendly atmosphere on board (e.g. Hochschild, 2012; Lin, 2015a). Yet, (most) passengers and their bodies cooperate in this endeavor by concertedly accomplishing an atmosphere of “civil inattention” or polite talk in a crowded and dense room most of the time. Bodies and objects can easily turn into media both of co-operatively accomplishing a mostly peaceful atmosphere and of conflict.

8.6

Detaching

Making up a vehicular unit is, as I have outlined, an ongoing co-operative accomplishment of different participants. This unit, however, is only assembled for the timespan of a flight. It has to be detached in order to finish the flight. In this process, the individuals loosen their entanglement with the vehicle in order to

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re-construct their own vehicular unit. In what follows, I will focus on this process of detaching, distinguishing two different forms: firstly, we find a temporary detaching when passengers get up from their seats and move as another vehicular unit within the plane; secondly, there is the ultimate form of detaching in order to leave the plane and finish the flight. The first, temporary form of building a separate vehicular unit within the plane happens relatively seldom, since the infrastructure of airplanes impedes it whenever possible. Instead, passengers’ bodies are bound to their seats by the material design as well as by explicit instructions, while flight attendants move through the plane in order to provide passengers with food and drinks, taking away leftovers, disseminating a friendly ambiance, and controlling passengers’ compliance with rules. Passengers only get up from their seats to move within the plane for those activities that cannot be handed over to flight attendants or material infrastructure. Mainly, they go to use restrooms or they carry out small exercises to prevent thromboses and embolisms. However, these activities of moving cannot always be accomplished without difficulties, as the following fragment from my field notes reports: While eating, I notice that I need to go to the restrooms. However, I don’t want to disturb my seat neighbor, and thus I decide to wait. Anyway, it would be difficult to approach there—as long as flight attendants are still going their ways with their trolleys it is difficult to pass. (Field notes of a short-haul flight from Frankfurt to Vienna in October 2013).

In this fragment, different difficulties of moving (relatively) independently within an infrastructure of sitting are mentioned. One being, that getting up often disturbs seat neighbors, since the seat rows are narrow. The other being, that the narrow aisle too only leaves room for one person. “De-commodating” is as complicated as accommodating, since the vehicle’s setting does not release its parts easily. At the end of a flight however, many people seem to actively seek detachment from the vehicular unit by getting up from theirs seats as soon as possible. The following fragment from a frequent traveler’s logbook reports on getting off the plane in detail: Shortly after, there is an announcement that seats are to be put in the upright position and window blinds are to be opened. All electronic devices must be deactivated and the seatbelt sign is switched on, and we are reminded of it once again. The captain says a few things about the weather and the land- ing approach. Should be no problem, visibility is good and it’s not raining. The flaps are extended and I can feel the landing

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gear extend. Somehow, one focuses more on the landing than on the take-off. You can really feel the descent and are busy swallowing to help adjust to the pressure. The plane accelerates one last time, and you touch down. After that, it’s always the same scene. Announcement: Please remain seated until the seatbelt sign is switched off and the plane stops moving at the gate. It’s a good thing this announcement exists, but it is futile. As soon as the plane comes to a stop, most people jump out of their seats like maniacs and get their belongings from the overhead bins, standing in the aisles and blocking everything. You could almost think there’s a fire or you’ll be denied entry at the border if you’re not fast enough, even though it will be a while before everyone can get off the plane. (Logbook B, intercontinental flight, September 2014).

Similar as in conversations, closings don’t just happen. Complex activities of “opening up closings” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973) take place in airplanes as well. Often, there are formalized rituals like the landing announcement, which the logbook mentions. Requesting to move the seat rest back into the upright position, to open window blinds, or to switch off electronic devices also indicate possible dangers. At the same time, passengers are reminded to contribute to the security of landing by suspending their activities and coming back to the position of take-off. Thus reminded of their embodied existence (and their vulnerability to injuries), some passengers report on deeply corporeal sensations like the altitude compensation mentioned above, the embodied sensation of losing height and of landing or of particular fears. While landing, and maybe particularly at touch-down, bodies that were bound to their seats get an activating impulse. The rationality of getting up early is certainly questionable, as the logbook suggests. However, it might be a consequence of this activating impulse. Also, by getting back one’s hand luggage from the overhead bins and re-connecting mobile phones, the individual prepares for becoming a vehicular unit of its own again. This vehicular unit passenger gradually detaches itself from the airplane as it stands up, takes it’s luggage, re-connects to voice networks and walks out of the plane. There again, it walks through the airport towards a connecting flight or— reassembling with the rest of the luggage and perhaps passing immigration and other controls—towards the final destination of travel.

8.7

Conclusion

Taking Goffman’s concept of a vehicular unit and Mauss’ concept of body techniques as a starting point, I have focused on the material foundations of co-operation based on empirical data from an ethnographic study on air travel. Indifferent to the modern demarcation line between human and non-human, these

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two concepts allow us to investigate the entangling of bodies and objects as an ongoing co-operative accomplishment. Viewed from this perspective, sociality on board is a complex social process dependent on different participants like the crew, passengers, their bodies, objects, and material infrastructure. Not only flying, but also boarding is clearly shaped by the materiality of the vehicle. Passengers coming in have to stop being a vehicular unit of their own in order to become part of the aircraft as another vehicular unit, fitting their bodies into the plane’s narrow seat rows, staying nearly immobile there, while flight attendants move through the plane instead. To fit into this “infrastructure of sitting”, passengers use different objects to accommodate to the given setting. While accomplishing this deeply material co-operation, they mostly contribute to a culture of “civil inattention” among passengers, which is sometimes interrupted by polite conversation. Even conflict is more often covertly than overtly acted out. However, the same infrastructure that contributes to the mostly friendly and peaceful atmosphere on board can turn into a medium of conflict: seat rests, arm rests, food, drinks, bodies of other passengers respectively their smells or noises, all this can be perceived as part of an exciting experience, as hardly relevant for one’s own situation, or as annoying. In this vein, co-operation is a fruitful concept to understand not only how material dimensions of the social are woven among persons, bodies, objects, and infrastructure. The concept furthermore delineates how dense such material entanglements can be and how much of a concerted effort all participants have to make in order to put them into effect.

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Part IV Participating and Privacy

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Information Control and Trust in the Context of Digital Technologies Thilo Hagendorff

Abstract

Modern information societies are characterized by a virtually unbroken trend to network more and more technical artifacts. Among other factors, this trend is illustrated by the proliferation of the Internet of Things and associated phenomena such as “pervasive computing” or “ubiquitous computing”. However, networking simultaneously creates a range of vulnerabilities: Security gaps, the repression of data protection, breaches of privacy, hacking or cyber-attacks, the surveillance of telecommunications, et cetera. The essential feature of all these phenomena is a loss of information control. Technological methods used to exercise control over the collection, processing and dissemination of personal information largely failed, particularly in the context of digital media have. One consequence of this failure and the subsequent loss of information control is a loss of trust in digital services and platforms. Conversely, this loss of information control tends to be compensated by evermore and increased IT security measures, making the use of digital media more complex and successful cooperation increasingly difficult. This again calls for a new, purely social approach to dealing with the loss of information control described in more detail in the paper.

T. Hagendorff (B) Internationales Zentrum für Ethik in den Wissenschaften, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_9

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Introduction

Some while ago, the German news platform Spiegel Online reported on the Consumer Electronics Show under the heading “Not to network is no longer possible” (Kremp, 2017)1 . One of the subheadings reads: “[the] most important question [is]: How to link anything with everything?” The first thing that comes to mind for people educated in IT-security are bot-networks and DDos-attacks. Providers like Mirai or other bot-networks would find reason to celebrate such notifications (Krebs, 2016). The fact that bot-networks were such an important issue in the last months certainly suggests one thing: In digital technology we are dealing with software and devices whose safety can never be guaranteed. That leads to a situation where, from the perspective of end users, online cooperative practices are conceptualized as practices comprising mainly undesired cooperation. The present paper starts its considerations at exactly this point. This paper is divided into four sections. First, I describe the underlying momentum of digitalization, namely the trend to connect more and more technological artefacts. This interconnectedness forms the basis for the release of huge information flows, which in themselves cannot be subjected to effective measures of control. It follows, as I will show in the second section of this paper, that there are only very limited opportunities for individuals to exercise control over the collection, processing and sharing of personal information. I will then analyze why the aforementioned loss of information control is equivalent to low IT-security. As I demonstrate in a further section, the latter has a significant impact on trust relations with the system of the Internet as well as with particular online applications and platforms. High levels of distrust again have consequences for the way people use the Internet and its services and platforms. Basically, distrust fosters the implementation of more and more security techniques, the non-use of actually useful services, or cutting links between technological artefacts. However, those techniques make routines of media usage more complicated, cumbersome and laborious. By analyzing the conditions for cooperation under the influence of mistrust, I will finally point out that the price of the loss of trust is very high.

1

This paper was written in 2017. Since the publication process took five years, some of the details and arguments in this paper can be viewed as outdated.

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Interconnectedness

What we are concerned with is a humongous interconnectedness of more and more digital artefacts. The headline of the aforementioned Spiegel article says it quite accurately: “Not to network is no longer possible”. The trend to network seems to be a development that cannot be stopped. Manuel Castells, the founder of the theory of the information society, suggested, that there is an essential structural moment in information society, namely, an increase of the interoperability and interconnectivity of IT-systems (Castells, 2010). Today, ten years after Castell’s book “The Rise of the Network Society”, we have found new terms to represent the trend of interconnectedness. We can think about terms like “Internet of Things” (Sprenger & Engemann, 2015), “pervasive computing” (Cuff, 2003; Kitchin & Dodge, 2011), “ubiquitous computing” (Wiegerling, 2011) et cetera. These terms and the concepts behind them are not just indicating that IT-systems are involved in more and more interactions. They also denote that those systems will become linked together more thoroughly over time. According to current estimates there will be a 150 billion interlinked sensors in the world by 2025 (Helbing et al., 2015). Figuratively spoken, there will be a tighter and more entangled connection between the analog and the digital world. In one of his books, Michael Seemann succinctly stated: “Who is part of the world will be part of the Internet.” (Seemann, 2014, p. 25) As a matter of fact we are permanently living in a technologically saturated atmosphere that enables a more and more comprehensive “datafication” of incidents and circumstances. And with that, it also enables more and more undesired as well as unexpected cooperation. Basically, data and information can be transposed between computers as soon as two or more computers are linked together. This connection can be built by wire or radio circuit. But of course, we would like to control the “penetrability” of these connections. As a matter of principle, every system of a computer network can reach any other system that is linked to the network (Hall, 2000, p. 6). It is not intended, however, that any system can have access to any other system as soon as sensitive information is put in that network. Therefore, software and tools were developed for the purpose of information control. Information control means that a person or organization can decide if and how information is collected, processed and distributed. Information control is not just an equivalent to information security. Rather information control is a requirement for the management of our identity and of our privacy. We all want to control how our personal information is collected, processed and distributed (Goffman, 2009).

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Information Control

How can information control be executed? Castells differentiates between several layers of the “space of [information] flows” (Castells, 2010, p. 442). The lowest level consists of carriers of electromagnetic impulses or electronic circuits, which enable electronic communication. Telecommunication in particular no longer follows the logic of space, but rather the logic of flows, represented by networks of fiber optic cables, for example. It is not the flows that constitute the space, but the space is organized around the flows. The second level of the “space of flows” is constituted by nodal points that have a certain functionality. Nodal points enable data and information streams to be directed from the transmitter to the receiver or, in principle, to any element of the network. The third level of the space of flows is formed by social centers, through which power structures can influence the functionality, design and switching of information streams. Jonathan Zittrain developed a similar model of information flows (Zittrain, 2008, p. 67). He differentiates between the “physical layer”, the “procotol layer”, the “application layer” as well as the “social layer”. Between these different layers, there are operational borders. That means that one can manipulate a certain layer without affecting the other layers. Zittrain’s model is loosely related to the “Requests for Comments” (RFC) with regard to the “Requirements for Internet Hosts” (Braden, 1989) respectively to the “Open Systems Interconnection Model” (OSI) of the “International Organization for Standardization” (ISO) (Zimmermann, 1980). However, this model only reflects certain aspects of the technical architecture of the Internet. The model differs between the physical, the data link, the network, the transport, the session, the presentation, and the application layer. All these layers are controlled by different protocols, or rather protocol families. The most famous protocol is the “Internet Protocol” (IP), wellknown is also the “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” (HTTP) or the “File Transfer Protocol” (FTP). But, as already mentioned, this concerns only certain technical dimensions of information control and thus only refers to very specific, rather implicit forms of cooperation in the context of the basal functioning of the World Wide Web. In the end, I designed my own model (Hagendorff, 2017, p. 73 ff.). I differentiate between three distinct levels, based on which information can be controlled in the context of digital information and communication technologies. First, there is the physical layer of the material connections inside a network. Second, there is the layer of machine language, program codes, algorithms and protocols. This layer is not equivalent to the typical user interfaces of digital technologies. Rather, it is about a data space, regulated by computer scientists, software engineers,

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hackers et cetera. The second layer is virtually the level of the “engine rooms”. And third, there is a layer of user interfaces. On this layer, a graphical and semantical preparation of the processed data takes place. What is happening “behind” the user interfaces, on the layer of the codes, algorithms et cetera, is ignored. At all three layers there are different options of information control. On the first layer, data and information control is executed via the infrastructural fundamentals of the Internet, that is within the physical connection or interconnectedness. On the second layer, control is manifested through the manipulation of code. And on the third layer, data- and information control is manifested through “features” of the used software. With respect to the second and third layer, there are many well-established tools to restrict the “penetrability” of data and information within computer networks. This can happen by encryption, by using filters, i.e. firewalls, by requesting passwords or other authentication methods, by digital rights administrations, by privacy settings et cetera.

9.4

IT-Security

Coming to the crucial point of matter: all these methods are unreliable. Encryption can be compromised—for example by simply making a screenshot, while someone is reading an encrypted mail –, firewalls can be bypassed, password requests can be avoided by brute force, shoulder-surfing or other techniques, software based right administrations also can be compromised easily, and privacy settings, well known, for example, from Facebook, are providing only very limited possibilities of information control at the front-end of the platform. Besides, there are, of course, countless further scenarios of attack and “cyber threats” (Königs, 2013, p. 415 f.). There are hardware-hacks (Stiller, 2018). There is the possibility of side channel attacks (Michalevsky et al., 2014, 2015). Hacking tools like spyware, Trojan horses, keylogger, screen recorder, viruses and ransomware are existing. There is also a big sector of social engineering (Hadnagy, 2011). There are man-in-the-middle-attacks. The list could go on and on. There are studies demonstrating the number of security gaps is rising from year to year (Sherrill et al., 2014). And just on the basis of considerations of complexity theory one can assert that attackers are always in advantage over defenders. It is easier to disturb or destroy highly complex systems than to maintain their complexity. For the attackers it is sufficient to find one security gap. But the defender hypothetically has to know all security gaps and close them (Schneier, 2015, p. 76). It is therefore much more difficult to control data, so that it only moves within specific

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contexts rather than transmitting or spreading it across contexts. This adds up to the simple fact that, in the context of the Internet, undesired cooperation is more likely than desired cooperation. What I want to stress is that technological possibilities of information control are very limited. Of course, limitations also apply to non-technological measures of information control, but these are situated in a much narrower context. Virtually every book about IT-security concedes that there will always be residual risks. And one could rightfully say that, in view of hardware-hacks (Stiller, 2018) and countless other security gaps, choosing the term “residual risks” is somewhat belittling. One of the most and reliable methods for information control is the cutting of links. There is a German term for this so-called “Entnetzung” (Gaycken, 2011, p. 80). If one has a computer, which is neither linked by radio, nor by wire to a network, I need physical access to the computer to reach information. Basically, “Entnetzung” means that the possibilities of mutual cooperation are systematically reduced. In the logic of data protection it is counterintuitive to connect computers to ever-growing networks. On the one hand “not to network is no longer possible”— and on the other hand there are fierce debates about privacy and data protection. Actually, these are antagonistic positions. One cannot have both. Privacy and data protection are to secure precisely what is being lost by interconnectedness, namely information security and information control. But what in reality interconnectedness is clearly gaining momentum with the result that information security and the possibilities of information control are being more and more reduced.

9.5

Trust

One question that remains is how society will develop if some day everything is interconnected with everything. Here one must mention things like the deprivation of privacy (Brin, 1998), the rise of mass surveillance (Los, 2006), the change of personal identity management (Boyd, 2008, 2014; Suler, 2002; Zhao et al., 2008; van Dijck, 2013; Marwick & Boyd, 2011), or phenomena such as leaks or general vulnerabilities in sectors of information security (Rao & Nayak, 2014; Swire, 2015; Domscheit-Berg, 2011; Greenwald, 2014). I want to focus especially on the consequences of the loss of trust loss in IT-infrastructures. Surveys of the BITKOM say that just a tiny minority of people thinks about their data as safe on the Internet (Holz, 2016). Before the NSA-affair, 41% of people still thought of their data as safe—now we are speaking of only about 20%. Trust in the state

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and in companies safeguarding personal data at these respective institutions has also dwindled to a tiny fraction of the population. The survey says nothing about what trust is. What the survey assesses are intuitions. The background for that is that the Snowden-revelations have made it publicly known to what extent the intelligence agencies use virtually every possibility to surveil digital information and communication technologies. This caused a huge loss of trust within society. Studies such as the one undertaken by BITKOM show that we are dealing with an ever-rising “culture of mistrust”. I would now like to introduce the term “trust” into a social-scientific analysis in order to gain a better understanding of the aforementioned phenomena. Relations of trust are an essential part of “frictionless”, productive and cooperative functioning social systems (Whitty & Joinson, 2009; Schneier, 2012; Capurro, 2008; Frings, 2010; Garfinkel, 1963). Trust is, in the words of Niklas Luhmann, a mechanism for the reduction of complexity (Luhmann, 1973). Trust enables us to suppress moments of insecurity, to build solid expectations, and to mask risks. In doing so, trust is itself a risky endeavor. The resulting benefits of a trust relation may not counterbalance the disadvantage of the breach of trust. Trusting too much is always imprudent. That is why mistrust can be very important, especially in political systems. Mistrust leads to a situation where people don’t ignore risks, but perceive them as such and react appropriately. There are different kinds of trust. Trust can take the form of trust in persons, in groups of persons, or in systems—like for example an airplane (Giddens, 1990) –, in institutions, and in infrastructures. Learning processes precede rationally managed trust relations. During these learning processes, people collect information about the trustworthiness of other persons or systems. Trustability can be estimated on the basis of three aspects (Mayer et al., 1995, p. 715; Hubig & Siemoneit, 2009): the evaluation of expertise and skills, the evaluation of intentions, and the evaluation of the moral integrity of the person or institution concerned. However, any gathering of information is always incomplete. Therefore, there can never be absolute certainty. Trust relations can always be disappointed. Trust based on safe expectations is more instable than distrust. Expectations can be disappointed quickly, but experienced disappointments can be redeemed by stable expectations only very slowly. On a level of macro sociology the function of trust is to make the contexts of action more productive, to lower the “costs of transactions” of social relations by putting aside the expenditure of controlling, to simplify cooperation, to increase the stability and the performance of the relations between citizens and institutions et cetera (Möller, 2012; Frevert, 2013, p. 104 ff.).

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At this point, trust shall be analysed in the context of Internet applications. “Internet trust” plays a big part, because nobody can totally follow or control which way data is flowing through the Internet, where data is recorded, copied et cetera. The current loss of trust concerning the Internet and its related institutions, notably online applications of all kinds, is not only involving the intelligence agencies, but also corporations. It crucially concerns corporations that are developing, building, and cultivating the infrastructure of the Internet, that are producing hardware and software, that are hosting data et cetera. A trustworthy Internet essentially meets five fundamental preconditions (Blefari-Melazzi et al., 2011, vii). First, it is secure in the sense that it is reliably protected against attackers and crashes. Second, it guarantees a certain quality of online-platforms and -services. Third, it offers protection for personal or user data. Forth, it safeguards the privacy of the users, and fifth, it offers reliable tools so that users can choose between different strict security and privacy settings. In order to meet these requirements, a complex interplay between different individuals and institutions developing and providing the Internet protocols, the infrastructure of the Internet as well as its services and platforms is required. The debate about “trust towards the net” is not about a symmetrical, interpersonal trust, but about an asymmetrical trust in a system. If the level of trust is sinking, actions requiring trust aren’t performed anymore. Concerning IT Systems that means that particular applications are used less frequently or not at all anymore. For example, US-American cloud providers made a billion dollar deficit because their services were no longer used after the Snowden-revelations. In addition to that, the decrease in trust means leads to changes in that communication behavior is changing. Because of the missing privacy protection, a culture of self-censoring is evolving. Or it means that certain transactions cannot take place anymore. If the level of trust towards a system is in decline, the medium of trust has to be substituted by other means. The distrust, that was mainly caused by the Snowden-revelations, is primarily counteracted by security applications. However, this is creating high costs, which under the conditions of a higher trust in systems did not exist. New preventive measures must be introduced like the implementation of encryption technologies, avoiding the use of practical technologies, or the implementation of disconnection strategies—for example by national routing programs like the “Schengen”or “Deutschland-Routing” (Blank, 2013; Bleich, 2013). Differentiations have to be made between trustworthy and untrustworthy communication tools—like, for example, Posteo vs. Yahoo, ownCloud vs. Dropbox, or Signal vs. Viber et cetera. Data security is becoming an important factor in advertisement and in economic competition. Pure trust as a base of security for using various Internet applications

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is not sufficient anymore. Stronger validation strategies are becoming necessary. But those strategies are making things more complicated. Routines are becoming more complex. For example, with PGP one needs to enter a password for reading mails or the mails are not searchable anymore. A further example is that one can no longer inform oneself about certain topics—like for example health topics—because one must fear a negative impact on particular scores et cetera. Access to the Internet is becoming complicated, for example when dialing into the TOR-network. A further point is that secure channels for communication or interaction are always dependent on all actors involved having a certain technical knowledge that must be reliably applied, for example when it comes to securely encrypting data. All in all, the price of the loss of trust is very high. Especially in the context of trust in Internet applications, the answer to the question of how to intelligently distribute trust in order to avoid placing one’s trust in non-trustworthy individuals, organizations or systems, proves to be very complex. An intelligent management of trust with respect to digital information and communication technologies as well as online platforms and services requires technical expertise to such an extent that one cannot expect normal end users to acquire. The question then is: what are the consequences? Should the idea of an intelligent trust management in the context of Internet applications and services be relinquished—or is there another option? The answer could perhaps be to replace the idea of an intelligent trust management with the idea of an intelligent mistrust management. Such an approach always operates on the following premise: Neither the Internet, understood as a global technical infrastructure, nor computer-based communication can ever guarantee the characteristics that are fundamental to trust relationships, i. e. security against attackers, the necessary quality of platforms and services, as well as the protection of personal data and information. In the end, the growing culture of mistrust, which has emerged on the Internet at latest since the revelations concerning the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, is the best form of resilience against the loss of information control. The impossibility of end-users to deal with information technology systems in such a way as to control or even just keep track of how and to what extent personal data is collected, processed and disseminated does not only require a new paradigm of media use and media competence. The loss of information control may also have an impact on elementary areas of users’ personal identity management and their self-presentation on the Internet, for example in social networks. In a culture of mistrust, there are good reasons to practice new forms of digital identity management in order to achieve some resilience against the lack of IT-security and data protection options. Hacker attacks, exploits or surveillance programs are no longer perceived as disappointments and breaches

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of trust, but are always expected and regarded as an integral part of networked digital information systems. Nevertheless, it can also be observed that under the conditions of vulnerable network structures and in view of the permanent risks of loss of control over private or otherwise sensitive information, media use takes place as if information security and trust existed or could be justified. This phenomenon is defined by the term “privacy paradox” (Barnes, 2006; Taddicken, 2014). What is crucial is that privacy concerns are not necessarily an indicator of the way information technology systems or platforms are used. In the very extensive research on the privacy paradox, however, recent studies have relativized to some extent the original thesis on the value-action gap and show that high security or privacy concerns actually result in reduced media use (Baruh et al., 2017).

9.6

Conclusion

Beyond this brief thought experiment outlining the concept of an intelligent mistrust management, we must comclude that for using digital information and communication technologies or the platforms and services connected to them, some at least rudimentary forms of trust must always be present. In the context of “Internet trust”, certain functions, technologies or services must be fundamentally trusted in order to be able to operate with information technology systems. Maintaining an intelligent mistrust management therefore does not mean to suspend trust in general, but to place trust as specifically as possible, namely in those functions, technologies or services in which trust relationships generate as little vulnerabilities as possible. In doing so, it is especially security technologies resulting from the culture of mistrust that can be used as a good basis for rebuilding trust. But security technologies are not the only possibility to restore trust. I want to mention three buzzwords. First, one can increasingly use privacy enhancing technologies. Privacy enhancing technologies to a certain extent assure information control, which in turn can increase trust in the secure functioning of programs and platforms. Second, one can promote open-source initiatives. The insight in program code establishes safety concerning the correct functionality of programs. And third, one can execute data protection audits. Independent institutions auditing programs—TrueCrypt being an example—can generate trust, too. The listing of these examples is not intended to imply that there is a simple causal relation between security and trust. Security can create and regain trust. However, the fact that an intelligent mistrust management is recommended shows that security must always be seen in relative terms. Traditional securities, together with

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the trust relationships based on them, can collapse. New securities can be created, and with them new relationships of cooperation and trust. In the end, however, the form of resilience proposed in this paper is based on the fact that the possibility of being disappointed by the loss of security and information control in the digital sphere is always taken into account.

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Mutually Designing Domestic IT Applications with Older Adults Claudia Müller, Marén Schorch, and David Struzek

Abstract

Participatory design is a widely used approach in technology development. Participation and active involvement of target groups help understand sociocultural contexts and build bridges between the imaginary worlds of designers and future users. Especially if the worlds of imagination are very different, means are needed to open up shared creative spaces. When working with coresearchers who have little experience with technology, it is crucial to find methods that provide them with a joyful and meaningful path to technological topics. The question of motivation, digital literacy and the creation of supportive learning spaces are particularly important. In this paper, we elaborate the concepts of “Empirically-based Participatory Design Workshops” (EbPDW) and “Technology Probes” as means to illustrate the cooperative processes of mutually developing joint constructions of imaginations of actual and future IT usage between IT researchers and older project participants.

C. Müller (B) · D. Struzek Wirtschaftsinformatik, insb. IT für die alternde Gesellschaft, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Struzek e-mail: [email protected] M. Schorch SFB Medien der Kooperation, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2023 C. Eisenmann et al. (eds.), Varieties of Cooperation, Medien der Kooperation – Media of Cooperation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39037-2_10

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Introduction

The article provides a methodological reflection on the deployment of a cooperative IT research and design process with older and non-tech-savvy adults. In order to outline elements of the cooperative development of digital media and appropriation infrastructures in detail, we choose an interdisciplinary approach. Our work itself is rooted in Socio-Informatics, a sub-field of applied computer science that pursues a praxeological foundation of research and design work (Wulf et al., 2018). Socio-informatics takes a close look at the socio-cultural conditions of the emergence and processes of cooperative design projects and thus extends classical concepts of applied computer science. The praxeological approach is supported by a newer concept of cooperation in media studies, based on an understanding of cooperation as the “mutual making of common goals, means and processes” (italics in original) (Schüttpelz, 2017: 24). Digital media are thus seen as products that function as the result of cooperation between all stakeholder groups involved in the processes of designing and use. Consequently, the role of the researchers as well as the role of the research partners must be reflected upon intensively. In qualitative social sciences, the selfreflection of the ethnographer is considered an important element of the discourse (Coffey, 1999; Eisenmann et al., 2019). In applied computer science, however, this perspective has been marginal so far (Hamidi et al., 2016). It is our aim to carve out the cooperation practices focussing on a variety of media of cooperation being jointly developed in a participatory design project with older adults. The underlying design approach of the current project is Participatory Design (PD), a design approach based on close cooperation with representatives of the target group at eye level (Kensing & Blomberg, 1998). PD emerged in the 1980s in Scandinavia and formulated the ethical principles of participation-oriented IT to implement workplace computerization in a socially acceptable way. IT design should contribute to democratic working relationships, empower users to work independently, and actually fulfill these promises. It was assumed that IT systems in the field of work would achieve a higher product quality (Ehn, 1993). With the spread of IT systems from the workplace to other domains, such as the home or the health sector, different target groups also came into focus, such as older people, who were understood as digital media users in their home environments to be targeted in the future. However, the ethical foundations of the PD approach were followed in different ways or often even neglected. Modes of collaboration labelled as PD thus are highly diverse within informatics research, from punctual research points with end-users, e.g., via surveys or focus groups, to long-term collaborations

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in which researchers work with local co-researchers in real-world settings over long periods of time. The approach chosen in the work at hand follows the classic principles of PD: building trust in long-term relationships with a local community of research participants, cooperating at eye level, working on the collaborative design of socio-technical artifacts and practices (Meurer et al., 2018). One main challenge in Participatory Design is creating a shared imagination space between the development team and the participants, opening up opportunities for cooperation. Fischer (2000) describes this challenge with the concept of “symmetry of ignorance,” which represents knowledge and imagination gaps on both sides: participants often do not have the technical knowledge and can hardly imagine future practices. Developers, on the other hand, are aware of technological possibilities but lack knowledge about everyday practices in the working or living environments of the intended user group. Muller and Druin (2012) refer to this shared imaginative space as “third space”, meaning an environment where mutual and shared learning is possible between the different groups involved in the research and development process. A whole range of PD methods has been developed in the last decades, from punctual creative methods, as applied in onetime workshops, to long-term ethnographic and action research based engagement (Muller & Druin, 2012; Maass & Buchmüller, 2018). The data on which this study is based comes from a socio-informatics research project dealing with the design of IT artifacts as everyday support for older people living in their domestic environments in the countryside. A group of older villagers in a West German municipality was involved in all phases of the research project based on Design Case Study methodology (Wulf et al., 2015). Design Case Studies are divided into a preliminary ethnographic study, a subsequent prototyping phase, and a more extended appropriation phase. Participants in their natural practice environments try out the developed prototype. Understanding appropriation processes is at the heart of socio-informatics research. With the concept of “appropriation infrastructures”, Pipek and Wulf (2009) focus on user practices necessary for the newly developed artifact to become an everyday object in the addressed environment. Thus, the artifact itself and its social embedding become the research object of IT research. So far, however, appropriation processes in the final design phase have been the focus of appropriation research. In collaborative IT design with older people who have no experience with digital media, it becomes apparent that it is necessary to incorporate the perspective of appropriation practices already in the pre-study phase. If PD aims to consider older people as actively collaborating co-designers in an

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IT development project, it is necessary to focus on their modes of access to technology use. This includes questions of motivation to deal with new media at all and the development of digital competencies. Appropriation practices, thus, are already essential to be taken into account at the very beginning of the project, as they may encompass a broad spectrum of practices, ranging from intellectual engagement with technologies to physical and sensual engagement with unfamiliar technologies to the formation of usage routines. It also includes how older people see themselves as technology users and their value-oriented thinking about technology (Neven & Peine, 2017; Vines et al., 2015). In this contribution, we would like to tell the story of a cooperative process of mutually creating modes of cooperation between a group of researchers and a group of older research participants. This paper describes how appropriation practices result from negotiations between the design team and research participants and how measures for enabling co-operation have been considered at the outset of the project. We use the conceptual frameworks of “Experience-based Participatory Design Workshops” (EbPDW) (Hornung et al., 2017) and of “Technology Probes” (Hutchinson et al., 2003) to illustrate what it takes to successfully implement socio-informatics design in practice, specifically with persons that are not familiar with digital media practices. Besides ethnographic tools of data collection and self-reflection and documentation such as participant observation and interviews, we mainly focus on further options for the use of probes. The presented off-the-shelf solution for everyday problems raised by the participants was quickly integrated into the daily life routines and thereby supported the realistic build-up of digital literacy for the older participants. Consequently, the establishment of small-scale but more sustainable IT solutions might also pave the way for other, large-scale systems or lower the hurdle, especially for non-tech-savvy people. It further enables a better understanding of cooperation by considering the mutual conditions of mutual makings that are relevant for co-operative and participatory research, especially with non tech-savvy research partners.

10.2

Related Work

In its “Innovation for Active & Healthy Ageing” program, the European Commission stresses that “the development of new solutions should involve users strongly to ensure that they meet real needs in an acceptable way” (European Commission, 2015). A closer look at the cooperation between design teams and representatives of older end-user groups reveals a wide range of methods for involving end-users.

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These approaches range from “cookbook-like” method lists for user integration in AAL projects (Nedopil et al., 2013) to more profound reflections on what participation and co-design mean for cooperative settings between academic researchers and community participants (Light, 2011; Lindsay et al., 2012). Lindsay et al. (2012) discuss tensions regarding engagement with older people in an authentic and open, participative way against the background of formalized results of work in large publicly funded projects. Despite the calls for funding that prescribe the involvement and participation of end-users, related work packages in projects are sometimes used by the project partners “as a checkbox that exists exclusively to show that what they are doing is valid” (Lindsay et al., 2012, p. 1207). Among the researchers, who take forms of older people’s involvement in ICT projects more seriously, different issues are addressed such as: how can ICT projects help people age in dignity and fulfilment (Subasi et al., 2013), considering ageing as a process rather than treating “age” as a state (Light, 2011). Another aspect of PD projects with older adults is the co-construction of common design space (Boehner et al., 2007) by creating a creative space for co-exploration and co-design between different stakeholders in order to support a new culture of participation (Fischer & Shipman, 2011; Sanders & Stappers, 2014). Kanstrup et al. (2017), in the context of the development of e-health technologies, discuss how “key actors can be involved in shaping future technologies to close the knowledge gaps in requirements analysis and design for functional support across the board”. They emphasize that research participants should be perceived as partners and not only as “testers of products”. Besides establishing a common design space, the so-called “third space” (Muller & Druin, 2012), the early adoption of technology is an essential aspect for the development of innovative ICT systems (Dourish, 2003). Dourish (2003) defines appropriation as “the way in which technologies are adopted, adapted and incorporated into working practice. This might involve customisation in the traditional sense (that is, the explicit reconfiguration of the technology to suit local needs), but it might also simply involve making use of the technology for purposes beyond those for which it was originally designed or to serve new ends.” Older non-tech-skilled adults, in particular, lack the technical imagination to use certain technologies in everyday life. The everyday practice of users is therefore of decisive importance to adapt the system to the individual needs of users (Dourish, 2003; March et al., 2005). In addition, appropriation of technology can be understood as a transformation practice so that technology as an instrument receives a place in everyday environments (Leavitt, 2016). Another vital aspect is digital literacy as well as the development of media competencies. Both issues as a field are intensely researched by adult educators

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and the pedagogy of ageing (Kolland, 2013; Boulton-Lewis, 2010; Purdie et al., 2001). With our contribution, we would like to demonstrate the importance of current approaches in the pedagogy of ageing with respect to IT development. Providing facilitating devices to elderly project participants will support them in gaining individual access to technology usage options and qualification for project participation on “eye-level” for a highly complex IT design project in a long-term approach. We aim to create a learning setting with long-term support in technology acquisition. The learning differences of older people, their wishes, requirements, everyday problems, and interests are addressed comprehensively within our pursued praxeological approach of the “Experience-based PD workshops” (EbPDW) (Müller et al., 2015). Integrated into these specific modes of organizing the PD workshops, the concept of “Technology Probes” (Hutchinson et al., 2003) is helpful to illustrate the joint learning paths between the research team and the local group of older co-designers. Hutchinson et al. (2003) define Technology Probes (TP) as “a particular type of probe that combines the social science goal of collecting information about the use and the users of the technology in a real-world setting, the engineering goal of field-testing the technology, and the design goal of inspiring users and designers to think of new kinds of technology to support their needs and desires.” (p. 18). We build on this understanding of technology probes, but append some new perspectives: 1. We transfer the probes concept and apply it to the field of PD work with older, primarily non-tech-receptive people in rural environments; 2. We enlarge the options of what can be gained by technical probes in long-term and large-scale modes of collaboration with persons who, for the most part, show a low affinity for information technology.

10.3

Project Setting and Methods Used

The interdisciplinary research project consists of scientific partners from SocioInformatics, Cultural Science & Engineering as well as partners from industry and stakeholder organizations and aims at the development of an advanced high tech system to foster health literacy and self-monitoring based on pattern recognition technologies for older adults. It thereby contributes to the field of supportive technologies for ageing at home. Apart from the question of what “healthy living” means for different individuals—a question inherently contoured by discourses on ageing that need to be carefully considered in IT projects (Vines et al., 2015) –, researchers here (as in many other IT design projects) face another huge challenge: bridging the gap between the “high tech visions” in a participatory design

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approach and the real-life worlds of the groups of elderly people, who collaborate in the project. One important measure to bridge these worlds and develop a shared design space is to help older and non-tech savvy persons gain media competencies. We report here on the build-up and usage of a mutual learning, appropriation and reflection space by integrating Google Drive™ as an off-the-shelf tool to bridge actual practices and future design ideas. The project is long-term in that it involves a group of older participants over three years; the time we are writing about here is the end of the first year and thus the transition phase from the pre-study to the prototyping process. Three researchers of the socio-informatics group, who are in charge of the user research in the overall project, meet with the group fortnightly in a workshop format oriented at “Experience-based Participatory Design Workshops” (Müller et al., 2015) in which we link digital literacy qualification and co-design activities in pleasant company with coffee and cake. The group consists of 15 participants aged between 65–80 years, all retired, and women and men roughly in equal shares. Some participants have health restrictions due to their age (like reduced physical mobility) and drop out of regular meetings from time to time. Still, primarily, these limitations don’t hinder the collaboration. We became acquainted with our participants with the help of gatekeepers (a housing company, a local doctor and his team, a community nurse, a pastor, people working voluntarily with older adults in the area). The workshop location is a community room of a local church in a small village. The workshops last two to three hours and are thematically prepared, carried out, and documented by the research team. The general methodological frame of our study is inspired by the Grounded Theory research paradigm (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as well as the design case study approach (Wulf et al., 2011, 2015). Consequently, our project covers the whole iterative participatory design cycle of a qualitative pre-study (including observation and interviewing (Flick, 2009; Randall et al., 2007)), the development of a technical prototype, the real-life evaluation with our participants, and the further improvement of it. Even so, this paper focuses on a particular stage within this cycle: the participatory design workshops, i.e. the passage between qualitative study and designing a technical prototype. Each of the workshops was documented in detailed field protocols, collectively produced by the research team. Additionally, pictures were taken by both the participants and the research team, e.g. for testing the functionality of the devices, but also for producing memories of the group meetings. During the same time, 16 qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the gatekeepers,

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some participants, and local key persons such as a community care nurse and a pastor, who were in regular contact with the older participants. Each of the interviews lasted between one hour and two hours, was recorded, transcribed, and analysed jointly in the research team, following the coding method with the support of MAXQDA software. In addition to our empirical study (and not intended as such initially), tinkering with off-the-shelf tools became a valuable source of information for our design and development process. We introduced the cloud device Google Drive (implemented on the Samsung tablets that had been handed over to participants at the beginning of the project). During the research process, we recognized the value of such tools for understanding and creating spaces for the mutual construction of a joint imagination space that is anchored in the everyday experiences and practices of both, the participants as well as the researchers.

10.4

Experience-based Participatory Design Workshops (EbPDW)

The EbPD workshops are essentially aimed bridging the gap between the actual practices of people in their everyday lives and the ability to imagine possible applications for meaningful ICT support, e.g. by establishing a shared space to think of future possibilities (similar to what is described in Müller et al., 2015). Three essential features are the basis of the workshops: First, the delivery of off-the-shelf technology and support through individual and group-based appropriation is strongly linked to issues in their everyday life. Second, an engagement in concrete participatory design sessions can be started based on subsequent technology usage meaningful to the individuals. The goal here is to provide formerly inexperienced participants with a certain level of skills that enable them to operate the technology in meaningful ways and, perhaps more importantly, overcome their skepticism, anxieties, and negative self-images with respect to the new media. Instead, this research collaboration format helps to foster their pleasure to see themselves as capable and essential contributors to the design project. The third feature of the workshops is introducing and utilising tools that open a space for motivating older adults to engage in a long-term cooperation with the researchers. These tools provide different forms of media supporting cooperation which we will demonstrate in the empirical section. The workshops provide low-threshold activities to offer an open, welcoming space where anyone has the chance to form and communicate an opinion— based on the presentation of and interaction with off-the-shelf-technology, in this

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specific case Google Drive. Such an open approach can be interpreted as a prerequisite for individual processes of making sense of and reflecting on possible ICT usages in their everyday lives. More specifically, after some first meetings for information purposes and to get to know each other, tablet PCs were distributed to demonstrate and jointly practice general possibilities of internet-based communication, interaction, and information. The goal was to ultimately spread out a “common notional space of possibilities” and introduce people to the world of the internet and a device and applications widely spread. In a dialogic way, the researchers started learning paths with the older workshop participants, listening to each other and finding possible anchoring points for technology use in their everyday chats and narrations and helping them trying things out such as taking pictures and videos, using instant messaging tools with their peers and with their family members and friends, trying out email, doing online searches in their fields of interest and so on. Through these activities, a motivational foundation was laid to start engaging with the device and the internet. At the same time, participants also became “qualified” to engage deeper with us in more future-oriented questions of technology usage options. After approximately seven months, they were eager to test additional devices that serve as data collectors for the pattern recognition approach. These were devices for self-tracking, such as smartwatches, fitness bracelets as well as smartphones. We deliberately chose a step-by-step approach regarding the introduction of devices that, in the last stage, will lead to the introduction of a system based on sensor technologies and pattern recognition, yet to be developed. The step-by-step way of introducing devices supports a slow-paced and deep interaction with the devices and applications. Learning about possibilities of new ICT tools is thereby deeply connected to activities of co-exploration in participants’ actual living circumstances and the way they lead their everyday life. This research approach takes its time but it is also deeply grounded in actual practice. Participants not only somehow become “qualified” to contribute to design workshops. Within our approach, research and development can be linked to the observation of appropriation (Stevens et al., 2009; Pipek & Wulf, 2009), i.e., how making sense takes place in the older project participants based on integrating technological devices into their everyday life.

10.5

Findings

This chapter presents selected aspects of the beginning of the joint learning and appropriation process. In the first PD workshop sessions, after distributing tablet PCs, the research team introduced some applications to demonstrate possible

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uses, such as taking pictures and videos, organizing them in the picture gallery, or conducting internet research. Learning topics emerged from both the themes introduced by the researchers and the individual explorations when participants took their tablet PCs home, discussed usage options with their friends and family, and brought their thoughts back to the workshops to discuss their questions in the group. A mix of individual experiences and “over the shoulder learning” within the group and with the research team led to a whole bunch of questions and needs for assistance in order to appropriate the device and to adjust applications to the interests of each participant.

10.5.1 Note-taking: Memory and Repetition To support a sustainable learning process, researchers distributed a notebook to each person, where participants could note down single steps of operations they did with the tablet PCs, such as e.g., “how can I find a picture in the gallery and send it to another group member via email or telegram?” Noting down every step in detail and reiterating these steps several times—during the workshop and at home on their own—was a strong need. However, it turned out that some of them often did not bring their notebooks because they could not find them or forgot to bring them. In this case, they put notes on a sheet, which sometimes got lost, and they had to start from scratch. To some participants, it felt easy taking notes and finding words or drawing symbols about a process; others, however, found it hard to take notes. That’s why some discussions came up whether those for whom it was “easy” to take notes were willing to share them. They agreed, but the tools for sharing they adopted and were acquainted with—i.e. email or an instant messenger tool—so far have not proven very supportive.

10.5.2 Sharing Material Besides sharing notes, people also had the wish to share other documents, such as, e.g., baking recipes. This was after some participants had brought a homemade cake to the workshop and others asked for the recipe. Then discussions came up about how to exchange the recipe. At that stage the possible channels for sharing material, email and the instant messenger telegram, were still perceived as too uncomfortable to write down the recipe and send it quickly. The “bakers” then

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decided to write it down at home and send it later or bring it in handwritten form. However, this was repeatedly forgotten and not being taken up again later.

10.5.3 Data Transfer Between Devices After a couple of months, smartphones were also distributed to prepare the next sensor technology introduction for health monitoring. The smartphones were necessary as most of the smartphones and trackers we were to distribute later could not run independently. After being more familiar with tablet PCs and using them in manifold individual ways according to personal interest and life-style, the participants were eager to learn how to use smartphones and incorporate them into their everyday lives. Transferring and exchanging data, applications, and pictures between the devices turned out an exciting option that helped them in this second step of technology appropriation. However, for this operation again adequate infrastructure supporting processes of learning and use was needed.

10.5.4 Ever-changing Safety Concerns As many participants took their first steps on the internet and internet-based applications, the groups perceived an ongoing feeling of uncertainty. News in the media about circulating viruses and a lot of messages sent through the operating system of the tablet PCs and via apps, such as, e.g., update messages, provided an ongoing source of not knowing what to do and how to behave. Consequently, the topic “how can I use the internet safely” is very complex for persons who are just starting to venture into the internet. The computer-related wording and English terms aggravate the situation for older adults in Germany, most of whom did not learn English at school. To help participants to acquire more confidence and knowledge, the research team prepared some material and held some introductory presentations on the topic. Researchers developed information material and related instructions in easily readable language and with illustrations easy to understand. From a practical perspective, these documents—apart from our idea that these could be put in the notebook we prepared for each participant—again often were forgotten at home and could then not be used to rehearse the topics if needed. There was a need to talk about and repeat specific issues several times; not having the material at hand did not contribute to a sustainable learning space. Linked to the need to

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inform non-tech savvy persons on such complex safety-related issues in a sensitive way, another problem surfaced: as the actual contexts may suddenly alter, one has to react to this, e.g., when media report about current threats by malware. This showed the need to find a way to update existing documents to follow up with current events.

10.5.5 Giving Google Drive a Shot as a Collaborative Learning Tool In need of finding a more sustainable socio-technical support structure to help participants in their daily activities and explorations with the tablet PCs, the research team decided to try out Google Drive and introduced it to the groups. This idea was both “technology-driven,”, i.e. the researchers were inspired by their working activities with cloud devices and were looking for the most easy-to-operate tool. But some inspirations were also grounded in the participants’ everyday activities and interests with respect to the usage of the devices and applications and the shortcomings perceived with other communication and collaboration channels reported above. The choice for Google Drive was motivated by the option to use it as shared cloud storage and a collaborative learning support tool. The availability of office programs seemed to help to overcome some of the listed shortcomings. In addition, it is free of charge, widely spread, and it was already preinstalled on the devices with OS Android. The choice was also motivated by the fact that learning in participatory design work with older and not tech-savvy persons was seen as an essential, but not the central theme in the overall project objectives. However, for most of the participants, learning the principles and applications of Google Drive was somewhat tricky at the beginning, especially understanding the principles and consequences of operations such as renaming, relocating, or deleting documents. Sometimes participants accidentally deleted documents or unintentionally erased parts from collaboratively produced texts. These incidents created some confusion at first, but as the participants perceived the learning environment as a protected space, guided and supported by the research team, they were open to hanging in and overcoming the first troubles with Google Drive. The handling of Google Drive was a topic throughout several workshop sessions. Participants were provided with a lot of time and space for repeating and exploring the new application—as was the case with all the other applications that had been introduced before.

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10.5.6 Mixed Purposes of Google Drive: Both Learning Tool and Probe for Data Collection Learning Tool for Self-produced, Collaborative Documents for Self-help and Tech Learning Despite the confusion participants experienced with Google Drive at the very beginning, they liked to engage with this new tool on their tablet PCs as it partly took up experiences some of them already had with text processing programs such as Microsoft Word. They especially appreciated that they could observe what a peer was writing in a document in a shared folder. This awareness function supported them in discussing what they wanted to note down. It also helped to balance different levels of readiness and skills to formulate texts in the individual participants. Some of them were more eager and “brave” to write things up and then wrote down the outcome of the group discussions. Others, who were more reluctant to writing up things by themselves, were happy to engage in the discussion and contribute verbally to the generation of textual material in the first joint sessions. In the following paragraph, we describe four categories of documents, which were co-produced in the groups of participants and researchers. These document categories show how the joint production of a space of understanding and the processes of meaningful use of digital artefacts have been co-developed in the course of time. It becomes clear how—analogous to ethnographic work—themes and artefacts are further developed, reformulated and individually and collectively appropriated (Eisenmann et al., 2019). 1. A list of unknown (PC/internet-related) terms and English vocabularies 2. Collaboratively created notes “for self-help” on how to operate specific applications on tablet PCs and smartphones 3. Self-created texts relating to individual interests 4. Handouts created on specific topics, such as using the internet safely, by the research team. The participants proposed that it would be helpful to create a document serving as a “vocabulary list”. This idea originated in the widespread and recurrent problem of participants permanently struggling with specific computer- and internetrelated terms and English words. Together they discussed a possible structure for such a document. One lady remembered that she liked to look things up on Wikipedia, and she thus suggested that together they could build up a small “Wikipedia for the group”. Every time one of them came across a term s/he

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did not know very well, they would look it up on the internet, discuss it in the group and try to formulate it in their own words in order to be understood by all members of the group. The second category of documents being created and saved in a shared folder are collaboratively created notes on operating specific applications on tablets and smartphones. Mostly, the people who started to create these documents remain their “owners” and editors. However, these documents are highly appreciated by the group. They spark discussions and co-learning and serve as helpful frameworks for memorizing and rehearsing during the workshops and at home on their own. Examples of such notes are how a picture can be attached to an email or sent via an instant messaging tool. The third category, self-created texts, is currently growing and shows varying types of texts that participants would like to share with their peers. One type is baking recipes, as mentioned above. The “bakers” very much appreciated that they now can use a “proper” text editing tool to write down the cake recipes and that they have a straightforward way to share them with the group and build up a shared repository of recipes. Another type of text are historical descriptions of the region of one of the participants. He was happy to have the word text editor to record and organize his documents. When he mentioned his passion, other participants got interested and asked if he would share what he had written. Others then shared their own experiences and knowledge of the local history of their villages. It should be noticed how a supportive socio-technical infrastructure, such as Google Drive, has proven the potential to spark a shared commitment and cooperation between people with similar interests. This, in turn, contributes to the sustained practice-based generation of capacities in digital literacy for the participants and strengthens their ability to envision further IT usage options as meaningful to themselves. The last category of documents saved in a shared folder are handouts. The research team has created those to elucidate general themes that caused uncertainty and inconveniences among the group, such as surfing the internet safely. Participants appreciate that they may access these documents and re-read them wherever they are (in the workshop, at home or at other places). They also appreciate that the research team can make updates due to actual events.

Google Drive as a “Classic” Probe for Cooperative Data Collection Once participants had gotten familiar with Google Drive and had started to use it for the different purposes described above, the next step in the overall project context was due to the distribution of the next devices such as smartwatches and wristbands self-monitoring. For documentation, we had planned to hand out

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paper-based diaries to participants and ask them to fill them in over several weeks. They were supposed to register how they were using these tools, how they fitted into different everyday situations, and what they thought about wearing these devices. In former projects, we had found that diaries, as one form of a cultural probe handed out to individual participants, often did not provide the results that researchers had hoped for. Our present experiences match the reflections in the literature, e.g. Wherton et al. (2012) discuss the constraints on the usage of cultural probes when they do not apply to the participant’s physical, mental and emotional capacity or, as we often perceived, when they are not exciting or challenging enough to keep up motivation over a longer time. Having these constraints on diaries in mind, and being inspired by the successful appropriation processes of Google Drive by the workshop participants, especially the motivating factor of the awareness functionality for collaborative writing, the research team developed a shared diary and introduced it in all three groups. One decision was to provide a relatively “open” document to give space to share whatever participants had in mind with respect to their usage of the devices. In order to provide them with some inspiration of what the researchers were hoping to collect as experiences, a sample entry had been created. This entry started with the date and some reflections by individual researchers on workshop discussions about the benefits and shortcomings of self-monitoring with the devices at hand. The shared diaries currently have been in usage for three months, and participants were eager to share their thoughts. Sometimes they only provided one or two short sentences, and sometimes they wrote more detailed reflections. In sum, 64 entries on 16 different pages have been created. Entries are concerned with, e.g., failures of technology (e.g., the step counter was not working correctly in specific circumstances), the affordance of the devices (e.g. “I am feeling uncomfortable with the leather band of the smartwatch. This is not suitable for doing exercises”), or general reflections on situations where self-monitoring or persuasive functionalities of the devices seemed beneficial or, to the contrary, disturbing). During the workshops, researchers and participants regularly looked at the entries and used them as a basis for deeper discussion. The results of these discussions had been communicated to the technical project partners working on the pattern recognition algorithms in regular project meetings. For the introduction of future tools developed in the overall project, with the successful appropriation of Google Drive by the participants for different purposes, as described above, the research will be able to benefit from the older project participants, who feel capable of operating their devices and can discuss prototypes as well as future

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developments against the highly practice-based backgrounds of their everyday experiences with these devices.

10.6

Discussion

In addition to Pipek and Wulf’s (2009) notion of appropriation infrastructure, where appropriation is only conceptualised at a later stage of the project, i.e. after the design step and the introduction of developed technologies into practice contexts (such as user households), our analyses provides a deeper understanding of how appropriation practices and processes in the field of IT design for older adults are already highly relevant at the initial access to the field and therefore need to be ethnographically traced and included in the conceptualisation of practice- and user-oriented design processes. Our work shows the necessity for IT researchers to build bridges to existing modes of appropriation and imagination of intended participant groups from the very beginning of research projects. Design and research activities in participatory constellations thus, first of all, have to deal with questions of motivation and enabling participation as well as creating conditions that facilitate cooperation “at eye level”. In the long term, they can thus open up access to the world of technology for older people who initially have no affinity for technology or are not interested in it at all. Our studies show that upstream measures for a low threshold step-by-step construction of a shared imagination space embedded in everyday practices (Hornung et al., 2017) are highly relevant before actual co-design activities can be successfully conducted in co-design studies with field participants in later design phases. In taking a practice-theoretical perspective, our study demonstrates a range of media of cooperation that over the course of the project have been mutually co-constructed between the research team and the group of participants. The precise tracing of the rationales and decisions of researchers and how these are received, modified, appropriated and reflected back by participants, only to be adapted again by the researchers, clearly demonstrates that IT research is built on ongoing co-operative references between the participants. With these mutual practices of sense-making, a more comprehensive understanding of how older people may or may not use technologies in their everyday worlds can be achieved. With researchers being open to an ongoing process and to necessary adaptations, the tools turned into means of self-empowerment for the older participants. It becomes clear that conventional off-the-shelf tools, such as Google Drive as a flexible “technology probe”, can reveal three crucial aspects in the co-design

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processes with older people: On the one hand, they are tools to bring technology and everyday perspectives together in an accessible way and enable older participants to explore their own individual practices with a digital device. Secondly, as a learning and appropriation infrastructure, these tools can offer an environment in which tinkering and joint trying out and making meaningful practices are made possible. Thirdly, they function as their own research object in making individual and collective appropriation practices visible and thus forming a fertile ground for co-design practices that build on them. Practice-theoretical approaches in IT design, such as those pursued in SocioInformatics (Wulf et al., 2018), also sharpen the perception of cooperative moments between the design team and the user group. With Schüttpelz’ definition of cooperation as the “mutual making of common goals, means and processes” (italics in original) (2017, 24) the conditions for mutually co-designing material and immaterial appropriation infrastructures become visible. This perspective on the interventions of researchers and the strategies they use to open up spaces of experience for participants in IT projects has rarely been pursued so far. We would like to take up the idea of the cooperative constitution of digital media and thus also strengthen the visibility of the researchers’ interventions and their consequences for user-designer cooperation in a participatory project, which so often are taken for granted in mainstream IT research (Müller, 2019). Another, similar source of inspiration are discourses in qualitative social sciences, which put the focus on cooperative moments in ethnographic field studies (Coffey, 1999). We refer here specifically to reflections on the relationship between the researcher’s self and the ethnographic work. Coffey particularly focuses on the dimensions of the personal, the emotional and the identity of the researcher in the context of longer-term studies. In doing so, she opens up a space for reflection that makes it possible to view research activities in the field, but also data processing, the analysis and writing up results, as a practice that is permanently reconstructed, reproduced and changed and that consequently also affects the relationships with research participants and the development of the researcher’s own identity, including her or his professional identity. The transfer of these considerations to a formative scientific discipline such as computer science has further implications: the reflection on the professional self-image opens up a space to critically examine research concepts and methods that are considered “common sense” in the disciplinary scientific community by making cooperative production of research designs the object of ethnographic tracing and reflection.

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Conclusion

The results show several challenges and specific requirements for designing autonomy-promoting socio-technical infrastructures within the framework of participatory design with people who are at a great cognitive distance from digital media. The research demonstrates specific conditions for the creation of autonomy for older people through participation in two respects: off-the-shelf digital media served as the object of study for the promotion of social participation of older people as an object of appropriation; at the same time, they were used as a medium for the co-construction of a common notional space of possibility between researchers and older project participants utilizing ethnographic and action research methods. The results obtained enable a practice-based reflection on the conditions for the emergence of participatory co-production of media of cooperation in long-term IT research projects. In summary, concepts such as “technology probes” (technical prototypes, but also commercially available devices used in community settings) have the potential to increase opportunities for participation in community projects. The introduction and implementation of ‘everyday’ applications (such as, in the case at hand, Google Drive) and ongoing support for their appropriation can strengthen the motivation and active participation of individuals who previously did not consider engaging with digital tools. Our definition of a “technology probe” thus introduces a further important aspect of PD, namely the bridging of research-related practices and their transformation into long-term learning objects relevant to everyday life, which, on the one hand, strengthens the digital literacy and interest in IT use of the older participants and, on the other hand, may serve as a research tool through which valuable insights into appropriation practices of older people can be gained.

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