Materialität der Kooperation
Abstract
Die Autorinnen der „Materialität der Kooperation“ fragen nach materiellen Bedingungen und Medienpraktiken der Kooperation – vor, während und über Situationen hinaus. Kooperation wird als ein wechselseitiges Zusammenwirken verstanden, das mit oder ohne Konsens, mit oder ohne Kopräsenz der beteiligten Akteure in verteilten Situationen vonstattengehen kann. Materielle Bedingung von Kooperation sind Medien als Artefakte, Körper, Texte, Bilder und Infrastrukturen. Sie ermöglichen, bedingen und figurieren wechselseitige Verfertigungen – und entstehen selbst durch Medienpraktiken in kooperativen Situationen.
Der Inhalt
• Historische und ethnografische Beiträge zur Praxistheorie der Medien.
Die Zielgruppen
• Forschende, Lehrende und Studierende der Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften, Sozialwissenschaften, Ethnologie, Anthropologie, Informatik und Geschichte.
Die Herausgeber
Sebastian Gießmann ist Kultur- und Medienwissenschaftler und arbeitet als Akademischer Rat am Medienwissenschaftlichen Seminar der Universität Siegen.
Tobias Röhl ist Soziologe und arbeitet als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Teilprojekt Normale Betriebsausfälle im SFB „Medien der Kooperation“ an der Universität Siegen.
Ronja Trischler ist Soziologin und Kulturwissenschaftlerin und arbeitet als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Werkstatt Praxistheorie im SFB „Medien der Kooperation“ an der Universität Siegen.
... Digital media are not just seen as technological artifacts, but as grounded in practices that span all stages of development and use involving various stakeholder groups. We will argue that the setup of joint spaces for anticipating and imagining future technologies along with interlinked media and data practices is crucial when involving target user groups with little or no previous experiences with digital technologies (Meurer et al. 2018;Gießmann et al. 2019). It is our aim to elaborate on the discourses, methods and different interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches which all come together in an R&D project and thus have impact on the research designs, the final products as well as the imagination spaces which are being collaboratively produced and sometimes fit together better and sometimes less well. ...
What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.
... This study sheds light on the importance of materiality in the process of digitalisation (on materialities see for example Gießmann et al., 2019). It provides elements describing the transition from paper documents to an increased use of digital means to produce and disseminate information, and retraces digital history from punched cards and magnetic strips through the Minitel (Schafer and Thierry, 2012;Mailland and Driscoll, 2017) and the CD-ROM to the web and mobile applications. ...
Since the 1970s, the Publications Office of the European Union, the official publisher of all the institutions and bodies of the EU, has had to adapt to a fast-changing situation as the number of EU Member States has grown and the number and nature of publications has evolved (including publishing public tenders of EU institutions and Member States in 1978 through a supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union and handling CELEX, an interinstitutional and multilingual automated documentation system for community law, in 1992). These changes occurred over several ages of computing. The computerisation of the Publications Office was primarily a response to the need for rationalisation and productivity, but the aim was also to gradually adapt to new types of document publication and consultation. These different stages of digitalisation required the constant transfer of information to a multitude of media. Supports, such as punched cards, optical discs and CD-ROMs, had varying life expectancies and are all evidence of attempts to digitise information before the Web.
This evolution not only illustrates the need to constantly harmonise a large amount of information, it also highlights some continuities. It affects the management of information systems but also meets regularly updated standardisation, interoperability and sustainability needs within a complex ecosystem.
... Therefore, we propose a socio-material and methodological perspective to situations. Contrary to classical (micro-)sociological understandings of situations, which suggest that situations are characterized by corporeal co-presence and defined by the actors involved (Gießmann, Röhl, & Trischler, 2019;Goffman, 1981), we approach situations at multiple levels of scale. Situatedness, in our understanding, includes the common understanding as "the involvement of the researcher within a research site" (Vannini, 2008, p. 815), similar to the way that app use practices and technical agencies are embedded in various infrastructures. ...
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, make apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Therefore, engaging with and even staging these situations allows for political-economic, social, and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures to be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. This article offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this multi-situated approach, focusing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages, and app connections. We conclude with nine propositions that develop out of these studies as prompts for further research.
Zusammenfassung
Am Fall der Entsorgung radioaktiver Abfälle analysiert der Beitrag, wie Gesellschaften Wissen über ihre Tiefengründe produzieren, um langfristig stabile Entsorgungsszenarien zu entwickeln. Hierzu wird untersucht, wie geologische Formationen in ein solches Entsorgungsvorhaben eingebunden bzw. gar als handlungstragend adressiert werden. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung stehen soziogeologische Relationen im Feld der naturwissenschaftlichen Endlagerforschung. Aus einer soziomateriell orientierten ethnografischen Perspektive wird gezeigt, wie Wirtsgesteinen stabilisierende Fähigkeiten aber auch Anfälligkeiten mit Blick auf Endlagervorhaben zugeschrieben werden. Zudem wird das Experimentieren mit ‚endlagerrelevanten‘ Materialien in Laboratorien fokussiert. Ziel des Beitrags ist die Formulierung einer Soziologie der Entsorgung im Gefüge von Natur, Technik und Gesellschaft.
Thinking cooperation through materiality addresses questions of production and impact of both media and social order, and, most importantly, their interconnections. It also points, and this is the central claim of this book, towards the situation as an important methodological concept for social order and its spatio-temporal organisation—a concept which needs updating if we want to deal with the relation between media and sociality adequately. For us, both materiality and cooperation can only be grasped through their situated temporalisations and can only be historicised on this basis. This allows us to include media in this picture: materiality of cooperation deals with the socio-material and cultural-technical reciprocal fabrication and production of media and social order beyond communication and semiotic practices. As we will establish in this introduction, methodologically, in order to access the materiality of cooperation through situations it is necessary to update the influential micro-sociological concept of the situation: a ‘methodological situationalism’ (Knorr Cetina, 1981) based on the centrality of the local situation created in situ by physically co-present actors (Goffman, 1964, 1981). We suggest the notion of a post-situationalism: by starting off from situated practices—rather than an individual situation formed by practices—and by including media practices. The present volume—like the Siegen Collaborative Research Centre ‘Media of Cooperation’ in which it originated—takes these questions on the situated, cooperative and material constitution of media practices as its starting point for different theoretical, historical and empirical endeavours presented in the chapters.
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, 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.
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. 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.
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