reading notes

by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star

ISBN: 0262522950

Though at times needlessly academically opaque, the authors do raise valuable questions about the impact of information infrastructure on human lives. They point out that we are surrounded by standards and classifications (everything from turning off your alarms clock in the morning to reading your email is governed by multiple standards and classifications) that remain largely invisible, and thus taken for granted.

One of the goals of the book was to make the invisible visible: to look not at the existing classification systems, but to peer back into how they came to be and to recognize the moral, ethical, and political pressures that shaped them. As the authors point out early on:

Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing–indeed it is inescapable. But is is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous–not bad, but dangerous.

Bowker and Star use the ICD (the International Classification of Dieseases), the systems used to diagnose and treat tuberculosis, and as an extreme, the definitions of race under apartheid in South Africa as examples of classification schemes. It is where classification and biography intersect (or more accurately, fail to properly intersect) that classification systems become visible, and frequently painful.

I found it interesting to think about classification systems as a living, political process rather than as immobile, fossilized, not-to-be-questioned “received wisdom.” As advances in computer technology make even more elaborate classification schemes possible if not probable (think of vast database repositories of medical records, credit records, insurance claims, etc.) making information infrastructure visible will be increasingly important.

Recommended, but note at times academic obfuscation (why be crystal clear when you can cite multiple sources in the body of the text and sound important) gets annoying.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 27th, 2002 at 11:21 am and is filed under nonfiction.