Not exact enough… for reason!
The politics of knowledge in Russian STS
One of the most intriguing and maybe even painstaking questions for me around STS as a discipline is why don’t we produce exact and solid knowledge? The commercial sector, states, media industry — they know very well how to adjust firm knowledge with their own practices to get more money, money influence, and more power out of it. Why we don’t produce this kind of knowledge for them?
The question about the nebulosity of knowledge in STS was posed several times. In 2007, innovation scholar Frank Geels pointed at his disappointment with STS: STS is too vague. It consists of infinitive cases without any exact theoretic common schema about them. He claimed that STS needs to be humbler about its ambitions and it should transform itself into something blander, for instance — into a solid and scalable framework for the investigation of the sociotechnical changes (for the business needs).
The same idea was supported by the eminent STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff who also blamed STS-ers for not being very focused and disciplined. If STS wants to remain remarkable, claimed Jasanoff, if it wants to have its brand, then it should abandon the infantile sickness of being too much democratic and too radical about the theory and start to behave itself like a decent part of the academic family.
However, there were people in the STS community who argued. Christopher Gad and Casper B. Jensen in 2014 tried to persuade their colleagues to remain young and foolish and be experimental with their both theoretical and empirical resources. Their idea was that we must not to hold on to the vision of one correct way to go to the academic heaven (via the middle theory concept) but to reflexively improvise with the ideas and cases within reach. Of course, at the expense of being needed by the big guys.
I think, STS in Russia has the same problems, maybe even worst. Pity for us, we don’t have enough long history of our discipline on the Russian soil to be defended from the positivistic or critical winds. Our colleagues from history and philosophy of science seem to not have enough common ground (or trading zones) with us to be our genuine allies. Natural and technical scientists see in us, for the most part, journalists or bloggers. Engineers may speak with us about a bunch of things, but they are not ready to invest too much interest in what we do. This bareness of our being urges us sometimes to think about where we find our solid allies to have faith in what we are and what we do.
One of the reasonable solutions to this problem is to find out the fact that we’re very close to the developers who produce technologies, tech businesspeople, state officials who regulate the technologies. They may need us. There’s only one thing. We should slightly change the knowledge that we make. All that qualitative amorphous stuff is not these people value today. “If you look around,” - some of them might say, “you will find a lot of media journalists and YouTube bloggers who do your work much better than you. They can conduct a hundred interviews while you do a dozen”. Developers themselves in their gloomy studios can record a million of hours of talk about what they do and how, and what’s wrong with it. Whether we still need STS-ers who permeate the souls and the labs of scientists and engineers to reach their real motives and factual practices?
“And what about the post-truth situation we’re in?” the anonymous partner may continue, “Everybody lies; you should not trust in discourse anymore”. The best thing you can do is to take advantage of the development of all that digital stuff and become a data scientist. Isn’t it the injection of the solid knowledge from the neural networks syringe that you need to come to real life far away from the actor-networks and boundary objects? Exact knowledge is what we need from you. Certain and quantified knowledge which is based on big data to make you feel that you do real science. And, what’s important, useful knowledge”.
Although you’re almost lulled to sleep by the arguments above, suddenly you wake up. And you start to think. Maybe this house of cards of quantified knowledge was created just to make useful knowledge for all those developers and businesspeople? It is not an accusation; it is a reflection. In STS, we like to blame all those narrow-minded engineers, start-uppers, bureaucrats that they rely on the knowledge that too much surface and too much alien to the people on whom they make money.
- “Do you really think that your users are mostly women of middle age?”
- “Do you seriously consider your consumers to be just a pair of eyes and fingers?”
- “Don’t you see as we are that they have a lot of images and a sea of their life experience with your technologies?”
- “Don’t you see people don’t habituate to talk with your robots in the call-centers, they create new images of what the robots are based on their experience?”
- “Don’t you see that trust is not something that is established between a person and his laptop, that one can find a lot of practices there that transform this socio-material hybrid into the office machine, the leisure booth, the communicative hub, the presentation wall?”.
But our so-called partners seem not to hear what we say.
But what if it is for good? Maybe it is fine that we produce knowledge that won’t be used by someone with the only profit as a life mission? Do we as STS-ers want to witness the situation when your complex descriptions of users are consumed by neural network to attuned itself to tiny gestures and omnigenous practices of people? What if our quest for the multiplicity of mundane life of users may bring about more and more substantial control into the life of people?
I mean, I’m not so serious. Of course, it needs too much energy and resources to do so. I don’t think it is feasible to do that in the near future. It’s hard to imagine the world when the results of the article of STS-ers are uploaded to a server where some machine instantly transforms it into the new kind of heuristics to classify and to control users’ practices. It is only a (and maybe excessive) reflection. But the issue with what to do with our knowledge remains.
Probably, it’s for good that we produce very disparate and amorphous knowledge? Probably, it’s good that our results are not interesting for the people in charge of technology development? Probably, we should stay not hungry and foolish but small and nebulous? Not to mix up with the extended and rigorous networks of industries, states, and big companies? At least, we cannot blame ourselves that we do some harm to our fellows with our knowledge. At least, we have some time to think twice and to reflect upon the networks we want to be dragged in.
