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+title: 'AOIR 6.2.2: Saskia Sassen'
+date: '2005-10-07T09:11:53-04:00'
+permalink: /aoir-622-saskia-sassen/
+tags:
+    - conferences
+---
+
+What follows are my notes on Saskia Sassen’s keynote address, “Digital Formations: The Intersection of Technical and Social Logics in Electronic Space.” A reminder that any mischaracterization or misunderstanding is my fault, not hers.
+
+social science research council project: how can social scientists take technology seriously but not be blinded by it?
+
+concepts like “internet” operate like master categories — create a kind of penumbra around themselves; what is it that those words that are becoming categories are actually obscuring
+
+project: how would we as social scientists constitute the object of study, in a way that both takes the technology seriously and avoids being blinded by it
+
+team of mostly social scientists, but a few IT types (incl. John Seely Brown)
+
+instruction to committee: we cannot water down one another’s discourses in order to communicate; we have to build analytic bridges that allow us to talk to each other without oversimplifying
+
+a beautiful idea! but how do you do that? trial and error
+
+second rule: if we as social scientists are going to discpline ourselves in the field, how can we take the tech seriously instead of treating it as a independent variable (the “impact of” approach)
+
+technologies constitute a whole new domain of experience — must get past the dependent/independent variable mode
+
+third rule: interested in interactive domains, at the limit, in their constitutive capacities; technologies in their “sociality” (from French socialité; signals a very think kind of socialness, associatedness — doesn’t imply the multiplicities of transactions that “the social” imply) — studying domains that in their interactiveness construct new kind of sociality
+
+fourth rule: let’s look at interactive domains that are structured in electronic space (not pipes)
+
+one way to study would be to take interactive spaces and try to understand the question: how does the presence of social logics that at least partly structure interaction in this doman alters the technological logic that one can derive from the capacities of the technology?
+
+alter = enhance, etc.
+
+interactivity of social logics and technical logics
+
+can actually explain why so many of the predictions of the power of new ITCs have not been accurate; they have inferred from technical capacities certain outcomes, but it doesn’t work that way — fails to take into account the social logics
+
+can we specify a few analytic structures that need to be taken into account in order to pursue this question?
+
+three such analytics: first, the relationship between fixity and mobility — no doubt that technologies are designed to neutralize space, to enhance mobility; need to understand constitutive features of mobility, but study whether fixity remains important
+
+capital mobility no doubt enhanced by digital markets and instruments — software removes need to know the math in order to use; made a foundational difference in the functioning of financial markets, and thus the technology becomes constitutive in the change, an actor altering the foundational dynamics of the market
+
+on the other hand: still interested in fixity in mobility, which is part of the new mobilities (see David Harvey, /Late Capitalism/
+
+what of when a building becomes part of a financial market (?) — building is fixed, immobile, and yet our use of the building changes (?) — technical logic of domain inhabits the building (???)
+
+second: destabilizing of traditional hierarchies of scale; technologies disrupt traditional institutionalizations through scope, etc. — we can now reach so many more people! but it’s not just that we can reach them — also, they should be able to reach one another — simultaneity is too often not a part of scale models
+
+technologies can be disruptive to geographical and institutional jurisdictions, but at the same time…
+
+a story that has not received enough attention: the potential for discovering what might work (???)
+
+third analytics: culture of use — we talk a lot of competence, access, in binary terms, but there’s more to be explored; discovering an analytic border zone, an ambiguous terrain between one pole and another
+
+example: anthropological study of how different types of Muslims in the Middle East use the internet; expectations were at one end, hip, tech-savvy Muslim youth, and at the other, older, traditional scholars of the Koran — but it turns out, that because of the culture of use the scholars of the Koran brought to the technology, they had a much more complex use of the technology than did the youths, and were able to find utilities of the technology that the youth were not able to find
+
+how do social logics alter the outcome of technical logics?
+
+book that came out of project, /Digital Formations/, presents new analytical model
+
+Tagged: [aoir](http://technorati.com/tag/aoir)
+