Blackboxing and Instruction Manuals
Continuing to think out loud, rehearsing and revising ideas from the previous post. Comments most welcome.
Anyone familiar with STS theory who read this (from my last post):
…it’s as if the instruction manual which was normally held fixed by both the physical nature of print and various cultural force has been posted on a wiki, where anyone and everyone can edit or add to it in a virtually frictionless manner.
will immediately realize that I’m not talking about anything new – this is essentially the process of “opening up the black box,” taking knowledge which has been treated as fixed or “made” and opening it up for renegotiation. There’s a whole body of literature on how this happens (including a good percentage of my dissertation), so I won’t go into it here.
One of the things I really like about the “instruction manual” metaphor for how we learn and pass on knowledge about technology is that it’s explicitly focused on writing. The “black-box” metaphor is incredibly useful for the ways in which it highlights transparency vs. opacity (in fact, this is the core tension of the metaphor), but it does so by shifting emphasis a bit from the knowledge that is/has been made to its relative state of visibility. By talking about “instruction manuals,” we can again foreground the nature of this knowledge as having been “written”; by people, in local contexts.
The problem, of course, is that instruction manuals are by nature fixed (i.e. black-boxed); we don’t want to lose the nuances of opacity and transparency that “black-boxing” raises. This brings us to one of the biggest problems with “black-boxing” as a metaphor: it conflates two very important and very distinct activities. When we talk about whether something has been black-boxed, we’re fundamentally talking about access…in the case of knowledge about the potential and appropriate uses of a technology, however, “access” can mean two very different things:
- On one hand, “black-boxing” is used to highlight the extent to which the production of a certain piece of knowledge has been erased – the more “black-boxed” a piece of knowledge, the more it seems to stand as an objective fact as opposed to something that was manufactured at a certain time and place by a given set of individuals. This is the Latourian sense of the metaphor (see Science in Action).
- In the Social Construction of Technology literature, “Black-boxed” has come to mean something a bit different. Here, the focus is less on the production of a single piece of knowledge and more explicitly on the skirmishes between competing knowledges, so “black-boxed” has become another way of pointing toward the “closure” of a dispute; while still highlighting the erasure of the process by which a given piece of knowledge became fixed, the term also points toward the fixedness and tangibility of that knowledge, both the inability of others to alter it and its ability to impact the world around it.
In both cases, “black-boxing” means limited access; in the first, the production of knowledge is made less visible, while in the latter, the actual means of knowledge production are moved farther away from relevant actors.
As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I’m not verbalizing the distinction between the two very well; it’s hard to find the right language (and in some ways I’m likely grossly mischaracterizing the subtle nuances of each approach). The best way I’ve been able to come up with to explain this is as the difference between literacy and fluency: if you’re literate, you can read a language, but in order to write it you must be fluent.
This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but I can assure you that it’s very real – I can read and speak Spanish more or less fluently, having studied it for years earlier in my academic life and having spent time here and there in Spanish-speaking countries, but my experience with French is far different. I took a “French for Graduate Students” seminar at Cornell, which was designed explicitly to make me literate but not fluent. As a result, I can read French on a page and even do a half-assed job of translating French text to English (essentially a substitution mechanism), but I can’t really form original French prose at all1.
Here, I would argue, is a useful point when thinking about technical knowledge; in short, there are two ways of interacting with it, literate and fluent. With regard to a given technology, the literate are those who are able to read the instruction manual, and perhaps even understand how it was written (i.e. open up the black box in the Latourian sense). The fluent, on the other hand, are those who are able not only to read meaning, but are able to (re)write it. They’re the ones for whom the instruction manual appears in wiki form as opposed to immutable marks on fixed paper.
1 My relationship to the French language is actually even weirder than this: because the seminar was designed almost entirely for students to learn to read French, I have for the most part no idea whatsoever how it is supposed to sound when spoken aloud. For me, French is a system of marks on paper, which I have a moderate ability to translate into a more familiar language.
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