Social Science Research Council

Where teaching and research were still, until recently, “crafts” indissolubly attached to the person performing them, scholars are now regarded as a “bundle” of functions that can and should be “unbundled,” desubjectivized, and broken down into as many discrete tasks that can be fulfilled more efficiently, and on demand, by interchangeable operators – a development made possible by the pervasive introduction of ICTs as instruments of coordination.

This last week I attended a talk by Professor Paul Duguid of the UC Berkeley I-School. Prof. Duguid teaches on the topic of information quality, and recently has begun research on the history and development of trademarks and branding. As with his previous work, his talk raised issues that question the embrace of the current popular culture of open web based systems, and his commentaries are well worth sharing.

There are many fine histories of the postwar development of the computer and the construction of the Internet, such that it might appear almost superfluous to mention them as a prime determinant in the transformation of our understanding of the production and distribution of information. Their joint impact upon global communications and the control and storage of information conventionally makes reference to two principles said to be inscribed in the very technological trajectory of their development: Moore’s Law, which guaranteed that the per-unit cost of a calculation and/or memory unit was destined to fall exponentially over the horizon of its relevance; and the so-called “end-to-end” principle in the packet-switching architecture of the Internet, where ‘all’ the coordination and control functions were supposedly relegated to the edges of the network, and the internal nodes of the Internet were deemed neutral with regard to simple routing functions.