10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16934
This article illustrates a case study where the adoption of epistemological assumptions and data analysis techniques borrowed from both semiotics and ANT have enabled the researcher to transcend the limits that characterise traditional studies on online communities underpinned by a “sociology of the social” approach. Today, the very concept of “online community” seems to be at stake, to the point that it is no longer clear whether there exist online ties that are specific enough to be called “communitarian”. In order to analyse such an opaque and unstable object of study, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy objects have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed. Approaches like semiotics and ANT turn out to be useful exactly because they use texts as “handles” to grasp heterogeneous, transient, objects of study. This article discusses in details a “funnel-like” method of analysis in a research field that has too often forgone the critique of epistemological assumptions inherited from other disciplines.
application/pdf
2038-3460
16934
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en
Annalisa Pelizza
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
ANT
From Community to Text and Back. On Semiotics and Ant as Text-Based Methods for Fleeting Objects of Study
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
1
Essays
2011-01-07
2023-05-11
2011-01-07
2023-06-29
57-89
TS
Annalisa Pelizza
2010
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/16934
57
2038-3460
2
ANT
en
89
From Community to Text and Back. On Semiotics and Ant as Text-Based Methods for Fleeting Objects of Study
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/16934/15856
1
                                                                                    Essay
From Community to Text and Back
On Semiotics and Ant as Text-Based Methods for Fleet-
ing Objects of Study


Annalisa Pelizza



      Abstract This article illustrates a case study where the adoption of epistemologi-
      cal assumptions and data analysis techniques borrowed from both semiotics and
      ANT have enabled the researcher to transcend the limits that characterise tradi-
      tional studies on online communities underpinned by a “sociology of the social”
      approach. Today, the very concept of “online community” seems to be at stake, to
      the point that it is no longer clear whether there exist online ties that are specific
      enough to be called “communitarian”. In order to analyse such an opaque and un-
      stable object of study, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy ob-
      jects have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed.
      Approaches like semiotics and ANT turn out to be useful exactly because they use
      texts as “handles” to grasp heterogeneous, transient, objects of study. This article
      discusses in details a “funnel-like” method of analysis in a research field that has
      too often forgone the critique of epistemological assumptions inherited from oth-
      er disciplines.

      Keywords online communities; information systems; method; semiotics; ANT




Introduction
    Drawing upon the methods developed as part of the Tracing Back Communi-
ties research,1 this article illustrates a case study where the adoption of epistemo-
logical assumptions and techniques of data analysis borrowed both from semiotics
and Ant have enabled the researcher to transcend the limits that usually character-
ize studies on online communities underpinned by a “sociology of the social” ap-
proach (Latour 2005a).


1
  Tracing Back Communities. An Analysis of Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities archive
from an Ant perspective is the title of author’s doctoral dissertation at University of Milan-
Bicocca. The dissertation was discussed in March 2009.



TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Volume 1(2) pp. 57-89 - ISSN 2038-3460
http://www.tecnoscienza.net                       © 2010 TECNOSCIENZA
58   PELIZZA



         Traditional sociological approaches to online communities (OC) have often
     paid with arbitrariness the heterogeneity and fuzziness of similar objects of study.
     Early studies from the nineties, for instance, took the dichotomy “virtual Vs. phys-
     ical realm” for granted and concentrated on whether OC might be compared to
     real ones, or on the indicators that help distinguish “true” communities from other
     types of looser aggregations.
         However, about fifteen years later the same concept of “online community”
     seems to be at stake, to the point that it is not longer clear whether there exist
     online ties that are specific enough to be called “communitarian”. In order to ana-
     lyse such an opaque and unstable object of study as current online techno-social
     communities, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy objects
     have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed.
         A similar methodology should enable the researcher to refrain from a priori
     postulating specific types of grouping, to deal with the transient, unstable nature of
     social ties, especially online, to extend agency to non-humans, to recognize innova-
     tion in emerging forms of interaction. As a matter of fact, similar epistemological
     assumptions are embodied by text-based approaches like semiotics and Ant.
         According to those social sciences which aspire to hardness, semiotics is
     charged with being a discipline that only deals with texts: on the contrary, by try-
     ing to avoid the blind alleys wherein many researches on online communities end-
     ed up, semiotics and the specific strand of Ant developed by Bruno Latour turn
     out to be useful exactly because they use texts as “handles” to grasp heterogene-
     ous, transient, fuzzy objects of study.
         This article shows how a text-based approach makes possible a different meth-
     od of analysis in a research field that has too often forgone the critique of episte-
     mological assumptions inherited from other disciplines (i.e. computer sciences and
     economics). By discussing a method underpinned by the dialogue between Ant
     and semiotics, this article outlines a path for those who do not want to produce
     another research which aims at distinguishing “true OC” from “mere aggregates”,
     but aim at adopting a performative definition of “community”.
         § 1. enumerates the epistemological constraints posed by transient, fuzzy tech-
     no-social communities, and the limits of prior methods of analysis. § 2. deals with
     the choices made on an epistemological level to face those constrains, while § 3.
     and § 4. respectively show the solutions adopted as far as the choice of the sample
     and the techniques of data analysis are concerned. Furthermore, § 5. illustrates
     some research applications that can help throw light on the method proposed. Fi-
     nally, § 6. draws some conclusions.


     1. Interrogating Fuzzy Objects
        Any research on OC carried out in the first decade of the twenty-first century
     must face some pieces of evidence that tend to make the object of study opaque
     and fuzzy. First, since 2000 developments in the economy of Internet (see Ander-
     son 2006; Benkler 2006; Carr 2005a, 2005b; Formenti 2008; Lovink 2007) and in
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)       59



the politics of information (see Goldsmith and Wu 2006; Lessig 2001; Shirky 2003)
have called into question a considerable amount of the utopias that the digital
community paradigm inherited from cyber-culture and from counter-culture
(Pelizza 2009). More generally, in their discussion on the three theoretical bridges
at the confluence on communication studies and Sts, Boczkowski and Lievrouw
(2008) have showed how over the last two decades the “continuity view” about
the social effects of media has been overcoming the “revolutionary rhetoric” and
the “new technologies, new society” discourse.
    The shift from the prairie to the battlefield has been promptly documented by
scholars from diverse disciplines (see among others Lovink 2003, 2007; Lovink and
Rossiter 2005; Pasquinelli 2008; Turner 2006). Similarly, some authors agree in ar-
guing that the “digital information revolution” has been incrementally replaced by
achievements in security, reliability, and ease of use (Graham 2004; Herring 2004;
Lunenfeld 2004).
    Despite the different approaches, these authors have all argued that many of the
postulates that the communitarian, non-profit Internet culture has inherited from
cyber-culture cannot be taken for granted, when they are not overtly disproved by
evidence. As a consequence, some academic commentators have renounced to
acknowledge the digital existence of peculiar social aggregates kept together by
communal ties, and influent sociologists that have opened the field of Internet
studies have replaced “communities” with “networks of individuals” (Castells
2001; Wellman 2001).
    Second, it might be said that while the cyber-culture paradigm underpinning
the notion of “virtual community” is showing its limits, other domains are taking
over this notion. We are witnessing the explosion of the gemeinschaft well beyond
the domain of sociology and computer science – towards economics and manage-
ment, as well as beyond academic institutions – towards market and corporate me-
dia. It has crashed the boundaries of social sciences and urban planning to shore
on the crowded coast of business, Internet companies and media discourse. As
Woolgar (2002) has pointed out, the discourse behind all the narratives of the “vir-
tual” as opposed to the “real” is characterized by hyperbole: terms like “virtual”
and “remote” are applied to activities and institutions in order to attribute them an
appealing image.
    As a consequence, an ever-widening meaning of community is ascribed to the
meaning of OC. There is a clear etymological trend in the successive variations of
this expression: it goes from the most specific meaning of the early underground
scene to the most comprehensive one (Wellman 2001). “Online communities”
have been ranging up to include almost every form of aggregation through ICT:
collaborative tagging, blogging, bookmarking associate objects as well as digital
personae. This evidence questions the distinction between human beings and ob-
jects, and asks whether it is possible to extend agency to technological artefacts.
    Third, OC have been growing in popularity as the range of potential shared in-
terests has widened. If the Berkshire Encyclopaedia of Human Computer Interac-
tion indicates digital divide's reduction, open access to ICT, community empow-
erment and revitalized democracy as issues that were addressed by “cybercommu-
60   PELIZZA



     nities” during late nineties, with social networking sites (SNS) it has become hard
     to identify an explicit interest focus that expands beyond sociability itself. If early
     OC were glued together by a common mission, today “the interest focus cannot be
     considered a prolific category for research” (Mascio 2003). Likewise, Boyd and El-
     lison (2007) argue that SNS mark a shift from interest-centred networks to me-
     centred networks, and that this shift mirrors a new organizational structure of OC.
         Fourth, pervasive computing and smart mobs (Rheingold 2002) show much
     more variegated ways to articulate the dichotomies /individual Vs. collective/ and
     /physical Vs. virtual/ than it was postulated by early research on OC. In early
     works from the nineties, in fact, even a context-oriented approach like virtual eth-
     nography (Hine 2000) tended to focus on online practices as the primary field of
     investigation, without taking into account their overlapping with off-line practices.
     On the contrary, more recent empirical research has shown that the introduction
     of computer-mediated technologies can stimulate activities in the “physical” do-
     main (Nettleton et al. 2002).
         As a consequence of these movements, in the last few years OC are becoming
     more and more difficult to be delineated and their boundaries have become fuzzy.
     Early researches in the nineties could quite straightforwardly not only postulate
     specific definitions of OC as starting points, but also classify them according to
     their attributes, the type of technology used, their relationship to physical commu-
     nities and their degree of “boundedness” (Lazar and Preece 1998). Today, on the
     contrary, this proliferation gets to the point that drawing a list of all the types of
     grouping subsumed under the term “online community” appears an impossible
     task.
         In other terms, it is not clear anymore whether there exist ties that are specific
     enough to be labelled “communitarian” and that can be assembled together in
     constituting a special assemblage. “Community” seems to be watered down: it is
     diffuse everywhere and yet nowhere in particular.
         These features of the object of study converge in enlightening an “opacity” of
     OC, a sort of resistance to being “grasped”. Differently from earlier studies carried
     on in mid nineties, today the researcher interested in digital social assemblages en-
     counters more and more problems in setting the boundaries of her object of study.
     The main epistemological constraints arising when starting a scientific work on
     online social aggregates can be resumed as the following.
         First, the semantic proliferation of the term “online community” means that a
     priori drawing a list of all the types of grouping subsumed under this notion would
     be an arbitrary task. When groups proliferate, objectivity has nothing to do with
     the a priori selection of one better group to start with, but rather with the observa-
     tion of different contrasting selections. To retain a scientific approach, it is neces-
     sary to avoid defining the type of online group that is supposed to be relevant to
     the analysis before beginning the research. As Ward (1999, 96) has pointed out,
     research on computer-mediated assemblages needs to avoid “holding any precon-
     ceived ideas concerning the existence of community”. Following similar concerns,
     Teli et al. (2007) wonder how we can define online groups by avoiding the dichot-
                                                                       TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)           61



omised discourse of the “virtual lexicon”, and propose to replace it with a “cyborg
lexicon”.
    Second, while mid nineties’ studies on OC took for granted the existence of a
specific “communitarian” substance distinguishing OC from other types of techno-
social assemblages, today the appropriation of the term by business operators
makes it evident that one cannot postulate the existence of peculiar solidarity-
based aggregates definable as “online communities”.
    Third, online social assemblages are not established once and for all. As studies
on the high percentage of lurkers in online discussions demonstrate (Nielsen
2006), boundaries are so hazy and the number of those that cross them regularly so
high that one should better admit that stability and order are rare exceptions.
Therefore, a research dealing with online social assemblages needs to constantly
address the fleeting nature of social ties and to focus on the means whereby ele-
ments are kept assembled.
    Fourth, what is difficult when dealing with those techno-social assemblages
commonly subsumed under the umbrella term “online community” is precisely to
disentangle the technological dimension from the human one. As a matter of fact,
where is the threshold between the social and the technological set when it is the
software interface that rearranges the regimes of access and visibility?2 To account
for the fact that “software is political science in executable form”, it is necessary to
avoid deterministic explanations of the relationship between technological arte-
facts and social ties as a simple relation of cause-and-effect and explore more flexi-
ble definitions of agency.
    Fifth, the importance of avoiding the reduction of online forms of collaboration
to simple patterns of interaction is crucial when considering that for years OC have
been a site where innovation of product and innovation of process were jointly led.
Appealing to established and restricted sets of agency or grouping could thus lead
the research to an even thicker opacity and to disregard innovation; conversely,
avoiding arbitrary closures will give the enquiry much more freedom of movement
to trace innovations.


2. A Bottom-up Epistemology for Ephemeral Assemblages
   In order to address these constraints, the Tracing Back Communities research
developed a specific method which starts from the epistemological level (i.e. defini-
tion of the objective and choice of a performative method of classification) and
continues to the operative level (i.e. selection of the dataset and techniques of data
analysis). In this paragraph I am going to describe the first set of solutions.


2
  As Internet commentator Clay Shirky points out, “social software is political science in execut-
able form. […] designers of social software have more in common with economists or political
scientists than they do with designers of single-user software, and operators of communal re-
sources have more in common with politicians or landlords than with operators of ordinary web
sites” (Shirky 2003).
62   PELIZZA



        Most research on OC concentrated on the extent to which a digital assemblage
     might be considered a community rather than a fleeting transaction, thus disre-
     garding the same complexity in postulating “community”. On the contrary, the
     Tracing back Communities research borrowed some epistemological insights from
     Sts: Ant, in particular, was intended to deal exactly with opaque, unstable objects
     of study. Notably, three are the elements derived from the specific strand of Ant
     developed by Latour that helped to address the constraints listed above.
        First, Latour’s understanding of Ant starts explicitly from taking into account
     the main constraint discussed above: there are no groups more legitimate to start
     an inquiry with than others.
          It seems that the most important decision to make before becoming a social scientist is to decide
     first which ingredients are already there in society. […] [On the contrary,] there is no relevant group
     that can be said to make up social aggregates, no established component that can be used as an in-
     controvertible starting point. (Latour 2005a, 28-29)

         According to Latour, no social groups can be postulated at the beginning of the
     investigation: they can rather be found at the end, as the result of the analysis of
     the accounts provided by social actors themselves.
         Second, according to approaches focused on situated action, the presence of
     the social needs to be demonstrated each time anew and cannot be assumed once
     and for all. In particular, Latour stresses the fact that social groups are not inertial,
     but they need to be constantly kept up by group-making efforts: he brings into
     question the same notion of “society” as a kind of substance in itself, separated
     from other domains like economics, politics and culture. Rather than a stable enti-
     ty, the “social” is “a movement that can be seized indirectly when there is a slight
     change in one older association mutating into a slightly newer or different one”
     (ibid., 36).
         Under this perspective, the traditional sociological distinction between gemein-
     schaft and gesellschaft loses its meaning. If there exist no homogeneous ties that
     are peculiar to a substance named “society”, similarly it is unlikely that there exist
     homogeneous elements that are peculiar to a substance labelled “community”.
     This consideration frees any research on OC from the incumbency to look for ho-
     mogeneous, solidarity-based ties that can be named as “communal”.
         Third, while Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) has historically focused on
     “immediacy” as a key concept for the evaluation of interfaces (see Nielsen 1999;
     Norman 1988; Visciola 2000), Latour distinguishes “mediation” – a relationship
     that constitutes actors while taking place, from “intermediation” – a relationship
     where a tool just transports agency from one pre-existing point to another pre-
     existing point. While in intermediation the inputs are enough to define the out-
     puts, mediation exceeds its inputs and cannot be reduced to a relationship of
     cause-and-effect (Latour 1999; 2005a).
         The main theoretical opposition between the two disciplines implies two com-
     pletely different approaches towards agency. According to HCI, on the one hand,
     agency pertains to a full-blown subject endowed with intentionality. On the other
     hand, by calling into question the same notion of intentionality, Ant sees action as
                                                                         TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)           63



distributed throughout an assemblage, a network of hybrid actants.3 In this sense,
for Ant, objects too can be participants in a course of action: it is sufficient that
they make a difference in some other agent’s action.
   Latour’s approach to agency as distributed action in potentia4 can be explained
by recalling Greimas’ notion of “competence” as a being-able-to-do and a know-
ing-how-to-do (Greimas and Courtés 1979, 65). In Greimas’ Narrative Schema,5
competence is acquired during the qualification stage that logically precedes the
performance: before performing an action, an actant needs both pragmatic (being-
able) and cognitive (know-how or implicit knowledge) skills that make the action
possible. In a similar way, when saying that “things might authorize, allow, afford,
encourage, permit” etc., Latour is acknowledging that they are providing a being-
able-to-do and/or a knowing-how-to-do.
   Accounting for the fact that software design is “political science in executable
form” means to get rid of the notion of agency as related to intentionality and to
acknowledge that code too can participate in a course of action. Since digital inter-
faces re-organize the associations that constitute the socio-technical network
wherein they are included, they may be conceived of as mediators in their own
right and not mere intermediaries. Under this perspective, it is clear how Ant pro-
vides any research on OC with the pliability necessary to undertake an analysis that
aims at investigating how empowerment proceeds from information technologies.


2.1. Objective of the research
   Since its inception, the research on OC has concentrated on the relationship be-
tween access to ICT and changes in the societal structure. According to the cyber-
culture utopia underpinning the OC paradigm,6 this relationship has often been
conceived of as one of direct correlation: access to digital media was supposed to
increase the quality of life of community members. “Empowerment” has thus been
a key concept in the development of the digital communitarian perspective: it has
acted as the missing link in the relationship between ICT and social ties, the ele-

3
  In his works, Latour uses the term “actant” as a substitute of “actor” in order to gain higher
pliability with respect to figuration. In semiotics an actant is a narrative function that on a dis-
cursive level gets embodied into an actor endowed with a figuration. Latour explicitly borrowed
this distinction from semiotics, where it corresponds to the deployment of agency respectively
on the narrative level (actants) and on the discursive level (actors). See Greimas and Courtés
(1979, 5).
4
  “There might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence. In
addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action’, things might authorize,
allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on”
(Latour 2005a, 71-72).
5
  See Greimas and Courtés (1979), “Narrative (Schema)”.
6
  As demonstrated by Mattelart (2001), cyber-culture utopias can be traced back to Norbert
Wiener. In his 1948’s work Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine Wiener postulated information as the source of a second industrial revolution bearing
the promise of emancipation for the citizenry. For an extended discussion, see Pelizza (2009).
64   PELIZZA



     ment transporting the revolutionary effects from the technological domain to the
     social one.
         However, recent developments in the economy of Internet (i.e. the Dotcom
     burst, first, the development of UGC platforms harnessing the social potential of
     the Net, then – see Lovink 2003, 2007, O’Reilly 2005) and in the politics of infor-
     mation (i.e. the territorialisation of the Net – see Formenti 2008, Goldsmith and
     Wu 2006) have called into question a considerable amount of the utopias that the
     digital community paradigm inherited from cyber-culture. As a consequence, the
     correlation between access to ICT and empowerment cannot be taken for granted
     anymore. Instead of postulating a definition of “empowerment”, a study carried
     out in the last decade should investigate the patterns of self-empowerment that
     have underpinned the development of computer-mediated groups in the last dec-
     ade.
         To move along with this goal it is necessary to recognize that the concept of
     “empowerment” brings with it a strongly deterministic understanding of the rela-
     tionship between technology and society. Along its history the discourse on OC
     has witnessed the well-known struggle between two deterministic explanations.
     Both the technologically-driven position which argues that assuring access to digi-
     tal media would straightforwardly empower marginalized actors, and the sociolog-
     ically-driven argument that sees the design of participatory tools on the Net as “re-
     flecting” the needs of local communities are based on a simple cause-and-effect
     pattern of interaction that shrinks the number of possible relationships between
     technological artefacts and social ties.
         On the contrary, with OC it is impossible to disentangle the technological di-
     mension from the human one. It is thus evident that a research dealing with transi-
     ent techno-social assemblages would rather need a theory of action that goes be-
     yond the simple relation of causality, and that takes into account a multiplicity of
     modes of action between technological artefacts and social ties. To do this, a rela-
     tivist, bottom-up approach was chosen. As Bruno Latour argues,
     in situations where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of
     entities to be taken into account fluctuates, […] it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of
     informers offering cases of some well-known types. You have to grant them back the ability to make
     up their own theories of what the social is made of. […] [You have to] try to catch up with their [ac-
     tors’] often wild innovations in order to learn from them […] which accounts could best define the
     new associations that they have been forced to establish. (Latour 2005a, 12)

        As a consequence, the research’s objective was further developed: “to investi-
     gate the diverse patterns of self-empowerment that have underpinned the devel-
     opment of computer-mediated social groups” integrated a bottom-up perspective
     and became “to describe how social actors involved in online aggregations them-
     selves account for the empowering potential of technological artefacts”.
        Far from being an approach “only” concerned with the discursive aspects of
     empowerment and disregarding “actual” improvements, a similar objective takes
     into the greatest account one of Ant’s and semiotics’ common principles: that ac-
     counts not only “reflect” groups, but literally “de-scribe” them: bring them into
                                                              TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)        65



existence. Therefore, a similar objective suggests a hypothesis: that different narra-
tives of empowerment are supposed to bring different groups into existence. In
paragraph 5 we will test this hypothesis.


2.2. “Platonic” VS. “Wittgensteinian” classification
    Coming back to early studies on OC, durability over time, regularity of the
rhythm of interaction, presence of one or few shared interests were usually used as
indicators to distinguish “successful” communities from other types of looser so-
cial aggregations (Jones 1998; Kim 2000; Smith 1992; Smith and Kollock 1999;
Taylor 1987).
    From an epistemological viewpoint, these approaches adopted a Platonic meth-
od of classification. Platonic classification, in fact, numbers the features an object
needs to comply with in order to be classified as a token of a concept. Only cases
showing all the features numbered in the prior concept definition are seen as oc-
currences of that concept (Fig. 1).




Fig. 1. Platonic classification.




Fig. 2 – “Wittgensteinian” classification.
66   PELIZZA



         However, as we have seen, what is difficult when researching about online
     forms of aggregation is exactly individuating a closed list of features that are specif-
     ic to transient OC. In order to transcend this paradox, the Tracing back Commu-
     nities research chose to proceed the other way round. It did prefer to adopt an
     epistemological approach – that could be labelled “Wittgensteinian”7 – according
     to which a concept is not defined as a starting point, but rather a posteriori, as the
     result of clustering together online groups seen as occurrences of OC (Fig. 2).
         While Platonic epistemology postulates an essence common to all the occur-
     rences subsumed under a general substantive, Wittgenstein substituted Platonic
     Form with “family likeness”: “we are inclined to think that there must be some-
     thing in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justifica-
     tion for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games
     form a family the members of which have family likeness” (Wittgenstein 1958, 17 –
     Italic in the text).
         Similarly, Latour introduces a distinction between “ostensive” and “performa-
     tive” definition. According to him, since they need to be constantly kept up by
     group-making efforts, social aggregates cannot be the object of an ostensive defini-
     tion, but only of a performative one. “The object of an ostensive definition remains
     there, whatever happens to the index of the onlooker. But the object of a per-
     formative definition vanishes when it is no longer performed” (Latour 2005a, 37).
         In all these dichotomies, to the a priori adoption of essence-based definitions,
     another dynamic method of defining concepts is opposed. According to family re-
     semblance and performative definition, concepts are defined on field through the
     recognition of objects as members of a cluster: “they are made by the various ways
     and manners in which they are said to exist” (ibid., 34 – Italic by Author).
         Following this epistemology, recognition may be conceived of as a distributed
     situated action, “social” in Sts’ terms, since it is the result of the cognitive perfor-
     mances operated by multiple actors. This is why to overcome the main epistemo-
     logical problem in defining online groups based on solidarity ties, the Tracing back
     Community research adopted the principle that OC exist only inasmuch as they
     are recognized and acted upon by people.
         The following paragraph explains how the Tracing back Communities research
     proceeded from these epistemological choices to the selection of the sample of
     analysis.




     7
       I wish to thank Prof. Dieter Daniels for the suggestion of this label during my intervention at
     the “Community Vs Institution” panel organized by the Boltzmann Institute Me-
     dia.Art.Research during the re:place Conference in Berlin, 14-18 November 2007.
                                                                      TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)           67



3. Selection of the sample. Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities
competition as a space of controversy
    For what has been said right now, when it came to identify the sample of analy-
sis, the Tracing Back Communities research selected as case studies those cases
that had been recognized as occurrences of the concept “online community” by a
network of social actors. The network was the International Advisory Board of the
world’s leading competition for OC, the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz (At).
    Projects participating in the competition had been jointly recognized as occur-
rences of OC by the community spokespersons who submitted them to evaluation,
by the competition’s International Advisory Board who proposed additional en-
tries, and by the independent jury who excluded those projects that did not fulfil
the requirements.8 The resulting corpus of projects’ compliance with a performa-
tive definition of OC was assured by the fact that, far from being established once
and for all, each year requirements are overtly negotiated among jury members
throughout the whole process. The research thus analysed a dataset made by the
entry forms submitted to the competition from 2004 to 2007.
    Three are the aspects according to which the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital
Communities competition could constitute an adequate source of data. First, study
regarded competition as a peculiar form of controversy. Bringing together Latour
and Greimas, it can be argued that the situations where the social is made visible
and graspable are those where meaning emerges from comparison and “polemic
structures”:9 meetings, trials and plans in science labs, distance in time or space,
breakdowns and fractures, but also archives and museum collections, fiction.10
Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities competition could be seen as a space
for controversy because competitions constitute a primeval form of polemic struc-
ture: an arena where meaning emerges from comparison, contrasting logics are
made explicit, black boxes are re-opened.
    Second, like controversies (Latour 2005a, 52-58), competitions present some
recurring elements like a spokesperson, anti-groups, boundaries and accounts. It
might be said that competition is the place where online networks hit representa-
tion: it constitutes a moment in an unstable process of social innovation when a
spokesperson must emerge and – together with her – self-representations, identity
and opponents. Since competition catches online assemblages in the moment in
which they struggle to crystallize into the form “online community”, entry forms
are forced to make theories of action explicit.

8
   More precisely, I took into account the projects participating in the competition from the se-
cond phase onwards. The reason for this selection is that not all the projects submitted were
recognized as instances of online communities by the International Advisory Board and the jury:
some of them were excluded at the preliminary stage.
9
   Greimas and Courtés (1979) – see “Polemic” – define polemic structure as the dualistic prin-
ciple (subject/anti-subject) on which any human activity is based. Since they can be also con-
tractual (agreement, cooperation, etc.) and not only hostile (blackmail, provocation, open strug-
gle, etc), polemic structures lie at the core of any form of narration.
10
   These situations are numbered in Latour (2005a, 79-82) and Akrich (1992a).
68   PELIZZA



         Third, in order to grasp controversies accounts are needed: agencies and actors
     are made visible only into accounts. While not all Sts approaches share the under-
     standing of artefacts as “texts”,11 an overlap between Ant’s “account” and semiot-
     ics’ “text” may be recognised. It is true that for semiotics “text” is an a posteriori
     reconstruction of a set of relations (Marrone 2010) made possible by pertinence
     criteria, while for Ant accounts are descriptions, not necessarily constructed a pos-
     teriori by the analyst. However, it is also true that both semiotics and Ant rely on
     the notion of “text” as the unit of analysis:
     Textual accounts are the social scientist’s laboratory and if laboratory practice is any guide, it’s be-
     cause of the artificial nature of the place that objectivity must be achieved on conditions that artefacts
     be detected by a continuous and obsessive attention. […] If the social is something that circulates in
     a certain way […], then it may be passed along by many devices adapted to the task – including texts,
     reports, accounts, and tracers. It may or it may not. Textual accounts can fail like experiments often
     do. (Latour 2005a, 12 – italic in the text)

        Like semioticians, Latour is well aware of the “constructed” nature of texts, and
     accounts are always texts for which the pertinence issue is addressed in terms of
     “accuracy” and “truthfulness”:
     Foregoing the word “textual” in textual accounts remains dangerous however because, for people
     unaware of science studies and of semiotics, texts are often construed as “stories” or, even worse, as
     “just stories”. Against such a blasé attitude, I will be using the expression “textual account” to mean
     a text for which the question of its accuracy and truthfulness has not been put aside (ibid., 126 – ital-
     ics in the text).

         Rather, what seems different in semiotics’ text and Ant’s account is the role of
     the analyst. For semiotics, it is the analysts that holds the right to handle the perti-
     nence criteria and to set the boundaries of a text. On the contrary, for Ant the ana-
     lyst is only one of the professionals whose texts can bring an assemblage into exist-
     ence:
     For the sociologists of associations, any study of any group by any social scientist is part and parcel of
     what makes the group exist, last, decay, or disappear. […] [Sociologists] are on par with those they
     study, doing exactly the same job and participating in the same tasks of tracing social bonds, albeit
     with different instruments and for different professional callings. (Ibid., 33-34)

         It is Ant’s equivalence between texts reconstructed by analysts and texts as ac-
     counts by social actors that suggested me to consider the entry forms submitted by
     participants to Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities competition as textual
     accounts about what participants themselves conceived of as OC.
         As a consequence of these choices, the research adopted techniques of textual
     analysis. Next paragraph is going to explain the techniques of data analysis select-
     ed.


     11
       In his work about user configuration, for instance, Woolgar (1997) considers “text” as a met-
     aphor of the machine, and does not conceive of the machine itself as a text.
                                                                     TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)          69




4. Techniques of data analysis
    At an operative level, the epistemological choices so far discussed were translat-
ed into two main tasks and as many techniques of textual analysis, by blending Ant
and semiotic analytical categories. The choice of the techniques was led by two
constraints.
    The first constraint dealt with the high number of entry forms recorded in the
Ars Electronica archive.12 Since the dataset was constituted mainly by qualitative
data, I had to devise reliable techniques of data analysis for vast datasets. I faced
this problem by planning two distinct moments of the analysis. The first moment –
corresponding to task 1 – took into account the whole dataset (N cases) and used
quali-quantitative co-occurrence techniques provided by a textual analysis software
(Leximancer), while the second moment (task 2) concentrated on a selected num-
ber of case studies (n cases) and analysed in more depth texts’ stratification of
meaning.
    Second, according to the epistemological approach discussed so far, it was nec-
essary to avoid postulating categories in advance and, rather, to identify the catego-
ries used by the authors themselves. To face this constraint, when analysing the
whole dataset (N cases) I used Relational Analysis, a method based on measuring
how often concepts occur close together within the text. According to Relational
Analysis, categories that are relevant for a document can be inferred from the co-
variation amongst the high-frequency words in the text.
    The most remarkable aspect of the overall methodology was that the results of
the preceding task could be re-used in the following one. So, proto-themes ex-
tracted in task 1 by means of software tools were further investigated through text
browsing functionalities provided by the same software. By so doing I identified
some full-blown themes and different figures associated to them. In task 2 I used a
template to deepen the description of how the figures where articulated in differ-
ent texts. I called this way of proceeding funnel-like model. Not only it enabled me
to rely upon previously tested results, but also to concentrate on n cases only after
the analysis of N cases had provided me with a full array of themes and figures.
The following sub-paragraphs describe tasks and techniques in more details.


4.1. Task 1 – To identify relevant themes emerging from the da-
taset
   Task 1 was aimed at identifying matters of concern emerging from the whole
dataset through the automatic extraction of concepts and the analysis of co-


12
   Originally there were 1411 submissions; of these, some were blank entry forms, while some
others were excluded from the competition by the International Advisory Board and by the jury
as non-communities. 920 participating projects and related entry forms resulted after this pre-
liminary selection.
70   PELIZZA



     occurrence patterns. Then, by analysing the co-occurrence lists extracted by the
     software I identified some figures and narratives related to those themes.
         To extract relevant themes, I used the Automatic Concept Selection technique
     provided by Leximancer. Leximancer is a data-mining tool which performs Rela-
     tional Analysis; it can analyse the content of vast collections of textual documents
     and to visually display it. Information is displayed in a map that provides a bird’s
     eye view of the main concepts extracted from the dataset, and of their relation-
     ships.
         Some Leximancer features turned out to be useful to devise a method of analy-
     sis that was coherent with the epistemological assumptions discussed above. First,
     it allows both quantitative and qualitative analysis: while the conceptual map and
     the ranked list summarize the main concepts extracted, the browsing function al-
     lows the researcher to navigate through the instances of a concept or of a co-
     occurrence between two concepts.
         Second, Leximancer supports the visual display of the main concepts and their
     relations. The graphical representation of the semantic associations shows the ad-
     vantage of defining a concept not by any essence, but by a list of associations (see §
     2.2).
         Third, Leximancer performs concept extraction without forcing the researcher
     to define key concepts in advance, nor it assumes them from a predefined generic
     dictionary. Concepts in Leximancer are collections of words that generally travel
     together throughout the text: a terms is said to be part of a concept if it often co-
     occurs with it and occurs not so often with other concepts. By inferring the catego-
     ries present in the texts from the co-variation amongst the high-frequency words,
     Leximancer’s rationale allowed me to avoid the a priori formulation of categories.
         I obtained a map displaying the most relevant themes and the configurations of
     minor concepts related to them. Of course, it would have been naïve to consider
     “objectively relevant” the themes extracted in this way. I thus deemed them “pro-
     to-themes”, the starting point of the analysis. I then carried out a deeper analysis of
     the textual instances associated with them. Only for those that the further analysis
     recognized as full-blown themes, I passed to look for the figures associated to each
     one of them (see § 5).


     4.2. Task 2 – Analysing the stratification of texts
        Task 2 was aimed at analysing in depth the different theories of action under-
     pinning the OC participating in the competition. Notably, task 2 focused on the
     comparison of the projects participating in the competition as far as the role of
     technological artefacts was concerned. In order to do so, I privileged the textual
     analysis of a smaller number of entry forms so that more associations might emerge
     and narratives might be deployed in much more depth than I could do when ad-
     dressing the whole dataset. I took into consideration those OC that from 2004 to
     2007 deserved a Golden Nica (first prize) or Award of Distinction (second prize).
                                                                          TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)            71



   To fulfil this task, I carried on an analysis that could account for the stratifica-
tion of texts. Texts were thus analytically split up into units and subjected to a set
of questions gathered in a template. To elaborate the template, I adapted a four-
steps method suggested by Pozzato (2001).



1) Preliminary identification of the question

2) Question enrichment              Development of a theoretical background suggesting broad inter-
                                    pretative categories

3) Methodology test                 Elaboration of descriptive and operative categories; sample selec-
                                    tion; test of the template on 1/3 of the sample

4) Operative phase                  Coding of the text according to the template


Tab. 1. Method for template elaboration (Pozzato 2001).


    The preliminary question was about how social actors involved in OC them-
selves account for the empowering potential of information technologies (see §
2.1). The first part of the question was already solved thanks to the choice of the
sample; therefore, the questions to submit the texts to became as the following:
“what are the different theories of action that underpin the entry forms? Which is
the role attributed to technological objects in the course of action?”.
    As to the question enrichment, given the research’s epistemological perspective
discussed above, it avoided to adopt any theoretical framework. I thus evaded this
stage and passed to the identification of descriptive and operative categories.
    I borrowed descriptive categories and operative questions from both Greimas
and Latour. Notably, from Latour the template borrowed the list of traces left be-
hind by activities of group formation, and the distinction between mediator and
intermediary. First, since the list of groupings composed of social aggregates is po-
tentially infinite, it is easier for social enquirers to substitute it with the more ab-
stract list of the elements which are always present in controversies about groups.
These elements are: 1) a spokesperson who speaks for the group existence, defines
it and argues for its uniqueness; 2) some anti-groups that can be compared with
the group of interest, so that its consistency may be emphasized; 3) an element that
originates the group boundaries, so that they are rendered durable and taken for
granted. Usually limes are provided by appeals to tradition, law, nature, history,
freedom, etc.; 4) professionals (social scientists, journalists, statisticians) who speak
for the group existence. Any account by these professionals is part of what makes a
group exist or disappear (see Latour 2005a, 30-34).13

13
  On the performative role of journalists and pollsters in making social actors (for instance the
“public-opinion”) exist, see also Landowski (1989).
72   PELIZZA



         The second element that the template borrowed from Ant was the fundamental
     distinction between mediator and intermediary. A mediator is an actant that trans-
     lates, transforms, modifies the elements it is supposed to carry; it does not deter-
     mine, but makes someone do something, it triggers further actions and activates
     new participants; every time a mediator appears, it introduces a bifurcation in the
     course of action and the output is never predictable starting from the input. On
     the contrary, an intermediary only transports agency from an input to an output
     without transforming it; the output can therefore be easily predicted. With inter-
     mediaries, elements are usually linked through relationships of cause-and-effect
     and the chain transporting action is thus short, often made of only a couple of ele-
     ments (exactly the cause and the effect).
         From Greimas and semiotics the template borrowed the notion of “compe-
     tence”, the distinction between actants and actors and the definition of sender and
     receiver (see § 2) in a process of communication.14
         Finally, I tested the template on 1/3 of the sample before moving to the proper
     analysis. The final template is reported in Tab. 2. With reference to semiotics’ gen-
     erative path, both descriptive and operational categories in Tab. 2 lie on a discur-
     sive level, as the surface clues that could help the researcher to trace the stratifica-
     tion of text.
         Once I obtained the template, I moved to the proper operational phase. I thus
     coded textual extracts as if they were answers to the operational questions. At the
     end of each session, I used to index all extracts according to the last column on the
     right in the template.




     14
       These latter do not correspond to the sender and the receiver of Information Theory, since
     this early approach did not take into consideration the dynamic constitution of the subjects of
     communication. This is indeed the main difference between Information Theory, on one side,
     and Ant and semiotics, on the other side. Of course I cannot account here for the immense lit-
     erature dealing with subjectivity and communication from the fifties onwards. As Mattelart
     (2001) has pointed out, this literature traces indeed the history (and controversies) of what is
     meant by “Information Society”. A good account is provided by Boczkowski and Lievrouw
     (2008).
                                                                         TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)            73




Descriptive categories     Operational questions                                                Index

Project objective(s)                                                                            A


Goals                      What is the goal(s) that the project aims at achieving?              A1

Source of boundaries       To what element does the entry form appeal in order to de-
                           pict the community as a stable, taken for granted assem-             A2
                           blage?

Actors involved                                                                                 B

Sender                     Is there any entity that designed/developed the project?             B1

Receiver                   Is there any identifiable target of the action of the Sender?        B2a
                           Are Sender and Receiver clearly distinguishable?                     B2b

Anti-groups/anti-actants   Are there anti-actants that interfere with the course of action
                           in a negative way?                                                   B3

Actants as mediators Vs.   Is there any entity that contributes with some competences           B4
intermediaries             to the course of action?
                           Does the actant trigger further actions/mediations?
                                                                                                B4a
                           Does it activate new participants?
                                                                                                B4b
                           Does it introduce a bifurcation in the course of action?
                                                                                                B4c
                           Does it ‘transport’ (shift) or ‘translate’ (modify) what it is
                           supposed to carry?
                           Is the output predictable starting from the input?                   B4d

                           Does the actant determine some other event?                          B4e
                           How long is the chain of action? How many passages can be            B4f
                           counted?

                                                                                                B4g

Professional mobilized     Are there professionals (journalists, social scientists, statisti-
                           cians) quoted as part of what makes possible the durable
                           definition of the community?
                                                                                                B5

Spokesperson               Do the spokespersons that speak for the group existence –
                           namely, the author of the entry form – appear as agents in           B6
                           the account?

Tab. 2. Template
74   PELIZZA



     5. Case studies: from proto-themes to theories of action
         After having illustrated the method followed, I am now going to extensively
     discuss some applications. This is useful to illustrate on field what I have above la-
     belled funnel-like model: a method that identifies recurring themes and figures for
     large datasets (N cases) by means of co-occurrence analysis, and then enables the
     researcher to account for the deeper stratification of the text on a reduced number
     of n cases.
         In task 1 Leximancer identified some relevant concepts emerging from the
     whole dataset. The ten most frequently occurring concepts were “site”, “art”,
     “work”, “information”, “software”, “media”, “development”, “local”, “system”,
     “mobile”: these were not necessarily the most frequent words, but those that had
     many strongly related words that often co-occurred with them and that did not of-
     ten occur alone. As a consequence, minor concepts aggregated around highly con-
     nected ones: the resulting clusters of concepts might be regarded as proto-themes
     in semiotic terms (see circles in Fig. 3).




     Fig. 3. Leximancer’s map for task 1. Bird’s eye.

        Proto-themes formed around a highly connected concept, from which they bor-
     rowed the label, and aggregated less connected ones. The relationship between the
     main concept and the others that aggregated around it was not necessarily based
     on co-occurrence, but rather on contextual similarity: they appeared in similar con-
     texts in the dataset. The Information proto-theme, for instance, saw the concepts
                                                                          TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)            75



“information”, “local”, “government”, “services”, “city”, “human”, “develop-
ment”, “youth”, “including”, “map”, “life”, “members”, “created” appearing in
similar contexts.
    Not all proto-themes represented full-blown themes, though: some of them
were aggregates of rarely co-occurring concepts whose closeness in the map was
hardly significant. Conversely, some others seemed to reveal meaningful associa-
tions and deserved further investigation. Among these, “information” co-occurred
frequently with some of the concepts appearing in its cluster: “local”, “develop-
ment”, “government”. I thus analyzed its pattern of co-occurrence more deeply.
    By comparing the relative strengths of minor concepts co-occurring with “in-
formation”, I came to identify a full-blown theme “local development through in-
formation sharing” and some associated figures. In counter-tendency with the
dominant Internet discourse on de-territorialization, “information” registered the
emergence of a territorial topic. In the whole co-occurrence list for “information”,
among the five concepts most frequently co-occurring with it, three displayed a
semantic reference to a territorial dimension (“local”, “government”, “rural”),
while another one (“site”) connoted both a physical and a virtual (website) portion
of space (Fig. 4). The territorial topic was also present in the co-occurrence scheme
for “development”, the fifth item in the list.15




Fig. 4 – Co-occurrence map for “information”.


   Browsing through the textual extracts indexed as instances of co-occurrence for
“information” and “local”, a recurring figure might be recognized: local develop-
ment was supposed to happen thanks to the spread of information technologies
which are seen as empowering means for disadvantaged, rural communities:
     Namma Dhwani is an initiative which has created a space for different rural social groups to uti-
lize […] digital technologies to put in place a local information and communication network owned


 The most frequent item co-occurring with “development” was “local”, followed by “infor-
15

mation”, “site”, “software” and “technology”.
76   PELIZZA



     and operated by members of the local community. […] Namma Dhwani has enabled poor semi-
     literate, women, farmers, labourers, school drop-outs and other community members to use infor-
     mation & communication media & technologies […] The network successfully addresses local in-
     formation needs and has had a visible impact on local development and governance. (Namma
     Dhwani submission, 2004)

        However, this was not the only figure articulating the “local development”
     theme. Beside the one clustering around “information”, another completely dis-
     tinct pattern of relationship between territory and ICT was visualized in the map, a
     urban-centred one. As a matter of fact, the concept “city” never occurred with
     “rural”, “site” or “government”, and only once with “development” and “infor-
     mation”. “City” showed an absolutely peculiar semantic context aggregating
     around the urban territory, and a specific “metropolitan” use of information tech-
     nologies. While “city” did not occur with any of the other territorial concepts (ex-
     cept “local”), conversely it showed a strong co-occurrence with “mobile” and
     “map” (Figure 5).




     Fig. 5. Co-occurrence map for “city”


        Analyzing more closely the textual instances, they depicted a figure different
     from the previous one: here “local development” was meant as bottom-up regen-
     eration of a sense of place, and hit the ground in the form of geo-reference mobile
     systems allowing the creation of unconventional maps of the urban space:
         Everyone in Leeds can read and write a Citypoem, experiencing and contributing to an enriched
     sense of their own place from wherever, and whenever, they are in the city. The Citypoems biography
     is made new by every reader, turning the pages in the order of their own daily lives as they move
     through the city, and transforming mobile phones into books with an infinite number of blank pages
     waiting to be filled. (Citypoems submission, 2004)
                                                                          TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)            77



    In these two theories of action articulating the “local development” theme, dif-
ferent roles for information technologies were associated with different types of lo-
cal territory. As shown by a deeper analysis of the textual instances, in the first case
ICT were seen as empowering tools fostering the development of disadvantaged
areas, mainly rural, in partnership with local governments, by sharing information
through websites. In the second case, information technologies became mobile and
crossed the city. They were conceived of as representational tools that allow the
creation of subjective maps of the urban space, of collectively generated psycho-
geographies. Here, the mythological local community at the core of early online
communities’ discourses hit the ground in two different forms, each of which at-
tributed a different role to digital media.


5.1. ICT and developing countries
   Taking into account the first figure associated with the “local development”
theme identified by means of co-occurrence analysis, in task 2 I further deepened
the analysis by selecting fewer case studies and by using the template discussed
above (Tab. 2).
   The case studies I am going to discuss in the following sub-paragraphs do not
represent the totality of the winning projects, but only those whose goals dealt with
empowerment of disadvantaged populations and considered the belonging to the
so called “Global South” as a distinguishing element. By analysing four cases in
depth, I am going to show how online communities facing similar issues can devel-
op opposite narratives, and thus come into existence in very different ways, ac-
cording to the actantial role attributed to information technologies.


5.1.1. Tonga.Online. Or of rivers, dams, antelope horns and digital
music
   An amazingly rich case of proliferation of mediations was provided by the Ton-
ga.Online entry form. This project was an offspring of a cultural exchange pro-
gram between Austrian and Zimbabwean artists and NGOs which has been run-
ning for more than ten years.

The Tonga.Online project has established the first community-based Internet and Computer Centre
in one of the remotest areas of Zimbabwe. The project is now striving to reach out to other villages
and across the waters of the Zambezi River into Zambia. The Tonga community – only fifty years ago
forcibly divided by the advent of modern technology and the building of Kariba dam – has taken up
the chance to use the most advanced communication technology for rebuilding and improving links
within the community and with the world abroad. [...] One could perceive the Tonga people as a dig-
ital community per se because of their music. [..] Their unique Ngoma Buntibe Music is a kind of
binary or digital music in its own sense since one musician is mastering one note only by contributing
a short blow on an antelope horn to an incredible storm of sound and stamping movements. Robert
78   PELIZZA



     Bilek (a journalist with ORF / Vienna) after an encounter in 2001: “The music of the Tonga could be
     perceived as a system of binary individual decisions, sound or silence, 1 or 0, within the matrix of a
     creative group performance. Through this sound, through this seemingly wild and chaotic order, the
     community reassures itself of its coherence... It appears that the Tonga people’s understanding of
     digital technology has its roots in their musical tradition”. There is a smart gadget which has proved
     to be very helpful in expanding the project beyond the centres. It is a mobile device called Alpha
     smart, a kind of expanded keyboard run on batteries. [...] [The Alpha smart online posts] address
     stakeholders and the general public. (smart X tension/Tonga.Online submission, 2004 – author’s italic).

         This account wonderfully testifies the flamboyant life of mediators. From Aus-
     trian journalists to dams on the Zambezi River, from modern technology to the
     Ngoma Buntibe Music, from mobile devices to Cuban doctors, all these entities
     take part in the course of action whose goal is “rebuilding and improving links
     within the community and with the world abroad”. The extension of the project
     across the waters of the Zambezi River into Zambia provides the figuration into
     which the goal – the unity of the Tonga people – gets embodied. Fifty years earlier
     this unity was dismantled by “the advent of modern technology and the building of
     Kariba dam”: two anti-actants in their own right which are endowed with figura-
     tions borrowed from the ranks of Modernity.
         In this account, three of the four kinds of traces left behind by the formation of
     groups enumerated by Latour are present. Apart from the spokesperson – the one
     that submitted the entry form for evaluation – a professional enters the network in
     order to make possible the durable definition of the community: Austrian journal-
     ist Robert Bilek’s account is itself part of what makes the group exist. As to the
     third trace left behind, boundaries are created and rendered durable by appealing
     to tradition and cultural heritage. It is the cultural heritage and the ways of com-
     munication that define the Tonga community as a stable entity, that make it hold
     against the centrifugal force exerted by the harsh living conditions and that ferry
     the community into the digital age.
         Actually, the theory of action underpinning the project’s vision of the digital
     community is overtly expressed through the journalist’s voice: it is the traditional
     Ngoma Buntibe Music that acts as a powerful mediator and translates agency from
     the “short blow on an antelope horn” into a binary, digital sound. The Ngoma
     Buntibe Music is not only what keeps the Tonga people united in spite of the dias-
     pora started by modern technologies, but also the actant that carries this assem-
     blage into the computer era.
         Once the Tonga assemblage has shored on the quieter coasts of digital post-
     modernity, other helpers get to march side by side with the Ngoma Buntibe Music
     to realize the goal of extending the project over geographical boundaries. Notably,
     the mobile device Alpha Smart “proved to be very helpful in expanding the project
     beyond the centres”. Here, information technology allows the project leaders to
     activate new mediators: “messages and digital reflections” that, in turn, create new
                                                                      TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)           79



associations with geographically dispersed actants (stakeholders,16 pupils, the fish-
ermen etc.).
   The Tonga.Online – smart X tension project is an exemplary case where media-
tors proliferate and the chain that translates agency stretches out in many direc-
tions. Nonetheless, this is a peculiar case: it may happen that the chain is arbitrarily
short-cut before agency be fully unfolded, as I am going to show immediately.


5.1.2. Empowerment as a cause-and-effect relationship
    Very differently from the Tonga.Online project, the Akshaya submission char-
acterized itself for a low number of mediators involved in the course of action.
This project was developed in Kerala (India) to address Digital Divide, and was
implemented by the Government of Kerala and run by local entrepreneurs.
    In the entry form three objectives and relative theories of action were men-
tioned. The first goal (“Universal IT Access”) aimed at setting and maintaining
4500-6000 Akshaya e-centres. In this case only one mediator was involved: entre-
preneurs running the centres relied on e-literacy courses to assure self-
sustainability to each centre. Other technological entities – broadband wireless,
computers, scanners, printers etc. – appeared as mere intermediaries, since their
presence did not affect the outcome.
    The second objective (“E-literacy”) aimed at familiarizing people with IT and at
improving their computer skills. There also existed a meta-goal: to “create a 100%
literate state”. Here, the theory of action was underpinned by an overtly causal re-
lation: “the process of providing the skill sets shall lead to the creation of a long
lasting relation between the Akshaya centres and the families in the catchment,
which on a macro level will generate a state wide data warehouse and repository”.
    In these words, it is not clear through which means the process of providing
skills was supposed to cause a stable relationship whose ultimate outcome is a data
repository. As Ant has pointed put, in the social domain stability is a costly excep-
tion: face-to-face, unequipped interactions using only basic social skills pertain to a
very limited sphere, namely to baboons (Strum and Latour 1987). Unequipped in-
teractions alone cannot bear the weight of maintaining stable relationships that
need to be ceaselessly negotiated. It is objects that allow long-standing relation-
ships. However, in the Akshaya account there were no traces of the means where-


16
   What a better definition for the term “stakeholder” than “someone who participates in a
course of action”? From the synonymy of stakeholder and mediator, the anti-democratic charac-
ter of the (extended) use of this term follows. By using “stakeholder”, in fact, one may refer to
an assemblage and still avoid making explicit who/what that assemblage is made of. Since “poli-
tics” refers in half part to the procedures whereby groups are assembled and mediators legiti-
mized to take part in that assembly (Latour 2005b), the use of the term “stakeholder” relieves
the one who uses it from publicly arguing who and what is to be included in that assembly.
Conversely, in the Tonga.Online submission stakeholders are endowed with a list of figurations
(pupils, fishermen, etc.).
80   PELIZZA



     by the long lasting relation between the centres and the families was supposed to
     be maintained.
         A similar lack of mediators also characterizes the third (“Creation of Micro ICT
     Enterprises”) objective. Here again, the theory of action was immediate: entrepre-
     neurs from the local community were seen as lending their “entrepreneurial spirit”
     to the “total development” of community. No mediators intervened either in the
     emergence of the entrepreneurs from the community, or in the opposite translation
     of this spirit from entrepreneurs to communities.
         In the Akshaya account there were some intermediaries and only one mediator.
     Agency got stopped after few passages and might not rely on entities that translat-
     ed the initial inputs. As a matter of fact, there were few references to local commu-
     nities, and the relationship between technology and social ties was explained in
     terms of cause-and-effect, as one of “empowerment” immediately proceeding from
     e-centres to families.
         A less deterministic theory of action characterized Proyecto Cyberela – Radio
     Telecentros, a Brazilian initiative started in 1990 by the NGO Cemina as an initia-
     tive aimed at “developing female communitarian leadership as an agent of social
     transformation”. Since this early commitment, the (analogue) radio was deemed a
     strategic adjuvant, a media(tor) enabling women to promote human rights and
     gender empowerment.17 However, with the advent of digital information technolo-
     gies new challenges arose and new mediators were needed. The new goal became
     to include women into the new digital realm:
         el cenário impuesto por las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC) presento un
     gran desafío para Cemina: o las mujeres hacen parte de ese proceso o serian una vez mas excluidas de
     la participación igualitaria de la sociedad. Incluir las mujeres en el universo de la informática y de la
     internet, sin dejar de utilizar el medio radio, passo a ser prioridad para la institución. (Proyecto
     Cyberela – Radio Telecentros submission, 2006)

        On one hand, the change of the strategic goal from “developing female leader-
     ship” to “including women in the computer and internet domain” marked a major
     shift in the role of information technologies: from being mediators, ICT were
     transformed into “skills” and became the main goal (“prioridad”) of the course of
     action.
        On the other hand, gender-focused attention got transformed, as well: from be-
     ing the result of sensitization policies it became an intermediary (in the form of
     “contents”) that could attract women. Notably, if the (digital) radio continued to
     act as a mediator, it was because it made gender-related contents available:
     “www.radiofalamulher.com ayudo a intensificar la estrategia de traer las mujeres
     para ese universo con la disponibilización de contenidos de radio con foco de gé-
     nero y derechos humanos en internet”. If the internet radio “helped”, and was thus
     a mediator, there was no further specification about how contents – apart from be-


     17
       “El medio rádio fue escojido para esa finalidad por ser el medio de comunicación mas simples
     y barato, y que atinge 98% de la populación, siendo que la mujeres son las mayores oyentes”.
                                                                        TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)           81



ing available – transported/caused (“traer”) women to be included in the digital
realm. This transformation can be summed up with a scheme (Tab. 3).

                     Before the advent of the digital           With the advent of the digi-
                     domain                                     tal domain

 Radio               (Analogue)                                 (Internet radio)

                     Mediator                                   Mediator

 ICT                 (correspond to analogue radio)             (Seen as “skills”)

                                                                Goal to be reached

 Gender   and        (Attention)                                (Becomes “Contents”)
 human  rights
                     Result of policies                         Intermediary
 commitment

Tab. 3. Proyecto Cyberela – Radio Telecentros. Variations in the role of radio, ICT and gender com-
mitment following the advent of digital media.

    The project’s great interest in the digital domain lied on the principle that ICT
are causing major transformations in every field of human activity: “el surgimiento
de las tecnologías de información y comunicación (TIC) ha trasformado las rela-
ciones sociales, la educación, el trabajo, la economía y hasta el comportamiento”.
As a consequence, access to ICT was seen as a necessary condition for develop-
ment. On the contrary, the entry form quoted statistical data depicting women as
deeply excluded from access to ICT,18 to the point that the United Nations recog-
nized women access to ICT as strategic. That is, the gender perspective was legiti-
mized by appealing to statistical data: statistics provided the boundaries around
which the group “disempowered women” to which the project was addressed was
made to exist.
    The fourth community I am going to describe used statistics as a source for set-
ting up group boundaries, as well. The World Starts With Me focused on young
Ugandans between 12 and 19. This project was a digital learning environment
about sexual and reproductive health education and AIDS prevention. Its goal was
double: to “improve the sexual health of young people in East Africa while provid-
ing [computer] skills relevant to the job market”.
    Here, too, entering the digital age by acquiring computer skills was one of the
objectives. Nonetheless, differently from Proyecto Cyberela, in this project ICT
skills were not only a necessity to enter the job market, but something that “stimu-
lates curiosity to learn more”. That is, computer skills were not merely conceived

18
  “Lo mas interesante es que mismo las mujeres siendo la mayoría de la población en el mundo
(y también en la populación brasileña) el perfil del usuario de Internet aún es prioritariamente
del hombre blanco que habla el idioma ingles, tiene cerca de 35 anos, es de nivel universitario y
de clase A e B”.
82   PELIZZA



     of as the point of arrival, but as a competence that was supposed to trigger other
     actions (“stimulates”).
         What was striking about this project was exactly the number and assortment of
     the mediators mobilized to reach the goal of “giving young people self confidence
     and control over their own lives”. Public schools, foundations, clinics, NGOs,
     counselling services were assembled with software, students, artists, peer facilita-
     tors, people from the slums in an aggregate that blended formal institutions with
     informal ties.
         Summing up the results of the descriptions (Tab. 4), two types of digital com-
     munities aiming at empowering disadvantaged populations could be devised.
         This deeper analysis showed that the source of boundaries is a crucial element
     for identifying a project’s theory of action and the character of the resulting com-
     munity. On the one hand, projects that addressed disadvantaged groups whose ex-
     istence appealed to administrative or statistical boundaries displayed narratives of
     empowerment according to which target groups are pushed to acquire ICT skills
     in order to enter the information age. According to these theories of action, ICT
     skills and access to the digital domain are conceived of as the final goal. The rela-
     tionship between digital technologies and social ties is often one of cause-and-
     effect: access to technical facilities (and occasionally literacy courses) is supposed
     to immediately lead to better living conditions. As a consequence, the chain that
     transports agency is very short, with few mediators and some intermediaries. Para-
     doxically, in these accounts ICT themselves are conceived of as “technological fa-
     cilities” that act as intermediaries.
         Furthermore, in these accounts the roles of sender and receiver are easily dis-
     tinguishable: there is one entity – the initiator of the project – that acts as sender in
     a communication process (classes, service provisioning, etc.), and a community
     which is supposed to be the receiver of this process. In these cases group identities
     pre-exist to the course of action described and boundaries are stabilized: the
     community has already been black-boxed. In Akshaya, for instance, there are en-
     trepreneurs, who implement the e-centres, and the local communities, the target
     which benefits from the activity of the entrepreneurs. Similarly, in Proyecto Cyber-
     ela – Radio Telecentros, after the advent of digital technologies of information, the
     role of Cemina as core team got distinguished from that of the radio-makers who
     stopped to act as local leaders and became the audience of Cemina’s classes.
                                                                          TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)            83




                  Tonga.On-line         Akshaya              Proyecto               The         World
                                                             Cyberela          –    Starts       With
                                                             Radio Tel.             Me

 Source     of    Cultural heritage     Geopolitical/        Statistics             Statistic
 boundaries       and traditions
                                        administrative       (gender)               (age and, partial-
                  (Tonga people)        (local communi-                             ly, gender)
                                        ties in Kerala)

 Role of digi-    Mediators             ICT-skills     and   ICT-skills        as   Pc as intermedi-
 tal ICT                                data repository as   goals. Technical       ary (may be sub-
                  (Alpha      Smart
                                        goals.    Wireless   facilities as inter-   stituted).   But
                  triggers “msg and
                                        net, computers,      mediaries              ICT-skills as a
                  digital     reflec-
                                        scanners etc. as                            competence.
                  tions”    creating
                                        intermediaries                              WSWM is a me-
                  associations with
                                                                                    diator
                  dispersed actants)

 Role of other    Music as media-                            Radio as media-        Low-tech objects
 technologies     tor that translates                        tor                    (i.e.         pa-
                                                    /
                  the cultural herit-                                               per&pencil, local
                  age into the digi-                                                materials) as in-
                  tal age                                                           termediaries

 Mediators/       Many mediators,       One     mediator,    Few human me-          Many mediators
                                        some intermedi-      diators,     some
 Intermedia-      agency chain ex-
                                        aries. Very short    non-human      in-
 ries             tends in many
                                        agency chain         termediaries
                  directions

 Professionals    Journalist                    /                    /              Teachers

 Relationship     No distinction        Clearly distinct     Fairly      distinct   Only        during
 Sender                                                      after the advent       course: students
                                        (Service delivery
 /Receiver                                                   of digital media       who finish it be-
                                        business)
                                                                                    come facilitators

Tab 4. Summary of the theories of action associated with “empowerment”.


    On the other hand, the second model is exemplified by the Tonga. Online pro-
ject. This does not deal with statistical boundaries, but rather borrows its source of
identity from the cultural heritage. Here, ICT are seen as one of the many types of
mediators participating in the course of action. Mediators, in fact, are not only
human beings, but also digital devices and traditional music. Every mediator in-
84   PELIZZA



     troduces a bifurcation in the course of action and triggers new participants. The
     chain that transports agency extends in many directions, and includes also a jour-
     nalist mobilized in order to make the group exist. The “empowered” community
     that emerges is the result of all these transformations. As a consequence, in this
     dynamic techno-social assemblage distinguishing the project initiator from the tar-
     get becomes meaningless: community is an open gathering of heterogeneous ele-
     ments.
        Lastly, The World Starts With Me is located among these two types of OC.
     Like the first type, it appeals to statistics in order to legitimize the focus on disad-
     vantaged youth, and regards computers and technical facilities as intermediaries
     that may be replaced by paper and pencil. On the other hand, many mediators –
     both human and mechanical, institutional and informal – are involved, and the ac-
     quisition of ICT skills is not only seen as a goal, but as a competence that triggers
     other courses of action. In addition, actors undergo transformations: through the
     experiential learning model, former students may become peer facilitators, that is,
     mediators in their own right.


     6. Conclusions
         This article has described a method that uses Ant and semiotic insights, and co-
     herently proceeds from epistemological assumptions to operational techniques of
     data analysis. The results obtained by means of this method19 put into question
     some of the black boxes traditionally associated with OC – like “cyber-culture”,
     “empowerment” and “online community” itself – and some leading sociological
     positions.
         As far as the key notion of empowerment is concerned, for instance, results
     show that in the dataset analysed it hits the ground in a much more multi-faceted
     way than emerging from the “revolutionary” discourse on information technolo-
     gies. Depending upon the type of source of boundaries and the role (media-
     tor/intermediary) attributed to digital artefacts, “empowerment” can embody ei-
     ther a deterministic theory of action, or a well-deployed one.
         Furthermore, task 2 found a correlation between the length of the chain of ac-
     tion (i.e. in Ant, the proportion of mediators against intermediaries), and the at-
     tribution of the roles of sender and receiver to specific actors. So, for instance, a
     project like Akshaya – whose entry form showed a brief chain of action, that is, a
     deterministic cause-and-effect relation between ICT and society – tended to exclu-
     sively attribute the role of sender to the actor “Government Agency” and that of
     receiver to the collective actor “rural communities”, which did not have any possi-
     bility to give feedback. In other words, in the dataset technologically deterministic
     theories of action were associated with black boxed communities where roles were



      I cannot, of course, account here for all the results found as part of the Tracing Back Com-
     19

     munities research. For a complete discussion see Pelizza (2009).
                                                               TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)        85



stabilized, while accounts showing a well deployed chain of action tended to asso-
ciate the roles of sender and receiver in a more dynamic way.
    If this correlation cannot be deemed an indicator of “actual” empowerment, at
least it is an indicator of an open Vs. close discourse where communities are taken
for granted. In this sense, close discourse might be conceived of as a clue of extra-
neousness of the spokesperson towards the disempowered community s/he claims
to represent.
    The method traced in this article displays two reasons of deserts. First, it
demonstrates that the combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques of
data analysis is a profitable and expanding field of research. Far from requiring the
renounce to some form of discipline-related integrity, a savvy combination of qual-
itative and quantitative techniques of textual analysis may not only help to deal
with vast datasets made of qualitative data, but also to devise themes and figures
(for N cases) that can be further analysed in depth (for n cases).
    Second, this case study has tried to trace possible overlaps between two meth-
ods and related disciplines – Ant and semiotics – that, after an initial intensive dia-
logue (Akrich 1992b; Akrich and Latour 1992), lost touch with each other (Mat-
tozzi 2006). An exemplary overlap between Ant and semiotics can be found in the
correlation between length of the chain of action and roles of sender and receiver
above mentioned. This little example argues for the necessity to re-consider the
many overlaps between semiotics and Ant, not only in order to revitalize the dia-
logue between these disciplines, but especially to foster the development of anti-
essentialist, relational methods of social inquiry. Today, similar methods are much
needed to face the challenges posed by the “not-anymore-modernist” age, where
unstable, fleeting objects of study are not exceptions.




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                                    TECNOSCIENZA – 1(2)   89




Annalisa Pelizza
Via Orfeo, 19 – 40124 – Bologna.
Email: annalisa.pelizza@gmail.com
