In Making Information Matter, Mareile Kaufmann proposes a methodology for studying information practices as a living process, developing her argument through four case studies. Employing a theoretical framework that includes digital criminology, media studies and feminist philosophy, Kaufmann’s complicated picture of how information operates in the real world will be of interest to social scientists and media theorists, writes Sam DiBella.
At this point, I think we can all agree that we have plenty information. But what does it do? Through four case studies in her monograph Making Information Matter, digital criminologist Mareile Kaufmann proposes a methodology for studying information practices. Kaufmann uses theories of surveillance and media to complicate notions of information as a static object that we exchange or store. Rather, information is a living process.
Digital criminologist Mareile Kaufmann […] uses theories of surveillance and media to complicate notions of information as a static object
To study that process, Kaufmann suggests that empirical studies need to trace information through its entire life cycle, from its making in a particular form, the social maturation of its uses, and then its discontinuation or death. These biological metaphors for information recur throughout, as Kaufmann draws on feminist philosophy and anthropological theory of becoming: ‘[T]his is a methodology of life cycles, plural. Life cycles are never isolated. They always intersect. Together they join into a “spiral dance”. Though Donna Haraway uses this expression to describe the relationship between goddesses and cyborgs, I would like to use this term here to capture the ongoing dance that takes place in materialization’ (42). This understanding of information, though heady, encourages readers to see how, even though information is given form by matter, it still lives within an ecology.
Kaufmann demonstrates this methodology with four chapters on integral information practices: association, which locates “connections, relationships, and patterns”; conversion, which repurposes information by changing its form; secrecy, the selective concealment of information; and speculation, which challenges “dominant modes of information analysis” (45) by proposing alternatives. Together, these structure the kinds of options that individuals and institutions have for informational agency.
Making Information Matters contains chapters on predictive policing methods, hacking culture, artistic practice and secrecy to help the reader think through information mattering.
Making Information Matters contains chapters on predictive policing methods, hacking culture, artistic practice and secrecy to help the reader think through information mattering. Out of the four, I found the latter most novel. Extending her research from a prior study, Kaufmann uses the secrecy practices of school children to demonstrate how the action of concealment holds many layers of meaning. Concealment has much more social import than whether a secret is successfully held or not, a binary that technical fields like cryptography and information theory often confine themselves to.
Secret languages, keys, and signals are all means for negotiating unequal power dynamics as well as to create “in” and “out” social groups defined by the possession of relevant secrets. In this case, that relation is most present between students and teachers, but it also shapes relationships among students themselves and in their families:
‘Sharing secret information matters in creating friendships and other relationships, while not being able to share secret information does so, too. Zeynep is, for example, sad that her mother is not interested in her secrets: “For her, my secrets are just air; they are only decorated paper. She knows that these are my secrets, but she does not find them interesting”’ (90).
Our understanding of privacy as individual […] is insufficient for describing the social work of hiding and revealing information.
Examples like these demonstrate how our understanding of privacy as individual – even popular theoretical frameworks like Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual privacy” – is insufficient for describing the social work of hiding and revealing information. As Kaufmann describes, one group of children created their own secret language to contest a rival group that had developed a secret language to insult them. Through shared secrecy, the boundaries and membership of those two groups became more defined.
Although Making Information Matter draws on a variety of social-science literature, I see it most as part of turn towards interest in methods, and methodology, in critical data studies. With the triumphant announcement of the arrival of the age of “big data” in the 2010s, scholars scrambled to account for the social practices of data and produced influential accounts like those found in Lisa Gitelman’s edited volume Raw Data Is an Oxymoron. Researchers have continued to refine these accounts by providing domain-specific details, like the health data and self-tracking studies of Deborah Lupton (who Kaufmann cites often). In traditional information studies, “information” is posed as an intermediary step between data points and embodied knowledge.
“Information” however, preceded “big data” as a concept for widespread social scrutiny. Making Information Matter feels like a return to high-level theories of information developed in late 20th century books like Manuel Castells’ The Information Age trilogy, a return buoyed by a collective decade of research into the material production of data and computing. (As a PhD candidate in an information studies college, however, I do have to say that librarians and interface designers will likely be disappointed by Making Information Matter, with its lack of detail on information institutions or from the information-behaviour literature. Kaufmann is speaking much more to social scientists and media theorists than to practitioners in information institutions.)
Building on literature in criminology, critical data studies, media theory, and feminist epistemology, Kaufmann weaves a chaotic methodology where information is a ‘state of becoming, where the ways in which information matters are not entirely predictable’.
Building on literature in criminology, critical data studies, media theory, and feminist epistemology, Kaufmann weaves a chaotic methodology where information is a “state of becoming, where the ways in which information matters are not entirely predictable. When it is performed and reformed as matter, information has agency. As it enmeshes with lives and livelihoods, it becomes lively and productive” (24). I found the relations that she describes between theory and study to be generative, but also confusing. The four case studies demonstrate this ecological methodology in action, but I felt unsure how to model a future study after their practices – they are so different. Making Information Matter feels to me at its best a tool for rethinking and recombining what we know about information practices (in the book’s own terms, “conversion”). As the sheer novelty of information technology has worn off, titles like Making Information Matter can help remind us of our hopes for information and re-envision how it actually appears in our society.
- This review first appeared at LSE Review of Books.
- Image credit: Nirat.pix on Shutterstock.
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- Note: This article gives the views of the reviewer, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.
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