Bowker (1994a, 1994b) argued that current thinking in sociology has not sufficiently studied the impact of "infrastructural inversion" on knowledge production practices.
Simply stated, infrastructural inversion means that in order to understand the dynamics of cognitive change, what has generally been held as a private backdrop to the action played out on the public stage must, in fact, be analyzed as also determining the plot. For example, with the Internet and World Wide Web, a massive densification of networks is underway. More and more people use their personal computers as external memory for their specific knowledge production strategies. These external memories store documents for work underway locally, those that arrive over the net through e-mail, or those again that are downloaded from web sites and other digital repositories. A wide variety of operations — cut, copy, paste, annotate, associate, link, combine — can be applied to these document sets, generating new perspectives suitable for grounding individual plans of action.
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BOWKER, Geoffrey C., STAR, Susan Leigh, WILLIAM, Turner and LES, Gasser (eds.), 2014. Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide. New York: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-315-80584-9, p. xvi – xvii