Towards a political economy of technical systems: The case of Google

IF 6.5 1区社会学 Q1 SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY

Big Data & Society Pub Date : 2022-07-01 DOI:10.1177/20539517221135162

Bernhard Rieder

引用次数: 6

Abstract

This research commentary proposes a conceptual framework for studying big tech companies as “technical systems” that organize much of their operation around the mastery and operationalization of key technologies that facilitate and drive their continuous expansion. Drawing on the study of Large Technical Systems (LTS), on the work of historian Bertrand Gille, and on the economics of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), it outlines a way to study the “tech” in “big tech” more attentively, looking for compatibilities, synergies, and dependencies between the technologies created and deployed by these companies. Using Google as example, the paper shows how to interrogate software and hardware through the lens of transversal applicability, discusses software and hardware integration, and proposes the notion of “data amalgams” to contextualize and complicate the notion of data. The goal is to complement existing vectors of “big tech” critique with a perspective sensitive to the specific materialities of specific technologies and their possible consequences.

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走向技术系统的政治经济学:b谷歌的案例

这篇研究评论提出了一个概念框架，将大型科技公司作为“技术系统”来研究，这些“技术系统”围绕着关键技术的掌握和运作来组织他们的大部分运营，这些关键技术促进和推动了他们的持续扩张。通过对大型技术系统(LTS)的研究，历史学家Bertrand Gille的工作，以及通用技术(GPTs)的经济学，它概述了一种更仔细地研究“大技术”中的“技术”的方法，寻找这些公司创造和部署的技术之间的兼容性，协同作用和依赖性。本文以谷歌为例，说明了如何从横向适用性的角度来审视软件和硬件，讨论了软件和硬件的集成，并提出了“数据融合”的概念，将数据的概念语境化和复杂化。其目标是补充现有的“大科技”批判向量，并对特定技术的特定材料及其可能的后果保持敏感。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Big Data & Society SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY-

CiteScore

10.90

自引率

10.60%

发文量

审稿时长

11 weeks

期刊介绍： Big Data & Society (BD&S) is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes interdisciplinary work principally in the social sciences, humanities, and computing and their intersections with the arts and natural sciences. The journal focuses on the implications of Big Data for societies and aims to connect debates about Big Data practices and their effects on various sectors such as academia, social life, industry, business, and government. BD&S considers Big Data as an emerging field of practices, not solely defined by but generative of unique data qualities such as high volume, granularity, data linking, and mining. The journal pays attention to digital content generated both online and offline, encompassing social media, search engines, closed networks (e.g., commercial or government transactions), and open networks like digital archives, open government, and crowdsourced data. Rather than providing a fixed definition of Big Data, BD&S encourages interdisciplinary inquiries, debates, and studies on various topics and themes related to Big Data practices. BD&S seeks contributions that analyze Big Data practices, involve empirical engagements and experiments with innovative methods, and reflect on the consequences of these practices for the representation, realization, and governance of societies. As a digital-only journal, BD&S's platform can accommodate multimedia formats such as complex images, dynamic visualizations, videos, and audio content. The contents of the journal encompass peer-reviewed research articles, colloquia, bookcasts, think pieces, state-of-the-art methods, and work by early career researchers.