Information infrastructures allow, facilitate, mediate, saturate and influence people’s material and immaterial surroundings. They are often shaped and intertwined with networks of relations and distributed agency, sometimes enabling the existence of such networks, and being, in turn, produced by them. Such infrastructures are not static and immobile in time and space: rather, they require maintenance and repair, which becomes an important aspect of their use. They also define and cross more or less visible boundaries, shape and act as ecologies, and constitute themselves as multiple entities.
The various chapters of this edited book question the role of information infrastructures in various settings from both a theoretical and an empirical viewpoint, reflecting the contributors’ interests in science and technology studies, organization studies, and information science, as well as mobilities and media studies.
Giuseppina Pellegrino is a Lecturer in Sociology of Communication at the University of Calabria, Italy. Her core research interests intersect STS and mobilities, as well as media, gender and organization studies. A Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Lancaster University, IAS-STS (Graz) and TU Darmstadt, she was appointed a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. Her publications include the edited book The Politics of Proximity: Mobility and Immobility in Practice (Ashgate, 2011).