11 Responses to Introduction — Antti Silvast

1. alakoff says:

   November 7, 2007 at 10:36 pm

   Antti,

   The project sounds terrific. I am especially intrigued by the question of how to analyze and perhaps manage the behavior of users. What is meant by “situation-awareness” here? That is a term that has acquired impressive reach among US preparedness-types, but whose meaning seems rather vague – basically a general sense of “what’s going on” in the midst of a crisis situation. What is perhaps more interesting are the types of technologies being developed and implemented in order to generate such situational awareness – of which disease tracking systems are one example.

   As for your specific questions about where to look now: it is perhaps my ‘ethnographic’ (for lack of a better word) bias, but my inclination would be toward a narrower approach – not to achieve “depth” for its own sake, but to locate some kind of “problematic situation” – a setting of both uncertainty and high stakes.
2. Dale A. Rose says:

   November 8, 2007 at 12:31 am

   Greetings and welcome, Antti,

   Your project sounds very interesting, and I’m glad you and Stephen made each other’s acquaintance. I’m curious the extent to which your work will engage with constructivist slash systems slash ANT scholars who’ve looked at electricity, such as Thomas Hughes. Indeed there are aspects of your description which immediately bring to mind how an actor-network approach may prove productive (and you know Latour is a closet pragmatist as far as I can tell). Anyway, I’m perhaps more a (closet!) fan of ANT than my colleagues, so forgive my indulgence along these lines. As for fieldwork, Andy’s suggestion is sound if it is doable. I rather liked having cast a wide as opposed to deep net for my own dissertation, but that was as much (more, actually) out of necessity as a need to adhere to a sound study design. I say follow whichever approach is more doable.
3. Antti Silvast says:

   November 8, 2007 at 4:46 am

   Andrew,

   The striving for “situation awareness” of users has been pervasive in my investigations It was that in my master’s thesis expert interviews about blackouts and the same continues when I ask the reliability experts why they are doing their projects: “We need to raise people’s awareness” is the standard answer. Curiously, the notion that people are “not aware” does not seem to be based on any systematic evidence, but rather on anecdotes about particular users that could not handle some practical situation during blackouts. I’ll have to ask my informants more about this.

   As for technologies for “raising awareness”, my first data could have some examples of these. Most of these are from Sweden, as I attended a Nordic preparedness seminar.

   1) Large simulated exercises about disasters are one strategy for mitigating blackouts. In one upcoming exercise, communications, leadership, maintenance, network, production and customer informing will be trained, and even customer groups like cities and large businesses get to participate.

   2) All Swedish electricity users shall receive an information newspaper on blackouts in 2007. It includes information on how to keep warm during heat outages in the winter, and also other education for rational blackout behaviour. The information will be customised suit the needs of from 12 to 14 different customer groups.

   3) At least one electricity utility in Finland has included maps on their home pages. Through these, the users can check whether some area has blackouts.

   4) There are in the Nordic countries criteria with which customer are disconnected from electricity supply when there is a serious disruption in electricity supply or energy has to be rationed for some other reason. In Sweden, the actual priorised customers are decided at “the local level” by local councils.

   5) A slightly more far-fetched idea is that electricity companies could offer a whole new “infrastructure” of reserve power generators for the users. The users would pay the companies to take care of these generators.

   Dale,

   I take from pragmatism the idea that action is an ongoing process. It is not interrupted by discrete “conscious” decisions, which has been the mainstream approach on risk (e.g. rational choice theory or Douglas & Wildavsky). I also think this opens many fruitful discussions with Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and maybe also Thomas Hughes. But I will probably not bring this much to the front in my introduction, as especially Latour carries connotations of “difficult and slightly vague French theory” over here. However, I think Latour is a good and useful writer if one spends some time with his texts, and challenging ANT with my empirical material is something I shall do.

   There is one problem that I have had with Latour: think he overemphasizes the opening-up of the black boxes during technological incidents. I would claim that as far as human action is concerned, even abnormal situations have a strong routine dimension: some habits and beliefs continue even if the normal life has been interrupted.

   Thank you for both of you on the comments. Your answers on data supports the same idea I had taken: I should probably go on and follow the same experts and same seminars.
4. scollier says:

   November 9, 2007 at 9:42 am

   Antti,

   Just a couple comments.

   First, on situational awareness, the idea that situational awareness is not only a question of what technologies are used to create a awareness but a question of who exactly has to be aware. I posted a little bit ago on the use of various new technologies to make people aware of how the fires were unfolding in Southern California. So there seems to be an idea that situational awareness is not just for experts but for a much wider collectivity that is linked by an unfolding emergency. This seems worth more thought both in your project and elsewhere.

   Second, I thought that I might push you on this question of “opening black boxes.” Of course I agree with you that in many cases people respond to events using long-developed routines and analytical approaches to understanding problems. But it seems that a focus on problematization would direct one to those interesting moments when new ways of seeing a problem as a problem become relevant. And isn’t this exactly what you are proposing to look at? The idea, for example, that electricity users and the government of their behavior should be part of managing electricity outages (or preventing them from happening in the first place) seems like a new kind of response to a problem. Ditto the shift from reliability to something like Critical Infrastructure Protection. I am not sure that Latour gives us the conceptual tools required to understand these shifts, but I was surprised by your response in part because your description of your project does seem to be focused on new problematizations and, thus, on situations when the “black box” is being opened up.
5. scollier says:

   November 9, 2007 at 9:43 am

   Also — Antti, you are going to have to tell us whether post #4 is spam!!!
6. Antti Silvast says:

   November 10, 2007 at 3:41 am

   Stephen,

   Thank you for these comments.

   Firstly, I agree that the question of situational awareness has to do with the people who are made aware, not with the technologies themselves. I like your description of the “collectivity linked by an unfolding emergency”, it is very fitting.

   Secondly, my project is of course concerned with new-found problematizations of electricity supply. But based on my research I think the “black box” is not always completely opened, in fact the new ways of seeing the problems vary between different sites. For example, in 2005, Sweden had a devastating storm called Gudrun, which caused in some areas blackouts that lasted for many weeks. After the lights had been out for some days, the government deemed the situation to be a catastrophe. However, the electricity companies according to one informant simply thought this is an incident which is being handled by clearing the fallen trees and restoring electricity to people.

   However, I think your point is very good to give focus. Perhaps some new ways of seeing the problem are overwhelming and I should emphasize those. Altering the behaviour of electricity users seems to be like that, as far as I can tell it is shared by the industry and the authorities and the market people. It would be quite hard to claim in today’s situation that people should not be “situation-aware” and that they should in fact think less about electricity.

   As for post #4, my apologies. I linked to this post in my personal blog (in Finnish), and the update service included it here. My own posting simply mentions the VSS, so it is probably irrelevant for you. Thus, you can delete comment #4 from here if you like.
7. scollier says:

   November 11, 2007 at 8:50 am

   Antti – I agree that the question of whether the black box is opened up is empirical, and one of the really interesting things to look at. So, do experts and emergency managers use existing frameworks? Do they redeploy existing elements in new ways (with corresponding reflection on the character of the new challenges they face). Are there sectoral shifts where a problem taken up in relationship to one set of questions (reliability, efficiency) gets taken up in relation to another (security)? These are the things we all want to map.

   As for post #4 — not a problem at all! I just didn’t know what it was, and spam does show up from time to time.
8. Carlo Caduff says:

   November 11, 2007 at 7:42 pm

   Antti: welcome to the vss blog! I have a couple of questions for you. Who is in charge of the electricity grids in Finland? Who owns and maintains the infrastructure that is responsible for the transmission of power?

   How often do blackouts happen? Have they increased in recent years? And if so, why?

   Do they happen because there is a problem with the infrastructure that is responsible for the transmission of power or is it a problem of supply/demand?

   I am not sure but I guess a “situational awareness” on the side of the consumers doesn’t really mean less blackouts (it just helps people to cope with a breakdown). Is that correct? What kind of work would you say is this concept of situational awareness doing, then? Is it a technique that ultimately normalizes blackouts?

   You are right with your critique of M. Douglas. At the same time I think her idea that risk discourses are always also about blame is still important. Does the concept of situational awareness shift the blame from those who provide electricity to those who consume it?

   One interesting question here would be: Do people want to be included in the network in such a way? Do people want to be this kind of consumer? This question may also point to one of the limits of ANT which always takes the perspective of the network itself.

   As far as I know the re-framing of electricity as a question of security has occurred in Europe only recently and it has not focused on questions of critical infrastructure (and the protection of critical infrastructure from terrorism and the like) per se but rather on questions of supply and demand. There is also I think a curious development: although the electricity market has been liberalized, there is a growing dependence of Europe from Russian oil.
9. Antti Silvast says:

   November 14, 2007 at 8:05 am

   Carlo,

   Thank you for the questions and ideas.

   The electricity distribution and generation were liberalized in Finland in 1995. The infrastructure is now owned by a heterogenous mix of private and public actors. Many of the significant players are still public though. Two of the largest electricity supply companies in Finland, Fortum and Vattenfall, are mostly owned by the Finnish state (Fortum) and the Swedish state (Vattenfall). Speaking in numbers, many of the utilities are also still owned by cities. I would assume the situation with generation is about the same, a mix of private and public stakeholders. However, even most of the public companies have outsourced their functions like network maintenance.

   Additionally, there is only one high-voltage transmission company in Finland, which is largely owned by the state.

   I actually used to work for the industry in gathering statistics on blackouts. The question of them increasing depends on which way you look at it. We gathered average numbers and durations of blackouts over the country. They show a mostly stationary trend, which is interrupted by relatively large spikes when there is a year of exceptional storms. Even the typical trend seems to have slowly risen after liberalization, especially in the countryside. Additionally, I have heard from a person that works for an electricity company that the number of exceptionally long blackouts has increased in recent years, but I have not seen any statistics on that.

   Looking at the numbers, most of the blackouts are in average caused by natural reasons like wind, snow and falling trees: thus, it is a problem with distribution more often that with supply/demand. More generally speaking, there have been a number of explanations for the rising trends: lack of investments, outsourcing of maintenance, diminishing workforce, the increasing regulation, or increase in exceptional weather conditions. I do not know which is the right answer. I would like to point out that most of these explanations come from different kind of lobbiers and authorities, not from the scientific community, so they are open to some suspect.

   I think that the situation awareness on the part of the customers can mean both less blackouts and coping with blackouts, depending on whether the customer decides purchase a personal electricity generator while weighting the “costs” and “benefits” (this is the experts’ reasoning, not mine). Country-wide speaking, the number of blackouts is probably not going down, since it would mean massive investments and rising electricity prices, both of which are deemed unacceptable.

   A growing number of European states have adopted policies on critical infrastructure protection and vital systems security. But you are right that these developments are fairly recent, and blackouts used to be framed more techno-economically as questions of supply/demand. Also, as you point out, the framing here does not necessarily have to with terrorism: the last I heard the EU was still debating whether to take a terrorism or an all-hazards approach towards critical infrastructure protection.

   Speaking of ANT, Michel Callon has written an interesting article on “economy of qualities”, which explains what happens when service provision such as electricity are subjected to market principles. At least that has a strong user perspective.

   Perhaps I will look at Mary Douglas at some point again, thank you for the tip.

   As for Russia, you can follow the power balance in Finland from the homepage of Fingrid the transmission company. I just checked and we were importing 1296 MW of energy from Russia, which means over 1/10 of our consumption.
10. Carlo Caduff says:

    November 16, 2007 at 7:54 am

    Antti: thanks a lot for your response. This is very interesting stuff! Please do send along any papers that you may have or that you are working on.
11. Antti Silvast says:

    November 18, 2007 at 12:31 pm

    Carlo,

    I would be very interested to correspond about my work in the future. I should thank all of you, because this has been a most interesting and useful discussion! As you may guess, not a lot of people are doing this kind of work in my university (or even my country), so your support has been most important. It has been great to overcome the institutional and geographical boundaries that often separate researchers.

    I would be happy to post my early findings at some point when I have them, I will let you know then.

    All the best and thank you,

    Antti