When it comes to knowledge infrastructure, such as schools, texts, academic programs, conferences, and digital tools, I have been an end-user but have never paid careful attention to them before. In short, they have been invisible to me, even though I have always been using and surrounded by them all the time. Therefore, I must rethink and reposition myself, from a user to a participant, to understand and answer the questions: 1) What are my personal knowledge infrastructures? Where are they? 2) How are they functioning? and 3) How can I actively and critically engage with knowledge infrastructure?
If I could define knowledge infrastructure as an entity that produces, collects, accumulates, maintains, and transfers knowledge between people, generation to generation, then its shape has been dramatically transformed through history: Groups of Individuals – Academia/Schools – Religious institutions/Church – Government/Public school system – Private corporations – Digital form of information. This means that knowledge infrastructures have been changing and interacting with social/political/cultural demands.
As a user of knowledge infrastructures, I have experienced old ones (school, texts, printouts, email, online journals, and online bookstores) and have been struggling with using new ones (coding programs, the CUNY system, online classes). However, in terms of actual usage, it is not easy for me to draw a sharp line between the old and new ones, since they are always overlapping and involving each other, even in a class. For example, one of my classes this semester is an online class, so I use Microsoft Teams; but I read a physical textbook that was delivered from Amazon.com. Plus, I must be familiar with Python, a coding language, to do my assignments every week in Google Colab. My knowledge infrastructure, in this respect, is seamlessly woven together. Even Amazon’s supply chains should be included in the list.
This embeddedness of infrastructure also sways its user’s position. I could function as a part of the infrastructure simply by paying tuition, buying goods, or working as a TA or RA at the institutions; these activities would help the infrastructure secure its maintenance and strengthen its influence. The problem is that, regardless of my intention, I could be fortifying corporations’ dominant influences on knowledge infrastructures as well; what makes the problem worse is that I cannot avoid using this system because there are no available alternatives. Whenever I use CUNY’s system as a student, I automatically become a consumer of Microsoft products. The strategy of corporations is transplanting their system, which is another infrastructure, into knowledge infrastructure and monopolizing it, and this forces users to adjust their habitual practice to the monopolized system. Corporations do not have to monopolize knowledge itself, but they invisibly support users/participants by generously offering their system.
This trend will never disappear if academic communities limit their role in producing knowledge and only seek efficiency for it. Also, we cannot just deny and refuse the existing knowledge infrastructure. Doing so could be a ‘one step forward, two steps backward’ mistake. Instead, in this connection, I think Alan Liu’s argument of being a lightly-antifoundationalist should be a possible lead to the problem: “it is precisely the ability to treat infrastructure not as a foundation, a given, but instead as a tactical medium that opens the possibility of critical infrastructure studies as a mode of cultural studies.”
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