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only contain kinds of facts that leant weight to the company's official presentation of itself: that is to say the cycle of accumulation of messy half-truths should be carried out elsewhere than in the organization's own potential memory system (Bowker 1994, chapter 3). |
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This strategy of distributed erasure is more punctillist than that of clearance: it involves the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions the better to remember others. In Adrienne Rich's words, this is an act of silence. "The technology of silence/The rituals, etiquette/the blurring of terms/silence not absence . . . Silence can be a plan/rigorously executed" (Rich 1978, 17). |
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Classification systems subtending information infrastructures operate as tools of forgetting (without representation in the medical informatics infrastructure, the profession of nursing is progressively erased from the annals both of history and of science). They also operate as tools for delegating attention (Latour 1996b has an extended discussion of this sense of delegation). Nurses do not want to have to carry around in their heads what drugs the patients on their wards need to be taking and when. They either use written traces or electronic means to hold the memory and perhaps automatically remind them (either directly by commanding attention through a beeping sound or routinely by constituting distributed traces that the nurse will encounter on their normal rounds, for example, the canonical chart at the foot of the patient's bed). The storage of information in a section of an organization's permanent record guarantees that attention (Weick and Roberts 1993) is paid to that information in either the production of organizational knowledge (formal accounts of how the organization works) or the organization's production of knowledge (how the hospital contributes to the production of nursing knowledge). |
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To produce nursing (and other) knowledge, then, various kinds of forgetting need to be operated on the permanent record held by organizations. This suggestion is fully complementary to the results from science studies and organization theory that many significant memories are held outside of formal information infrastructures. Ravetz (1971), Latour (1987), and many others have noted that one cannot do scientific work without being able to draw on information about specific local, organizational details of the operation of a given laboratory. And yet that information is nowhere systematically stored. In a series of studies of Xerox technicians, Julian Orr has shown that formal representations of fault diagnosis is often, on the spot, supplemented and indeed replaced by the swapping of war stories ("I had a |
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