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resulting data will be, at the least, incomparable, but in ways that may be completely invisible to User C, compiling statistics for a court case arguing for the legalization of abortion based on prevalence. When this aspect of the coordination of work is deleted and made invisible in this fashion, then voices are suppressed and we see the formation of master narratives and the myth of the mainstream universal (Star and Strauss 1999). |
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Thus, we can see categorical work as partly about managing the mismatches between memberships and naturalization. One way to think about this is through the management of anomalies as a tracer. Anomalies or interruptions, the cause of contingency, come when some person or object from outside the world at hand interrupts the flow of expectations. One reason that glass-box technology or pure transparency is impossible is that anomalies always arise when multiple communities of practice come together, and useful technologies cannot be designed in all communities at once. Monsters arise when the legitimacy of that multiplicity is denied. Our residual categories in that case become clogged and bloated. |
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Transparency is in theory the endpoint of the trajectory of naturalization, as complete legitimacy or centrality is the endpoint of the trajectory of membership in a community of practice. Due to the multiplicity of membership of all people, however, and the persistence of newcomers and strangers as well as the multiplicity of naturalization of objects, this is inherently nonexistent in the real world. For those brief historical moments where it appears to be the case, it is unstable. |
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In place of transparencyand it is a good enough counterfeit to work most of the time as transparencyone encounters convergence: the mutual constitution of a person or object and their representation. People get put into categories and learn from those categories how to behave. Thus there is the ironic observation that East Enders in London learn cockney (and how to be cockney) through watching the soap opera East Enders on television. "I am an East Ender therefore I must talk like this; and I must drink such and such a brand of beer." Aided by bureaucratic institutions, such cultural features take on a real social weight. If official documents force an Anglo-Australian to choose one identity or the otherand if friends and colleagues encourage that person, for the convenience of small talk, to make a choicethen they are likely to become ever more Australian, suffering alongside his or her now fellow countrypeople if new immigration measures are introduced in America or if "we" lose a cricket test. The same process occurs |
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