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attention to this feature of all societies from the indigenous and tribal to the most industrialized.
58 Today, with the emergence of new information infrastructures, these classification systems are becoming ever more densely interconnected. This integration began roughly in the 1850s, coming to maturity in the late nineteenth century with the flourishing of systems of standardization for international trade and epidemiology. Local classification schemes (of diseases, nursing work, viruses) are now increasingly giving way to these standardized international schemes that themselves are being aligned with other large-scale information systems. In this process, it is becoming easier for the individual to act and perceive him or her self as a completely naturalized part of the "classification society," since this thicket of classifications is both operative (defining the possibilities for action) and descriptive.59 As we are socialized to become that which can be measured by our increasingly sophisticated measurement tools, the classifications increasingly naturalize across wider scope. On a pessimistic view, we are taking a series of increasingly irreversible steps toward a given set of highly limited and problematic descriptions of what the world is and how we are in the world. |
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For these reasons, we have argued in this book that it is politically and ethically crucial to recognize the vital role of infrastructure in the "built moral environment." Seemingly purely technical issues like how to name things and how to store data in fact constitute much of human interaction and much of what we come to know as natural. We have argued that a key for the future is to produce flexible classifications whose users are aware of their political and organizational dimensions and which explicitly retain traces of their construction. In the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. Only then we will be able to fully learn the lessons of the past. In this same optimal world, we could tune our classifications to reflect new insitutional arrangements or personal trajectoriesreconfigure the world on the fly. The only good classification is a living classification. |
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