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bad, but dangerous. For example, the decision of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to classify some races and classes as desirable for U.S. residents, and others as not, resulted in a quota system that valued affluent people from northern and western Europe over those (especially the poor) from Africa or South America. The decision to classify students by their standardized achievement and aptitude tests valorizes some kinds of knowledge skills and renders other kinds invisible. Other types of decisions with serious material force may not immediately appear as morally problematic. The collective standardization in the United States on VHS videotapes over Betamax, for instance, may seem ethically neutral. The classification and standardization of types of seed for farming is not obviously fraught with moral weight. But as Busch (1995) and Addelson (1994) argue, such long-term, collective forms of choice are also morally weighted. We
2 are used to viewing moral choices as individual, as dilemmas, and as rational choices. We have an impoverished vocabulary for collective moral passages, to use Addelson's terminology. For any individual, group or situation, classifications and standards give advantage or they give suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made, and how we may think about that invisible matching process, is at the core of the ethical project of this work. |
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Sorting Things Out stands at the crossroads of the sociology of knowledge and technology, history, and information science. The categories represented on our desktops and in our medicine cabinets are fairly ad hoc and individual, not even legitimate anthropological folk or ethno classifications. They are not often investigated by information scientists (but see Kwasnik 1988, 1991; Beghtol 1995; Star 1998). But everyone uses and creates them in some form, and they are (increasingly) important in organizing computer-based work. They often have old and deep historical roots. True, personal information managers are designed precisely to make this process transparent, but even with their aid, the problem continues: we still must design or select categories, still enter data, still struggle with things that do not fit. At the same time, we rub these ad hoc classifications against an increasingly elaborate large-scale system of formal categories and standards. Users |
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