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The related code in ICD-10 is expanded to include discord with neighbors and lack of adequate food (ICD-10, 1: 1, 152). In both, the name of the city gives way to the name of the social category and social condition. |
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These context codes define what is considered to be medically relevant in one's material surroundings. They make it easy to structure studies in these terms (for example, what effect does poor housing have on the incidence of tuberculosis?). At the same time, these codes do make it much more difficult to deal with unrecognized contexts (what effect does conspicuous consumption have on cholesterol levels?). It is not impossible to do these latter studies, but the information is not at hand in the way that it is for medically sanctioned contexts. The reason we stress this point is that it can be taken as a sign of the correctness of allopathic medicine: it has isolated the basic variables that need to be taken into account in the development of public health policy or medical science. Although the ICD is a powerful tool in this sense it also, as infrastructure, enforces a certain understanding of context, place, and time. It makes a certain set of discoveries, which validate its own framework, much more likely than an alternative set outside of the framework, since the economic cost of producing a study outside of the framework of normal data collection is necessarily much higher. |
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This sort of convergence is an important feature of large-scale networked information systems. Convergence, again, is the double process by which information artifacts and social worlds are fitted to each other and come together (Star, Bowker, and Neumann, in press). On the one hand, a given information artifact (a classification system, a database, an interface, and so forth) is partially constitutive of some social world. The sharing of information resources and tools is a dimension of any coherent community, be it the world of homeless people in Los Angeles sharing survival knowledge via street gossip, or the world of high-energy physicists sharing electronic preprints via the Los Alamos archive. On the other hand, any given social world itself generates many interlinked information artifacts. The social world creates through bricolage, a (loosely coupled but relatively coherent) set of information resources and tools. Thus people without houses also log onto the Internet, and physicists indulge in street gossip at conferences as well as engage in a whole set of other information practices. Put briefly, information artifacts undergird social worlds, and social worlds undergird these same information resources. We will use the concept of convergence to describe this process of mutual constitution. |
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