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https://doi.org/10.25819/ubsi/7935
Infrastructural Media and Public Media
Erhard Schüttpelz
1. The Challenge for Media Theory
When Marshall McLuhan turned the medium into a scientific mes-
sage, the cooperative nature of media was at the centre of his theoretical
intervention:
The use of the term “mass media” has been unfortunate. All media, 
especially languages, are mass media so far at least as their range in 
space and time is concerned. If by “mass media” is meant a mecha-
nized mode of a previous communication channel, then printing is the 
first of the mass media. Press, telegraph, wireless, telephone, gramo-
phone, movie, radio, TV, are mutations of the mechanization of writ-
ing, speech, gesture. Insofar as mechanization introduces the “mass” 
dimension, it may refer to a collective effort in the use of the medium, 
to larger audiences or to instantaneity of reception. Again, all of these 
factors may create a difficulty of “feedback” or lack of rapport be-
tween “speaker” and audience. There has been very little discussion 
of any of these questions, thanks to the gratuitous assumption that 
communication is a matter of transmission of information, message 
or idea. This assumption blinds people to the aspect of communication 
as participation in a common situation. And it leads to ignore the form 
of communication as the basic art situation which is more significant 
than the information or idea “transmitted. ( McLuhan 1954: 6)
Sixty years later, the impetus of this passage has lost none of its cur-
rency: the scientific challenge to overcome the blindness that prevents 
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14 Research Articles
a consideration of “communication as participation in a common situa-
tion,” and doing so in referring to “a collective effort in the use of the me-
dium” through which a communicative form is first of all constituted as 
a “basic art situation.” The great achievement of classical media theory 
as presented by Edmund Carpenter (1960) and Marshall McLuhan (1964), 
and onward to Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler (both 1986) lay in the 
unmistakeable proof that the technical conditions and elements of mod-
ern mass media and telecommunication media were adopted from infra-
structural inventions. Those infrastructural inventions first emerged 
from the increase of requirements of cooperative work in industry and 
industrial research, the governmental and commercial bureaucracy, and 
the military.
A study of the history of media inventions confirms that all pres-
ent technical media stem from special cooperative techniques and me-
dia practices, which only became universal techniques and public media 
through a contingent process of conversion. On that road, they were often 
enough delayed or impeded. All media are cooperatively developed con-
ditions of cooperation and have evolved as such.1 In comparing different 
media as well as the history of their invention and usage, this generali-
zation suggests that media theory and social theory should not be viewed 
separated.
Looking back at the period of classical media theory and the media 
history that emerged from it, however, we see that neither has provided 
a stringent theorization of the cooperative infrastructures from which 
modern mass media and telecommunication systems emanated and in 
which they could be consolidated, despite and perhaps also because of 
classical media theory’s critique of a functionalistic reduction of the me-
dia. The initial premises of the shared foundational phase of communica-
tion departments and media studies, and especially some of their shared 
dichotomies, would reveal themselves as theoretically domineering well 
into the new millennium, in as much as their common generalization 
seemed to define the totality of technical media:
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Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 15
 1) the separation of “production” and “reception” adopted from the the-
ory of mass communication;
 2) especially the categorical separation between telecommunication 
and interaction that, beginning in the early 1960s, theorized social 
face-to-face interaction from a space within proximity and without 
telecommunication and even “without media” (see Leeds-Hurwitz 
2010). Media theory and telecommunication, however, were marked 
by an “ineluctable absence of interaction”, an idea that was general-
ized for the use of all technical media (see Luhmann 1986);
 3) but also a separation between a mathematical notion of “information” 
and physical-technical “matter” that has retrospectively emerged as 
an intentional separation of universalized information theory from 
its official and confidential applications (Hagemeyer 1979; Roch 2009). 
Still, this notion found its way all the more effectively into the estab-
lishment of cybernetics and system theory, leading up to the recep-
tion of neo-cybernetics in recent decades (Pickering 2007); 
 4) furthermore, the conception of telecommunication, cognition, and 
mass-media as consisting of “black boxes”, whose automatisms can 
be manipulated through input or following a given output, and whose 
modules are meant to be configured as prostheses (Harrasser 2013) 
or as something that can be cognitively improved by substitution 
(Crowther-Heyck 2005).
Since the triumph of digitally networked media in their application to 
ongoing media practices and organizational forms, the strength of these 
four basic theoretical motifs has been proven, both as a source of distor-
tions and as a cause for continuous theoretical and empirical weaknesses. 
The most influential media theories and models of communication of the 
past and our introductory courses were not established in order to char-
acterize the infrastructural techniques whose innovations led to mod-
ern media and which bring forth current media practices (Beniger 1989; 
Yates 1989). They were not designed to characterize the cooperative con-
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stitution and processing of modern and non-modern media, nor to un-
derstand the processes of interactive and collaborative computerization, 
whose triumphal march began in the 1970s —a process that would have 
an enduring impact on the new permeabilities between production, dis-
tribution, and reception (Schmidt 2015a). The networked computer is no 
Turing machine, and neither is the Internet; and a media theory of in-
teractive and collaborative computing has only been rudimentarily de-
veloped to date (Schmidt 2015b). Since the 1980s, a reconceptualization 
of those dimensions of media that, to this day, remain inadequately ex-
plored in the framework of both media and social theory has unfolded in 
three separate research branches. It is only recently that these research 
branches have begun to interconnect:
– in the research on science and technology within the international 
field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), with branches focus-
ing either on contemporary or historical issues in their continuing 
discussion of modern infrastructures (Schabacher 2013a);
– in a wide range of ethnographic studies within the field of qualitative 
media research, dedicated to the cooperative constitution of media 
“on site” and incorporating ideas of STS (Larkin 2013); and 
– in practical and theoretical work on interactive and collaborative 
computing, focusing on design questions in so-called Computer 
 Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (Schmidt 2011) and other de-
velopments concerning human-computer interaction (Woods et al. 
2005).
In any case, it is true for all three of these areas of research and their in-
creasingly intense exchange that their focus has not been on generaliza-
tions emerging directly from media studies and theory, and that some 
of the most illuminating research on media has even been done without 
an explicit concept of media. Hence, some of the most empirically well-
grounded research on analogue and digital screen-media in control rooms 
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as well as other coordination centres has been undertaken in the frame-
work of “Workplace Studies” and “Studies of Work” (Bergmann 2006) 
and in studies of “Distributed Cognition” and “Cognitive Ergo nomics” 
(Hindmarsh / Heath 2000; Hutchins / Klausen 1996; Woods / Patterson et 
al. 1998). These fields of research have indeed discussed cooperative ob-
jects and artefacts that, upon closer inspection, have turned out to be co-
operative media (Heath / Hindmarsh 2000), and it is in those discussions 
that their requirements of cooperation and their procedural forms have 
been defined with unmatched precision, but with slightly differing ter-
minologies. With a few exceptions, Science and Technology Studies, too, 
have dispensed with an explicit concept of media, for decades describing 
media with the vocabulary of cooperatively identified “inscriptions,” to 
be precise: the infrastructures of instruments of inscription (Sismondo 
2004). One of the great exceptions is the description of modern media and 
laboratory artefacts from the standpoint of their standardisations, which 
Bruno Latour called “immutable mobiles” (Latour 2006) —a concept that 
has been broadly received both in international and German speaking 
research. The same applies to Latour’s notion of “centers of calculation” 
(Rottenburg 2002) as a complement of the “immutable mobiles”, for this 
terminology emerged in direct engagement with the media theory of its 
time. However, there was a certain delay in opening the theoretical dis-
cussion in STS and media studies via this prominent exception (Döring / 
Th ielmann 2009).
The cooperative constitution of digital media has been most succinctly 
spelled out in the realm of “computer supported cooperative work”: quite 
simply, when the relevant task is described as CSCW, then computerized 
media used at the workplace are defined as work-supporting cooperative 
media. Meanwhile all media research in the social and cultural sciences 
with a focus on the contemporary has found itself forced to come to terms, 
in its own way, with the basic constitution of digitally networked forms 
of work as it was first defined by CSCW. This is because, at present, not 
only every form of work but also all forms of everyday media network-
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ing contain their portion of work-supporting cooperative media or have 
been organized with their help. More than a decade ago, Jörg Bergmann 
succinctly summarized the challenge facing media research as follows:
With the progressive digitization and miniaturization of informa-
tion technology, media have penetrated all of society’s functional 
systems; modern everyday life can no longer be conceived without 
them. Without media communication and coordination, all modern 
transportation, transaction, and product-distribution systems would 
quickly collapse; today, imaging procedures are part of everyday ac-
tivity in medicine, engineering, and the technical sciences; over the 
past years, the authorities responsible for social control have […] un-
dergone an unprecedented medialization; and organizations increas-
ingly rely in their functional procedures (documentation, communi-
cation, development, etc.) on the most disparate forms of media-based 
transmission and storage. But however much medialization has pene-
trated broad fields of professional activity and the working world, the 
degree of attention this process has received in media research so far 
has been remarkably low. Not the least of the reasons for this is that, 
as a rule, media usage in the working world is completely different 
from the reception of entertainment media. Although stockbrokers, 
surgeons, journalists, and pilots do look at a “monitor,” this monitor 
is not a “television screen”. They do not receive pre-set programs but 
rather use information transmitted in media form for the success-
ful execution of steps of their work. Here, media are a resource for 
professional work and their analysis only makes sense by taking this 
context into account. Except for ethnographical audience research, 
traditional methods of media research are not attuned to such decen-
tring. (Bergmann 2006: 391 f.) 
The necessity of a form of research that can do justice to the ubiquitous 
medialization of our institutions, organizations, and areas of work as Jörg 
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Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 19
Bergmann describes it, has meanwhile been recognized by all relevant 
strands of the social and cultural sciences, albeit with manifest methodo-
logical difficulties and terminological reservations. Moreover, the neces-
sity for the invoked “decentring” has increased further —as now, it is not 
only everyday work and all the events organized by work, but everyday 
life in general, with its public and intimate spaces and procedures that 
is affected. The earlier often derided turbulence that the task of “defin-
ing your concept of media” tended to spark in discussions of media the-
ory has now arrived in all the social and cultural sciences, disciplines 
that can no longer evade the challenges of their own media research 
and, thus, find themselves in the quandaries of media-theorizing their 
own procedures and findings. On the one hand, the greatest challenge 
appears to lie in the social- and media-theoretical conceptualization of 
the research field as outlined by Bergmann: its ubiquity. But also, on the 
other hand, in the difficulty to estimate the historical depth or newness 
of ongoing media developments. Are we here actually facing an increasing 
medialization through digital terminals, or do their functional practices 
only make explicit what was already medialized in other ways? Across 
all the above-mentioned disciplines, a socio-technical re-assessment of 
the digital present and its historical classification and reconstruction has 
become a steady desideratum. This is also apparent in various modalities 
of the basic concept including “medialization,” “mediatization” (Hepp / 
Krotz 2014), and “mediation.” The “decentring” of media research Berg-
mann diagnoses demands a “re-centring” that connects media and social 
theory, a process that should unfold through three interventions:
– through the introduction of a concept of cooperation that either ren-
ders more precise or replaces the concept of “communication”;
– through a historicization that makes possible an understanding of 
the interaction between “entertainment media” and “transportation, 
transaction, and product-distribution systems,” or more generally, 
between media publics and medialized infrastructures;
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– and through a intertwining of media theory and social theory via the 
perspective of practice theory. In the following, the necessary relation 
between practice theory, the concept of cooperation, and media re-
search will be outlined step by step.
2. Media Practices and Practice Theory
An enduring insight from early German media studies is that even the 
seemingly most stable modern media should be considered “histori-
cal interludes” (Zielinski 1989), i. e. that, at least indirectly, the practices 
that enable their transient or long-term technical and institutional con-
solidation need to be explored. This perspective has gained depth since 
the triumph of digital networked media: in order, for instance, to ren-
der plausible an app, but also all discoveries tied to interactive comput-
ing, it becomes absolutely necessary to prioritize cooperative media prac-
tices over the media techniques and stabilized media constituted through 
them, with all the practical misappropriations that can, in turn, emerge 
from such a practical priority. Which practice theories should media 
research revert to in order to reorganize the relation between “media” 
and “media practices”, and what can a particular media theory contrib-
ute to praxis theory? Even just a few years ago, the two seemed hardly 
reconcilable. The first “practice turn” in the social sciences (Schatzki / 
Knorr Cetina / Savigny 2001) had no direct impact on media studies al-
though the recruitment involved partly came from STS, some of whose 
main themes had turned out to be genuine topics of media history: for ex-
ample, telecommunication’s “large technological systems” (Hughes 2012) 
and the enduring topic of laboratory instruments and their inscriptions, 
both of which have remained favourite topics in German media studies. 
But not only in Germany, an enduring anti-sociological impulse tied to 
post-structuralist theorizing and the paradigm of discourse analysis im-
peded a systematic engagement with research that, in its own way, had 
moved from classical sociological references to unorthodox sociotech-
nical variables and controversial symmetrizations between social and 
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Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 21
technical, human and non-human forms of agency. In addition, discus-
sions in the wake of classical media theory (from McLuhan to Kittler) 
tended to consider the “status quo of the technical development of media” 
as an independent variable, whereas all the “messages” and “practices” of 
media should be treated as dependent variables, i. e. in their dependence 
on the status quo of the development of media technology. Studies of me-
dia appropriation and of the reception-behaviour of mass media consum-
ers (Morley 1980) first appeared to be a mere instantiation, then a form 
of resistance within this relationship of variables. Only in the wake of 
the speedy triumph of digital media over the period of a few years would 
the results of this research be transformed into an all-penetrating sym-
metrization of “media” and “practices” (Couldry / Hobart 2010).
Therefore, the fulfilment of the promise of classical media theory 
seems to have happened in a more than paradoxical fashion: technolo-
gy’s new status quo has effected not only a shifting of the force-field of 
media practice but media theory itself has turned out to be a limited or 
expandable practice. The German-language discussion regarding the cat-
egorization of the relationships between media and “cultural techniques” 
has fortified this insight (Krämer / Bredekamp 2013; Siegert 2013). Since 
then, the relations between independent and dependent variables of me-
dia theory have once again become a matter of debate: Based on which 
practices and media practices do we reconstruct the consolidation and 
stability of media? And which practice theories should be preferred in 
research on ongoing media developments?
In the ongoing praxeological boom in cultural studies, the social 
sciences, and some areas of engineering, too, it makes sense to distin-
guish between a genuine “practice theory” and research on practices. For 
several decades, research on practices and the theoretical programme of 
practice theory have supplemented each other without becoming con-
flated. The strength of practice theory should lie in its capacity to prior-
itise practice over all other theoretical variables (Schmidt 2015c). To this 
end, it can proceed as abstractly or speculatively as any other theoreti-
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cal approach. While research on practices can help prepare the ground-
work for any theoretical programme without such an orientation, it must 
prove its point, as it were by definition, in meticulous and adequate de-
scriptions of concrete practices. Research on practices and the impetus of 
practice theory only become congruent when a sufficient number of docu-
mented practices are called upon to explain the constitution of non-prac-
tices, f.i. patterns, artefacts or structures. At the moment, this congru-
ence of research on practices and the agenda of practice theory remains 
an exception. Cultural patterns, technical “scripts,” social structures, 
and behavioural dispositions (like “habitus”), dispositifs and media un-
derstood as dispositifs, all of these entities are drawn upon in the daily 
business of theory formation to explain practices. And when their own 
practical emergence is meant to be discussed, they are generally only ex-
trapolated as the consequences and effects of such practices (f.i., Reckwitz 
2003). In contrast, explicit methodological efforts to represent and derive 
social and cultural entities (e.g. entire institutions and institutionalized 
media) from their practices alone have remained rare and are often only 
undertaken in essayistic forms. Particularly helpful for a media history 
and ethnography oriented toward practice theory, is the theoretical dis-
cussion of practical knowledge or of “skills,” in recent years partly de-
veloped from STS and from both anthropology (Ingold 2000; Schüttpelz 
2015) and socio-informatics (“communities of practice”) (Lave / Wenger 
1991; Wenger 1998). The international theorizing of “skills” and their im-
pact on media research is generally compatible with the German term 
“Kulturtechniken” (“cultural technologies”), with the qualification that 
the international research-literature on skill emphasizes “apprentice-
ship”, “enskilment,” and the cooperative exercise of technical and artis-
tic capacities and has provided much more thorough research on these 
aspects (Goodwin 1994; Sterelny 2012a).
In both diachronic and synchronic research, the heuristic priority 
of media practices over the entities constituted by them requires a par-
ticular reflexivity: concerning the media practices that are manifested in 
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Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 23
the relevant documents, and in both the historical documents assembled 
and scrutinized for research, and the ethnographic documents that are 
constituted by research itself. For research on ongoing media practices, 
a central question remains how to assess the impact of participatory ob-
servation becoming part of the field of research, be it by collaboration, 
by volunteering, by participation or by observation. How can non-pre-
dicative knowledge and habitualized behavioural forms be theoretically 
articulated? Which theoretical implications does the concept of partic-
ipatory observation, an idea central to anthropology, produce through 
its emphasis on an intersection between researching (media-supported) 
and researched (media) practices? These methodological considerations 
provide the context for the epistemological question regarding the con-
sequences of a position informed by practice theory for the objectives 
of research. Can an object defined as “an ongoing accomplishment”, i. e. 
practice, be pinned down with methods that deny their own processual-
ity or “ongoingness” —or are there scientific procedures that for their 
part strive for such a reality and mediate between art and science (Mohn 
2002)? And which form should a digital archive take that understands 
the research process as an “ongoing accomplishment” and makes it avail-
able as such?
Last but not least, the challenge of practice theory points media re-
search to its own practical origins in various disciplinary forms of so-
cialization and both objectively and personally risky changeovers. Since 
the nineteenth century, media have been planned and built on the ba-
sis of engineering and basic research in the natural sciences; at the same 
time, they have been shaped by socio-technical collectives, organized 
partly with the help of applied social sciences, and they are articulated, 
interpreted, and framed as a distinct “semiosphere” of circulating signs 
and linguistic manifestations in the humanities and cultural studies. In 
this way, media consistently participate in all three of the scientific for-
mations of modernity, repeatedly drawing methodological and practical 
competencies from these formations, which encounter one another in a 
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turbulent and only temporarily consolidated middle - the medium. What 
we know about media depends on the practices that meet in that middle 
(or muddle), and on the practices of making them meet.
3. Media of Cooperation
It seems obvious that if, for many years, not only media studies but also 
academic research on media in general have lacked a concept informed 
by practice theory for denoting media’s cooperative constitution, then 
the most effective term that could change this situation is “cooperation”. 
All media are cooperatively created conditions of cooperation, a fact that 
lies at the heart of their raison d’être. In other words, they are media of 
cooperation.
What is cooperation? For decades, this question was both sharp-
ened and distorted through abstract theory models, particularly from 
game-theory, whose dichotomies and reductions have been losing their 
persuasiveness for some time. In interdisciplinary and anthropolog-
ical research on cooperation, empirical studies of cooperation that ex-
plore the full virtuousity of human and technical cooperation, including 
in the realm of media-supported research on linguistic and media prac-
tices, have meanwhile achieved prominence. These studies have avoided 
distorting the cooperative capacity by setting up premature oppositions 
(Bratman 1992; Goodwin 2013; Marshall 2010; Sterelny 2012; Strübing / 
Schulz-Schaeffer et al. 2004). And as mentioned before, a subsidiary 
realm of computer science, inspired through other ongoing approaches in 
practice theory (for instance “activity theory” and ethno-methodology) 
had a head-start in defining the formative difficulties and requirements 
of digital programming through the concept of cooperation, namely as 
CSCW (Schmidt 2011) at a very early stage. For our purposes, “coopera-
tion” can be defined as the “mutual making of common goals, means and 
processes.” The etymological connection of “media” to “means” and “mid-
dle” points to these common means and processes as characteristics of 
media; in other words, in line with their etymology, above all as “means 
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Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 25
and middle,” media contribute shared processes for cooperation of every 
sort and have stability even when common goals are lacking.
This foregrounding of cooperation in turn underscores a concept 
long-since anchored in science and technology studies and adjacent re-
search fields but which has only been discussed in respect to media the-
ory for a few years: the concept, coined by S. L. Star, of the “boundary 
object” (Star / Griesemer 1989). The concept emphasizes the conditions of 
“cooperation without consensus” and their shaping by media. Two char-
acteristics in particular enable cooperation without consensus, equally 
characterizing modern work media of work and digital platforms, but 
also all historical media practices since the invention of writing: on the 
one hand modularity and modularization (the “overlapping boundaries” 
of wholes and the “repositories” and stacks of parts); and, on the other 
hand, incompletion and supplementability (for instance through ad-
ministrative “forms” with gaps for inserting new parts; or through an 
“ideal type” whose realization as a new whole demands substantive mod-
ification) (Star 2015). The boundary objects originally mentiones by S. L. 
Star are all media of work that continue to be in extensive usage; and al-
ready while the term was being coined, this concept facilitated the shap-
ing of new digital “information infrastructures” (Star / Bowker 2002) in 
socio-informatics.
From a media theoretical point of view, the concept of the boundary 
object helps us to more precisely define what constitutes the cooperatively 
processed artefacts of digital and analogue media practices —namely 
a combination of context-dependent plasticity and context-independ-
ent robustness. In Star’s words, boundary objects are “plastic enough 
to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties em-
ploying them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across 
sites” (Star / Griesemer 1989: 393). When this common identity is endan-
gered, the required robustness can also be affected. Meanwhile the so-
cio-technical limitations of design have repeatedly been asserted for dig-
ital working tools and media, both making shared media objects flexible 
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(Bechky 2003) and making them overly flexible and, thus, robbing them 
of their function:
– Either because through their digital fluidity and constantly actual-
ized versions they forfeit the robustness necessary for an unproblem-
atic change of contexts (Bailey et al. 2012; Slayton 2013); 
– or because they forfeit their practical verifiability through a patch-
work consisting of diverse simulations (Gusterson 2005);
– or because the local alignment between two places (for example in 
multi-local work streams through monitor work) no longer succeeds 
without explicitly establishing consensus, in this way suspending 
the technical premises for friction-free cooperation without consen-
sus (Hinds / Bailey 2003).
Cooperation without consensus in media practices thus has interlock-
ing social and media-technical boundaries. If they are crossed, tests and 
controversies emerge, and the different paths for gaining consensus take 
centre stage. The more illuminating the concept of “boundary objects” for 
media theory becomes, the more it will be necessary to research coopera-
tive media not only in their balanced “middleness” but in all pacified and 
non-pacified conditions “with and without consensus”, and to include 
the disturbances of all forms of media cooperation (Kümmel / Schüttpelz 
2003). This undertaking must especially prove itself in an effort to bring 
together the two traditional research areas within communication the-
ory and media theory: infrastructure and public.
4. Infrastructures and Publics
The media technological arrangement of infrastructures is based on 
shared means, procedures, and processes. In many respects, the im-
mediate and more distant goals of the people involved are left open, or 
can only be defined to the extent that shared means and processes can 
be consolidated through boundary objects. In public media, we find an 
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invocation of consensus and dissent, together with the heterogeneous 
spheres which enable the successful recourse to the scaling of concerns 
(Boltanski / Thévenot 1991) and to normative but pluralized forms for 
the establishment of a public good. Publics battle out issues that very 
quickly refer to their own media staging (Marres et al. 2013) and only 
attain their full density and volume through this recursive constitution, 
becoming louder by self-reference. Whereas infrastructures often sink 
into a deceptive invisibility, from which they only step into the limelight 
through repair and maintenance or major disturbances (Potthast 2007). 
Nevertheless, these heuristic oppositions between infrastructures and 
publics are never final, for the process of establishing and forming me-
dia infrastructures and other infrastructures itself catalyses controver-
sies and initiates the quest for public consensus (Nelkin 1979). And pub-
lic media, too, are based on many forms of infrastructural cooperation 
that neither presume a substantive consensus or even have to explicitly 
omit it, for the sake of guaranteeing procedural agreements.
What is the nature of the interrelationship at work here? In general, 
modern infrastructures and media publics are intertwined through 
shared proportions and scales (Müller et al. 2010). This shared scaling of 
media publics and technical infrastructures has been well researched in 
some respects, particularly when it comes to the history of traffic system 
for persons, goods, and media (Morley 2011; Schabacher 2013b). How-
ever, this research never produced more than a theoretical outline of 
the shared social and technical scaling at play here (Joyce 2009; Ribes 
2014). The intertwined scaling of local, regional, national, and interna-
tional infrastructures and publics points to their common emergence 
in the framework of a historical interchange including a correspond-
ing development of media, for only the comprehensive strengthening 
of modern transportation and media infrastructures made possible the 
development of a universal “public” into a first-rank collective singu-
lar. Corresponding to this conjunction, the concept of “publishing” and 
the vocation of the “publisher” were only generalized in the early nine-
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28 Research Articles
teenth century, in a framework of regional, national, and international 
infrastructures of distribution, whose scaling corresponded to the reach 
of each addressed public (Johns 2009a). This shared scaling on the part 
of modern publics and infrastructures demonstrates that, upon closer 
inspection, what is at work here is not a series of independent devel-
opments but two aspects of a historical interchange that has yet to be 
researched.
In addition, it becomes clear that for the past two centuries, both me-
dia infrastructures and other infrastructures have emerged that have 
tended to form monopolies and repeatedly prompted a public discussion of 
their centralized regulation, governance, and breakup (Henrich- Franke 
2009). Past and present media publics have rested on the organization 
and institutionalization of infrastructures whose operators either enable 
publics or who prevent them through censorship, hidden operations, or 
shutdown (Galison 2004). Hence the relationship between infrastructure 
and public is not only governed by the rather easily recognizable shared 
scaling of range and of network densities but also by the reconfiguration 
of economic, political, military, and ideological organizations of power, a 
process that will continue to play itself out within institutional negotia-
tions and compromises about publics and infrastructures —including the 
enactment or impeding of egalitarian users’ rights. Especially the history 
of globalization and intercontinental entanglements (Epple 2012) has, in 
harmony with this perspective, taken a standpoint that links the devel-
opment of infrastructures and publics within the framework of a “logis-
tic history” (Mann 1986; 1993). Thus, there are good reasons, not only for 
the history of modernity but also for media history in general, to explore 
publics and infrastructures at their “interfaces”. As suggested above, this 
exploration can invoke classical media theory, which likewise focused on 
the technical basis and infrastructural heritage of public media. So far, 
however, the theoretical discussion has in no way developed by system-
atically interconnecting or even systematically fine tuning the two con-
cepts. While theories of “publics” continue to be informed by the research 
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literatures of social philosophy and of the social and political sciences, 
the theorizing of “infrastructure” is mainly grounded in research of the 
history of technology, in Science and Technology Studies, and in macro- 
history. Both strands, through their shared emphasis on practice the-
ory, have, however, begun to reveal clear parallels and intersections. 
Within a single generation, the literature on infrastructure has moved 
from the macro-perspective of Large Technological Systems and their 
system builders to the grounding of a micro-perspective involving basic 
cooperative activities of “infrastructuring” (Pipek / Wulf 2009). And the 
long-lasting discussion of what Habermas termed the “structural trans-
formation of the public sphere,” taking place with, following, and against 
Habermas (1962), has increasingly focussed on examining heterogene-
ous processes and spaces of public dissemination and of their particular 
publics, including the necessary references to an unrestricted, univer-
salized, or particularized “public” (Bosse 2015). The approximations of re-
search on the processes of “infrastructuring” and “publishing”, of nego-
tiating infrastructures and of “making (something) public” suggest that 
defining their interfaces via practice theory will be possible (Potthast 
2007; Simone 2004). 
5. Public Media
When we relate the concept of a public sphere to media publics that are 
conceived and formed as the “cooperatively created conditions of cooper-
ation” in establishing public dissemination, we need a definition of the 
concept of the public sphere which allows us to highlight pluralised and 
cooperative processes of the formation of a public. A relevant and current 
intervention is provided by the term “issue networks”, coined by Rogers 
and Marres (2005). Such issue networks are formed through a shared 
grappling with “issues” but are also capable of moving past any tradi-
tional catalysts and organizational forms (Kraft 2006).
John Dewey’s characterisation can be taken as the historical starting 
point for such a definition of media publics. Although he still uses the 
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term in the singular, his comments still hold strong currency today. “The 
public,” he writes,
consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of 
transactions, to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have 
those consequences systematically cared for.…Since those who are 
indirectly affected are not direct participants in the transaction in 
question, it is necessary that certain persons be set apart to represent 
them, and see to it that their interests are conserved and protected. 
(Dewey 1927: 15 f.)
In this pragmatic definition, Dewey is referring to political publics and 
their often highly traditionally conceived questions of representation. 
At the same time, his “matters of concern” can be easily generalized so 
that every public occasion for discussion and every controversy can be 
considered in terms of the formation of its sub-public, and every such 
public in terms of the formation and specialization of its controversial 
issues. Recognition of the overflowing nature of the objects of discus-
sion and issues at play here and a concomitant pluralization of publics 
has meanwhile also been integrated into deliberative concepts of the 
public. In a retrospective foreword to his Structural Transformation of 
the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas thus writes as follows: “The corpora-
tively organized opinion-making potentially leading to responsible de-
cisions can only do justice to the goal of a cooperative search for truth to 
the extent that it remains permeable for the free-floating values, themes, 
contributions, and arguments of an environment of political communica-
tion.” (Habermas 1990: 43) And he explicitly describes it as “a mistake to 
speak of the public in the singular,” pleading for a perspective that “from 
the start onward takes account of competing publics and thus considers 
the dynamics of communicative processes excluded from the dominant 
 public sphere.” (Habermas 1990: 15) 
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Both the notion of an ineluctable plurality of publics (which, mean-
while, has been widely accepted) as well as the idea of a pluralization of 
recourses to a “common good” (Boltanski / Thévenot 1991) remain central 
for a theorizing of the public sphere. The concept of plural “spheres of 
justice” (Walzer 1984) and the critical questioning of the modern inter-
play of exclusivity and universalism, too, are highly significant. In the 
framework of media theory, to speak with Marres (and with Dewey), 
what needs to be underscored is the temporalization of public “issues”. 
On the one hand, these issues may generate their own particular “issue 
networks” and paths of decision-making, which allow a transcending of 
every previous path. There will, however, always be media and well-op-
erating media agencies that consistently cater to a number of issues and 
“issue networks”. For this reason, it would be mistaken to equate the 
concepts of issues and issue networks with an optimistic scenario of al-
ways possible egalitarian participation. The capacity for controversy of 
a sub-public itself remains a controversial matter; and every demand 
for and practice of egalitarian participation will encounter existing hi-
erarchies, professional organizations, and agenda-setting institutions 
(Baringhorst 2014). Dewey’s redefinition of the “public” led him directly 
into a debate with Walter Lippmann about the capacities and incapacities 
of democratic media representations (Peters 2005). Moreover, this defi-
nition is connected to the modern invention of public relations, with its 
media agencies that force even actors and organizations from civil soci-
ety into an infrastructural alignment or symbiosis:
Consequences have to be cared for, looked out for. This supervision 
and regulation cannot be affected by the primary groupings them-
selves.…Consequently special agencies and measures must be formed 
if they are to be attended to; or else some existing group must take on 
new functions. (Dewey 1927: 15 f.)
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In this way, the development of media publics is marked by its “public-
ity” or media recursivity: the issues are already drafted, prepared, and 
reused as media issues; and the media documents, genres, and instances 
of media publication themselves become causes for processes of negotia-
tion and for possible media controversies. Niklas Luhmann has general-
ized this feature of all publication processes as the “autologous nature” of 
media reality:
The function of the mass media would…be not the production but the 
representation of the public. And what is meant here is “representa-
tion” in a “contracting,” reductive sense. Precisely because the “pub-
lic” always describes the other, inaccessible side of the boundaries of 
all systems, including the mass media, and cannot be specified in the 
direction of particular partner systems, it is necessary to represent 
them in the form of constructions of reality in which all subsystems, 
indeed, all people, can have a part, without any obligation arising to 
go about it in a particular way.…As we have already noted repeatedly, 
this is an “autologous” concept. (Luhmann 2000: 105 f.)
This version of the theme of media recursivity as recognized by Dewey, 
Lippman, and Bernays is well formulated but incomplete, even in the case 
of its digital radicalization through self-evaluations (Gerlitz / Lury 2014). 
One the one hand, there is no reason to limit it to the mass media of a sin-
gle public; rather, it equally applies to scientific, political, artistic, and 
other sub-publics within the untameable heterogeneity of publication 
processes (Hoffmann 2013). On the other hand, it remains questionable if 
the constructed realities of a public generally have to turn out so autolo-
gous that they necessarily involve the absence of an obligation described 
by Luhmann. The media recursivity of public media does not only begin 
and end in the publications themselves but already takes place where 
they are prepared and processed (Zillinger 2013). And these locations 
are rarely characterised by autologous indifference but by substantive 
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discussions which unfold in processes of formalized and informal ex-
changes of opinions, and as technical discussions concerning the appro-
priate mode of cooperative production, both inside and outside the media 
realm (Rohde 2013). Yes, the self-references of “publicity” are strong, but 
the references of scientific, political, artistic and other forms of exper-
tise are strong too.
For the practical processing of scientific publications, Bruno Latour 
has formulated a theorem that relates to the length and interlinkage of 
steps of publication and the simultaneity of their practical and media-re-
lated preparation: “the more instruments, the more mediations, the bet-
ter the grasp of reality.” (Latour 2002: 21) In other words, there is a direct 
connection between the stability and practical reliability of the succes-
sive and the successively intertwined steps of mediation and publication 
for participants, and the number and degree of complexity of those steps. 
Antoine Hennion has transferred this theorem to processes of artistic 
and mass media production, drawing attention to analogous interlink-
ages of mediatory steps and the actors responsible for them (Hennion / 
Méadel 2013), and has shown that even the most meticulous evaluation 
of publications fails to shed light on the practical constitution of the pub-
lishing process. For this reason, what constitutes a public’s media recur-
sivity should be considered less the outcome of an elegant theoretical 
reduction than a question for empirical and historical research. Before 
their publication and for the purpose of their publication, public media 
are prepared in non-public situations and from a number of interlink-
ages of non-public media. The emphasis of classical media theory on the 
self-referentiality of the mass media and its publics demands a revision 
that is not only oriented toward an assessment of publications but toward 
an ethnographic comparison of all media-related processes and media-
tory steps enabling and preceding a publication. This is even more the 
case for low-threshold practices of digital publication (Klass 2013). 
In the framework of perspectives of the History of the Book, A. I. 
Doyle has offered the following recent definition of the threshold for pub-
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lication: “The communication of a work from one person to others with 
permission (perhaps tacit) to pass it on to others; which may be preceded 
or followed by the growth of knowledge of its existence and interest, 
rousing desire for further copies, consequent reproduction and gradual 
dissemination’” (Doyle, cited in Tenger / Trolander 2010: 6). In line with 
this definition (giving permission for dissemination to unknown others), 
pre-publications of any kind are also publications in their own right. And 
before publication, there is a cooperative production process that, to the 
extent that it takes place within a division of labour or through friendly 
exchange, moves forward in a manner that is both productive and recep-
tive at once, through commentary, correction, and versioning (Binczek / 
Stanitzek 2010), not only of texts, but of all publications-in-the-making, 
music, films, websites included. Where does the public status of this pro-
duction, or, put more precisely, of this simultaneity of production and re-
ception, this mutual making of a medium for publication begin?
6. Media in the Mode of their Making
The original focus of media theory lay in public media and publicly ac-
cessible telecommunication services. All explicitly non-public media and 
media in their making were initially ignored; they still remain outside 
the normal usage of the English (and journalistic) term “media”. Even 
now, they have to be specially marked, for the simple reason that they 
are not meant for the public. A film that is only half finished, is no “film”, 
because there is no publication in sight; once the footage is edited and re-
leased as a “fragment”, there is a “mass medium”. What about the film in 
between? And are the office files dealing with its production part of the 
film as “mass medium”? McLuhan’s original take on the medium as a co-
operative art form came close to asking these questions, but failed to spell 
out the consequences.
For a long time, the most difficult case for a general theory of me-
dia was the telephone. Although it involved a standardized infrastruc-
ture and its public services, the practices of phone calls in private and 
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work-related spaces systematically entangle the dimensions of interac-
tion and telecommunication, of production and reception, of information 
and corporeality, categories whose separation was meant to be constitu-
tive for “media.” In both land-line and mobile telephoning, interaction is 
a resource of telecommunication and vice versa (Laurier 2001); produc-
tion is a resource of reception and vice versa; and corporeal locatedness 
and situatedness is part of information and vice versa (Laurier 2004).
The social and technological history of the telephone (Fisher 1992; 
MacDougall 2003) could have been the touchstone for an alternative me-
dia theory (and via the diffusion of mobile terminals, this has meanwhile 
been realised through the backdoor, so to speak [Thielmann 2014]): for 
a shared consideration of technical applications, of the development 
of technical networks, and of the socialization in tele-communicative 
“communities of practice.” The same is the case for geo-referential me-
dia that have moved to the centre of media development through the re-
finement of sensor systems, spatial forms of visualization (Kolb et al. 
2010), and tracking data, together with their mobile terminals. This has 
been even more the case for a plenitude of everyday work-related media, 
i. e. for all media (whether in business, the academic world, technology, 
entertainment, art, or politics) established for and within the organi-
zation of work processes (including the work of organizing work), and 
whose documents and inscriptions are not meant for publication or are 
used up or archived in the course of their usage (Ludwig-Mayerhofer / 
Sondermann 2010).
For their part, work-related media belong to an even larger group 
of non-public media practices that could be termed “media for making 
things” in as much as the term “work” does neither apply synchronically 
nor diachronically to all media formations in the household and family, 
in friendship, and aesthetic creation that can be declared and practiced 
as unpaid work, or even markedly as non-work or anything but work. 
With the present everyday world, including both its everyday activi-
ties and range of media products, being structured by numerous prac-
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tices connected in a digital network, the diagnosis by Jörg Bergmann 
quoted above (Bergmann 2006) is made more poignant: to reiterate, that 
the everyday situation of media usage no longer corresponds to the basic 
situation framing classical mass media, not only for the world of work 
but also for the household, family, and for socialization (Reißmann et al. 
2013), for entertainment, games, and for political debate.
Digitally networked media thus test the constitution of the everyday 
order of interaction (Hitzler 2010). Only a fraction of non-public, every-
day media practices is destined for publication or serves as a step unto 
a broader public. This was the case in the past and is still a fact in the 
digitally interconnected present, despite the fluid borders between pro-
cessing and publication that have emerged in the realm of social media 
and make it difficult —but so did earlier epistolary and rhetorical media 
practices (Marrou 1948) —to distinguish between private messages and 
the granting of a permission to disseminate messages to unknown third 
parties.
Which concepts can media research rely on to more precisely char-
acterize, historically and intellectually, media not meant for publication, 
but also the relation between media operating in the context of non-pub-
lic being-in-the-making and publications emerging from them?
The practical relation between “media in the making” and “public 
m edia”, together with the emergence of the latter from work-centred 
media and makeshift media, has been extensively researched and com-
mented on mainly in two areas only:
– in Science and Technology Studies, regarding the relationship be-
tween “science in action,” i. e. science still being in the making 
(Latour 1987), and “ready-made science,” i. e. science that has been 
published; between, on the one hand, planned and improvised scien-
tific research and experimental culture and, on the other hand, offi-
cial representation and publication (Collins / Pinch 2000, 1999), with 
media on both sides of the divide;
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– and in the History of the Book, for the period between 1450 and 1800. 
There have been some productive intersections between these two re-
search areas, especially in the paradigmatic studies in media history 
by Adrian Johns (Johns 1998; 2007; 2009b; 2012). 
In the first area, STS, the concept of media has usually been absent, de-
spite all the paradigmatic analyses of publication procedures and illumi-
nating general observations on the relationship between work-related 
and public media. The concept’s absence notwithstanding, an important 
insight has been developed here into the infrastructural mediation of 
work-related scientific media and publications, an insight that with some 
modification can be applied to other domains of the work-related world 
and in part to the production, distribution, and reception of mass media 
(Hennion 1983). Since its emergence, the field of Science and Technology 
Studies has served as an inspiration for broad areas of the ethnography of 
organisations and of “shop-floor” technology (Rammert / Schubert 2006), 
in that context allowing research into many work-related media (Volmar 
2012). However, there is at present still one gap in the core field of STS, i. e. 
methodologically rigorous research on work-related and production-cen-
tred media within the social sciences (Greiffenhagen et al. 2013) and in 
the humanities (Martus / Spoerhase 2009).
Over the past decades, research in The History of the Book has ini-
tiated a learning process tied to STS, that has only recently been recog-
nised in the relevant German-language research literature. Especially 
concerning the Early Modern period and extending to the late eighteenth 
century, new scholarship has repeatedly unearthed different stages and 
outcomes in the processing of manuscripts for book-printing as well as 
of both manuscript-books not meant for printing, but for circulation as 
cooperative manuscripts (Ghanbari 2013). Historical research on print 
media has meanwhile offered paradigmatic accounts of interchanges be-
tween manuscript media and their publications, and is well underway to 
achieve a new synthesis, partly in the framework of a fundamental re-
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vision of a number of concepts and areas of study: the “print revolution” 
(Johns 1998) and the “scientific revolution” (Smith 2009); literary history 
and the history of political, religious, scholarly/scientific, and literary 
publics until the early nineteenth century. It will be important to develop 
this perspective of media history for non-print media, and to extend it 
into the present so that it can be connected to STS, Workplace Studies, and 
media anthropology, and to find the right framework of media theory.
This development depends on sustained interdisciplinary cooper-
ation, because of striking differences in the scholarly approaches in-
volved. Nevertheless, we can already identify a number of general points 
that seem equally applicable to all “media in their making,” which is to 
say for historical and current, as well as digital and analogue practices. It 
is no accident that the best prospects for a theory of “media in their mak-
ing” are embedded in a framework of precisely those four dichotomies of 
media theory that have been codified since the 1950s (from various pre-
cursors) for the mass media and for telecommunications. These are the 
disjunctive separations:
 i) between production and reception; 
 ii) between interaction and telecommunication; 
 iii) between the sending of signs and material transport; 
 iv) between automatisms and human skills.
These four separations sharpened the theoretical awareness of the spe-
cial achievements of the mass media and tele-communicative signal pro-
cessing in already standardized infrastructures, but they were and re-
main invalid for the processing of the infrastructures themselves, hence 
for the forms of work and the inventions manifest in their “infrastruc-
turing” (Pipek / Wulf 2009); they are also invalid for media in their mak-
ing, for older and more recent work-centred media, as well as for every-
day interactions embedded digitally networked media. For all of these 
media practices, we find that:
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 i) The production, distribution, and reception of media in their making 
does not inherently unfold in separate stages. Many work processes 
thus often enough simultaneously contain media practices of recep-
tion (e. g. assessment and commenting), further distribution, and 
production or processing (of corrected, supplemented, or entirely 
new versions). Typical modern work media (files, forms, file cab-
inets) and their specific design are made for precisely these transi-
tions (Chandler 1977; Yates 1989) and, therefore, constitute paradig-
matic boundary objects (Star / Griesemer 1989).
 ii) Interaction und telecommunication do not proceed on separate tracks; 
telecommunication remains a part of interactive processes, and in 
fact one of its thematic and decision-guiding resources, and vice versa 
(Heath / Hindmarsh 2000). In addition, 
 iii) Being in the making, the material and physical mobility and the mo-
bility of signs do not function separately. This is equally the case for 
the private and everyday life of photos and documents (f.i. family me-
dia), in the everyday working world, and in logistics: in the world of 
modern transport, material transport and sign-delivery never pro-
ceed apart, neither on a small nor on a large scale, but rather through 
registration processes and “labels” that move with what is labelled. 
In other words, things are addressed, their data is systematically de-
livered and is verified, all the way to the “internet of things” (Busch 
2011).
 iv) The automatisms of machines and of computers and their media are 
interactively processed and themselves remain part of interactions, 
with corresponding feedback effects on the connection of human and 
non-human processes (Schmidt 2015b).
For this reason, in every kind of non-public media in their making, from 
the most private media practices to large technical systems, the eight cor-
ners of the four classical dichotomies of media theory not only remain 
“unseparated” but are shaped in a highly-refined way; they are only 
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manageable and recognizable in the context of their shared shaping only. 
Hence, recognizing the four aspects of non-separation outlined above 
does not constitute a negative finding but what we positively know about 
all kinds of media that were initially addressed in very different inter-
disciplinary areas of media research. They are bound to challenge social 
theory as well as media theory alike:
Media in their making form communities of practice whose coop-
erative procedures enable a mutual teaching and learning. This appren-
ticeship and “enskilment” emerges from the needs and possibilities of a 
continuous reciprocal assistance, together with sequential repair and co-
ordination of the interactive dynamic (Goodwin 2013; Rawls / Mann 2015).
The physical anchoring of media-related skills and the material an-
choring of technical “extensions” take place via the same procedures and 
on the basis of mutual teaching and learning (Mohn / Wiesemann 2007). 
Techniques and technology, media techniques and media technology, all 
require consistently available bodily engagement, without which they 
would lose their functionality. In the case of modern media, this bodily 
engagement —for example in repair and maintenance, but also in pro-
grammers’ “communities of practice” (Knuth 1974; Naur 2001) —does not 
transpire as a result of separation but through interconnections and mu-
tual delegations of interaction and telecommunication, through process-
ing and usage (i. e. production and reception), automatization and skills, 
signal transport and material transport (Schubert 2011). Not to forget: in 
their mutual making, not in their “ready-made” state of affairs.
Only in and between such “communities of practice” are technical in-
novations possible. One of their typical forms, in both the field of pro-
gramming and in those of earlier media inventions, consists of what von 
Hippel has termed the “functional source of innovation” (Von Hippel 
1988; Shinn 2005). The emergence of cooperatively developed solutions 
to problems initially occurs in the context of obstacles emerging in the 
course of work or during technical meetings between different branches, 
first through preliminary and later through regulated technical facili-
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ties, which are first generalised as specialized technical solutions in or-
der to be later potentially universally marketed or transformed. 
Kjeld Schmidt, a specialist in socio-informatics, has established a 
generalisation of media theory for the realm of interactive and collabo-
rative computing, which may allow us to situate the most enduring and 
most successful digital media inventions within the framework of a the-
ory of non-public media in their making:
What today, typically, is conceived of a “computing”, namely, “per-
sonal computing”, initially developed as a technology for facilitating 
large-scale cooperative work activities (initially air defense, later air 
traffic control and airline reservations) in order to deal with the prob-
lem that had become too complex to be performed by conventional 
means of the coordination of cooperative work, manual or mechani-
cal. The technology of interactive computing subsequently branched 
out in all directions, ranging from interactive human-computer sys-
tems such as workstations, laptop computers, and smartphones, to 
“embedded” computing devices for the purpose of controlling ma-
chinery such as machining stations, car engines, and washing ma-
chines, in which the computing device “interacts” with mechanical 
or other environmental entities.
Important paradigms of interactive computing applications were de-
veloped in ways that have remarkable similarities: they were built by 
practitioners as practical techniques for their own use or for the use 
of their colleagues, and later generalized. (Schmidt 2015: 156)
7. Infrastructural Media
These revisions in media theory were initially developed mostly in re-
search facilities dedicated to media-supported or technically equipped 
work. On the one hand, this was beneficial because the relevant re-
sults were presented with the unmistakable seriousness of empirically 
demonstrated “work requirements”. Furthermore, the work was and is 
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undertaken in a highly reflexive fashion as far as the methodology was 
concerned: as a media-supported analysis and design of media-based 
work, in other words as a practical analysis of media practices. Neverthe-
less, the concentration on media-supported work resulted in a number of 
shortcomings on several levels: On the one hand, as mentioned above, to-
day all areas of everyday life have felt the impact of digital networking, 
whose organizational forms seemed to previously only pertain to com-
puterized work. At the same time, however, the constitution of work pro-
cesses in digital media has experienced a shift, as many media practices 
now exist apart from places of work and without suitable payment or fi-
nancial motivation while competing or interacting with paid or unpaid 
work processes.
Consequently, the results are also significant for the realm of “com-
puter-supported cooperative work”: will the basic concept of work now 
be decentred (Schmidt 2011), or indeed must it be decentred to newly ad-
just or to precisely define what stands at its centre, namely “work”? Even 
for current work-centred media (not to mention everyday digital media 
and platforms) it has now become necessary to take a step back and put 
forward a weaker concept with a wider scope, so as to allow to do with-
out the term of work. This would justify the introduction of the term of 
“media in their making” or “media engaged in mutual making” as out-
lined above, to encapsulate the most mundane dimension of digital and 
historical media practices. However, the ongoing dissolution of boundaries 
between and the relativization of forms of media work also demands a 
more precise historicization of modern work practices. In order to charac-
terize those current media practices that unfold far away from contexts 
of work and elsewhere undermine traditional forms of work (especially 
in the realm of digital social media), it seems particularly necessary to 
characterize the historical emergence of the special qualities of modern 
media of work. It is only then that a specific linkage between infrastruc-
tures and publics becomes evident, a connecting element which has been 
largely neglected by researchers and media theorists alike.
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Since the systematic connection established between the rail and 
telegraph services (Beniger 1989), modern work media, like all media in 
their making, have been developed in localized interaction, while at the 
same time enabling a form of circulation that allows for hierarchically 
organised changes of scale (Gießmann 2014). The key to a mediation be-
tween localized interaction and specialized scaling lies in both standard-
ization (Busch 2013) and bureaucratization (Yates 1989), and especially in 
techniques of identification and registration (Caplan 2005; About et al. 
2013). Only continuously wielded techniques of identification and regis-
tration (i. e. media practices) allow administrations, on the one hand, an 
anonymization and a cooperative processing of circulating, reproduced, 
and assessed documents and data (to the point of enabling statistical eval-
uations). On the other hand, they make possible the verifiable referenti-
ality or “traceability” of individual procedures (especially addresses and 
individual “dispatch” of goods, messages, and persons, or of individual 
services and contracts). Since the late 19th century, modern work-centred 
media have thus contained a mass-media aspect, namely the anonymiza-
tion and aggregation of collectively gathered data and its assessment, but 
based on the simultaneous establishment of a “mass individualizing” ref-
erence-building and “traceability,” created via localized interactions and 
suitable media in their making.
There are thus good reasons to call this section of modern work-cen-
tred media “infrastructural media.” Firstly, the relevant work-centred 
media and their paths of circulation presume already existing modern 
infrastructures of transport and supply and hitch on to them (Braun 
1991; Edwards et al. 2007). Moreover, modern work-centred media are 
created and used not only within organisations of work but also within 
the administration of working processes (Yates 1989). At least since the 
“second industrial revolution,” modern work-centred media —in busi-
ness, technology, science, the universities, and in the realm of the mass 
media —have been characterised by a progressive proliferation and dif-
ferentiation of administered work (Galambos 2005, 1983, 1970). Since the 
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nineteenth century, new media techniques have been able to count on the 
steady demand for more efficient ordering, transmitting, and duplicating 
techniques (Yates 1991) that, at the same time, guaranteed easier coor-
dination, delegation, and registration. The proliferation of administered 
work since the 19th century was based on new technologies of reproduc-
tion and transmission as well as on the improvement of reference-build-
ing. It was only through the work-intensive and costly stabilization of 
techniques of identification and registering, that those quantitative as-
sessments, aggregates, and variables, whose surveying and calculation —
in the interplay of official and non-official programs, their avoidances, 
and appropriations —enabled the media history of computerization (es-
pecially in the use of censuses and life insurance [Yates 2008]), from in-
dividual data to statistical data and from computing these data to punch-
cards and mainframe computers. 
From a technical and socio-technical perspective, the thrust in inno-
vation of both modern analogue mass media in the late nineteenth cen-
tury as well as of the digital media emerging after World War II (Haigh 
2003) developed in the wake of an already ongoing proliferation of infra-
structural media. This fact, very much in line with classical media the-
ory, might provide grounds for a possible “infrastructural inversion” of 
media history:
Take a claim that has been made by advocates of a particular science/
technology, then look at the changes that preceded or accompanied 
the effects claimed and see if they are sufficient to explain those ef-
fects —then ask how the initial claim came a posteriori to be seen as 
reasonable. (Bowker 1994: 235)
For the case at hand, this would mean prioritizing the basis of non-public 
work-centred media vis-à-vis public media in both a historical and con-
ceptual framework, in order to research the relationship between infra-
structural and public media in a more systematic fashion. Apart from 
Media in Action
Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 45
American media research within the framework of business h istory 
(Chandler / Cortada 2000; John 2010; Starr 2005), however, the program-
me for such a media history has neither been completed nor become com-
mon currency in contemporary media research. The far more complicated 
history of European and non-European media has, until now, not been able 
to follow this paradigm. This presents researchers with the opportunity 
and challenge to also explore, in part comparatively, important facets of 
European and intercontinental media history in the realms of non-public 
work-centred media and their later computerization, in this way correct-
ing the asymmetries of North American research. Where is a comparative 
history of European administrative media? And of their globalization?
8. The Longue Durée of the Digital Present
The theory and historiography of digital media is in a state of upheaval. 
During the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of digital and digitally networked 
media was marked by the promise of an epochal turn whose similarity 
to earlier media revolutions (especially book printing and analogue mass 
media) was underscored. In the work of several media theorists, this sea-
change, at the same time, seemed to herald an eschatological “end of the 
media” (Kittler 1986), annulled within the universal medium of the com-
puter. The elements of this diagnosis, which encountered considerable 
scepticism in other parts of Germany (Winkler 2004), have all been mod-
ified, although, or precisely because the penetration of all areas of life 
by digitally networked media continues apace. An end of media develop-
ment is presently no more foreseeable than an end of history. The modifi-
cations of the above-mentioned diagnosis is most apparent in the theory 
of computerization and of the computer, with a dictum of Michael S. Ma-
honey now prevailing in the “history of computing”:
The computer thus has little or no history of its own. Rather, it has 
histories derived from the histories of the groups of practitioners who 
saw in it, or in some yet to be envisioned form of it, the potential to re-
Media in Action
46 Research Articles
alise their agendas and aspirations. What kinds of computers we have 
designed since 1945, and what kinds of programs we have written for 
them, reflect not so much the nature of the computer as the purposes 
and aspirations of the communities who guided those designs and 
wrote those programs. (Mahoney 2005: 119)
This shift from a history of the computing machine to a socio-techni-
cal history of computing, and from a history of invention of the Internet 
to a history of networking (Russell 2012) has had several consequences. 
Meanwhile, in order to understand the digital epochal threshold, we are 
helped less by an emphasis on ongoing discontinuities or a comparison 
with past media upheavals than by a registering of the long-lasting so-
cio-technical continuities from which past and present “agendas and as-
pirations” of computerization and digital networking have drawn their 
effectiveness.
In a way, the perspective has been reversed. The prognosis of the 1980s 
and 1990s was that as a “universal medium”, the computer would take 
control of all existing media and thus bring about an “end of the media” 
or at least cause their “convergence”. To the extent that such a process re-
ally took place, previous media were transformed into digital formats on 
mobile platforms and entered into unpredicted combinations. Their me-
dia practices have taken possession of the computer and continue their 
own history under new and changing conditions —with the consequence 
for research in media history to be forced to orient itself toward other ba-
sic units and their continuities (e.g. toward a history of cooperative com-
puting capacities and their practices and formats [Campbell-Kelly et al. 
2003], instead of a chronology of computing machines). And because the 
individual or networked computer remains a “protean” machine only ca-
pable of definition through the features of its practical usage, the idea of 
the computer as a universal medium has largely lost its currency. Rather, 
the focus is on the emergence of steadily new computerized media prac-
tices that, because of their interactivity, networking, and mobility, can 
Media in Action
Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 47
only be examined to a limited degree in the computer itself. Current re-
search has responded to this altered situation with a stronger and more 
experimental approach to the media ethnography of digital media prac-
tices, meant to explore such practices as they unfold between online and 
offline contexts; at the same time, with historical work on the continui-
ties manifest in the present state of computerization.
The question of the interfaces between infrastructures and pub-
lics (see section 3.) is especially suited for addressing both the continu-
ities and present turnarounds in computerization. This question leads 
to the insight that the emergence of nineteenth century infrastructural 
work-centred media constituted an epochal threshold signifying a trans-
formation of modern public media which has yet to be sufficiently ex-
plored in research. Without understanding this transformation, the 
present period of digitally networked media, too, cannot be historically 
fully understood. Infrastructural work-centred media (see section 7) con-
tain, on the one hand, localized interactive sequences with their situated 
“skills”, “communities of practice”, and “established procedures” and, on 
the other, standardizations and bureaucratic procedures involving an 
anonymization and duplication of circulating documents and data. Mod-
ern bureaucratic procedures are based on massively produced boundary 
objects (Star / Griesemer 1989), especially forms; the reports they pro-
duce can be in the mode of internally circulating media or media avail-
able to the outside world, extending from handwritten notes to printed 
and published editions. But because of the underlying media of identi-
fication and registration, the process of anonymization and duplication 
at play here remains reversible: all participating individuals, adminis-
trations, and work procedures are meant to remain legally accountable 
(Vismann: 2000). Much of the appropriation of new media technology is 
aimed at generating or restoring the manageability and legal accounta-
bility of interactive procedures, for example in the financial realm both 
around 1900 and at present (Preda 2007). Individual references to spe-
cific persons, things or deliveries are lost in statistical aggregations, but 
Media in Action
48 Research Articles
they are maintained to make each transmission accountable and trace-
able, and statistical and data aggregations rely on their existence. It’s a 
prestabilized harmony of identification and aggregation, registration 
and computing, forged not in heaven but in our modern institutions and 
organisations.
Even modern mass media themselves are not only administered but 
also produced via administered work. Both the establishment of mod-
ern administrative media and the form of production of mass media have 
thus been characterized by a double nature comprising a step-by-step 
transformation of localized work-centred media up to the point of pub-
lication, and by identification and registration techniques and adminis-
trative steps subject to legal control. For modern mass media, this doc-
umentation reveals clear parallels with other bureaucratized domains 
of working life, which have, however, only rarely been researched in 
the framework of “production studies” (Powdermaker 1950; Hennion / 
Méadel 2013), especially principal-agent-relationships and their contracts 
and accountabilities. For nearly a century, infrastructural work-centred 
media and public mass media and telecommunications media seemed to 
occupy two different worlds or faces of a planet, and only one side, the 
face turned toward the product, the audience and the public service, was 
treated as the “world of the media.” A medium only became a medium 
by being a means of mass communication —in short, a mass medium —in 
publicly accessible form, while research of its non-public production and 
socio-technical being-in-the-making remained in darkness.
The genealogy of digitally networked media only becomes historically 
more plausible when infrastructural media and public media are seen in 
their historical correlation; this is particularly the case for the all-pene-
trating presence and digital ubiquity of techniques of identification and 
registration. The socio-technical foundations for digital media and com-
puterization consisted of a production of documents and data that could 
be rendered anonymous and collective, but based on referential tech-
niques of identification and registration (Deibert 2009; Engemann 2003; 
Media in Action
Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 49
Haigh 2003; Schröter 2004). In line with this double nature, over a few 
short years, digitally networked media became capable of integrating all 
past mass media, in order to develop new mass-media practices along this 
path. However, this development came at the price of a fully infrastruc-
tured organisational form, whose history and prehistory was largely un-
known and seemed innocuous enough because of our ignorance. From the 
outset, the basis of digital networking consisted of techniques of identi-
fication and registration, without which, for instance, neither the digital 
administration of addresses, the legally monitored delivery of goods and 
digital mail, nor digital financial transactions and the mail-order busi-
ness would have become possible. This foundation and its consolidation 
through sensor systems and databanks results in the four classical di-
chotomies of media theory only pertaining to digitally networked media 
on a case-by-case basis —which is to say no longer being able to signify 
an essential definition of developing media practices. They are pertinent:
 i) most prominently in the case of the separations between production, 
distribution, and reception that could be easily undercut (Ochsner et 
al. 2013) or cooperatively undersold in the framework of the Internet’s 
end-to-end-architecture (Gillespie 2006);
 ii) just as strikingly in respect to the invalidity of the dichotomy be-
tween interaction and telecommunication, annulled through both 
sensor systems and media technologies and practices of a mobilised 
referentialities of place, time, and person; an “explosion of place” 
(Graham 1998) that would have signified no surprise for either media 
in their making or for infrastructural media, but that came as a big 
surprise for all expectations concerning an “overcoming of time and 
space” or “space-time compression”.
 iii) equally effectively with respect to the annulment of the dichotomy 
between delivered information and referential objects and persons, 
on the same basis (Busch 2011), extending to the possible personaliza-
tion of every delivery and the cleverness of our “filter bubbles”;
Media in Action
50 Research Articles
 iv) and regarding the postulated separation of physical skill and autom-
atisms that, both for users and programmers, has shifted into the op-
posite of a mix composed of stabilizable skills and instable semi-au-
tomatisms (Gaver 1992; Vincente et al. 2001).
Despite these four revisions, now commonplace in the research litera-
ture under various fashionable designations, classical mass-media sepa-
rations between production and reception also evidently exist on the In-
ternet. In its first popular years, the Internet world appeared —partly on 
the basis of an orientation and maintenance dominated by academic val-
ues of egalitarian accessibility —as an optimized mass-media infrastruc-
turing that promised a transparent formation of publics, together with 
increased market transparency. For the time being, the conditions for 
this mass-media infrastructuring have been maintained, albeit in a con-
text marked by the steady erosion of the interim assumptions of trans-
parency, equality, and anonymity. The mass-mediality of the Internet 
has unfolded on the basis of its bureaucratic setup: with the meanwhile 
generally known dangers of data mining that has become inter-opera-
ble and of the permeability of a security architecture that has been weak 
from the start in face of interested third parties who have turned out to 
be technically and institutionally superior.
In hindsight, and in the midst of this most deeply problematic me-
dia world —our present and its future —the mass media of the past and 
present appear in the light of their historical fragility and improbabil-
ity: as public enclaves or, more precisely, as institutionally guaranteed 
or illegally realized exclaves only maintainable through technically and 
institutionally standardized practices of separation between interaction 
and telecommunication, production and reception. This practical “in-
frastructural inversion” (Bowker 1994: 235) of media history and histo-
riography offers good reasons to newly study the intercontinental his-
tory and the present of the institutional and technical guarantees that 
facilitated anonymization and equalitarian participation, dis-identifica-
Media in Action
Erhard Schüttpelz : Infrastructural Media and Public Media 51
tion and un-registration in the epoch of earlier mass media —in order 
to restore them in an unknown media future, if possible and if it’s not 
too late.
Notes
1 This article was written in the frame- Gießmann, Christian Henrich-Franke, 
work of preparation of the special re- Christian Meyer, Wolfgang Reißmann, 
search project “Media of Cooperation” Gabriele Schabacher, Kjeld Schmidt, 
in 2015. I would like to thank all pro- David Sittler, Nadine Taha, Tristan Thiel-
ject participants and its preparatory mann, Ehler Voss, Martin Zillinger, and 
group for the cooperative work, espe- Cora Bender.
cially Volker Wulf, Lene Faust, Sebastian 
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