The Theatre of Failure

Perriam, Jessamy

doi:10.4324/9780429355950-14

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Research on the emergence of new technologies tends to focus on how successful or pervasive technologies come to be, but failure can also be instructive (Latour, 1996; Perriam, 2023; Sadowski, 2021). In the context of complex systems, accident (Perrow, 1984) and failure (Dekker, 2011) are inescapable even as efforts are made to mitigate their effects (Dörner, 1997).…”

Section: Forms Of Failure: Mapping Pandemic Drone ‘Failures’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Attending to failure in autonomous vehicle accidents, for example, complicates narratives of ‘automation’s efficacy’ and diversifies our ‘understandings of the sites and operation of power in automated systems’ (Bissell, 2018: 57). Simply put, failure is an endemic feature of technology (Sadowski, 2021) that can be produced and performed via digital and social media platforms (Perriam, 2023). Drones are no exception.…”

Section: Forms Of Failure: Mapping Pandemic Drone ‘Failures’mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism

Jackman,

Richardson,

Veber

2024

New Media & Society

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In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, excitement broke out around the potential for drones to generate aerial solutions to devilish pandemic problems. But despite the hype, pandemic drones largely failed to take to the sky and far from the scale initially imagined. This article pursues the failure of the pandemic drone to materialise, showing how it nevertheless functioned as a locus of experimentation for remote logics and processes. As such, we shift focus away from what the pandemic drone is to if and where it – or its logics – can be found. To learn from the pandemic drone, we turn to three trajectories of failure: failure as experiment, failure as imaginary and failure as glitch. With particular attention to specific case studies, we show how failure enables drone logics and processes to migrate across various socio-technical forms, sites and applications of automated decision-making responses to the pandemic.

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Section: Forms Of Failure: Mapping Pandemic Drone ‘Failures’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Forms Of Failure: Mapping Pandemic Drone ‘Failures’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism

Jackman,

Richardson,

Veber

2024

New Media & Society

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“…Could social media analysis help demonstrate how (not) testing for coronavirus had proven socially testing in the first few months of the pandemic? 9 As noted, when the Covid pandemic started, Twitter was a prominent platform in our societies for participation in media events as well as for communication of emergency and disruption (Burgess & Baym, 2020;Perriam, 2023;Thelwall & Thelwall, 2020). Over the last few years, scholars have turned to Twitter to analyze public reactions, controversies, and sentiment about various aspects of the pandemic, such as vaccination, social distancing, lockdown, and face masks (see, e.g., Cascini et al, 2022;Charquero-Ballester et al, 2021;Pascual-Ferrá et al, 2021;Xue et al, 2020).…”

Section: Analyzing Testing Situations Across Scales: Twitter Accounts...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing and Not Testing for Coronavirus on Twitter: Surfacing Testing Situations Across Scales With Interpretative Methods

Marres,

Colombo,

Bounegru

et al. 2023

Social Media + Society

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How was testing—and not testing—for coronavirus articulated as a testing situation on social media in the Spring of 2020? Our study examines everyday situations of Covid-19 testing by analyzing a large corpus of Twitter data collected during the first 2 months of the pandemic. Adopting a sociological definition of testing situations, as moments in which it is no longer possible to go on in the usual way, we show how social media analysis can be used to surface a range of such situations across scales, from the individual to the societal. Practicing a form of large-scale data exploration we call “interpretative querying” within the framework of situational analysis, we delineated two types of coronavirus testing situations: those involving locations of testing and those involving relations. Using lexicon analysis and composite image analysis, we then determined what composes the two types of testing situations on Twitter during the relevant period. Our analysis shows that contrary to the focus on individual responsibility in UK government discourse on Covid-19 testing, English-language Twitter reporting on coronavirus testing at the time thematized collective relations. By a variety of means, including in-memoriam portraits and infographics, this discourse rendered explicit challenges to societal relations and arrangements arising from situations of testing and not testing for Covid-19 and highlighted the multifaceted ways in which situations of corona testing amplified asymmetrical distributions of harms and benefits between different social groupings, and between citizens and state, during the first months of the pandemic.

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The Theatre of Failure

Cited by 2 publications

References 12 publications

Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism

Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism

Testing and Not Testing for Coronavirus on Twitter: Surfacing Testing Situations Across Scales With Interpretative Methods

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