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SPT Conference Abstract July 2005 Timothy Weber, Doctoral Candidate |
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Values in a National Information Infrastructure: A Case Study of the U.S. Census In July of 2004, the United States Census Bureau complied with a request from the Department of Homeland Security and released to the Customs and Border Protection division a specialized compilation of demographic tabulations on the Arab-American population (specifically tabulations outlining urban areas with more than 10,000 inhabitants reporting Arab descent and zip-code specific tabulations subdivided by country of origin). While the sharing of information between the two agencies was declared "common practice", the public outcry which resulted prompted the Census Bureau to revise its information sharing policies - requiring all special data requests from law enforcement and intelligence agencies to undergo review by an appropriate Associate Director. In light of this controversy, this paper seeks to flesh out the relationship between the American census, notions of values (such as public concerns over privacy), and technology (including the census itself). By tracing this triangulated relationship throughout U.S. census history, I will argue for the importance of keeping census practices both reflexive and open to the public. In their work on the consequences of classification systems , Bowker and Star discuss the tendency of information infrastructures toward "embeddedness" - being "sunk" into other social structures and arrangements, as well as into technologies. In the case of the U.S. census, one finds a prime example of this notion; census data (and the typologies contained therein) diffuse throughout a wide range of American sites - from realty to academic research, from Wal-Mart's planning decisions to the data mining of "private sociology" at large. As the Census Bureau gears up for the full-scale launch of the American Community Survey (a program tested in 2003 aimed at continuous information solicitation from the U.S. population), it seems safe to expect this "diffusion" (and the consequences created in its wake) to accelerate. As such, the time is ripe for encouraging public discussion of the classification schemes "embedded" in this (technological) practice - such encouragement is what this paper aims to achieve.
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