Turning Aggression into an Object of Intervention: Tinkering in a Crime Control Pilot Study

Abstract

Real-world experiments that test new technologies can affect policy and practice by introducing new objects of intervention through tinkering; the ad hoc work of realigning relations in the face of frictions, surprises, and disturbances that occur when introducing a technology. In a pilot study on aggression detection, tinkering moved aggression in and out of the human body. In the end, the pilot defined aggression as a set of acoustic-physical variables representing the aroused human body, alongside other signals of aggression. How aggression as an object intervention was shaped by tinkering is relevant because it involved inclusions and exclusions by the authorities who identified aggression, the methods they applied, and mandate for intervention. A focus on relations that are tinkered within a real-world experiment permits critical engagement with this format. Although the real-world experimental format is credited with producing knowledge about a technology's ‘actual’ performance, actors and events at the pilot study location were made only selectively relevant. Analyses of real-world experiments should therefore explain how experiments selectively make the world relevant, giving only particular objects of intervention a truth status.

Keywords:

• aggression
• real-world experiment
• sound
• pilot study
• crime control
• tinkering

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank John Grin, Amade M'charek, Javier Lezaun, Clive Norris, Thomas Levin, Joseph Vogl, Lonneke van der Velden, and Jurjen Hesseling for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Also, the author would like to thank her informants for their willingness to share their knowledge and experiences.

Notes

1 Fictitious names guarantee the anonymity of my informants, with the exception of the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA).

2 See, for instance, Gates (2010), Boyle and Haggerty (2009), and Helten and Fischer (2004).

3 The material production and consumption of sound are the focus of sound studies (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2012). This field has a particular interest in the materiality of sound, and its embeddedness in society, science, and technology (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2004). Authors in this field have shown the role of sound practices in the shaping of subcultures and identities (Waksman, 2004), and demonstrated that ‘sounds are places where power relations are managed, elaborated and acted out’ (Sterne, 2003, p. 59). This body of work has not, however, explicitly addressed the bringing into being of acoustic objects in material semiotic terms. I turn to other STS literatures to describe how aggression is established as an acoustic object. I should mention here that some authors’ work does point in this direction. For instance, Mody (2005) shows how sounds are part of the organization of laboratory work. Lachmund (1999) examines how lung sound codification systems are variably constituted in different countries.

4 The Dutch DPA contended that no privacy regulations were violated. It allowed these practices because Analytics Inc. claimed that it did not save recordings beyond the ‘purposes of the experiment’, and because the content of words and sentences was not analyzed (letter, Dutch DPA, 2005, see endnote 6).

5 All quotes are translated from Dutch by the author.

6 Citing the full titles of the research literature and policy documents that I quote or reference in this article could reveal the names of individuals, locations, or organizations. I have therefore chosen to mention only the document types in the text, and exclude those references from the bibliography.

7 I follow my informants’ terminology in referring to codification systems as filters.

8 The demonstration function of experiments is well described in STS. See, for instance, Shapin and Schaffer (1985), Latour (1988), Barry (2001), and Simakova (2010). Whereas most of these accounts demonstrate success, in this case the actors seem to demonstrate failure.

9 Here I do not discuss the technology's performance in terms of missed and detected cases of aggression because the police do not register all cases of verbal and physical violence.

10 For an overview of tropes on everyday practice, see Elias 1998 [1978].