Nautical Media E-Book

Asher Boersma

• Herausgeber: transcript Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Media in Action
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 517

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Over the last 70 years, media have become increasingly central to nautical mobility. Asher Boersma describes how, in the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of the Western European infrastructuring state shifted from dramatic physical intervention to control rooms, which both benefited from and drove the mediatisation of navigation, especially radar. He shows that, in the 1980s, conflicts between operators and management were manifested and resolved in the design of early simulators, and traces how the digitalisation of bridges and wheelhouses decentralised control again, away from shore. The nucleus of change in transport infrastructure has been where it is scaled, in control rooms and on ships, and that scaling is primarily what nautical media allow.

Leseprobe

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Asher Boersma

Nautical Media

An Historical Ethnography of Ships and Control Rooms

Universität Siegen, DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Locating Media”

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First published in 2024 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

© Asher Boersma

transcript Verlag | Hermannstraße 26 | D-33602 Bielefeld | [email protected]

Cover concept: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld

Cover illustration: Asher Boersma

Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar

https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839473733

Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-7373-9

PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-7373-3

EPUB-ISBN: 978-3-7328-7373-9

ISSN of series: 2749-9960

eISSN of series: 2749-9979

For Yael

Contents

Foreword

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Devil’s Island

1.1.“Will you decipher the name?”

1.2.The island takes shape

Rijkswaterstaat enters the scene

1.3.Enrolling a name

1.4.Testing a hypothesis

1.5.The need for mediated control

Unification of the Rhine

Mechanisation of inland navigation

Managing distance and proximity

Centralisation as prestige

Oversight and overview of traffic

1.6.A control room on Devil’s Island

Growing infrastructural complexity

Rijkswaterstaat in transition

River masters at the frontier of changes

Conceptual development of the Dordrecht control room

Establishment of a control room on Devil’s Island

1.7.Conclusion

Chapter 2 – The Mediatisation of Work

2.1.The anthropological interest in historiography

Archives: structured absence

Situating oral history

2.2.(Former) skippers with nautical media skills

Joining and (never really) leaving a community of practice

Mediatisation

2.3.Dordrecht control room (start-up) problems

A kitchen and bathroom in the control room

2.4.A first professional rivalry

2.5.Formalisation of work

Initial formalisation left room for operators

Loose learning on board in a formal structure

Early media technology affords autonomy

Simulatable

2.6.Managers contesting professionalisation of operators

The managerial trend

Becoming a manager

Managerialised and mediatised work

2.7.Conclusion

Chapter 3 – Control room Prestige and Design intertwined

3.1.Traditions of making the control room (work) visible

The representational tradition of Rijkswaterstaat

Same control room photo, different readings

3.2.Combining workplace studies and media studies to avoid their pitfalls

3.3.Control room gatekeepers caught between prestige, concentration and resignation

The three phases of gatekeeping

Who gets in

Designing control room visits

Broken door (politics)

Historicising gatekeeping, seeing control futures

3.4.Conclusion

Chapter 4 – Tweeting operators

4.1.From broadcasting concerns to tweeting operators

Retired operator speaks

What tweeting can do

Who to follow?

4.2Localising tweets

Persistent

Significant but less frequent

Expected but rarely encountered

4.3.Conclusion

Chapter 5 – Media of Separation

5.1.Navigating research: follow the practice

I.Following actors empirically

II.Action is distributed and dependent on media

III.Follow the practice of ordering

5.2.Boarding the ships

5.3.Undetermined future: conflicting priorities in navigating rivers

Episode one: accounting and steering clear—navigational ordering seen from the wheelhouse

Episode two: Conflicting temporalities of navigation—seen from the control room

5.4.Just in time: navigating competition, speed and low water

Episode one: closing time window—balancing draft, speed and riverbed

Episode two: losing time—the collective problem of acceleration

Episode three: stealing time—breaking agreements and consensus

5.5.Resting time: navigating with assemblages of surveillance

5.6.Asynchronous times: navigating shipping and family life

Episode one: pockets of synchronous time—stacking intimate orderings on others

Episode two: solitary time—media compete for attention

Episode three: sharing time and space—enduring intolerance

Episode four: sharing time and space—active negotiation between orderings

5.7Conclusion

Conclusion

1.Presumed invisibility

2.Transdisciplinary

3.Theoretical contributions

4.Revisiting Cognition in the Wild

Every field its own question?

Embodied navigation of risk

Navigating is infrastructuring

Literature

List of Figures

Foreword

What are nautical media? This question is likely to be asked not only by those unfamiliar with media studies, but even by media scholars themselves. Firstly, this book uses ‘media’ where others use ‘technology’. This is done in order to focus on why technology is developed and how it is used, because technology is always situated between a user and the world (other users, other technologies, networks, environment), both by design and in practice. For those still uncomfortable with this use of ‘media’, it may be helpful to use the distinction between public media and infrastructural media (cf. Schüttpelz 2016), where public media are those traditionally identified as media, and infrastructural media are those that make the world work, mostly outside the public eye. Second, the study of media, even in its broadest sense, has a terrestrial focus, with a few exceptions to the rule (cf. Jue 2020; Borbach 2024). The relationship between mobility and media has been studied extensively and with great success (cf. Ramella 2018, 2021; Hind and Gekker 2022; Willkomm 2022; Bender and Kanderske 2024), whereas the media used on water and between water and land have not received enough attention. This study shows how these media are arranged and configured to enable navigation on rivers, estuaries, and in ports, also through the numerous connections between land and ship. Although the focus is on inland navigation in northern Europe, its relevance extends beyond inland navigation, both through its interaction with maritime navigation and through the shared media, practices, and work biographies. Furthermore, the contrast between the two in terms of manoeuvrability, navigation techniques, economic dynamics and hydrological conditions is made productive for both inland and maritime shipping. Thus, nautical media are those technologies nested in constellations between the bridge or wheelhouse on the one hand and crew members elsewhere, river or seabed, other ships, and shore on the other hand. Such constellations primarily enable navigation, but also (and often simultaneously) economic activity, compliance with regulations, and nurturing (distant) social relations. Ships require physical separation, and nautical media both ensure this, but also bridge it. In fact, it is the constant electronic, often digital, bridging of distances that makes safe, profitable, authorized, and intimate separation possible in the first place.

One might then ask: what is historical ethnography? Again, neither historians nor anthropologists are likely to have a clear idea of what it is, let alone anyone else. If ethnography is “an account—in writing, film, or other graphic media—of life as it is actually lived and experienced by a people, somewhere, sometime” (Ingold 2017: 21) it relies on certain methods for collection in the field, like participant observation and interviews. Archival research and oral history can also be such methods, with the difference that I remained an ethnographer while doing historical research, looking for traces of lived experience. An ethnography can become a historical ethnography when the researcher realises that key events took place before entering the field (cf. Vaughan 1996, 2021). It allows the researcher to understand how the past resonates in the present, how and why people are invested in the past, and it gives the researcher and participants a common purpose in delving into the past together. It places a lived experience between past, present and future: it shows what has been “handed down” (Wietschorke 2012) and what is being handed down, not only to shape the present but also in an attempt to shape future knowledge and practices. Nautical media are thus understood within the practices in which they emerged and are now embedded.

Different Belgian, German and especially Dutch communities—skippers, engineers, control room operators, civil servants—welcomed me into their homes and workplaces, which are sometimes one and the same. For days on end, they let me witness how they work and live, and how they have done so in the past. Archives, then, are much more than the official ones financed and managed by states. What is worth remembering is therefore first preserved by those involved in the field and then generously shared for this particular reconstruction. I am immensely grateful for the openness and trust of all those involved. I cherish our conversations, the empathy displayed and wisdom shared. This would be the place to name these people. However, after several participants asked to remain anonymous, and after it became clear that others who spoke openly were in need of protection, I have decided to change all the names of people and ships still active. This leaves those who were part of the oral history project and most of whom are retired, my collaborators of chapter two: Dirk Zwijnenburg and Ruud Filarski who carefully read earlier versions of parts of this book, Jan Timmer, Rolph Herks, Frans and Mieke Heijlaerts, Fokko Boersma, and Ad van Zanten.

Asher Boersma

Prologue

At first I was not sure what Harry meant when he said “the shore turns the ship” (Field note 11.10.18). He has been sailing on a push boat for 41 years, the last 20 or so as captain. Both Harry and later the captain of the rotating shift, Pat, used this phrase as we sailed on the Tigris from Duisburg to Rotterdam and back. At the time, in the autumn of 2018, we were experiencing record low water levels, which narrowed the river and brought the shore ever closer. As a result, we pushed four barges instead of six. At around 25 metres wide and 180 metres long, we were still one of the larger vessels on the river. The push boat itself, with its two huge engines, lay deeper in the water than most: at times our propellers were just 20 centimetres from the river bed. It was explained to me that if they got too close, the suction would dig them in. A large rock could also have been our undoing. Whenever a ship came close, the engines were switched off. The faster a ship goes, the more water it displaces. Aboard the Tigris, the fear was that the other ships would take what little water we had left.

This was to be my last voyage on the Rhine. It was never my intention to leave the shore and join ships, but how people (both in the control room and on board) live at the limits of what can be planned gradually became the subject of this study. So it was only fitting that my research should take some unexpected turns. The question that preoccupied me became: how is near-permanent mobility organised in an otherwise largely sedentary society? By then it was clear that nautical media were an important part of the answer.

Many have given up the transient life on board, and ships are depopulating, but some have found a way to stay in touch. One way is to become an operator in an inland waterway control centre, most of which are run by Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch government’s “infrastructuring” (Star 2006) agency. Dirk, a skipper-turned-operator, was quoted by a nautical industry magazine at his retirement party as saying that he never wanted to enforce state authority, but to serve skippers (cf. Spek 2003).

My intention was to conduct an ethnography of a particular control room in Dordrecht, east of Rotterdam, located on a peninsula called Devil’s Island at the confluence of four rivers. Its elevated position offers a panoramic view of the waterscape, with radar and CCTV completing the picture. Skippers call in on marine VHF radio and operators organise passage through what is probably the busiest waterway junction in the world.

The first time I entered this control room, in the spring of 2015, I was almost immediately sent on another mission. To my knowledge, I was the first independent researcher in this control room. I used this fact to gain the trust of the operators, as I was told by a former manager of the control room that they were particularly weary of researchers. One operator asked me if I was going to find out why their peninsula had the name it had? If it meant anything to them, I would find out why it was called Devil’s Island, I decided. As well as gaining legitimacy, I hoped to find out more about the rivers they oversee, as the history of land and water is so closely intertwined in the Netherlands.

This dissertation consists of several movements which, when combined, form a rarely seen picture of infrastructure, nautical media, mobility and work as observed (ethnography), recorded (archives), represented (public media) and retold (oral history). The first movement is from ethnography to historiography. This diachronic perspective is then transported back into the present: the second movement is to return to the control room, now understanding that lived present as an “überlieferte Ordnung” (Schmidt cit. in Wietschorke 2010). However, I soon realised that staying in Dordrecht and focusing on local interactions would reinforce the physical and organisational isolation of this control room. The third movement is therefore in a synchronic direction. I started by visiting the other control rooms, hopping along the main infrastructural axes Rotterdam-Duisburg and Rotterdam-Antwerp. Then I joined ships to experience the interaction from the water. Embarking on ships became a scaling experience, where gradually the sum of interactions, of localities, would bring the infrastructure as network into view.

In 2015, I cornered the eminent academic Christian Heath at a conference. Together with Paul Luff, he had carried out pioneering studies of control rooms, as detailed in Technology in Action (2004). I told him about my field and my suspicion that there was something beyond that control room in Dordrecht, that I needed to travel further to understand the practice that had materialised there. He listened to me, then politely said that he disagreed and urged me to take a camera and zoom in on the action. That was all I needed to hear, I would prove him wrong.

In fact, my field would prove him wrong. Looking back, I decided then that the field itself should guide the research. If I wanted to understand the way operators see the world, rather than impose my theoretical structures on them, I would have to let them design the map I could survey. Nor could I impose my method on them. For example, filming their actions, as Heath suggested, would have drawn uncanny parallels with the research commissioned by Rijkswaterstaat. The work of the operators had been observed in detail in order to quantify the intensity of their work, which in the eyes of the operators was then used to justify or instigate budget cuts. Hence their distrust in those observing them and their work.

It often seemed that the only stable thing in the field was change and the ability to navigate it. Roughly three things changed considerably and consistently: 1) the way in which control room work is learnt and carried out, 2) despite regulation, the river is alive and therefore constantly changing, 3) this is best experienced from the water, by those who are constantly on the move.

Dealing with change, I thought, was a skill to be learnt. If I exposed myself to it, I would get a glimpse of the experience of those in the field, perhaps I would become better at dealing with ever-changing circumstances. Gradually, my fieldwork became entangled with a transnational life of my own, oscillating between several countries, between old friends and new colleagues, between loyalty and ambition, between curiosity and anxiety.

The idea of going on board came from the operators. They suggested that I would only understand the river, the interaction between the control room and the ships, and the mobility the operators were trying to facilitate, if I went on a few trips myself. It was also recommended that I then join different types of vessels, as their rhythm, manoeuvrability and regulatory framework varied. Many of the operators had been skippers before, but had settled for a life on land. Being an operator was a way of staying in touch with the water, as they often put it, and one of the few places where their maritime expertise had value. The cohort of new operators I followed through their simulator training were also expected to join ships and complete tasks involving interaction between the control room and the ship. Harry had welcomed many of them on board. Due to their size, push boats need to anticipate traffic much earlier, making them more dependent on mediated vision. As in the control room, it is no longer sufficient to scan the water surface optically. These vessels also have the capacity to accommodate guests. Their larger crews have individual cabins, and the owner’s cabin is regularly vacant, as most push boats are owned by shipping companies that have entire fleets.

Boarding the push boat, or any ship for that matter, was not easy. I had to adapt to the ship and its practices. I had shared my ambition to join a push boat during several visits to different control rooms. Jan, a control room operator who had sailed on one in the 1970s, was a childhood friend of Harry’s. Jan had just finished a two-hour stint of intense ship coordination. After rotation, we sat behind a console where administrative tasks are carried out. Without my asking, Jan called Harry. He walked away first. I could hear them catching up like old friends. Then he returned to the desk and explained my research, I wrote down some details which he added to the conversation. Harry was convinced, but said it was not his decision. He gave me the number of Josh, a senior manager at the shipping company. Later that week I called Josh, explained what my research was about and asked if I could go on a cruise. He said that they did not run cruise ships, but that they could take a serious passenger and asked me to explain everything in an email. This would enable him to explain to the crew the purpose of my visit. Below is the email I wrote:

From: Boersma, Asher Sent: Friday 24 August 2018 10:11 To: <deleted>, Josh Subject: joining the ship for research

Hello Josh,

as discussed over the phone just now below is a short explanation and dates when I am available.

Since 2015 I have been conducting academic research about inland navigation on the axis Rotterdam-Duisburg and focus on the interaction between control rooms and ships. This interaction I try to understand from both sides through observations in the control rooms and on the ships. I have already joined container ships, tankers, and barges. However, I haven’t got to know the push boat practice.

As for my availability: the third week of September has my preference, my schedule is still empty from 17 until 21. Otherwise I have time in October too. I can embark both in the Netherlands and in Germany.

Thanks a lot for your cooperation.

Kind regards,Asher Boersma

This email seemed to satisfy Josh. So, with our interests roughly aligned, the question was, when would there be room for me on board? That depended on when Harry was sailing—he works a two weeks on, two weeks off schedule—and if there was a cabin available. When we found a week that suited everyone, it was a matter of getting used to the rhythm of the ship. It travels between Rotterdam and Duisburg, but does not know when barges can be unloaded or picked up. In addition, the tides come into play closer to Rotterdam, so the speed of the ship varies. The week before I went on board, after the approximate date had changed four times, Josh gave me the ship’s mobile phone number, which was usually answered by Harry or Pat (the other captain). Now I had to settle things with them. The first time I called, we agreed a provisional boarding time. I called every few days to see if anything had changed. To get to the ship, I had to take a taxi from Duisburg’s main station to the harbour of the huge steelworks. Only one taxi driver was allowed on the site and he knew the way. Whenever the expected boarding time changed, I had to call the driver. He was aware of the provisional nature of these arrangements. Soon it looked as if I would have to board during the night, around 03.00. Pat could predict when they would reach Duisburg at their current speed, but not when they would actually be called into port. Whenever that happened, I had a window of about 90 minutes to get there. He asked me to keep my mobile phone close to my bed. That way they could wake me if it changed again: “Later is not a problem, earlier is.” (Field note 11.10.18) The ship would not wait for me.

I was staying with a friend in Cologne and needed 120 minutes to get from his house to the port. This meant that Pat and Harry had to anticipate when they would be called, as the actual call would be too late for me. The night before Pat rang to say 11.00 was more likely, the head office had said they would have to wait at anchor. I was relieved as it meant I could get a good night’s sleep. I spoke to the taxi driver and agreed that I would confirm at 08.00 in the morning if 10.00 was the pick up time at the station. At 04.30 Pat called: if I wanted to board I had to get there right away. I checked the train connections and called him back to confirm that I would be going. On the way, at about 06.00, I called the taxi driver to ask if he could pick me up at 07.00. At 07.30 I was waiting on a quay in an industrial landscape that I only knew from the final showdown in an action film. A smaller boat came to pick me up. The Tigris was in the middle of the river, about to turn downstream with the current, when the smaller boat came so close that only a small step was needed to get on board. Harry, tall, broad-shouldered, bold, wearing a white buttoned shirt, stood there to welcome me on board.

We headed for Rotterdam straight away. Harry was at the helm, the crew busy tightening the barges, setting the lights, lowering the rudders. During the 180-degree manoeuvre to turn downstream, Harry gave the shipping company the numbers of the barges we were pushing, interrupted the phone call to tell the crew on their local radio to tighten port side, and was called on the marine VHF radio by another skipper who suggested a passing arrangement, which Harry refused. “That’s sweet of you, but we’re not going to do that,” he said to himself, appreciating the ability of the approaching skipper to recognise our limited manoeuvrability, but finding the suggestion too vague (Field note 11.10.18). Pusher boats have no bow thrusters, so they have to use the current and the wind to make elaborate manoeuvres, Harry explained. I took it all in, grateful and relieved to be there. It was not until 15.00, when sleep began to creep in, that I asked where my cabin was. Just before falling asleep, I texted my wife that I had actually made it on board.

Several members of the crew were clearly disappointed when they were informed of the sudden change of plans. First we were told to wait for 24 hours in the port of Rotterdam, which seemed unusual. The unprecedented water levels forced the company to reconsider the usual procedures. The news spread quickly among the crew. One helmsman made the offhand suggestion that family members could come over for a cup of coffee; they hadn’t seen them for 10 days. Pat dismissed the idea as impractical: they might be told to move on. Instead, plans were made for maintenance work, a young sailor would practice with his motorboat (which was tied to the stern of the push boat), and a meeting was arranged to brush up on safety protocols. In the end, we left Rotterdam after just 14 hours. Harry and Pat took it as proof of the maxim: “The shore turns the ship.” (Field note 11.10.18)

The disappointment, accompanied by heartfelt curses, took me by surprise. I thought my relief and despair at navigating changing plans was due to my status as a newcomer to the improvised mobility “community of practice” (Lave 1991). Those who live on the water routinely improvise, to varying degrees. There are variations in water levels, behaviour, weather, market, tides, traffic, all of which trigger a response, albeit in different spatio-temporal dimensions. It was my mistake to think that just because they are able to improvise, they enjoy it all the time. Looking back, I can see moments when the skippers needed time to readjust, to digest the fact that they would not be going where they were going.

The announced 24-hour delay in the port of Rotterdam was due to low water levels. It forced the shipping company to improvise on an unprecedented scale. It had temporarily expanded its fleet by hiring a large number of barges and push combinations to keep metallurgical production going. These ships have a minimal draft, so they can cope better with a shallow river.

In general, low water means that many more ships are needed to transport the same volume—in this market, skippers make good money. In August 2018, I spent a few days in control rooms during low water. There were more ships on a narrower river, sailing at higher speed, afforded by their light loads. I heard a lot of swearing on the VHF frequencies; skippers demanding more space or taking too much, eager to get to the next lucrative cargo. The water would not rise significantly until late autumn. Records were being broken, and large parts of the Rhine were no longer navigable.

Back on the Tigris, it was night, when over the VHF marine radio the Amalia called. It wanted to pass us on the wrong side, on starboard, which requires a passing arrangement and the unfolding of blue boards with a blinking white light, hanging on the starboard side of the wheelhouse. The control room in Nijmegen had listened in and told the Amalia to “give a bit more room, this is a pusher” (Field note 13.10.18). This intervention was made possible by the superior radar network of the control room and the software functionality that allowed the operator to plot the Amalia’s probable course. The operator demonstrated an understanding of our manoeuvrability and our critical draught, preventing the Amalia, which was moving downstream at considerable speed, from taking what little water was left under our hull. By carrying transponders, by registering when entering control room sectors, by tuning into the relevant radio frequency, ships make themselves accountable. They can use radar to account for traffic in their vicinity. In this way, they become part of a “sociomaterial” (Braidotti 2002) assemblage in which they ultimately depend on their own and others’ ability to identify with what is approaching. That the operator was able to do this, that he knew how to embody the relevant dimensions and foresee the critical variables at stake, almost certainly points to previous skipper experience.

Many operators gave up a sailing life in exchange for a more sustained presence. In general, their families were already living a life on land. One operator explained that he made the choice for his marriage and to see his children grow up, another had no choice when his wife suffered a stroke and could no longer look after their teenage daughter alone. The coast had changed their lives. The birth of my first daughter also marked the end of my fieldwork.

After leaving the push boat, I emailed Harry to ask what they had meant by ‘the shore turns the ship’. I expected it to be part of a maritime idiom, but Harry wrote of a much more local use (Email 4.11.18). In the offices of the shipping company and the metallurgical parent company, plans are made which, in the eyes of Harry and his colleagues, often have practical shortcomings. When asked for input, the crews point this out—often to no avail. This leaves them disillusioned. The extent to which these plans depend on the distance between management and practice, between office and ship, between changing an Excel spreadsheet and having to make do with less crew, has remarkable parallels with the experience of operators. As will become clear, the wheelhouse and the control room have shared an ethos for decades, both rely increasingly on a very similar mediated vision, and in some cases both interact with a management class that has made unfamiliarity with established practice and practical knowledge a pillar of its ability to change practice itself.

One might think that aligning oneself with a control room is easier than with a ship. Logistically it is, the control room is static, but there are often significant obstacles to overcome. As a rule, I have visited all the control rooms I have passed while on board a ship, and vice versa: I have sailed the waters around every control room I have been in.

A voyage aboard the Porter, a tanker bound for Ghent, took us through the Western Scheldt, the Dutch estuary that connects the Belgian port of Antwerp to the North Sea. The control centres along this busy waterway share a transnational radar network—there are three Dutch control centres and one Belgian control centre in the port of Antwerp. When we reached the Terneuzen sector, the control room that manages the intersection of the Ghent-Terneuzen canal, Maria, the skipper, had to call in to register. Before entering the Western Scheldt through the Zandvliet lock in Antwerp, Maria and her husband Philip instructed the crew to secure all the hatches, I had to check the door to my cabin. The waves created by wind, tide and huge barges (the ones carrying containers that look more like a giant apartment block than a ship) made them nervous. Compared to other rivers, the waterscape is so vast that the optical identification of ships, with the aid of binoculars of course, is quite easy—weather permitting. Another complicating factor is the difference in speed: ocean-going vessels can travel three times as fast as barges, making it difficult to translate distance into time. Maria had to call three times – “Station Terneuzen, Porter”—switching between different marine VHF radios they have as a backup (Field note 19.2.17). Finally, the Terneuzen control room answered. Maria said: “Yes, good morning, the Porter, passed buoy 32 and she is coming, eh, she is coming in.” (ibid.) Something inaudible (to my untrained ears) followed, which Maria took as confirmation.

I had heard stories about the Terneuzen control room from an operator who worked there, they were dramatically understaffed, morale was low, he told me. It would be difficult to get into that control room, I thought: why would they want a nosy researcher around? That, at least, had been my experience with the Dordrecht control room, and I had deduced that more controversy meant less access. I decided to give it a go, to see if I could get in touch with whoever was controlling access. The only contact I had in this region was a senior manager at Rijkswaterstaat, who had previously granted me access to another control room. She replied to my email by copying a local manager, who simply replied that I was welcome and to call before I arrived. It took me fewer attempts to get into the Terneuzen control room than it had taken Maria.

It had never been that easy, so I also tried to see if they could put me in touch with the Belgian control room, assuming they worked closely together. But the team leader had no contact there, and neither did his supervisor. There was, however, a person responsible for maintaining contact with both parties, who worked for an organisation set up by the Belgian and Dutch governments. He gave me a number and an e-mail address for the Antwerp control room. I wrote that “as inland navigation is not limited by national borders” I also wanted to visit them (Email 22.2.17). The senior operator replied the same day that “it’s normally no problem” but that I would have to make a formal request, including date and time, to his superior (Email 22.2.17). She was the head of all Vessel Traffic Services (VTS, the international nautical term for this type of control room) run by the Flemish government. After two emails and a phone call in which I stressed the international dimension of my project and the minimally invasive nature of my presence, she was convinced. I had to promise to come and present my results later.

My plan was to visit Terneuzen and Antwerp on two consecutive days. The former is a town on a strip of land that, apart from a tunnel under the Western Scheldt, has only one land connection with Belgium. To my surprise, I had found a city in the Netherlands that I could not reasonably reach by public transport in one day from Siegen, where I lived. The region is struggling with depopulation and is not only geographically but also politically peripheral in the Netherlands. I spent the night in a cheap hotel on the waterfront, where the other guests wore work clothes for breakfast. When I arrived at the gate shielding the control room premises, it was open, the intercom taped over with a piece of black garbage bag and the control room door, reinforced and guarded by CCTV, unlocked. The idea that something critical, prestigious and potentially vulnerable was being carried out here, as other Rijkswaterstaat control rooms suggest by their architecture, protocol and attitude, was absent.

Fred had been an operator at Terneuzen for more than 20 years, before which he had worked at a lock for 13 years. He had a minimised web browser on a screen to the far right of his console, which he checked occasionally. He was logged in to real-time stock market data—he trades himself. Basically, he was coordinating a huge T-junction, of which he was the only one who could clearly see who was approaching, thanks to his radar network. Ship radar is tied to a ship’s position and cannot see around corners. Ships calling in were informed of the positions of other ships. The software, which overlays the radar with a nautical map, allows him to plot distances to the intersection, which he then translates into time. In the control rooms, where only inland navigation is coordinated, the speed is more homogeneous and distances are defined in metres.

When I asked him about the unguarded door, he shrugged his shoulders: they had no capacity to monitor the entrance. Going to the toilet was already an issue as the radio frequency had to be staffed permanently and the only colleague able to take over had then to abandon the other frequency. These were not unforeseen circumstances, according to Fred: “This is a deliberate policy” (Field note 6.4.17). The mouse on his console did not work properly, he cursed under his breath and wondered why they had to “work with such crap” (ibid.). Towards the end of my stay, Fred opened up a little. In other control rooms, operators were quick to voice their concerns. He explained that no new staff had been recruited for eight years, that overtime was no longer paid, and that there was no staff for the patrol vessel on the canal to Ghent. Occasionally there were nights when the control room was empty and the skippers were on their own—the local press had also reported this. At the locks on the canal, just behind the control room, staff were repeatedly dismissed after three years—“when they had finally gained experience”—to avoid giving them permanent contracts (ibid.). Fred felt that: “slowly everything is being demolished here, socially and physically” (ibid.). When he started working for Rijkswaterstaat more than 30 years ago, the organisation was “a bit boring and super reliable, now it is not boring and totally unreliable” (ibid.).

I was taken to the bus stop by another operator—the bus only ran once an hour. While I was waiting, I realised that in my twelve hours in the control room, no one had ever asked me what I did. In other control rooms I always had to declare my interest and my independence from management before anyone would open up, I had to show who I was aligned with. In those control rooms, not only was the entrance guarded, but the operators still had positions to defend within the larger organisation. To complain is to signal a transgression of a norm, a deviation from the desired state. In the case of the Tigris, they use the phrase ‘the shore is turning the ship’ to mark this transgression, implying that the shore should not be turning the ship. Fred and his colleagues resigned in who turned them.

The next day in Antwerp I had to be at a railway station at 06.45 in the morning. As with the Tigris, the practical alignment was left to me and those present. I had asked if there was a public transport connection—there was not. Terneuzen remained the only control room I could reach on foot. There would be a taxi there to take me and an operator to the control room. At 19.30, when the shift was over, we could share the taxi again. Although I arrived early enough, I soon discovered that there were taxi ranks at both exits and never found the operator or the taxi. Instead, I found a random taxi driver who took the fare as only his sat nav knew the address. We negotiated a fixed price, which worked out in my favour when we had to take a major detour that the driver was unaware of. An hour later, I was standing in front of a building on an island between two locks, one of them with a ship dwarfing all the surrounding buildings.

The Antwerp control room seemed to start in the corridor, the whole floor filled with consoles for traffic operators, pilot coordination and the port authority. They had planned a new building, the design was ready, but post-2008 austerity meant that the architect was bought out and an ad hoc renovation was carried out in the old building. The room had a majestic view of the docks and the entrance to the port, where the Scheldt river and its estuary, the Western Scheldt, meet. Marine VHF radio filled the room. I was greeted warmly and shown to a desk, and the chief operator said they would give me a tour when they had time.

Listening in, I noticed that most of the calls on the frequency were from inland waterway skippers. From sailing around the harbour—with Maria and Philip on the Porter and Rob and Rebecca on the Liberty—I knew that in the docks, between the seagoing vessels, barges came and went and every movement was anxiously recorded and accounted for, these skippers being aware of their vulnerability between much larger vessels. Inland navigation skippers were identifiable by their calls: they added greetings and used more syntax and were more tense than pilots. If a seagoing vessel made high waves, they would curse it, as Harry of the Tigris did when ships passed too close and too fast.

Thomas, a young operator of about 30, asked what I was doing. I told him about my project and he was curious about Dutch practices. When he heard that many Dutch operators had been skippers before, were proud of it and saw it as a key skill, he said that almost none of the Belgian operators had sailed before and added: “Air traffic control is not done by ex-pilots either.” (Field note 7.4.17)

When I joined an operator called Gunter at his console in the late afternoon, he also asked how Dutch and Belgian control rooms compare. In Belgium, I said, the skippers have more freedom to sort out passing arrangements between each other. Gunter replied that the Dutch were stricter, “in Antwerp a lot is possible.” (ibid.) Unlike Rijkswaterstaat or the Port of Rotterdam, only the Federal Police are responsible for enforcing maritime law. There are two agents on board a ship that they rent from another government agency, but which cannot sail autonomously. Gunter shows on his radar that their ship is in the docks: “Very frustrating for these guys. Even if we gave instructions, all the skippers know that we can’t really enforce our authority. Many of the official reports are cancelled.” (ibid.)

Shortly afterwards, a vessel called to ask if the control room was in contact with a sailing yacht. It had made a dangerous manoeuvre, Gunter agreed. He had no contact with the yacht and it was not responding to his calls. Gunter took a pair of binoculars, had a look and then handed them over to me. Through the haze I saw a blue and white yacht, a push boat with four barges lashed onto it and suddenly steered clear of it at considerable speed. The yacht was unaccountable, the shore was definitely not turning it.

Introduction

Figure 1: (top left) An operator working in the Nijmegen control room, located where the Maas-Waal canal and the Waal, the main Dutch continuation of the Rhine, meet. Figure 2: (top right) A skipper of barge carrying grain photographed in the wheelhouse navigating on the German Rhine. Figure 3: (bottom left) The captain of a push boat transporting iron ore on the Waal. Figure 4:(bottom right) An operator at work in the Tiel control room, at the intersection of the Amsterdam-Rhine Canal and the Waal.

After returning from the field, I realised that it is not easy to tell at first glance whether the photos above were taken in a control room1 or in the wheelhouse2 of a ship. They are surprisingly similar. Both are isolated from the outside world. Both rely on detection by sending and receiving radar beams and radio waves. Both the operator and the skipper are surrounded by screens and displays showing radar, nautical charts and CCTV. Precise control of their internal environment is crucial for both. They rely on ergonomics to endure prolonged observation of screens and waterscapes during shift work. As the health risks associated with sitting have become more apparent, both operators and skippers are increasingly able to work while standing. Because of the amount of light brought in by the abundance of windows, both need large (automatic) sun filters to be able to read the surfaces of computer screens and gauges.

Not only are they similar, but they are also deeply interconnected and interdependent. With many operators having been skippers before and often returning to skippering after retirement, they share a culture. One that is passed on informally. Skippers register their cargo in internationally linked databases so that the control room knows what is being carried in the event of an accident; skippers report when they approach the control room territory, known as a ‘sector’. They rely on the operator to provide an overview of the intersecting traffic at the confluences of the rivers in the Dutch Delta. This overview is made possible by the elevated position of the control room, but above all by the combination of its superior network of radar antennas, overlaid with AIS (a geolocative system to see which ships are nearby) and projected onto a digital nautical map stretching several horizontally linked screens. The information is exchanged via marine VHF radio. Using a common frequency, all participants in the local traffic are aware of each other’s presence and direction. Ships cannot stop or remain stationary for several kilometres, so an order has to be established while everyone keeps moving. This is done by consensus. A passing arrangement can easily involve five different vessels, which means that six people, including the operator, have to communicate their agreement or disagreement in time. However, only one person can speak at a time over a marine VHF radio. So, through sociomaterial assemblages, narrow bits of time and space are shared.

But there are also clear differences. Not everyone is equally vulnerable. The operator sits high and dry, static, while others are constantly on the move. Operators represent the state; many skippers who own their ship privately represent only themselves. Compliance also depends on authority, on the unequal distribution of power. But the operators refrain from giving orders, preferring to cajole and nudge the skippers into a temporary arrangement. Furthermore, the operator should locate and track the skippers, for the skippers it is not important where the operators are, as long as they are available to provide an overview.

This study brings the control room and the ship together to understand both better.

It may not matter much to the skipper, but operators are convinced that they need a direct view of the waterways whose traffic they coordinate. Their managers are less convinced, and believe that a central, remote location might suffice. A senior policy advisor at Rijkswaterstaat speculated that in the long term centralisation would reduce the current eleven control rooms to three (Interview 29.4.16). Other infrastructures have already gone through cycles of centralisation: the Dutch railway control centres went from forty-five in 1990 to seventeen in 2000 and are now down to thirteen, the main architect of this process told me (Interview 1.9.16). This has been made possible by automating the execution of the timetable. Unlike schedule-based rail transport, waterway transport is rule-based. There is no timetable to automate.

The comparison made by the Antwerp operator in the prologue with air traffic control has another dimension. The question of whether one should have been a skipper in order to be a competent operator depends on where and how the traffic is observed. For the Antwerp operator, the place of expertise is the interface; for him, his control room could be anywhere, but for the skipper-turned-operator, a direct view of the water is indispensable. In their study of Parisian infrastructures, Latour and Hermant (2006) claim that only the “view from nowhere,” from an “oligopticon” instead of a panopticon, provides the “total view” (32). For them, therefore, one should “refrain from looking outside” (11). Places like the air traffic control tower and the control rooms of inland waterways offer grand panoramic views, but Latour and Hermant note that it is not the panorama but the diorama that is used, because “in order to take it all in at once, to ‘dominate it at a glance’ (...), Paris must first become small”. (4) In the case of traffic on Dutch waterways approaching an intersection, only the operator’s screen can see all the traffic coming from different directions. This is what is called a “small whole” (Latour and Hermant 2006, 45).

However, this study shows that the ‘small whole’ does not exclude a view from anywhere, it shows how control rooms can be understood as local phenomena in a dynamic environment. What matters is local history, tradition and tensions. The latter, a long simmering conflict between management and operators, leads to control room work being made public by the operators themselves via Twitter. They share their view from somewhere with infrastructure publics (professional skippers, recreational skippers, local residents). Furthermore, during the fieldwork it became clear that the operators use the view that the architecture and location of their control room gives them an advantage. There are phenomena that only they can see from a particular position. Irresponsible leisure skippers manoeuvre their yachts where they cannot or should not. The same Antwerp operator was confronted with a yacht on the wrong side of the channel, trying to cross in front of a much larger and faster freighter. The operator grabbed his binoculars, always within reach, to see what this yacht, which was not responding to calls over the marine VHF radio, was up to (Field note 7.4.17).

The three movements discussed in the prologue—from control room ethnography to historiography, back to the control room and out to sea—inform the chapters of this book. The first movement, into historiography, covers two chapters. In the first, I delve into the history of Devil’s Island near Dordrecht—taking cues from the operators, but relying mainly on archival sources. It describes the early history of the island through the rivers and canals around it. This provides an insight into the history of infrastructure and its mediated control, which in turn enables a more fundamental understanding of the first Dutch inland navigation control room built on the island. It is shown that a focus on land is insufficient to explain the island’s emergence, as it turns out to be a by-product of infrastructural interventions to create new waterways. In the control room, the operators wondered where the name came from. It is difficult to say. What is more interesting, however, is how the name evolved from an informal reference to the name of an official Rijkswaterstaat site, since it was the agency itself that “enrolled” the name (Callon and Law 1982: 622) when it built a control room there. Archival research, supplemented by oral sources, paints a picture of the emergence of the control room: the rise of tanker shipping made the local public demand active protection, and Rijkswaterstaat lost the authority, and soon the funds, to intervene in the dramatic way it had done in previous decades. Surprisingly, given the high-tech reputation of the control rooms, the control rooms built in the early 1980s were not only the more legitimate but also the cheaper option compared to redesigning and creating waterways. The control rooms mark a behavioural shift in infrastructure. Framing these sites historically teaches us that, rather than the revolutionary sites they are made out to be when celebrated at their inauguration or through the persistent representation of state actors, control rooms are both a reaction to changes in speed, scale and infrastructural complexity that had already taken place, and the facilitators of the continuation of these trends.

The second chapter looks back at the work on Devil’s Island at a time when Rijkswaterstaat had already abandoned the island. The work of the outdoor departments that used to be located there was increasingly outsourced and the operators moved to a nearby building on the banks of the Oude Maas. Here, too, they had a direct view of the water they had fought so hard for. Through oral history, supplemented by archival sources, it is reconstructed how the understanding of the basic requirements of the operator’s work—experience on the water and a direct view of the water—could diverge between the operators and the management. It is argued that through the mediatisation of work (shifting the scope of observation from the waterscape to a configuration of interfaces), learning could be relocated, making work ‘simulatable’. As a result, legitimate access to an ongoing community of practice was no longer controlled by operators and rooted in shipping. This shows how the shift from mobile life to sedentary work changed the intimacy of expertise. It is not so much automation as mediatisation that has changed work, both in the control room and on board ships, and explains a significant part of the botched professionalisation of operators. Another key component is the rise of managerialism in three forms: the transformation of nautical experts in supervisory positions into managers, the internalisation of managerial norms by every member of the organisation, and the promotion of a new type of manager who deliberately has no substantial expertise other than management. Not only was management able to prevent a costly professionalisation of the operators (as part of its own professionalisation strategy), it was also able to mobilise the previously exclusive operator perspective through mediatisation and distribute it to the skippers. Thus, it was not automation but distribution that was a cost-saving strategy, sold as a gain in ‘efficiency’, used to justify what operators perceived as an understaffed control room.

Throughout these chapters, I keep the notion of field intact and draw on historical anthropology to understand past practices. This allows for an understanding of the past that is almost as rich and reflexive as an ethnographic account of the present. Importantly, it also relies on a media studies-informed sensitivity to the materiality and biography of the sources themselves. Taken together, these chapters show how the present is deeply rooted in questions about the past.

Faced with a shortage of staff, the operators took to the national stage in 2015. They broke ranks by declaring on a prime-time news programme that ‘safety on the rivers was at risk’. The odd thing was that control room operators claimed they were out of control. However, the operators were confronted with the perfect reputation of the control room, constructed by their superiors seeking legitimacy regardless of their actual work. More specifically, as long as there were no major incidents, budget cuts could seem justified. Normally, from an organisational perspective, it is only important to demonstrate that someone is in control, not how it is done. This demonstration, and how it has changed, is examined in two steps. In chapter three, having mapped the visual tradition of the infrastructural control room, including locally, I look at how organisational goals are translated into architectural design. For managers and the organisation as a whole, it may not matter where a control room is located, but it does matter that it is visible. It turns out that this is not just true of nautical control rooms. Control rooms are visible markers of organisational ambition, efficiency, public safety and thus legitimacy in a way that representations of ordinary offices could never provide. The (infrastructural) control room therefore has a dual function by design, physical coordination and organisational legitimacy, which is becoming increasingly explicit, but has been there for a long time.

Then, in the wake of the public phase of the conflict, the operators took to Twitter. They began to make their work visible. These tweets are the focus of the fourth chapter and are compared to the organisational representation of the control room. The operators were able to do four things differently. First, they were able to turn their networked public into a public of professional skippers, recreational skippers and local residents. Second, the operators not only opened up an inaccessible workplace, but also offered a casual route to the visual literacy needed to understand the real situations they faced. Third, by addressing multiple audiences, the operators escaped the insider-outsider dichotomy that characterises most infrastructure work. Fourthly, by persistently presenting the ‘near misses’ as dangerous but nonetheless non-events, they found a way to legitimise the work of the control room, not just the control rooms, despite their success.

After a massive infrastructure scandal in the early 2000s, Rijkswaterstaat changed course. It now saw itself as a ‘network manager’, which meant that control rooms became a focal point. In addition, as an extension of the New Public Management dogma, Rijkswaterstaat wanted to be more ‘customer-oriented’. Operators are one of the few positions within Rijkswaterstaat that have a serious job and work with tangible results: safe mobility. For this reason, the department’s communication department monitors the tweeting operators on a daily basis and organises training sessions. In this context, it is not surprising that the operators engage in a form of symbolic legitimisation reminiscent of classic (military) control room publicity stunts. Operators not only make their work visible, they engage in visibility work. These may be the contours of the changing work of the operators: as the control room perspective is increasingly distributed to the wheelhouses, the operators seem to have their hands free for public relations work, while the communications department itself partly switches to monitoring Rijkswaterstaat employees in the field through a specially designed dashboard.

In the fifth and final chapter, I go on board several ships, urged on by the operators. Going beyond the isolation of the control room means refusing to remain a researcher once inside. It is to connect the operators’ experience to the larger whole of which they want to be a part. Building on the work of the first chapter, it is finally possible to move beyond the land-water dichotomy, and the chapter moves on to combine the land-based experience with the onboard experience. The chapter analyses the interplay between movement and stasis by looking at four different orderings: navigational, regulatory, market and intimate. These orderings are ongoing situated practices carried out by actors in distributed sociomaterial assemblages. In tracking different actors, the key is to follow the action through which they are connected. This allows scaling up without losing sight of the practices. It is shown that the mobilisation and immobilisation of ships is also carried out from land by control room operators, cargo brokers, family members and non-human actors such as radar networks, geolocative AIS applications and water level databases. Leisure skippers in particular would remain unaccounted for if it were not for the operators. It is only through their collective efforts that they can keep an eye on yachts that are navigating erratically. It became clear that often actors need to give market orderings priority and rearrange their position in other orderings accordingly. This results in tangible pressure, which manifests itself in various time problems. Skippers take physical risks to be just in time, to find rest and to mediate the asynchronous rhythms of loved ones ashore. At the same time, they have to maintain critical spatio-temporal separations with the riverbed, the embankment and other vessels. Media play an important role in the assemblages, keeping separate what would otherwise collide, and connecting to deal with separation.