Understanding the Warning Process Through the Lens of Practice: Emancipation as a Condition of Action–Some Lessons from France - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 231

Our background is in engineering, very technical, so we had absolutely no training in
communication and crisis management. (…) here they set up a single phone number that all
the media can call. (…) So in principle, it is the communication specialists who answer, the
communications department. [Which means that you, you only talk directly to the crisis
management people?] That's right. That's not always the case, when things are cool, we talk
to the media (…) So we introduced this because, in fact, a little while ago, when there was
an incident, with everything that happened, we were overwhelmed by phone calls from the
media. So we spent more of our time answering the phone than analysing the situation.

Here, the Communications Department plays the role of decoding the forecasts
for the media, but also 'fi lters' calls from the media to the forecasters. It operates
like a transistor that only lets the “current” through under certain conditions. This
detour releases the forecasters from the task of media management, so that they can
concentrate on forecasting.
The transistor-intermediary therefore resembles a real 'emancipator' and, in fact,
is the only one of the intermediaries explicitly to effect 'cut-offs' in the relationship.
This is both what distinguishes it from the other intermediaries and why its role is
tricky. While placed in the previous intermediaries is important trust, in the case of
the transistor it is crucial, in both senses of the term, decisive and critical, decisive
because it can only play its role as a fi lter and emancipator if it is given full latitude
to do so and critical because a mistake or failure on its part can have serious conse-
quences. So introducing a transistor-intermediary into a relationship of distance is a
far from trivial act.
To summarise, the transistor-intermediary serves to manage certain tricky rela-
tionships, fulfi lling a role of translation and emancipation in relation to certain entities.
Whereas the decoder acts as a connector between remote entities and action envi-
ronments, the transistor can be seen as the intermediary which, in addition, enables
them to coexist 'peacefully', by restricting competition between them in the course
of action.

12.4.2.4 Detour: An Emancipatory Strategy for Action

The detour would therefore seem to be a valid strategy for managing the profusion
of entities constituting the AE. As a strategy able to adjust between different types
of intermediary, it is full of possibilities, especially as the status of an intermediary
can vary at different times. Table 12.2 provides a synthetic comparison of the three
kinds of intermediary.
It is important to emphasise that the intermediary in no way serves to 'remove'
an entity from an actor's AE: with or without the presence of the intermediary, it
remains the actor's responsibility to take the entities into account. However, the
detour strategy is a way of dividing, delegating part of the task of taking account of
the environment. Typically, the CMIR forecaster cannot simultaneously develop
forecasts and translate for the media. A mayor cannot simultaneously monitor the
height of the water at several points on the river, read weather reports and go