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"Infrastructure is only visible upon breakdown" -- Geof Bowker and Susan Leigh Star

@wdenton@cosocial.ca replied · 7 days ago

@KathyReid Thanks for posting this. It connects with something I'm doing so I looked it up in Sorting Things Out, where it's part of a page sourced from this paper, which says "Infrastructure emerges with the following dimensions:" embeddedness, transparency, several more, and then this, which I quote for anyone interested.

https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111

Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces

/Becomes visible upon breakdown/. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks; the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now-visible infrastructure.

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