Invisibility

Star (1999) writes that ‘infrastructure as a system of substrates … is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work’. In other words infrastructure ‘is an often taken for granted part of everyday life until it breaks’ (Chetty, 2011). When it breaks, infrastructure becomes visible. Is this a feature of infrastructure specifically or tools more generally? Is every tool which ‘becomes visible upon breakdown’ (Star, 1999) an infrastructure? Marc Weiser, a scientist who ‘prefigured the critique of seamlessness’ (Inman and Ribes, 2019) wrote that ‘[a] good tool is an invisible tool’ (Weiser, 1994). Is infrastructure, in its visibility, a bad tool? Did it ever really function as it was supposed to?

Infrastructure

What is Infrastructure? According to Martin Brauch (2017) ‘Infrastructure is the underlying system of structures, facilities and services that are essential to the functioning of an economy’. Brauch’s definition is commonsense following Susan Leigh Star’s statement that ‘[p]eople commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates’ (Star, 1999, p. 380). Such a perspective resonates with the definition of ‘critical infrastructure’ detailed in the Sendai Framework Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2017). Nevertheless, Star casts doubt on the usefulness of an everyday understanding of infrastructure in the context of the production of ‘large-scale technical systems’ (Star, 1999). Instead, she foregrounds the relational quality of infrastructure; that it appears differently to different people based on their relationship to it. In concordance with Star, the adequacy of the commonsense understanding of infrastructure is reiterated by Lauren Berlant. Berlant writes, ‘[i]nfrastructure is not identical to a system or structure …. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure’ (2016).

Bibliography

Berlant, L. (2016) ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 393–419 [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/0263775816645989 (Accessed 14 March 2024).

Brauch, M. D. (2017) Sustainable Infrastructure: Definition and Co-Benefits, International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) [Online]. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep14773.4 (Accessed 14 March 2024).

Chetty, M. (2011) ‘Making Infrastructure Visible: A Case Study of Home Networking’, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Inman, S. and Ribes, D. (2019) ‘“Beautiful Seams”: Strategic Revelations and Concealments’, Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow Scotland Uk, ACM, pp. 1–14 [Online]. DOI: 10.1145/3290605.3300508 (Accessed 13 March 2024).

Star, S. L. (1999) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 377–391 [Online]. DOI: 10.1177/00027649921955326 (Accessed 13 March 2024).

UNDRR (2017) ‘Critical infrastructure’, http://www.undrr.org/terminology/critical-infrastructure [Online]. (Accessed 14 March 2024).

Weiser, M. (1994) ‘The World is not a Desktop’, ACM Interactions, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7–8.