Backroom Research

Star's The Ethnography of Infrastructure is a difficult text for me. This feels like my fiftieth read through; after applying it to a project last year, I thought I had a handle on it, but I revisit it again for this class, and am just as confused.

I understand her concepts in theory, but once I try to apply them to something, to an actual infrastructure, it all starts getting a little fuzzy. I'm not completely sure why this is, but I have an inkling that it may have something to do with her idea about embeddedness. According to Star, infrastructure is embedded; it's hidden, invisible, underlying the system. Thus, for the initiated at least, it's the taken-for-granted, the assumed. I find it hard to critique something that I subscribe to, at least tacitly; my perspective is limited, I only have a part of the picture because I can't get past the embeddedness.

Following her notion that infrastructure becomes visible (and thus not so embedded) upon breakdown, up until that breakdown I feel somewhat in the dark. Facebook is an excellent, if over used, example. Prior to the changes in the timeline feature, or any of the previous site redesigns for that matter, I would be hard-pressed to dissect it's assumptions, limitations, and embedded infrastructure. But now, having experienced the infrastructure overhaul with the introduction of timeline, I can better analyze the previous design and it's core assumptions; I can use it as a comparison, at the very least. Moreover, when timeline was first introduced, I was abuzz with criticism, concern, and critiques (issues of privacy, security, chronology, representation, ad nauseum), but now...it's again in the background, thoroughly embedded in the routine of my mundane, online existence.

Star only touches upon the cultural ramifications of this, but I think it's a significant contributing factor to the embeddedness. Once infrastructure becomes culturally embedded, the culture reinforces the embeddedness; it's cyclical and self-reliant; I don't question Facebook's infrastructure because Facebook is omnipresent in my social life. For us out here, whose research interests exist far away from the realm of technological infrastructure, how do we get outside of the embeddedness? How do we gain the perspective to see past it?