FEBRUARY 13, 2018

INFRASTRUCTURE IS CREATED by people and therefore embeds and reflects the values of the people who create it. This is a fundamental insight in the study of what information studies scholar Susan Leigh Star has called “boring things”: phone books, medical coding manuals, the Dewey Decimal System. Such systems are also usually invisible as long as they work. We rarely think about sewer pipes unless they’re backing up into our houses, and the patterns of air traffic don’t matter unless they’re disrupted by weather. Read more