Making Failure Public: Communicating Breakdowns of Public Infrastructures

Abstract

It is a common trope of infrastructure studies to talk about the invisibility and silence of infrastructures or, to be more precise, the invisibility and silence of their workings in the background (Star 1999; Shove 2017, p. 158). Infrastructures are structures that exist, but are infra, that is, one could argue, not only literally beneath other structures and infrastructures, as the historic origins of the term suggest (Carse 2017, p. 27f.), but also most of the time beneath our immediate attention. They are, in Harold Garfinkel’s words “seen but unnoticed” (1967, p. 36) features of our daily lives.