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"the silent sister." The silent sister immediately becomes itself a telling indicator of the entangled infrastructure, medical politics, and the use of metrics in classifying tubercular patients. It tells a rich metaphorical story, and may become a concept useful beyond the rarified walls of the fictional Swiss asylum. What other silent sisters will we encounter in our infrastructural inversionwhat surveillance, deception, caring, struggling, or negotiating? |
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In the sections below, four themes are presented that require the special double vision implied in the anecdotes above. They frame the new way of seeing that brings to life large-scale, bureaucratic classifications and standards. Without this map, excursions into this aspect of information infrastructure can be stiflingly boring. Many classifications appear as nothing more than lists of numbers with labels attached, buried in software menus, users' manuals, or other references. As discussed in chapter 2, new eyes are needed for reading classification systems, for restoring the deleted and dessicated narratives to these peculiar cultural, technical, and scientific artifacts. |
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Methodological Themes for Infrastructural Inversion |
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The first major theme is the ubiquity of classifying and standardizing. Classification schemes and standards literally saturate our environment. In the built world we inhabit, thousands and thousands of standards are used everywhere, from setting up the plumbing in a house to assembling a car engine to transferring a file from one computer to another. Consider the canonically simple act of writing a letter longhand, putting it in an envelope, and mailing it. There are standards for paper size, the distance between lines in lined paper, envelope size, the glue on the envelope, the size of stamps, their glue, the ink in a pen, the sharpness of its nib, the composition of the paper (which in turn can be broken down to the nature of the watermark, if any; the degree of recycled material used in its production, the definition of what counts as recycling), and so forth. |
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Similarly, in any bureaucracy, classifications aboundconsider the simple but increasingly common classifications that are used when you dial an airline for information ("if you are traveling domestically, press 1"; "if you want information about flight arrivals and departures. . . ."). And once the airline has you on the line, you are classified by them as a frequent flyer (normal, gold or platinum); corporate or |
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