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Investigating Infrastructure |
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People do many things today that a few hundred years ago would have looked like magic. And if we don't understand a given technology today it looks like magic: for example, we are perpetually surprised by the mellifluous tones read off our favorite CDs by, we believe, a laser. Most of us have no notion of the decades of negotiation that inform agreement on, inter alia, standard disc size, speed, electronic setting, and amplification standards. It is not dissimilar to the experience of magic one enjoys at a fine restaurant or an absorbing play. Common descriptions of good waiters or butlers (one thinks of Jeeves in the Wodehouse stories) are those who clear a table and smooth the unfolding of events "as if by magic." In a compelling play, the hours of rehearsal and missteps are disappeared from center stage, behind a seamless front stage presentation. Is the magic of the CD different from the magic of the waiter or the theater ensemble? Are these two kinds of magic or oneor none? |
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This book is an attempt to answer these questions, which can be posed more prosaically as: |
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What work do classifications and standards do? Again, we want to look at what goes into making things work like magic: making them fit together so that we can buy a radio built by someone we have never met in Japan, plug it into a wall in Champaign, Illinois, and hear the world news from the BBC. |
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Who does that work? We explore the fact that all this magic involves much work: there is a lot of hard labor in effortless ease.
3 Such invisible work is often not only underpaid, it is severely underrepresented in theoretical literature (Star and Strauss 1999). We will discuss where all the "missing work" that makes things look magical goes. |
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What happens to the cases that do not fit? We want to draw attention to cases that do not fit easily into our magical created world of standards and classifications: the left handers in the world of right-handed magic, chronic disease sufferers in the acute world of allopathic medicine, the vegetarian in MacDonald's (Star 1991b), and so forth. |
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These are issues of great import. It is easy to get lost in Baudrillard's (1990) cool memories of simulacra. He argues that it is impossible to sort out media representations from "what really happens." We are unable to stand outside representation or separate simulations from |
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