Rethinking Repair An Essay by Steven J. Jackson sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media. The modern infrastructural idealThe fulcrum of these two worldsA creature of bones, not wordsThe world is always breakingA side that goes unrecognized+8 More 104. Site RepairMakers and MakingMaintenance and Care repair
An affection for words There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones. Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Let’s go exploring!” James Somers, You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary It's a Magical World wordsknowledgecuriosity