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
Reversibility of perspectives Irwin's thinking was informed by the writings of Alfred Schutz, a follower of Husserl, ...[who] had noted that typification was at the basis of the assumption of the reversibility of perspectives, which was a condition for the possibility of intersubjective experience and the notion of a shared, commonly experienced world. It is also the first step in overcoming the specificity of the individual in favor of knowledge about groups. What is gained by this procedure is an understanding of demographics, but the cost of this understanding is a lack of emphasis on differences between individuals and their unique subjective experiences. Matthew Simms, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art You and your user are one