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
Time and space Tones appear placed and directed predominantly in time from before to now to later. Their juxtaposition in a musical composition is perceived within a prescribed sequence only. Horizontally, the tones follow each other, perhaps not in a straight line, but of necessity in a prescribed order and only in 1 direction – forward. Tones heard earlier fade, and those farther back disappear, vanish. We do not hear them backward. Colors appear connected predominantly in space. Therefore, as constellations they can be seen in any direction and at any speed. And as they remain, we can return to them repeatedly and in many ways. This remaining and not remaining, or vanishing and not vanishing, shows only 1 essential difference between the fields of tone and color. The accuracy of perception in one field is matched by the durability of retention in the other, demonstrating a curious reversal in visual and auditory memory. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color It will not stand still to be pointed at