1. Humanistic infrastructure studies: hyper-functionality and the experience of the absurd.
- Author
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Seberger, John S. and Bowker, Geoffrey C.
- Subjects
UNITED States presidential election, 2016 ,HUMAN-computer interaction ,SOCIAL media - Abstract
Bridging third wave HCI with infrastructure studies, this paper examines the relationship between infrastructural visibility, breakdown, and experience through an existentialist lens. We present and theorize a state of infrastructural functionality – which we term 'hyper-functionality' – that renders infrastructure visible because of its experiential effects on end-users, not necessarily because of malfunction. We introduce this term through the presentation of a story from the life of one of the authors in which an infrastructural assemblage behaved unexpectedly, giving rise to the experience of the absurd – a feeling of alienation from oneself and the technological assemblages that constitute one's daily world. We explore the applicability of hyper-functionality for the interpretation and theorization of larger-scale scenarios by using it to interpret reactions to the role that social media – Facebook in particular – played in the troubled United States presidential election in 2016. We contend that the existentialist-tinted lens of hyper-functionality constitutes a novel and meaningful way of analyzing the human experience of the mundane in relation to infrastructures, thus forming the basis for a humanistic infrastructure studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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