Abstract
Digital infrastructures, like many other infrastructures, are beginning to cause “drama”. Their perennial breakdown and disruption have been noted as a matter of risk assessment, regulation, and compliance. In science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology, the book argues, digital security can be approached as a form of technological maintenance. Rather than overcoming breakdowns and disruptions, this book brings strategies of living with broken technologies to the fore, captured by the notion fragile computing. The chapter introduces the methodological approach in this book, as well as challenges connected to ethnographic studies of digital security. It concludes with a discussion of the term “fragile computing” that is further developed throughout the book.
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Notes
- 1.
https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/. For a material semiotic analysis of Stuxnet, see Balzacq and Cavelty (2016).
- 2.
- 3.
Computer scientist Paul Dourish insists that computer science should take ethnography’s conceptual contribution more seriously, for example, that there is not one “truth” to uncover about technological practices, that they are enacted in multiple ways (Dourish, 2004). Ethnographers are not “tape recorders” to bring the “reality” of technological use into engineering labs. Part of the debate is whether engineers can “simply” acquire the competencies of conducting the material work of ethnography without becoming familiar with the origins of ethnography in critical anthropological research (Forsythe, 1999). Reducing ethnography to a set of techniques may “underestimate, misstate, or misconstrue the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation” (Dourish, 2006, 542). To Dourish, assessing ethnography by how well it develops “implications for design” falls into a fallacy as it underestimates ethnographer’s abilities to uncover underlying assumptions and commitment that things could be different. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern writes: We must understand ethnography’s role “not as adding more of the same […] but as the intermeshing of different orders of phenomena, having to take certainties and uncertainties together” (Strathern, 2002, 312).
- 4.
Ethnographic writing, anthropologist Anand Pandian notes in reference to Kathleen Stewart, “tries to let the otherwise break through, to keep it alive, to tend it” (Pandian, 2019, 7). Ethnographies are exactly that: they tell different stories than other methods; they focus on what is not easily focused on. Or as Pandian puts it, they “rob the proud of their surety and amplifies voices otherwise inaudible” (ibid.). “Writing with care”, he continues, is a form of “letting things be vulnerable and uncertain” (Pandian, 2019, 14).
- 5.
Brit Ross Winthereik suggests “concepts as companions” that travel with us through the field and become—like the ethnographer—changed through the encounter. “Concepts companions can help open worlds, but they can also be too loud and talkative to the already quite heavily populated places we visit during ethnographies” (Winthereik, 2020, 30). Concepts are not only companions to ethnographers but interlocutors as well. Ethnographers are sensitive to such concepts in the field, as well as their contradictions or hierarchies. This sensitivity allows for juxtaposition of concepts that are prevalent in the field (e.g., definitions of security) with concepts that we “bring”.
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Kocksch, L. (2024). Introduction. In: Fragile Computing. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9807-4_1
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