Steven J. Jackson’s “Rethinking Repair” advances a decisive intervention in media and technology studies by arguing that the dominant intellectual grammar of innovation has systematically obscured the more ordinary yet more consequential work of maintenance, repair, and infrastructural care. Against triumphalist narratives of technological novelty, Jackson proposes what he terms broken world thinking: an analytic orientation that begins not with invention and progress, but with erosion, decay, obsolescence, and the ongoing labour required to sustain sociotechnical life amid inevitable breakdown. As he states in the chapter’s opening pages, modernity has been theorised too often through its moments of creation and too rarely through its conditions of upkeep, despite the fact that systems persist less through design than through the ceaseless labour of repair. This inversion is both empirical and normative. Empirically, Jackson shows that infrastructures endure not because they function seamlessly, but because they are continuously patched, recalibrated, and salvaged by forms of labour rendered conceptually and politically invisible. The photograph Shipbreaking #4 reproduced on page 224 is exemplary here: its depiction of dismantled industrial remains in Bangladesh visually condenses Jackson’s claim that modern technological systems are sustained not only by celebrated moments of production, but by equally consequential afterlives of disassembly, waste, and repair. Against the innovation imaginary, repair reveals technology as process rather than object, and durability as an accomplishment rather than an intrinsic property. Jackson’s deeper contribution lies in his ethical claim that repair is not merely technical remediation but a form of care—a moral and political relation grounded in attentiveness, responsibility, and mutual dependency. Drawing on feminist ethics and science studies, he recasts maintenance as a distributed social practice through which people sustain worlds and one another. Repair therefore names more than the restoration of function: it discloses the hidden labour, unequal power, and fragile interdependencies that make technological life possible. Jackson’s conclusion is thus profound in its simplicity: we do not live in the aftermath of media and technology; we live in their ongoing aftermath, where to understand systems properly one must study not only how they are built, but how they break, persist, and are cared for.
Jackson, S.J. (2014) ‘Rethinking Repair’, in Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 221–239.
