The article deals with the relationship between media and transportation infrastructures and analyzes their links to the concept of mobility. It examines the assumption that infrastructure systems themselves are mobile, in the sense that they develop and have to be maintained constantly. According to such a perspective, they are to be considered not primarily as “structures,“ but as specific processes of mobilization (infrastructuring) that constitute the basis for mobility in the sense of transport and movement. Drawing on historical knowledge of transportation, it will be shown that a broad understanding of traffic as exchange, communication, and transportation has narrowed in the twentieth century, whereby the originally implied idea of transport as transformation became suppressed. Recent approaches in mobility studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) can be combined in a fruitful way to unfold the specific dynamics of infrastructure as a process of mobilization (Callon) and technical mediation (Latour).

No abstract

No abstract

By focusing the temporalities of care, the chapter analyzes a special relation between time and technology that underlies the making and persisting of media and infrastructures. I propose to differentiate between four types of care practices with corresponding different temporal patterns that are highly relevant for the functioning of technological systems in the past and present. First, the retrospective response to unforeseen interruptions (repair); second, the prospective routine procedure to prevent all forms of disorder (maintenance); third, a neglect of care that leads to devaluating infrastructure (abandonment) as well as—fourth—forms of revaluation in changing contexts (repurposing). Taking the new Berlin airport BER as an example, it will be shown that infrastructures exhibit different layers of temporality formed by these cyclic and repetitive processes of care and their transforming effects. Thus, even the performance of the most “hardwired,” late modern technology systems is crisscrossed by temporal regimes that stem from older, non-modern temporalities of care.

No abstract