Susan Leigh Star’s The Ethnography of Infrastructure fundamentally transforms the study of technological systems by arguing that infrastructures are not static technical substrates but relational ecologies woven into the everyday organisation of social life. Against conventional understandings that treat infrastructure as merely material support—pipes, wires, roads, or databases—Star insists that infrastructure only becomes intelligible through its relation to situated practices and forms of collective work. Her famous formulation that “one person’s infrastructure is another’s topic” encapsulates this relational ontology: what remains transparent and taken-for-granted for one community may appear as obstruction, labour, or breakdown for another. Consequently, Star develops an ethnographic methodology oriented toward what she calls “boring things”—standards, plugs, protocols, classification systems, bureaucratic forms, and maintenance routines whose invisibility paradoxically grants them immense organisational power. Particularly influential is her concept of infrastructural inversion, through which analysts foreground the normally hidden backstage systems shaping institutional action. Across examples ranging from biological information networks and medical classification systems to digital libraries and communication protocols, Star demonstrates that infrastructures become visible primarily through failure, incompatibility, or exclusion. Her discussion of the Worm Community System illustrates how incompatible platforms and entrenched local computing practices undermined technically sophisticated collaborative systems, revealing infrastructure as a negotiated and historically layered ecology rather than a neutral support mechanism. Equally significant is her analysis of invisible work, especially the forms of articulation labour performed by secretaries, nurses, technicians, and users whose activities sustain organisational coherence while remaining systematically unrecognised. Star further exposes how infrastructures encode ethical and political assumptions through standards and classificatory regimes, producing “bridges and barriers” analogous to the discriminatory architectures discussed by Langdon Winner. The essay ultimately argues that ethnography must extend beyond visible interaction toward the hidden architectures of coordination that shape possibility itself. In this sense, infrastructure is revealed not as passive background but as the materialised politics of modern life: embedded, relational, and profoundly consequential precisely because it so often disappears from conscious attention.
Star, S.L. (1999) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp. 377–391
