Reconnection work.: A network approach to households’ dealing with ICT breakdowns

Abstract | Abstract

How can the concept of networks contribute to understanding the role of households in crises where ICT infrastructure fail? ICT infrastructures are large-scale techno-material networks crucial to modern human social organisation and living. They play a role in connecting individuals to households and individuals and households to their wider surroundings. Drawing on fieldwork from a recent crisis in Norway, this article uses actor-network theory (ANT) as an analytical lens. The aim is twofold; firstly to show the effect of an ICT infrastructure breakdown on the concerns of households as a socio-material network, and secondly to suggest how these networks reconnect and are stabilised at a household level through strategies where people mobilise actants such as cars and intact pieces of ICT to establish new temporal associations of actor-networks.