Frances Corry

When I think of a piece of broken technology, it tends to be my phone, which, despite best effort and purchased protection, is always chipped, glass falling into my hands. If I don’t think of my broken phone, perhaps it’s my toaster – burning one side of the bread. Or there’s the doorbell, which doesn’t ring at all (sorry to anyone who tries to visit). If I imagine a little longer, beyond the surface of screens, broken technology could be a 404 warning on a webpage – a broken link, something at least I don’t feel responsible for fixing. As numerous as these broken artefacts are, their number isn’t entirely surprising: science and technology scholars, with a nod to Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1958), have noted quite simply that, ‘Things are made, and things fall apart’ (Jackson 2014; Jackson et al. 2011).

The point is, that when I think of broken technology, I tend to first think of something material, or physical; something visualisable and bound to an object. A search online for images of ‘broken technology’ would lead you toward the same conclusion: broken technology means piles of discarded electronics with smashed screens. But this lay sense of technological brokenness has started to fall apart too, breaking, in a sense, the more research I do on sociotechnical systems as they fall into disrepair and disuse, or as they are dismantled. Instead, through this research, technological brokenness has been revealed more and more as social, constituted through individuals and groups, in shared discourse and ideology. Understanding technological brokenness as social, as I’ll show in this chapter, allows analysts and practitioners to see brokenness as not something that is absolute and bound to an object, but rather, as a category open to contestation and interpretation.

This is not to say that brokenness has always been treated as rote or as purely technical within scholarly literature. In science and technology studies, brokenness – and its entwined practice, repair – have been animated as useful lenses for understanding technical systems and their social entanglements. Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Steven Jackson, for instance, has proposed ‘broken-world thinking’, a framework that argues ‘breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design … are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today’ (Jackson 2014). Brokenness serves as the background to related scholarship on repair, which likewise has proposed that looking to and through repair of sociotechnical systems can foreground the pressing issues of our time. That is, repair as a subject is framed as an analytical move that tends to usurp dominant ways of thinking (Graham and Thrift 2007), particularly ideologies of innovation and progress mapped to new technology. In doing so, repair often reveals otherwise obfuscated actors and practices, modes of political resistance and contestation (Lloveras et al. 2025), just as it foregrounds often overlooked concepts, including identity and status, the effects of capitalism, as well as infrastructure, disaster and the environment (Russell and Vinsel 2018).

Scholarship from communication and information studies has also taken up brokenness, with a critical focus on ‘glitches’ in data-intensive, automatic decision-making systems, whether the algorithms used by Google Search or in recidivism rulings. Rooted in Black feminist perspectives, analyses of glitches by scholars like Safiya Noble (2018), Ruha Benjamin (2019) and Meredith Broussard (2023) have shown how events often described as glitches, such as Google Images labelling Black people as gorillas, or Google Search surfacing Nazi sites when looking up the term ‘Jew’ (Noble 2018), are more than minor malfunctions in a technical system. Rather, these so-called glitches are indicative of structural biases in these systems, perspectives of racism, ableism and misogyny endemic to the system rather than exceptional to it. As Broussard writes, ‘A glitch can be fixed. The biases embedded in technology are more than mere glitches; they’re baked in from the beginning’ (Broussard 2023). Other thinkers have shown how ‘errors’ can catalyse creative and liberatory reimagining within systems of oppression. Writers like Jack Halberstam (2011) and Legacy Russell (2020), for instance, show how bodies and ways of knowing that do not align with dominant systems necessarily fail within these matrices of power, failure in turn creating conditions for alternative forms of selfhood and community. Digital humanities projects have also played with the generative, aesthetic potential of ‘mistakes’ (Sample 2015).

These treatments of breaking and brokenness, whether the analytical affordances of repair from STS or the revealing nature of the glitch from communication and information studies, begin to complicate the notion of technological brokenness as something that is simply a matter of a cracked screen. Rather, they started to phrase brokenness as something that can reveal and reimagine social relations. It is a lens I took up, and then expanded from, through empirical research into the closure, or sunsetting, of social media platforms.

Over the course of 2020 and 2021, I recruited former employees of social media platforms that had closed, contacting them through publicly available emails or through their LinkedIn profiles. I ultimately interviewed fifty-three participants. I wanted to learn about how social media platforms functioned beyond moments of growth and innovation, how employees made decisions about how to handle user data as platforms declined and closed, and how these decisions would shape what was left of these sites in the long term. The platforms employees represented were typically ones that had been popular in the United States, among them Geocities, Friendster, MySpace and Vine, but I also spoke to founders of smaller platforms based in the United States and the UK (Corry 2024).

Developing a codebook that was sensitive to these themes of repair through frameworks from STS, information studies and communication, I analysed these conversations using an iterative thematic coding analysis, bringing existing themes to the texts and generating emergent themes in the analysis process. The study was approved by the University of Southern California’s Institutional Review Board.

Technological brokenness pervaded this work in obvious and non-obvious ways. There was the obvious way, that related to my material imaginary of technological brokenness as cracked screens and broken toasters. Social media platforms, at end of life, had to be materially dismantled: drives had to wiped, server space vacated, hardware sold and recycled. But brokenness revealed itself in ways that were not immediately obvious when I began these interviews, too; technological brokenness instead appeared as something that was always contextual and relational. Ideas of brokenness were categories defined and mobilised by different actors in different ways depending on social context.

This came out most clearly in the case of Friendster, a social media platform founded in 2002 in San Francisco. Friendster had similar capabilities to Facebook today, with user profiles, image sharing and messaging. As I’ve described in other writing about this platform (Corry 2022), Friendster grew rapidly, with significant amounts of blue-chip Silicon Valley funders who were interested in the possibilities of their userbase: young, hip and well-off tech workers of Silicon Valley and other major metro centres in the United States. Concurrently, however, the platform became popular in Southeast Asia, with the userbase there exceeding that in the United States. Former employees at Friendster noted that its popularity there grew in part because a famous Filipino actress joined the site early on, just as the site supplied a useful infrastructure for close-knit groups of friends, known in Tagalog as barkada, to communicate with one another.

In its early years, Friendster experienced significant technical breakage. The site struggled to handle user traffic and was often down, with little time for repairs, given its around the clock global use. Yet few employees, and platform investors, thought of the platform as ‘broken’ or ‘failed’ at that point. Rather, as another interviewee who founded a mobile platform noted: ‘There is this saying: growth fixes everything’. In his interpretation, no matter the technical disrepair of the system, economic fungibility of the business, or difficult interpersonal dynamics of the employees, if user numbers were growing, the platform wasn’t broken. For these sociotechnical systems, from the perspective of these actors, brokenness belied my imaginary of shattered screens: it did not equate to an ability to technologically function.

It was only when user numbers started to shift – when the technical issues had stabilised – that Friendster was deemed ‘broken’ by its US-based users, employees and investors. In the mid 2000s, Friendster users in the United States largely switched to MySpace and Facebook. Press accounts wondered what had ever happened to Friendster. Its investors implored its newly hired leadership teams to ‘fix it and flog it’, as one former CEO recounted: to get the platform to a place such that it could be sold, and investment recouped. But despite these discourses around Friendster’s disrepair, use in Southeast Asia had continued robustly: in 2008, Friendster was far from broken, as it was the largest social network in Asia.

In Friendster’s case, a sociotechnical system could be functioning when it was technically broken, and broken when it was technically functioning, according to some US employees and investors. On the other hand, user groups may have identified the platform as broken when it was technically struggling. Later on, users – especially users in Southeast Asia – may have thought of Friendster as robust even when US investors had deemed the platform broken. In other words, the platform’s brokenness was contested, open to interpretation and contextually dependent. It depended on where you stood, and what you valued. It was social.

At its most basic, for something to be social means that it is in relation to others (‘Social, adj. 5e’). Despite ‘technological brokenness’ always conjuring thoughts of individual objects – broken phones and doorbells and toasters – my interviews showed that brokenness is always social because it is always relational. It takes on meaning in groups of people, revealing complex social linkages (and their ruptures) between humans and other humans, and between humans and artefacts.

Understanding technological brokenness as social is useful, I think: to go beyond the object itself to the relations that animate it. What can that perspective do for analyses of technology, and for the theory and practice of digital humanities? Just as analyses of repair from STS, and analyses of glitches from information studies, have revealed otherwise obfuscated social relations, understanding brokenness as social may reveal interactions with sociotechnical systems that are otherwise hard to see. Brokenness may be a means of understanding how varying social worlds can interpret the same sociotechnical system in different, and sometimes competing, ways. Importantly, it may also point to a politics of brokenness, or how labels of disrepair and failure are wielded by different actors for different ends. Taking a relational and social view of brokenness also has the potential to inflect the critical praxis at the heart of the digital humanities. In DH, it might foreground the very human work – the choices and perspectives, as well as the labour hours – that go into project, tool and knowledge maintenance. It might prompt us to ask deeper questions about the types of social worlds that are supported or failed by this scholarly work. And it might build on that longstanding DH value of experimentation (Spiro 2012), and allow projects to investigate technological brokenness as a site of exploration, broadening the category beyond meaning the ability to technically function (Donaldson 2020).

These are perspectives that have seeped into my own relations to my many broken technologies. My toaster still burns the bread on one side, which has highlighted the planned irreparability of many consumer products. Glass continues to fall from my phone screen, but I realised it still functions for my needs, despite broken appearances. As for the un-ringable doorbell: I’ve decided I like the solitude.