Keeping Things Going: Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology

There is currently a growing recognition among philosophers of technology, that despite a consistent effort to understand the nature of the relationship that people share with the technologies that surround them, existing work within the field has nonetheless ignored forms of technical practice of utmost importance. These practices are known collectively as maintenance and together comprise the different activities that people must perform in order to “keep things going”. This introduction begins by exploring reasons why the topic of maintenance has until now received to so little attention in philosophy of technology, before examining the potential maintenance holds, not only as a source of new insights, but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy of technology. Next, the introduction provides an overview of existing work on the topic outside philosophy, by charting the development of the emerging interdisciplinary field of maintenance and repair studies, highlighting dominant themes and theoretical approaches which characterize the literature. Latter sections of the chapter aim to establish a preliminary agenda and orientation for the development of a discourse surrounding maintenance in philosophy of technology by identifying specific questions and areas of analysis surrounding maintenance that are particularly suited to philosophical analysis. The introduction concludes with a brief overview of the different chapters which are collected together in this volume.