Send message to Author

Short abstract

This paper studies waiting in practice within digital infrastructures in Greenland. Based on ethnographic research on internet disruptions in Tasiilaq, it examines everyday responses and practices to digital disruption, and explores how waiting and infrastructural care shape life in rural Greenland.

Long abstract

Infrastructures are often approached through moments of breakdown and repair (Jackson 2014). Yet in some places a common experience of infrastructure is neither fixing nor failing, but waiting: waiting for the signal to return, for technicians to arrive, or for explanations from the internet provider that may or may not arrive timely.

In Arctic regions such as East Greenland, where satellite infrastructures stretch across technical and administrative distances, disruptions are often diagnosed and resolved elsewhere. Internet breakdowns and disruptions therefore become known indirectly—through unstable signals, circulating stories about Tusass (the telecommunications provider of Greenland), short or non-existent announcements from the same provider, and everyday attempts to understand and work through what might be happening far beyond the town itself. At the same time, within waiting there matures ways of dealing with the slowness and the fluctuating internet. How does that everyday life look? Furthermore, this paper asks how the theme of waiting itself takes shape when it becomes an object of research. What happens when the analytical attention begins to zoom in on an often invisible and mundane activity?

Drawing on ethnographic research on internet connectivity and digital breakdowns in Tasiilaq, this paper asks how such waiting can be explored in practice. If waiting is not simply a pause between breakdown and repair, where does it appear in everyday life? How are internet disruptions endured, adapted to, and understood in a local and Inuk context?