Hollow infrastructures: The case of Facebook and Israeli civil society

Abstract

Recent scholarship has shown that digital infrastructures most often have a very slow demise and linger on for years after they start deteriorating. Moreover, this perplexing endurance comes despite apparent acts of erosion in the value they offer to groups of users. How can we understand the long tail of digital infrastructures in decline? How do digital infrastructures manage to retain groups of users despite deterioration in the utility that the platform provides them? This paper offers the term ‘hollow infrastructures’ as a partial explanation to these questions, and will suggest that certain groups of users and third parties are complicit in keeping a façade of functionality, and thus unintentionally confuse those who encounter these declining platforms. Yet the end result is a lack of efficiency and a drain on resources for those using these hollow infrastructures. This will be done by analyzing the case study of Facebook and Israeli civil society organizations. This analysis is based on a qualitative research project that included content analysis of website and Facebook pages, and 31 interviews.