Picturing Technological Change: The Materiality of Information Infrastructures in Public Education.

Information technologies are often depicted as possessing the potential to correct social inequalities by democratising information access and economic opportunity. This view of technology, however, tends to overemphasise virtual spaces to the neglect of the material and social conditions of technological infrastructures. The goal of this article is to explore visually the messy, situated materialities of information infrastructures in public schools ? in places that have become both sites and symbols of economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere. Through photographic images, the contradictions of technological promises and changes are interrogated with attention to the lives of individuals moving through physical and virtual spaces ? spaces that are always political and embodied.