Visibility Asymmetry: How Vendor Attention Shapes Which EdTech Breakdowns Become Product-Visible

Infrastructure scholarship in CSCW often treats breakdown as the moment when infrastructures become visible. However, in vendor-managed sociotechnical systems, not all breakdowns become visible to actors who have the capacity to repair them. Drawing on a retrospective qualitative study of a Chinese K-12 EdTech deployment, including 11 interviews, 5 classroom observations, and more than 28 days of field notes, this paper introduces visibility asymmetry: a sensitizing concept for understanding how similar local breakdowns encounter uneven conditions for being routed, recognized, and acted upon. The analysis traces a four-stage mechanism through which procurement categories sort schools into attention tiers; staffing and visit cadence follow those tiers; only some local problems travel through staff or administrator channels; and dashboards can re-code unresolved repair labor as evidence of adoption. By shifting attention from the occurrence of breakdown to the organizational channels through which breakdown becomes actionable, this paper extends CSCW work on infrastructure, articulation work, and repair. It concludes by discussing implications for feedback systems that can surface repair needs without expanding surveillance.