Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures

by Lisa Parks (Editor), Nicole Starosielski (Editor), Charles R. Acland (Contribution by), Paul Dourish (Contribution by), Sarah Harris (Contribution by)

Overview

The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure—transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like—intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.

Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.

Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252080876
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	05/14/2015
Series:	The Geopolitics of Information
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lisa Parks is director of the Center for Information Technology and Society, professor of film and media studies at University of California at Santa Barbara, and winner of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Nicole Starosielski is assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction Lisa Parks Nicole Starosielski 1

Part I Compression, Storage, Distribution

1 Compression: A Loose History Jonathan Sterne 31

2 Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure Nicole Starosielski 53

3 "Where the Internet Lives": Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure Jennifer Holt Patrick Vonderau 71

4 Deep Time of Media Infrastructure Shannon Mattern 94

Part II Resources, Environments, Geopolitics

5 Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia Lisa Parks 115

6 The Art of Waste: Contemporary Culture and Unsustainable Energy Use Toby Miller 137

7 Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel-Palestine Helga Tawil-Souri 157

Part III Content, Protocols, Platforms

8 Protocols, Packets, and Proximity: The Materiality of Internet Routing Paul Dourish 183

9 Service Providers as Digital Media Infrastructure: Turkey's Cybercafe Operators Sarah Harris 205

10 The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power Christian Sanding 225

11 Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure Charles R. Acland 246

Contributors 279

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

Best Edited Collection Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), 2015-2016.

"A vivid picture of the vital, essential, and fundamental role that infrastructure plays in the mediation of our world. . . . With an all-star lineup of media scholars engaging with cutting-edge technology from a range of intellectual approaches, Signal Traffic doesn't just offer an important and timely contribution to the study of media, but also makes a powerful argument for the central role that issues of distribution play in the circuit of culture; it leaves the reader with a strong sense that media scholarship can no longer ignore the material infrastructures at the heart of our media systems." —Information Society


"This highly original and thought-provoking volume does a good job of pointing out the remaining gaps in the field and makes a strong case for considering distribution from technological, economic, and political standpoints." —European Journal of Communication


"Finally, a definitive collection on infrastructure studies. Moving from compression to geopolitics to platforms, this book crystalizes what's at stake in moving media studies away from focusing on what appears on our screen towards how content travels and, through this movement, is shaped and re-shaped in profound ways."—Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics

"The first and only collection of its kind I know. This book is going to be a big deal, both nationally and internationally."
—Vicki A. Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy

"In an age when we are led to believe that information and communication are virtual rather than material, Signal Traffic provides a much-needed corrective, reminding us that behind the pixels and mp3s lie extensive and complex infrastructures that shape how we inhabit the emerging media environment. This book revives the tradition of critical attention to material infrastructure in media and communication studies, and not a moment too soon."—Darin Barney, author of The Network Society

From the Publisher