Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures Front Cover

Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures

Description

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.

Table of Contents

Part I: Compression, Storage, Distribution
Chapter 1. Compression: A Loose History
Chapter 2. Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure
Chapter 3. “Where the Internet Lives”: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure
Chapter 4. Deep Time of Media Infrastructure

Part II: Resources, Environments, Geopolitics
Chapter 5. Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia
Chapter 6. The Art of Waste: Contemporary Culture and Unsustainable Energy Use
Chapter 7. Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel-Palestine

Part III: Content, Protocols, Platforms
Chapter 8. Protocols, Packets, and Proximity: The Materiality of Internet Routing
Chapter 9. Service Providers as Digital Media Infrastructure: Turkey’s Cybercafé Operators
Chapter 10. The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power
Chapter 11. Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure

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