Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pt. 1. Compression, Storage, Distribution -- Ch. 1. Compression: A Loose History / Jonathan Sterne -- Ch. 2. Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure / Nicole Starosielski -- Ch. 3. "Where the Internet Lives": Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure / Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau. Ch. 4. Deep Time of Media Infrastructure / Shannon Mattern -- Pt. 2. Resources, Environments, Geopolitics -- Ch. 5. Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia / Lisa Parks -- Ch. 6. The Art of Waste: Contemporary Culture and Unsustainable Energy Use / Toby Miller -- Ch. 7. Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel-Palestine / Helga Tawil-Souri -- Pt. 3. Content, Protocols, Platforms -- Ch. 8. Protocols, Packets, and Proximity: The Materiality of Internet Routing / Paul Dourish -- Ch. 9. Service Providers as Digital Media Infrastructure: Turkey's Cybercafé Operators / Sarah Harris -- Ch. 10. The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power / Christian Sandvig -- Ch. 11. Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure / Charles R. Acland.

In Signal Traffic, editors Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski use the term "media infrastructure" to signal a shift in critical focus and approach that questions the international telecommunication network as a given. Contributors instead confront vital questions concerning the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways they are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.

Exploring such issues leads some of the essayists to examine the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities that live on the edges of media infrastructures--people 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 across industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.