Signal traffic : critical studies of media infrastructures /
edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski.
- Urbana, etc. : University of Illinois Press, 2015.
- viii, 292 p. : ill b&w ; 24 cm.
- The geopolitics of information .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Compression, Storage, Distribution -- Compression: A Loose History / Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure / "Where the Internet Lives": Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure / Deep Time of Media Infrastructure / Resources, Environments, Geopolitics -- Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia / The Art of Waste: Contemporary Culture and Unsustainable Energy Use / Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel-Palestine / Content, Protocols, Platforms -- Protocols, Packets, and Proximity: The Materiality of Internet Routing / Service Providers as Digital Media Infrastructure: Turkey's Cybercafé Operators / The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power / Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure / Jonathan Sterne -- Nicole Starosielski -- Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau. Shannon Mattern -- Lisa Parks -- Toby Miller -- Helga Tawil-Souri -- Paul Dourish -- Sarah Harris -- Christian Sandvig -- Charles R. Acland. Pt. 1. Ch. 1. Ch. 2. Ch. 3. Ch. 4. Pt. 2. Ch. 5. Ch. 6. Ch. 7. Pt. 3. Ch. 8. Ch. 9. Ch. 10. Ch. 11.
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.
9780252080876
Telecommunication systems--Social aspects Digital media--Social aspects Mass media--Social aspects Information superhighway Computer networks--Social aspects Information networks--Social aspects Telecommunication--Traffic Signal processing