Signal Traffic Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski / Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski
06/2015
eBook
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.
Introduction LISA PARKS; NICOLE STAROSIELSKI
Signal Traffic,
06/2015
Book Chapter
Signal traffic refers to the movement of electronic media across various parts of the planet. It is the aggregate result of a global culture of continuous electronic transmissions. Though electronic ...signal trafficking can be dated to the rise of telegraphy during the nineteenth century, this book focuses on the contemporary era of media globalization-an era characterized by contradictory global mediascapes and multiple media infrastructures.¹ Today, broadcasting, cable, satellite, Internet, and mobile telephone systems are used simultaneously, and sometimes in coordinated ways, to route signal traffic to and from sites around the world. The content and form of contemporary media-whether television
