Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures

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