Signal Traffic

This book uses the term “media infrastructure” to signal a shift in critical focus and approach that questions the international telecommunication network as a given. This book investigates how the material artifacts of media infrastructure—transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like—intersect with everyday life. The chapters 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 chapters explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized…