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Signal Traffic:

Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures
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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.
"In an age when we are led to believe that information and communication are virtual rather than material, Signal Traffic provides a much-needed corrective, reminding us that behind the pixels and mp3s lie extensive and complex infrastructures that shape how we inhabit the emerging media environment. This book revives the tradition of critical attention to material infrastructure in media and communication studies, and not a moment too soon."--Darin Barney, author of The Network Society
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