I’m somewhat falling behind with the updates on the good ole blog here, but another couple of episodes have been published in my podcast series Media, Technology & Culture. Episode 6 explores infrastructure, focusing in particular on the internet as a vast, dispersed infrastructures on which various media technologies, including nonhuman objects, depend. Episode 7 explores the embodied dimensions of media technologies, emphasising the fairly ordinary and longstanding ways in which humans have shared intimacy with media technologies.

I wrote about the series more genrally in this last blog post. Below I have included the episode descriptions, and an embedded a player link to the episode. You can subscribe to the podcast on all major podcast platforms at my podcast website.

Episode 6: Infrastructural Technologies

We have already discussed the importance of paying attention to how media technologies are powerful when they are ordinary and relatively invisible. When they work like ‘appliances’ in daily life. This was the key message of McLuhan’s ‘medium theory’ as well as theories of media domestication. These perspectives are limited, however, in that they tend to imagine media technologies individually: the television, the radio, the smart home assistant. They rely on an image of artefacts showing up in our home or office; user-friendly things which extend our contact with others or provide us with certain experiences. We sometimes ignore these domesticated artefacts and things. But we almost always ignore what lies below, or beyond: the vast, dispersed infrastructures on which these media technologies depend. In this episode, we consider media technologies as large-scale infrastructures. If we were to push the boundaries, we could point to all kinds of infrastructural dependencies related about by media: electrical power; water networks; or the mining or rare metals. We will focus however on the internet, as itself a technological infrastructure. This is perhaps the only case where it might make sense to refer to ‘the Internet’ as a proper noun, with the capitalised ‘I’. Thinking of the internet as an infrastructure takes on obvious importance when we look at its history, from its inception as ARPANET, a cold war project in the wake of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, to its more complicated interweaving with other technologies and ideas in subsequent years. While many still tend to describe the internet as an intangible or ‘virtual’ space, we will show that it in fact material, physical, subject to political manipulation and contestation, and increasingly acknowledged as rather fragile.     

Thinkers Discussed: Lisa Parks (‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Towards a Theory of Media Infrastructures); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); John Durham Peters (The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media); Michel Callon (Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay); Susan Leigh-Star (The Ethnography of Infrastructure); Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing); Manuel Castells (The Internet Galaxy); Lori Emerson (Other Networks); Laura DeNardis (The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch / Hidden Levers of Internet Control: An Infrastructure-Based Theory of Internet Governance); Joana Moll (CO2GLE); Alexander Galloway (Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization); Gilles Deleuze (Postscript on Societies of Control).

Episode 7: Embodied Technologies

Media technologies today seem to be everywhere. Assisting us in – or invading – each and every corner of our daily existence. We have already discussed how this ubiquity is embedded into a huge range of physical infrastructures; environments where media technologies surround us. And yet, we also increasingly carry media around with us, in our pockets, hands, ears, across our eyes, around our wrists. We wear media like clothes – and we may soon implant media within our bodies. This need not be seen in the guise of science fiction. It is more interesting to see it as really quite ordinary. For a long time, we humans have shared an intimacy with media technologies. They not only affect how we see ourselves, but modulate and help produce who and what we are. In this episode, we will begin our exploration of media as embodied technologies with the humble mobile phone. Through their aestheticisation, practical uses and technological development, mobile phones were an important precursor to the myriad mobile devices we know today. Contemporary embodied technologies however go beyond being portable, or affording wireless access to online content. They are increasingly built into our bodies, and modulate our interactions with environments: automatically detecting one’s geographic location and orientation, or one’s bodily temperature and heartrate, or the ambient sound and lighting in a room. This leads to a range of issues warranting critique, which we explore with reference to increasingly popular ‘self-tracking’ apps and wearables. Should the significant bodily data sets generated by such apps and devices concern us? Might we need new ways to think about digital literacy, medical efficacy, privacy, and surveillance? And how might these mobile technologies be developed and applied in the future?

Thinkers Discussed: Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (Life After New Media); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordon Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces); Erving Goffman (briefly); Sherry Turkle (The Second Self / Evocative Objects); Lisa Gitelman (Always Already New); James Katz and Mark Aakus (Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance); Harvey May and Greg Hearn (The Mobile Phone as Media); James Miller (The Fourth Screen: Mediatization and the Smartphone); Ian Bogost (Apple’s Airpods Are an Omen); Judith Butler (briefly); Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity); Daniel Palmer (iPhone Photography: Mediating Visions of Social Space); James Gilmore (Everywear: The Quantified Self and Wearable Fitness Technologies); Adam Greenfield (Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing); Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel and Tero Karppi (Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device); Hillel Schwartz (Never Satisfied: Social History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat).