Media Materiality and Infrastructure
The study of media as physical things and as infrastructures, including cables, servers, signals, and the material conditions that make communication possible.
Definition
Media infrastructure refers to the underlying physical and organizational systems, such as networks, hardware, and signal pathways, that enable media to operate; media materiality is the study of media as physical, energetic, and environmental things.
Scope
This topic examines the material substrates and infrastructures of media: networks, hardware, energy, and the often invisible systems that sustain communication. It draws on infrastructure studies, critical work on signal traffic and undersea cables, and elemental conceptions of media, attending to the labor, politics, and environmental dimensions of media materiality.
Core questions
- What physical infrastructures make media communication possible?
- Why do infrastructures tend to become invisible until they break down?
- How do material media implicate labor, politics, and the environment?
- What is gained by treating infrastructures as objects of media study?
Key concepts
- Infrastructure
- Invisibility and breakdown
- Signal traffic
- Hardware
- Elemental media
- Logistics
Key theories
- Ethnography of infrastructure
- Star's account of infrastructure as relational, embedded, and largely invisible until breakdown, providing a framework for studying the unseen systems beneath media.
- Critical media infrastructure studies
- Parks and Starosielski's program for analyzing the material networks, signals, and sites that carry media, foregrounding their politics and geography.
- Elemental media
- Durham Peters's argument that media include the elemental and environmental conditions, such as time, water, and air, that ground communication and existence.
History
Building on infrastructure studies in science and technology studies, notably Star's work, media scholars from the 2010s onward turned attention to the material networks underpinning digital communication, including data centers and undersea cables. Combined with elemental and materialist approaches, this established media infrastructure as a prominent line of inquiry.
Debates
- Scope of 'media'
- Whether extending media to encompass infrastructures and elemental conditions productively broadens the field or risks diluting the concept of a medium.
Key figures
- Susan Leigh Star
- Lisa Parks
- Nicole Starosielski
- John Durham Peters
Related topics
Seminal works
- star1999
- parksstarosielski2015
- durhampeters2015
Frequently asked questions
- Why study media infrastructure?
- Because the cables, servers, and signals that carry media shape what is possible, yet usually remain invisible; studying them reveals the politics, labor, and environmental costs of communication.
- What does 'invisible until breakdown' mean?
- Star observed that infrastructures recede from notice when working smoothly and become visible only when they fail, a key insight for analyzing media systems.