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Investigating Media Infrastructure

Module description

This module takes you ‘behind the screens’ of the media to explore the physical infrastructure that supports and underpins our digital world: telecommunications towers, satellites, fibre-optic cables, data centres, aerials, power grids. Most of us will barely ever notice this infrastructure – it is designed to operate in the background and only ever comes to our attention when it breaks down and our media services stop working. Infrastructure is often strategically designed to appear nondescript, dull and boring precisely to deflect unwanted interest or attention. Bringing these backgrounded forms to the foreground of critical analysis is a political act that enables us to study the history, geography and politics of media industries and services from a valuable vantage point. Through a focus on a range of media infrastructures, the module explores questions related to issues of regulation, labour, construction, maintenance, energy, privatisation, sustainability and security. You will be introduced to a range of methods to explore and better understand the materiality of media and communications infrastructure. There are no pre-requisites or co-requisites for this module, and no specialist knowledge, skills, or experience are required to take it.

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module aims to:

• Introduce you to the field of Critical Infrastructure Studies and to a range of methods and perspectives that can help to better understand the histories, politics and geographies of media infrastructures.
• Guide you in understanding the processes shaping media infrastructures
• Enable you to conduct humanistic analyses of media infrastructures
• Examine and situate specific infrastructures within their relevant historical, political and spatial contexts
• Ask you to think critically and creatively to communicate issues related to media infrastructure through assessed work
• Encourage you to develop your own advanced insight into the histories, politics and geographies of media infrastructure

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate an advanced knowledge of key approaches, theories, and concepts in the field of critical infrastructure studies and apply these to a specific media infrastructure and its relevant social, political, historical and geographic contexts
• 2. Demonstrate a critical understanding of the relevant scholarly literature on media infrastructures

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse relevant theoretical ideas and concepts across interdisciplinary intersections, tracing the development of debates across disciplinary boundaries
• 4. Deploy at an advanced level research techniques and methodologies appropriate to the discipline

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Communicate clearly and imaginatively in visual and verbal form
• 6. Demonstrate advanced research and bibliographic skills, and an advanced and intellectually mature capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument
• 7. Through research, seminar discussion and assignments, demonstrate an advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Media buildings (e.g. newspaper houses, television studios, Hollywood studio sets)
• Satellites
• Data centres
• Fibre-optic cables
• Antennas / telecommunications towers
• Wi-Fi networks
• Labour and maintenance
• Energy production (electromagnetic fields) and consumption
• Visual, spatial, psychogeographic, sonic or other sensory approaches to the study of infrastructure

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

RE-ASSESSMENT NOTES

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e., a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading:

• Burrington, Ingrid. 2016. Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure. New York: Melville House Publishing.
• Downey, Greg. 2001. Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers: The Spaces of Labor in Information Internetworks. Technology and Culture, 42(2): 209–235.
• Ericson, Staffan and Kristina Riegert, eds. 2010. Media Houses: Architecture, Media and the Production of Centrality. New York: Peter Lang.
• Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42: 327-343.
• Nikhil, Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, eds. 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Parks, Lisa. 2009. Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Visibility. Available online: https://www.flowjournal.org/2009/03/around-the-antenna-tree-the-politics-of-infrastructural-visibilitylisa-parks-uc-santa-barbara/
• Parks, Lisa and Nicole Starosielski, eds. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
• Parks, Lisa, Julia Velkova and Sander de Ridder. 2023. Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.
• Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3): 377–391.
• Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

• Taylor, A.R.E. 2022. Cloudwork: Data Centre Labour and the Maintenance of Media Infrastructure. Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. Edited by Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, Jolynna Sinanan, pp. 213-228.

Key words search

Infrastructure, Architecture, Built Environment, Space, Place, Materiality, Labour, Media Studies, Geography, Anthropology