The prominent media scholar thinks through her contribution to the critical studies of digital infrastructures and the future of infrastructure as a method.


        Anna Engelhardt: As Susan Leigh Star observed in 1999, “if we stopped thinking of computers as information highways and began to think of them more modestly as symbolic sewers” there would be a qualitative change in our understanding of informational systems. In 2015, in the “Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures” you and Nicole Starosielski brought this approach further, defining the new paradigm of media studies, one that treats “distribution” of information as worth investigation no less than its “consumption and distribution”. What were the main issues that infrastructural turn in the media studies was meant to address, and what is yet to be tackled by the infrastructural approach today?


        Lisa Parks: By suggesting a focus on the physical infrastructures of media distribution we were interested in drawing attention to aspects of networks that had been overlooked in critical media studies. Scholars had explored textuality, content, aesthetics, narrative structure, and practices of interpretation, as well as audiences and reception. Nicole and I organized a series of workshops called signal traffic at University of California at Santa Barbara when she was my doctoral student. We sought to create modes of investigation beyond the screen, the studio, and the home, and to think about how to study technologies of distribution in the media sector. Building on research I had previously done on satellites, we set out to explore the materialities of media distribution by examining physical objects in the built environment.  Since infrastructural objects had not been studied extensively in media studies at the time, our work involved experimenting with field-based practices and finding ways to document and render these objects and relations as part of media studies research. I have been working in this way since the early 2000s, when I did research for my Cultures in Orbit book, and am in the process of finishing another book now called Mixed Signals that explores media infrastructures in the context of globalization.

The main issues Nicole and I tried to address in Signal Traffic included understanding the ways that media infrastructures were built upon and in relation to earlier infrastructures of transportation and electrification, considering an array of technical artifacts (towers, satellite dishes, earth stations, data centers) as viable objects of inquiry for media studies, developing critical concepts and languages for focusing on such objects, and considering issues of power, whether in relation to geopolitics, economic scarcity, environment, or issues of race/ethnicity/gender/class difference.

There remains a lot of research to be done on the histories and particular sociotechnical relations that constitute media infrastructures in different parts of the world. We cannot assume media infrastructures are homogeneous. They take on different forms based on issues of resources and economics, technological knowledge/literacy, geopolitics, topography, environment, and so on. We also cannot assume that all infrastructures have the consent or permission of publics or citizens to be constructed or installed in particular ways or sites, even if states have authorized such actions. I have argued recently (2020) there is a need for a nodal approach so we can better understand which communities in the world may have objected to the installation of nodes of media infrastructure. I call these “contrapuntal nodes.” Studying them involves engaging with colonial practices and postcolonial conditions, structures of political and economic dependency, and struggles for sovereignty and autonomy. It also requires being experimental with historiographic practices as there are not always archives or official records of peoples’ opposition to infrastructure developments in all parts of the world. At various historical junctures network nodes have been built against peoples’ will or have been used in ways that harm or disrupt. Even though telecom infrastructures are referred to as “public utilities,” obviously they are not always managed, operated, or experienced as such. We have to reckon with such histories, and de-naturalize the development and installation of infrastructures as “public goods,” including the internet, since they are more typically “corporate goods.” There are also major social inequalities that should be core to research on and understandings of media infrastructure, and there is much work to be done on the nodal tensions that give form and life to networked systems.  


        A. E.: What are the various ways to define an infrastructure? Reading literature that deals with infrastructure as a conceptual framework, I have noticed the impossibility of the uniform definition. While some researchers tend to prioritise materialist approach - like the one you described in terms of “the stuff you can kick”, others understand infrastructure as a quality of relations, defined by your perspective. Where would you locate your research on this broadly outlined material/immaterial spectrum? What such an entry point allowed for your research, and when did you find it limiting?


        L. P.: There has been so much research on “infrastructure” across various fields that the term has become saturated with meanings. I have noticed frequent use of the term with “of” lately – in other words, many things have become an “infrastructure of” many other things. This suggests a highly generalized use of the term--as a support structure, facilitator, or fulcrum of relations. Rather than provide an inventory of the various ways the term has been defined (since that has been done elsewhere), I would simply encourage researchers to resist citing the same authors all the time, and, in some cases, reductively, and to seek out other works and sites that can be helpful in formulating conceptualizations of infrastructure from more diverse perspectives. Some people become enchanted with theorists of infrastructure who engage beautifully with continental philosophy or conceptual abstraction, yet don’t seem to want to engage beyond the armchair.

As a media scholar influenced by post-structuralist feminisms and STS research, I have tried to experiment with embodied and phenomenological investigations. This mode of inquiry stems from the fact that historically certain bodies have been encouraged and socialized to be experts on technology and others have not. My interest in infrastructure emerged from the recognition that I was socialized not to know about the sociotechnical systems that I, and other people around the world, use daily and subsidize. For me, studying infrastructure involves studying what I was socialized not to know and trying to find a language or a critical poetics for making sense of it. In my work as a media scholar, I have tried to adopt an infrastructural disposition; and engage with infrastructural materialities and imaginaries not as "givens," but as sites of difference and power that demand inquiry, specification, and analysis. Using empirical research, I have been trying to formulate ideas about what infrastructure is and how it takes shape and becomes meaningful across diverse contexts. Findings have led me to question the accuracy of network maps, face the complex biospheres and geopolitics that infrastructures are entangled with, and register the various kinds of labor required to sustain vast, layered systems. Based on this research, I would suggest that infrastructure is only boring if we idly accept or normalize static ways of mapping, perceiving, or understanding it.

My research tries to explore and specify infrastructure’s entanglement in and with material conditions—economies, sociotechnical relations, resources, topographies, biospheres, imaginaries, and/or everyday cultures. In this way it is in dialogue with work by Wendy Chun (2006), Keller Easterling (2014), Brian Larkin (2009). and Jenna Burrell (2012). While I very much appreciate the insightful work on immaterial labor and networks (and assign it in my courses), I do not fully accept the idea that digital economies and/or digital labor are immaterial. My reluctance has to do with fieldwork that I have done in developing countries over the past decade, and witnessing the various kinds of physical and manual labor, acts of jerry-rigging, reuse, and repair, and set up of alternate energy resources to operationalize and sustain use of digital technologies and economies. These practices are anything but “immaterial.” 


        A. E.: This material/immaterial spectrum is complicated by visible/invisible one. While some scholars define infrastructure through their invisibility - we do not notice electricity unless it’s broken, others speak of infrastructures that exist only through visibility. Brian Larkin, for instance, speaks of propagandistic projects that exist much more through TV than in everyday life (Russian readers would be familiar with art of ‘infrastructural painting’ that imitates curbs and new asphalt).

                  

How the question of visibility - as the quality of sensing and broadcasting infrastructure but also as its aim - informed your last book “Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror”? Could you think of other spectrums that materialise in attempts to define the infrastructure and their political implications?

        L. P.: As a scholar trained in media studies and visual culture, I first approached infrastructure as a problem of visual representation. A national or international infrastructure could be approximated in a network map or flow diagram, but the entire system could not be perceived by a human on the ground or captured photographically because of its extensive scale (unless by a satellite, perhaps). The particularities of infrastructural equipment, variable nodal conditions, and human operators and users are typically invisible in network cartography. Beyond this, infrastructures are generally considered to be culturally invisible, unintelligible, and even boring (Star).  Publics are socialized not to notice, learn about, or control the layers or stack (Bratton) of infrastructures that define contemporary societies.

To subject the discussion of infrastructure to the binary of visibility/invisibility is ultimately quite limiting, as there are so many other ways to investigate and think about infrastructure. I began my inquiry from that position given the fact that I am a media/visual culture scholar, and was trained to think about technologies and politics of visualization. Yet I firmly believe in the importance of syn-aesthetic approaches – what do infrastructures sound and feel like to those situated around, working on, or using (or being used by) them? The investigation of infrastructure certainly should not be reduced to visibility/invisibility. In fact, given the material complexities of infrastructures that path is a trap. I do think that visualization – as opposed to visibility -- can be a useful space for thinking through issues of what an infrastructure is, where it is, what it does, who it supports, and so on. Visualizations (photos, sketches, mixed media, paintings, etc.) should be thought of as provocations or catalysts for inquiry rather than as conclusive mappings.

Visualization or visual demonstration played a role in my most recent book, Rethinking Media Coverage (2018). This book was an attempt to analyze the ways aerial and orbital domains and technologies were mobilized to support the US geopolitics of war on terror after 9/11. The book is not a history of aerial and orbital infrastructure; rather, it uses visual media to demonstrate how aero-orbital technologies– broadcasting, aircraft, drones, and satellites – were mobilized to stage and re-assert US vertical hegemony after the aerial assaults of 9/11.  Rather than think about satellites and drones as technologies that “monitor” and sense from afar, I argue that their dynamic activities have the potential to materially transform conditions on earth. I offer the term “vertical mediation” to describe the use of aero-orbital technologies and spaces to support activities such as the international distribution of audiovisual signals, the patrolling of movements on and beneath the earth’s surface, and the physical destruction and reconstruction of lifeworlds. I explore the role of media culture in making the air explicit, constructing the world as a target, and waging of aero-orbital offensives.


        A. E.: In this project, I am trying to investigate the broadcast of propaganda, referred to as cyberwarfare, infrastructurally. I was inspired to see that you have pioneered the infrastructural approach against political issues of broadcasting and information manufacturing in 2005. In your book Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual you make a brilliant analysis of the coverage and remote sensing of the war in Bosnia. Could you recall the main points of your work on the conflict with specific attention towards coverage, its connection to surveillance and its role in the construction of the event?


        L. P.: The work you refer to is chapter three of Cultures in Orbit, which is a long chapter, but I’ll try to be concise here. The chapter explores a US military program called “Information Dominance,” and the release of US satellite evidence of atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia, specifically of the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995. During this massacre, approximately 8,000 Muslim men were separated from their families and allegedly killed by Serbian forces in and around Srebrenica. This chapter critically examines some of the satellite images that were circulated, and raises questions about the politics of monitoring and witnessing and the dialectics of distance and proximity. Rather than accept these satellite images at face value, I discuss the strategic agendas that prompted their circulation as well as the limitations of what they could reveal.

As part of my research, I traveled to Srebrenica in 2001, and went some of the sites represented in the US satellite images. During that fieldwork, I realized that the wartime events allegedly conveyed in the satellite images became even more fuzzy and complex when I was on site. In other words, traveling to the location did not clarify, rather it made understandings even blurrier. Building on the fieldwork experience, I tried to suggest the possibility of a satellite witness that does not search for total truth or crystal clarity but rather embraces a fuzzy logic of representation and insists upon the irreducibility of war.

The case study revealed the need to think critically about claims to what I call “diachronic omniscience” – the quest and claim to be able to see and know all over time. It is vital that digital images be subject to critical examination given their propensity to be discursively spun and technically doctored. Satellite images are digital approximations of events, and usually appear with graphic overlays that heavily guide interpretation. Many surveillance (and other) images share similar such characteristics and should be approached analytically rather than instantly embraced as truths.


        A. E.: Do you consider engaging in your future work with the infrastructural turn, ongoing in media studies at the moment? The way you define it as “a shift away from media spectacles to a focus on the “back ends” of systems that organise, generate, and deliver” information seems to resonate with the initial drive for the infrastructural turn. What future do you imagine for the infrastructural research of media defined by algorithmic governance?


        L. P.: Since I’ve been working on infrastructure-related topics for most of my academic life, I do not think of my research as part of a turn. In academia, topics become topical or trendy for a while and then, over time, lose their shiny appeal. I imagine that the term infrastructure may be on the verge of burning out soon. Nevertheless, I will continue to historicize and analysis sociotechnical relations and material conditions that make up media infrastructures, and hope to offer other sub-level concepts as well. We already see the splintering happening with the emergent and crucial research on “platformization” happening. In addition, media scholars are writing about algorithmic cultures, machine learning, and AI tools. In other words, there is a deepening of research in media studies (and beyond) on digital infrastructures – the software, algorithms, and platforms that organize and administer networked digital services. It is my hope that research in this area will include investigations that are not only interface based, but that are site-specific, field-based, public oriented, and/or transnational. It is important to understand the physical dimensions of digital infrastructures – how they are designed, energized, organized in time/space, and differentially experienced by laborers and users. Recently, there has been exciting new scholarship on media automation, cloud policy and ethics, and data centers, as researchers are tackling new questions and sites of inquiry.

At the moment, I am working on two books. The first is a book that I have been working on for some time called Mixed Signals that presents case studies in which I analyze and conceptualize different configurations of media infrastructure through fieldwork and empirical research. My case studies explore the sociotechnical relations that support media distribution on the outskirts of power, rather than in media capitals, and highlight localized creativities, labor, and resources that are arranged to capacitate media distribution.  It is an attempt to study and theorize media infrastructure from diverse peoples’ perspectives.

The second project is a co-edited book, with Julia Velkova and Sander de Ridder, entitled Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and the Politics of Knowing (under contract with the University of Illinois press), which emerged after a conference they organized at the University of Helsinki in October 2019. Media backends include electronic components in devices, network equipment and linkages, data centers and storage facilities, and algorithmic processes and software that are mostly off limits to media consumers, as well as the ways these components and processes are imagined and communicated about. While the front-ends of media -- the screens, monitors, and interfaces -- have remained relatively constant in their enframed shape and form, the backends have undergone major transformations during the past two decades. Contributors to our book explore these transformations alongside the politics of opacity and transparency, knowing or not knowing.

One of the primary intentions of this book is to provide clarification regarding technological terminology often invoked by media and communication scholars, sometimes in conflicting or confusing ways. Even the term infrastructure, which has become a key trope in media and communication studies, runs the risk of becoming diffuse if it is used as too much of a catchall (Hesmondhalgh 2021). Building upon useful models such as Jose van Dijk’s Cultures of Connectivity (2013), our book tries to bring clarity to concepts such as system, infrastructure, utility, network, platform, application, and service. While all of them represent media backends in some form, they differ in their empirical, analytical, and epistemological dimensions. Our intention is to cultivate sensitivity to these differences as well as expand critical terminology in media and communication studies by carefully engaging with emergent technologies, including cloud-based systems, data centers, algorithms, artificial intelligence, “smart” designs, and more.

About the author

Lisa Parks is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is a media scholar whose research focuses on multiple areas: satellite technologies and media globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; media, militarization and surveillance; and environmental media. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005). She is co-editor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke U Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers U Press, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002). She is currently working on two new books, On Media: Twenty-one Lessons for the Twenty-first Century, and the co-edited volume, Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and the Politics of Knowing.

Parks is Director of UCSB’s Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, which she initiated at MIT. Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has held other fellowships and visiting appointments at the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques & Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a Principal Investigator on major grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department, and has collaborated with artists and computer scientists. She is committed to exploring how greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice, and human rights. Before returning to UCSB, Parks was Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.

References

Burrell, Jenna. 2012. Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Bratton, Ben. 2015. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press.


Chun, Wendy. 2006. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. MIT Press.


Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London & New York: Verso.


HESMONDHALGH, D. 2021 (forthcoming). The infrastructural turn in media and internet research. In: MCDONALD, P. (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Media Industries. London: Routledge.


Larkin, Brian. 2009. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.


Parks, Lisa. 2005. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham: Duke University Press.


_____.  2020. "Global Networking and the Contrapuntal Node: The Project Mercury Earth Station in Zanzibar, 1959-64," ZMK (Journal for Media and Cultural Research, Germany), 11, 40-57.


_____. 2018. Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror. London and New York: Routledge.


_____. 2015. “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures,” Between Humanities and the Digital, David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015, 355-373.


Parks, Lisa & Nicole Starosielski eds. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media

Infrastructures. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.


Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist, 43.3, 377–91.

van Dijck, Jose. 2013. Cultures of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.