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.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Compression, Storage, Distribution 1. Compression: A Loose History 2. Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure 3. "Where the Internet Lives": Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure 4. Deep Time of Media Infrastructure Part II: Resources, Environments, Geopolitics 5. Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia 6. The Art of Waste: Contemporary Culture and Unsustainable Energy Use 7. Cellular Borders: Dis/Connecting Phone Calls in Israel-Palestine Part III: Content, Protocols, Platforms 8. Protocols, Packets, and Proximity: The Materiality of Internet Routing 9. Service Providers as Digital Media Infrastructure: Turkey's Cybercafé Operators 10. The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power 11. Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure Contributors Index | Best Edited Collection Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), 2015-2016. — Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)
|Lisa Parks is director of the Center for Information Technology and Society, professor of film and media studies at University of California at Santa Barbara, and winner of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Nicole Starosielski is assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University.