Media Infrastructure: Access, Mobility, and Social Formations
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MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURE: ACCESS, MOBILITY, AND SOCIAL FORMATIONS Sindhu Zagoren A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in the Communications Studies Department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Lawrence Grossberg Kenneth Hillis Jeremy Packer John Pickles Sarah Sharma © 2014 Sindhu Zagoren ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Sindhu Zagoren: Media Infrastructure: Access, Mobility, and Social Formations (Under the direction of Lawrence Grossberg) Through an analysis of communication infrastructure, this dissertation offers a study of the overarching systems that shape our communicative processes, and the ways these processes are commodified. Infrastructural systems always combine both “hard” material apparatuses and “soft” forms and uses, and as such they can offer a way to examine the interrelation of content and conduits. Innovations in communication infrastructure, both hard and soft, mobilize communication in new ways. The forms of communication mobility are material practices that create and shape space by adding meanings and values to it. Access to these communicative spaces is structured through technological and social systems, which position communicative space as a natural resource. This resource is then struggled over, and most often privatized, through the institution of cultural forms. These forms define access to communicative resources through a process of commodification, which generates value from these resources by retroactively structuring them as limited. The result of the commodification of communicative resources generated by infrastructural innovations is particular media formations, wherein infrastructures are assumed to generate discrete communication forms that are intrinsically related to their material apparatuses. The case studies in this dissertation analyze the innovations and struggles that create infrastructural systems as media formations. The first case study explores the ways in which iii early uses of radio technologies shaped access to the electromagnetic spectrum, and how the spectrum itself came to be understood as a resource. The second case study examines the implementation of coaxial cable for television distribution, and the effects this innovation had on the forms and uses of televisual communication. The final case study investigates changes in Internet infrastructure, and forms of commodification, especially as they pertain to current debates over net neutrality. Each study examines how innovations restructure access to particular communicative resources, as well as generate new ones, and then how these communicative resources are struggled over. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have been instrumental in making this project possible. I would like to thank David Raskin for his years of support and encouragement, as well as many many hours of copyediting. Mark Hayward, Lisa Calvente, and Guadalupe García have all read chapters and given me helpful feedback. Chad Johnston, and the People’s Chanel have both been instrumental in helping to formulate how ties between community, media, and policy can be forged. Rich Cante has provided advice and support throughout the years, and has always offered to be a sounding board no matter what stage my writing and thoughts have been in. The members of my committee, Ken Hillis, Jeremy Packer, John Pickles, and Sarah Sharma have all helped me in ways too numerous to count during this process. John’s questions have helped to push my work in new directions. Jeremy’s enthusiasm and willingness to help out when needed have been deeply appreciated. Sarah’s optimism and dedicated engagement with the field has spurred me on and taken this project to greater level of critical depth. Ken’s graduate seminar on technology introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking about what media and infrastructure do, and he has always made time to speak with me about my project, and my work more broadly. Lastly, I could not have done this without the help and mentorship of Larry Grossberg, whose mixture of no nonsense criticism with extremely generous and caring attention to my project have made this entire process possible. You v brought my writing and thinking to a level I would not have thought possible when I started – thank you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………...x CHAPTER 1: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACCESS AND INFRASTRUCTURE…………………………………………………………………………1 Creating Access……………………………………………………………………….1 Mobility……………………………………………………………………….2 Space…………………………………………………………………………..9 Resource and Property……………………………………………………….16 Situating the project………………………………………………………………….20 Outline of the Dissertation…………………………………………………………...27 CHAPTER 2: THEORIZING THE MATERIALITY OF MEDIA: INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOCIAL FORMATIONS……………………………………………………………..36 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..36 Property………………………………………………………………………………40 Legitimating Private Property: Property as Text…………………………….43 Paradoxes of Private Property: The Self-Interested Subject, the Prisoners Dilemma, and the Tragedy of the Commons………………….45 The Communicative Commons……………………………………………………...53 Infrastructure as Social Formation…………………………………………………...62 vii CHAPTER 3: WE WANT THE AIRWAVES: TERRITORIALIZING THE ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM…………………………………………………69 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..69 A Note on the Electromagnetic Spectrum…………………………………………...73 New Forms of Mobility: Wireless Telegraphy and Non-Commercial Broadcasting…………………………………………………………………………79 Radio as Point-to-Point Communication…………………………………….80 Radio as Non-Commercial Broadcasting……………………………………86 Formations of Space: Early Regulations and the First World War………………….91 Military Control During World War I……………………………………….95 Legitimating Corporate Control of the Spectrum……………………………………99 The Creation of RCA……………………………………………………….101 Cross-Licensing Agreements……………………………………………….106 The Hoover Radio Conferences…………………………………………….109 CHAPTER 4: THERE’S A WORLD GOING ON UNDERGROUND: CABLE INFRASTRUCTURE AND THE CULTURAL FORMS OF TELEVISION……………..116 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………116 The Networks: From Radio to Television………………………………………….119 The Formation of the National Broadcasting Corporation…………………120 Broadcasters and Telecommunication Carriers…………………………….125 The “Mom and Pops” and the Emergence of CATV……………………………….129 Access Television: Reclaiming the Streets…………………………………………136 Challenge for Change………………………………………………………138 The Portapak………………………………………………………………..140 The Alternate Media Center………………………………………………...143 viii Public Access Today………………………………………………………………..148 Public Access in the Internet Age…………………………………………..151 CHAPTER 5: HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURES: DATA CONSUMPTION MOBILE DEVICES IN THE CLOUD……………………………………………………..154 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………154 The Cowboy Years (~1996-1991)………………………………………………….159 The World Wide Web (1991-2004)………………………………………………...165 Web Infrastructure, Open Access, and the Beginnings of Net Neutrality……………………………………………………………168 From the Web to the Cloud: Social Networks, Data Centers and Mobile Devices (2004-2014)……………………………………………………….178 Web 2.0……………………………………………………………………..178 Cloud Infrastructure………………………………………………………...180 We have Never Been Neutral: Contemporary Struggles over Internet Resources……...……………………………………………………...184 Scarcity……………………………………………………………………..191 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………..196 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………201 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: The Prisoners’ Dilemma…………………………………………………………48 Figure 3.1: Frequencies and Wavelength in the Electromagnetic spectrum…………………74 Figure 3.2: Radio Waves……………………………………………………………………..74 Figure 4.1: The Sony Portapak…………………………………………………………..…141 x CHAPTER 1: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACCESS AND INFRASTRUCTURE Creating Access The way that we have access to media how we watch television, listen to the radio, go online is the end result of a long series of negotiations and conflicts. However, these processes are all too often forgotten by the time that policy controlling access to mediation is enacted, and the way that a given medium is used is usually considered inherent in its nature. This is part of a larger problem facing media studies: often the definitions of media we use are too simple and tend to fetishize the end result of mediation as defining a medium. The changing nature of media seems to be moving at a faster pace than the theoretical frameworks we have at our disposal to study them. This is in part because so much contemporary work within media studies tends to ignore the material aspects of mediation itself and instead focuses on the end results of a series of processes, which are then dubbed discrete media. Debates over access that only look at these end results, such as current debates over net neutrality for the Internet, cannot sufficiently address the power struggles that went into the making of a particular medium in its current formation. Arguing for increased access to a medium without examining how those points of entry have been produced in the first place remains inadequate to the specificities of the relevant medium. Through an empirical study of infrastructure, this work examines how access to media is constructed. It explores how media resources are produced by communication 1 infrastructure, and how these resources get brought back into hegemonic understandings of property. I argue that large-scale systems of media