10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17268
application/pdf
2038-3460
17268
2
en
Paolo Magaudda
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds.), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, University of Illinois Press, 2015
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Book Reviews
2016-01-29
2023-06-19
2016-01-29
2023-08-03
181-184
TS
Paolo Magaudda
2015
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17268
181
University of Padova
2038-3460
2
en
184
Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds.), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, University of Illinois Press, 2015
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17268/16125
6
Book Reviews                                                              181
origin of life. This is unfortunate because of one of the objectives of the
Series “Collection 360”, which is to highlight that scientific questions are
also a matter of economical and political power. But this is just a trifle
compared to the many qualities of the book, most of all, the fact that it
raises urgent questions about how and why to promote and improve the
relationship between different sciences working on the same research top-
ic. These are timely questions because of the interdisciplinary character
several current issues addressed by the society: they concern all of us,
whether we are scientists or philosophers, and the lay man above all.


                                    ***


   Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds.)
Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures.
Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 292

Paolo Magaudda University of Padova
    !
    The collective book Signal Traffic, edited by North American scholars
Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, represents a noteworthy and stimulat-
ing effort to intersect the study of digital media with the STS-rooted ap-
proach of infrastructure studies. In this sense, the book enters a wider
space of convergence already under development during these last few
years. Indeed, recently we are assisting to the increasing interest in the
contamination between STS and a broad area involving media, communi-
cation and cultural studies. This has been the cases, for example, of the
book Media technologies, edited by Gillespie, Boczkowsky and Foot for
MIT Press in 2014 and of the workshop titled Roads Less Travelled. Ex-
ploring New Connections Between Media Research and STS, held at the
University of Siegen in February 2015 (see Sørensen and Schubert 2015).
Of course, this book adds a further significant contribution to this emerg-
ing space of convergence.
    Proceeding at the intersection between STS and media and cultural
studies, the aim of Signal Traffic is to enrich the study of digital media en-
vironment thinking to it in terms of “infrastructure”, thus considering
media primarily as “situated socio-technical systems that are designed and
configured to support the distribution of audiovisual signal traffic” (p. 4).
In their introduction, editors ask readers: “what can media studies gain
by adopting an infrastructural disposition?” and consequently the book
develops by considering several infrastructural dimensions in digital me-
dia technologies, including data centres, digital compression, Internet
protocols and environmental consequences of the media infrastructure
!
Book Reviews                                                 Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

nature and so on. Parks and Starosielski offer a comprehensive sketch of
how media infrastructures are conceptualized along the book chapters,
identifying six main features of media infrastructures that assume rele-
vance in the collection of essays presented: their scale, the relationality of
their nature, difference and unevenness in their appropriation, labour and
maintenance required to make them working, their relationship with nat-
ural resources and, lastly, the role of affects in their shaping.
     One of the fundamental dimensions emerging from the book is, quite
predictably, the role of materiality in the shaping and working of digital
media infrastructures. As it has been also recognized by the aforemen-
tioned Media Technologies, materiality of media constitutes one of the
most manifest levels on which STS and media studies have converged up
to now. After several decades marked by a marginal interest toward the
ways media technologies are materially embodies in society, communica-
tion and media scholars are finally increasingly recognizing this issue as
an essential part of the understanding of the media environment.
     The framework traced by the editors is obviously far from being an
all-inclusive mapping of relevant focal points in the study of media infra-
structures; nevertheless editors are able to offer a useful chart to navigate
the multiform universe of media infrastructures, giving functional signals
helpful to the readers to move in an orderly way in the traffic of digital
media infrastructures. Looking more carefully to these signals, many of
them are directly rooted in STS and since the introduction, it is easy to
recognize how the conceptualization adopted borrows heavily on STS,
not just on the works of scholars such as Star, Ruhleder and Bowker, but
also on other references, including ANT, Thomas Hughes’s history of
large technological systems and feminist science & technology studies. In
this sense, the book - and especially some of the chapters contained in the
volume – can be read as a genuine outcome of the STS field and especial-
ly of the area of infrastructure studies in STS. While there is no space
here to enter in the contents of each chapter, I can sum up saying that the
eleven chapters offer a set of mainly empirically-based perspectives on
different kinds of media infrastructures, including the global undersea
cable network, urban media infrastructures, data centres, the internet in
Zambia, e-waste, cellular phones in Israel, with multiple chapters under-
standably devoted to internet protocols.
     However, the attractiveness of the book lies not just on the adoption
of conceptual tools from STS and their application to an object tradition-
ally belonging to other intellectual fields, i.e. media and communication
studies. On the contrary, the richness of the book is located also in the
attempt to trace a wider intellectual matrix, enriched also by other influ-
ences that can undoubtedly supplement the mainstream STS perspective
on infrastructures. Indeed, the book put together other instances coming
from different intellectual domains that assume relevance in the overall
framework proposed by the volume. Clearly, several crucial inputs are
recognized as relevant in the field of media studies, as in the case of the
!
Book Reviews                                                              183
works by James Carey, Armand Mattelart, Harold Innis and Manuel Cas-
tells. In addition to these classical works in communication, the book
brings also light on less-renowned areas in media studies, for instance en-
vironmental media studies, media archaeology, platform studies and format
studies. By the way, it is rightly in format studies that we can trace back an
earlier efforts to mix together the field of media studies with a STS-
rooted perspective on infrastructures, i.e. Jonathan Sterne’s 2012 book on
the origin of the mp3 audio format, in which the author unfolds the infra-
structural nature of compressed digital formats. Thus, it is not by chance
that the opening chapter of the book after the introduction is by the same
Sterne, who presents here a development of his research on data com-
pression, extending his work toward a more general history of digital
compression, showing how the process of compression is a circular pro-
cess, which both adapts media contents to the infrastructure and shapes
this same infrastructure in accordance to the need of representation in
specific media sectors (p. 35).
     Besides these satellite fields in media studies, other influences add in-
terest to the book’s overall theoretical picture, including urban studies,
“maintenance and repair” and the “affective turn”. At this regard, it is
hard to resist to play the game of finding missing pieces in the puzzle, so I
will not resist to it and therefore give my own contribution, by picking up
two further influences that would sharpen even more the theoretical pan-
orama of the book. A first addition would be the tradition of social an-
thropology and ethnography of consumption, especially in the cases when
these areas approached the use of media in everyday life, for instance in
the case of the seminal Daniel Miller’s and Dan Slater’s (2000) research
on Internet in Trinidad; this will allow to stress eve more the way global
infrastructures emerge also from local and very contingent conditions.
Secondly, I see fitting very well in the book’s approach the perspective on
infrastructures in consumer studies, especially through the work of Eliza-
beth Shove and other scholars on utilities (Van Vliet et al. 2005) and on
home technologies (Shove 2002). While these works do not deal directly
with digital media, they can anyway offer a relevant add-on to the under-
standing of the infrastructural configuration of technologies and distrib-
uted services in everyday life, especially in connection to the issue, explic-
itly raised by Signal Traffic, of environmental sustainability of media infra-
structures.
     All things considered, there is no doubt that Signal Traffic offers a
stimulating contribution both for STS practitioners and scholars in media
and communication, adding a valuable voice to the evolving debate on
the study of digital media technologies, understood not just as material
and isolate phenomena, but as parts of an heterogeneous, wide-ranging
and multi-situated network of relationships.



!
Book Reviews                                                      Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

References
Bijsterveld, K. (2014) Format theory or revitalizing Science and Technology Studies,
        in “Metascience”, 23(3), 539-542.
Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) (2014) Media technologies:
        Essays on communication, materiality, and society, Cambridge, MA, MIT
        Press.
Miller, D., and Slater, D. (2000) The Internet: an ethnographic approach, Oxford,
        Berg.
Shove, E. (2003) Comfort, cleanliness and convenience: The social organization of
        normality, Oxford, Berg.
Sørensen, A. and Schubert, C. (2015) Roads Less Travelled. Exploring New Con-
        nections Between Media Research and STS, in “EASST Review”, 34(1).
Sterne, J. (2012) MP3: The meaning of a format, Durham, Duke University Press.
Van Vliet, B., Shove, E. and Chappells, H. (2005) Infrastructures of consumption:
        Environmental innovation in the utility industries, London, Earthscan.




                                       ***


    Miguel Sicart
Play Matters
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014, pp. 176

Giacomo Poderi University of Trento

    Play Matters belongs to the Thinking Playfully series of the MIT Press,
which is designed to provide readers with short, readable and argumenta-
tive books that combine depth with readability. The volume fits well into
this series as an agile, yet engaging and thought-provoking manuscript on
a topic, the one of play, that has never been so central in the academic
debate since the time of Huizinga's seminal work Homo Ludens (1938).
This is particularly evident in game studies and in those fields of cultural
studies or social sciences that recently started facing the need to confront
with breakthrough societal changes. On the one hand, pushed by the
game industry and by the growth of a widespread gaming/participatory
culture, video games became a dominant form of entertainment media;
on the other hand, the emergence of strong semantic entanglements and
cross-contaminations among different human domains blurred the very
meaning of play: (i) game-related elements started entering non-gaming
domains; and (ii) aspects which were typically disassociated from games,
started converging into that domain, as it is generally hinted by the emer-
gence of areas such as professional gaming, gamification, serious games or
!
