Undersea fiber-optic cables are critical infrastructures that support our global network society. They transport 99 percent of all transoceanic digital communications, including phone calls, text and e-mail messages, websites, digital images and video, and even some television (cumulatively, over thirty trillion bits per second as of 2010). 1 It is submarine systems, rather than satellites, that carry most of the Internet across the oceans. Cables drive international business: they facilitate the expansion of multinational corporations, enable the outsourcing of operations, and transmit the high-speed financial transactions that connect the world's economies. Stephen Malphrus, staff director at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, has stated that if the cable networks are disrupted, "the financial services sector does not 'grind to a halt,' rather it snaps to a halt." 2 As a result, the reliability of undersea cables has been deemed "absolutely essential" for the functioning of governments and the enforcement of national security. 3 Militaries use the cables to manage long-range weapons tests and remote battlefield operations. Undersea networks also make possible new distri
This introductory chapter provides an overview of signal traffic in the contemporary era of media globalization—an era characterized by contradictory global mediascapes and multiple media infrastructures. Signal traffic refers to the movement of electronic media across various parts of the planet. Today, broadcasting, cable, satellite, Internet, and mobile telephone systems are used simultaneously, and sometimes in coordinated ways, to route signal traffic to and from sites around the world. The content and form of contemporary media—whether television programs or online games—are shaped in relation to the properties and locations of these distribution systems. As a suggestive concept, then, signal traffic demarcates a critical shift away from the analysis of screened content alone and toward an understanding of how content moves through the world and how this movement affects content's form.
This article documents how thermal manipulation is critical to the transformation of the earth’s raw materials into media and to maintaining those materials as media. Through an examination of thermal practices, including mineral extraction, the use of air-conditioning in media manufacturing and preservation, and thermal infrared imaging, thermal control is shown to be essential to the conversion of geological matter into circulations of media on a mass scale. In each of these cases, cultural assumptions and imperatives—the drive toward purity, the development of standardization, and the demand for homogeneity across elements and media objects—organize temperature management. The thermocultures of media inflect its composition, movements, and temporalities and embed it within existing regimes of capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. The study of thermocultures offers an alternative to traditional infrastructural and geological analyses, one oriented less toward the excavation of elements from deep time and the depths of the earth and more toward the conditions in which geologic matter’s potentials are actualized as media. It also opens up a new set of genealogies for investigation, including the historical role of thermal management in the differentiation of gendered bodies.
This article surveys the history of environmental animation and charts the aesthetic possibilities it offers for environmental representation, in order to prompt a reconsideration of indexical media’s dominant role in environmental communication. Given animation’s formal capabilities, it has the potential to depict imperceptible, indeterminate and interactive environments. Distinct representational practices have emerged in animated environmental films: the visualization of environmental mutability, the representation of environmental interaction and the revelation of the environment as a construct. This article defines three periods of environmental animation: the 1960s to early 1970s, the late 1980s to early 1990s, and 2005 to the present, and analyses how these practices transformed during each cycle. Early short films pioneered the depiction of a mutable environment. In the second period, mutability became less significant, but feature films expanded the possible modes of environmental interaction. Most recently, films have begun to reflect on the environment as a visual construct.
Tourism provides over six percent of the world's gross domestic product. As a result, there have been many efforts to use technology to improve the tourist's experience via mobile tour guide systems. One key bottleneck in such location-based systems is content development; existing systems either provide trivial information at a global scale or present quality narratives but at an extremely local scale. The primary reason for this dichotomy is that, although good narrative content is more educationally effective (and more entertaining) than a stream of simple, disconnected facts, it is time-intensive and expensive to develop. However, the WikEar system uses narrative theory-informed data mining methodologies in an effort to produce high-quality narrative content for any location on Earth. It allows tourists to interact with these narratives using their camera-enabled cell phones and an innovative interface designed around a magic lens and paper map metaphor. In this paper, we describe a first evaluation of these narratives and the WikEar interface, which reported promising, but not conclusive, results. We also present ideas for future work that will use this feedback to improve the narratives.
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