Farm Fresh Broadband

Abstract

The Information Policy Series publishes research on and analysis of significant problems in the field of information policy, including decisions and practices that enable or constrain information, communication, and culture irrespective of the legal siloes in which they have traditionally been located as well as state-law-society interactions. Defining information policy as all laws, regulations, and decision-making principles that affect any form of information creation, processing, flows, and use, the series includes attention to the formal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities of government; the formal and informal decisions, decision-making processes, and entities of private and public sector agents capable of constitutive effects on the nature of society; and the cultural habits and predispositions of governmentality that support and sustain government and governance. The parametric functions of information policy at the boundaries of social, informational, and technological systems are of global importance because they provide the context for all communications, interactions, and social processes.x Contents

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

“…Data infrastructure of course entails an assemblage of infrastructural sites and networks including fiber optic cables, content distribution networks, and telecoms masts as well as data centers to function (see Parks and Starosielski, 2015). The geographical imbalances of digital data infrastructure thus also involve discussing who has and who controls access to broadband and bandwidth, especially in rural and marginalized communities (see Ali, 2021;Duarte, 2017;Randell-Moon and Hynes, 2022). You can stand on a beach in rural Mayo, in Ireland, meters from a transatlantic fiber optic cable owned by a multinational tech consortium-and still have no basic cell phone service.…”

Social, seamless, just, and open: Advancing mobile communication research

“…Hence, many authors in this issue highlight that the taken for grantedness of mobile communication must be understood as a privilege. As mentioned previously, the future of mobile communication research should boldly embrace issues of equity and access to wireless connectivity including access to high-speed broadband service as a public utility (Ali, 2021).…”

Communication research and teaching: the Australian Communication Association at 40 years

“…That means I tend to gravitate to the work of communication scholars who cross similar conceptual boundaries through empirical work. This includes authors like Christopher Ali in the US, who explores the intersections between media localism, broadband policy and rural communication practices (Ali, 2017(Ali, , 2018(Ali, , 2021, and research on hyperlocal media environments by people like David Harte and Andy Williams in the UK (Harte et al, 2018). It has also meant that I rely on strong mentors and collaborators to help maintain my research track in communications.…”