Mass Media and Imperialism

Mirrlees, Tanner

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29901-9_122

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“…Today, as societies worldwide shift slowly to “renewable” forms of energy and the emerging infrastructural and technological systems these entail—including digitally enabled energy technologies like smart domestic electricity and responsive grids (see Levenda et al, 2015; Velkova et al, 2022)—new personal responsibilities arise to reduce carbon emissions and limit individual climate impacts, presenting new formations of existing inequalities that are intensified through digital data relations. These individualized assumptions can be seen in many global north-centered climate and environmental discourses, and impacts of Internet usage—particularly the energy use of individual digital practices like streaming and cloud storage in comparison to the astronomical use of multinational data centers—has been a pertinent recent example of this scalar imbalance (see Marks and Przedpełski, 2021). 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).…”

Section: Infrastructure Out Of Balancementioning

confidence: 99%

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

Brodie

2023

Big Data & Society

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In this article, I take the case of data centers as a powerful tool and infrastructure of multinational digital capitalism, analyzing the ways in which understanding these and other data infrastructures through their energy frameworks allows us to theorize the implications of planetary environmental impacts of digital data for contemporary subjects beyond individual data technologies themselves. This is especially true in data centers’ function as energy vacuums and in their carbon and extractive footprints and other environmental externalities. I demonstrate that data centers organize an assemblage of environmental relations whose operations reproduce uneven systems of capitalism enacted through energy and environmental politics. While this article is by no means comprehensive, and by necessity must be selective in its engagement with key texts in a number of overlapping fields, it broadly draws from media studies, geographical, and sociological approaches to data infrastructures to unravel the entanglements of digital systems and the environment. Data centers and their energy connections represent multivalent sites and indications into the global supply chain of data infrastructure, and their extractive dynamic as networked infrastructure fundamentally changes how we need to see their impacts and the impacts of datafication more broadly.

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Section: Infrastructure Out Of Balancementioning

confidence: 99%

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

Brodie

2023

Big Data & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Mass Media and Imperialism

Cited by 1 publication

References 23 publications

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

Data infrastructure studies on an unequal planet

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