“Where the Internet Lives”

Abstract

This chapter examines how recent depictions of data-center visibility function both as a mode of claiming corporate territory and as an obfuscation of the less picturesque dimensions of cloud infrastructure. Analyzing media infrastructure industries, such as the companies that run cloud systems, presents particular challenges for researchers. The structural convergence and functional heterogeneity of media make it difficult to apply some of the tried and true concepts in media and communication studies, such as the distinction between public and private. Using the Swedish data center as an example, the chapter then deciphers the backend of Internet architecture and data-trafficking policies, and highlights the importance of a relational perspective in understanding data centers as dynamic infrastructure nodes.

Lasers, Mantraps And Alligators: Visualising Physical Security In Data Centre Tour Videos

“…As media and cultural studies take an "infrastructural turn", scholars have focused on data centres as critical internet infrastructures. A growing number of scholars have examined the representation of data centres (Holt and Vonderau, 2015;Taylor 2017;2019), their labour (Velkova, 2020), territoriality (Hu, 2015;Rossiter, 2017, for cables, see Starosielski, 2015, political economy (Mosco, 2015) and environmental costs and interactions (Cubitt et al, 2011;Peters, 2015;Hogan and Vonderau, 2019).…”

“…In addition to highlighting power reliability and cooling efficiency, the video tours spend significant time presenting physical security infrastructure. I argue that data centre security videos foreground physical security to make certain features "hypervisible" (Holt and Vonderau 2015). By emphasising physical security features, the promotional videos cultivate an image of sovereign territory guarded against external threats (Hu 2015).…”

Of dog kennels, magnets, and hard drives: Dealing with Big Data peripheries

“…The hard drive, and specifically its 3.5-inch incarnation, is spectacularly knowable, if only we learn where and how to know it. Through the rise of Critical Infrastructure Studies, we have come to know the data center as a dominant signpost of digital materiality (Hogan, 2015a, 2015b; Holt and Vonderau, 2015; Hu, 2015; Johnson, 2019a; Vonderau, 2019), but what of the hard drive—that crucial magnetic brick populating all those centers? A tremendous amount of material and labor must be mobilized before data centers can get on with the business of being data centers, and in order to understand the complex flows of these materials and labor, we must first understand the hard drive—where it comes from, how it’s made, and who makes it.…”

Jio sparks Disruption 2.0: infrastructural imaginaries and platform ecosystems in ‘Digital India’

“…9 The initiative also had a crowdsourcing component, where Airtel customers could register complaints about bad connectivity and insufficient number of cell antennas in their areas, and then the Airtel staff and management would try to establish new cell antenna sites with backing from the area's residents and the local municipal administrators. Several media infrastructure scholars note that media companies like to keep the working of infrastructures hidden (Holt and Vonderau, 2015;Parks, 2010), and yet what we see in Airtel's case is that telecom companies at times might want to showcase their infrastructures as a move toward openness. In several advertisements, Airtel officials are shown demonstrating to customers, the maps of cell towers and their signal strengths.…”