This week, we shift our attention from street food and food delivery to media infrastructure. I think this week’s reading resonates with McLuhan and Postman’s theory of media ecology. It would be insufficient for media studies to merely research the content without investigating the technological form and the material basis. In many cases, the media’s materiality plays n decisive role in how people recognize the world. In Signal Traffic, the author discusses the importance of thinking about the material base of our daily use of media and communication. As the author puts, “our current mediascapes would not exist without our current media infrastructures.” The establishment of media infrastructures such as cable, satellite, and the Internet is affected by complex economic motives and fraught with power relationships. A vast amount of labor and natural resources is needed to maintain it. Though invisible most of the time, the material base of the media has a great impact on human society from various perspectives. For instance, infrastructures could materially reconstruct people’s sense of temporality by altering the immediacy of information transmission. It also redefines the power structure by considering the geopolitics of infrastructures and the risk of content being surveilled or censored. In China, all telecommunications companies are owned by the state to ensure the communication signal’s stability and to exert control and senatorship people’s daily communication. What is more, the privilege brought by the distribution of infrastructures also contributes to the unevenness on a global scale.
（A person fixing the undersea cable）
One interesting example I want to discuss is the cloud service that is widely used by people now. Big technology companies like Google created the cloud service to provide people with online storage spaces. In China, Baidu also has a similar service named Baidu cloud, and most of the people under 50 around me are familiar with such service. One of the fundamental functions of the cloud is, of course, storing our personal files. However, in China, the cloud service also contributes to generating a huge piracy market in which people exchange audiovisual products. By sharing private links, one could share the file stored in his/her cloud to others. Some people take advantage of this function and sell pirated copies online, which makes it harder and harder for big streaming platforms to protect their copyrighted content. The build of the mobile network and the popularization of the Internet helps the distributors to disseminate audiovisual products on the Internet at a lower cost. However, the circulation of the pirated material goes against such purpose and undermines the distributors’ efforts. From this case, I think it is reasonable to argue that although there are certain logics built in the construction of the media infrastructure that would strengthen certain political and economic power relations, the users could still take an oppositional position to use in a way against its constructer’s will, and thus emphasizes the human agent’s intentions when using media technology.
The article here provides more information about the piracy issue of Chinese cloud service.
The article here provides more information about the piracy issue of Chinese cloud service.
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