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Infrastructure is generally perceived as a system of substrates like railroad lines, pipes and wires, all images of which are concrete and visible. But when it comes to the academic research, we can also see infrastructure as a part of human organization, the physical network through which goods, waste, ideas, power and people are trafficked-which definition seems to be more abstract. In The Ethnography of Infrastructure, the author pointed out several properties of the infrastructure: embeddedness, transparency, reach, links with conventions of practice, embodiment of standards, built on an installed base, becomes visible upon breakdown, and fixed in modular increments. Moreover, it provides a new perspective to combine observation, historical research, systematic analysis and data collection in studying the anthropologic project and the infrastructure. And the Worm Community Study mentioned in the article could be a great example for the opinion in the above discussion: changing the traditional way to “a linked set of interviews with potential users and ethnographies” (pp. 382) enables the improvement of efficiency.

In my opinion, the most interesting and meaningful feature of infrastructure study is systematic thinking. As we all know, the infrastructure is always built on a series of small, technologically-based parts, then these parts converge into a network to form a large-scale structure. In modern society, advanced technological systems such as telecommunications systems have reconfigured urban spaces to bundle water, energy, people, and streets into a series of infrastructure networks, thus bringing convenience to urban life for residents. Therefore, we need to look at “modernity” from a comprehensive perspective, as the city we live in is a system composed of tiny elements on different levels.

 

Infrastructure of modern city

We could apply such knowledge of infrastructure to the research of the topic about the modern city and mobile food delivery. Both food stalls and delivery man can be regarded as a part of the modern city’s infrastructure. With the fast development of online platforms such as Meituan and Eleme, the number of delivery man in cities of China has reached several million. Though it seems to be a labor-intensive industry, food delivery industry is actually based on the big data and high technologies including cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and so on. The instant delivery platform develops an intelligent scheduling system by using machine learning, operations optimization, scheduling simulation and other technologies, which could track the direction and current position of the delivery man in real time. Combining the real-time situation, the platform is able to distribute and optimize orders in the most efficient way calculated by the system. Therefore, in addition to creating jobs and promoting the digital economy, food delivery system has become a part of urban life’s new infrastructure and the symbol of the upgrading transformation of modernization. There’s also a related report that reflects the growing number of delivery man, the boom of the mobile food industry, and their importance in the modern city. (Read more here)

Big Data and Modern mass media

Wenjun Fang (wf646)

The changes brought by big data have appeared in all areas, such as the media. No matter the traditional media or social media, they all had more connections with the big data. In the 2019 China International Big Data Industry Expo, editor Xu from the People’s Daily used a practical example to illustrate how the traditional newspaper connects with the big data. “One of our journalists,” he said, “used the People’s Daily database to write her article ‘Who are the Chinese people’s old friends.’ She used relevant word frequencies to sort out the international friends who have been called ‘old friends’ since the founding of New China, and analyze the changes in the global environment as well as the adjustment of foreign policy.” Using data to capture new facts and discover connections between different news pieces became a new trend.

On the other hand, big data also helps on the news’s immediacy and improve news production efficiency. With the help of artificial intelligence, readers are able to ‘listen’ to the newspaper rather than read it. The product named Guoguo is a little robot that able to read newspapers in seven different languages. Moreover, journalists can also use this product to transfer a one to two-hour interview with a manuscript in five minutes. What supported behind is the database containing a huge number of news articles that were released before, so the little robot knows the structure and a journalist. The journalists then have more time to think, which improves the new production efficiency and quality. At the same time, Guoguo can also help the journalist to analyze a news event faster and offer more numbers to support it.

For users and readers, big data can help the platform better understand their interests and recommend more personalized content. Though this is still a controversial topic today, we cannot deny that personalized recommendation makes more people enjoy reading since reading something interesting. People who disagree with the personalized recommendation technique believe that such a system will narrow a person’s interest. People will lose the chance to learn about the world in another way and finally formed information cocoons. They never communicate with other communities or people who are having different interests from them. However, I believe that big data or personalized recommendation is the only reason for the formation of information cocoons. People will only take the initiative to contact or choose to believe in content that conforms to their previous ideas in most cases. People will ignore the part that they are not interested in a book and has no connection with the algorithm. It is necessary to be careful when using new technology, but we should also believe that new communication technologies are making better, not worse.

Infrastructure is not solely associated with hardware, actually it never was. All infrastructures are in fact socio-technical in nature. It was like a net on which every elements is co-working and exchanging with each other. It was a dynamic net that every knot of the net is in the flow. This flow is a man-made process which continuously and collaboratively produce and distribute essential goods and service.   

 

The infrastructure is an invisible background of modernity. Some scholars argued that this gigantic system both enable and constrain human beings. The author had the automobile/ road infrastructure as an example, but here,  I want to develop further this idea. I would like to abstract some ideas from Paul’s article, in which he said that computation begin to manifest itself as an aspect of everyday environment. And he argues that this transformation is move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical one. He actually focus on the embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology here, but I think this “virtual-physical” transformation can be applied to other things, such as the transformation of infrastructure.

 

Before technology revolution and the popularization of internet, infrastructure may mostly refers to those giant project undertook by the government. However, with internet becoming part of our life, this meaning of infrastructure is widely expanded. Since this word ultimately describe a flow of essential goods, the internet came on the stage which provides people with a platform to do economic, social and historical exchange with each other, no matter the user of it is an individual, an organization or a state. Zoom in the contemporary world, where computation and algorithms are almost the dominate power of our society, which lead to a new situation that the infrastructure is focusing more on silicon and electronic cables.

 

Back to the initial meaning of infrastructure, which often refers to important, widely shared, human-constructed resources. And according to the dictionary, it refers to the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society. In this sense, mobile food delivery system, which built on computation and big data and relied on the function of internet and electricity, is growing to be the new kind of infrastructure, especially during the pandemic. When the city is hit by the pandemic, the delivery guy acts as a ferryman to keep the city running. They connected quarantined businesses and consumers, the online and offline. They are part of the infrastructure, the delivery infrastructure. This inorganic system finally meet with organic lives. Infrastructure is not only associated with concrete, cement or silicon, but also the flesh and blood. As Paul mentioned in his article that certain infrastructure could be considered to be a force or time amplifier, the delivery system was more like a speed and connection amplifier.

 

However, as an infrastructure, it surely has its constrains. We can see that in mega city like Shanghai, the consumption of delivery food is awfully high, which means most people in the city rely on the delivery system. But if a restaurant does not register on the delivery platform, the business and income it has will decline, to some extent. It is not about business and income only. It is about exposure on the internet, which has a profound influence on its business. To costumers, we are blind and disabled without this food delivery system. We can see the sales volume and comments on this food store to decide if we are going to order this. The delivery system facilitate us in some way, but it also give us constrains.

Infrastructure is essentially important in our society. It has a great power to bring together different people, objects, and spaces into interaction, and “allow the possibility of exchange over space”. They are “system of substrates” that underlies the built phenomenal world and is “invisible” to most of us in most of the time. “We often see computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not pipes and sewers”, the infrastructure has a peculiar ontology that they are “things”, and at the same time, they are also “the relation between things”.

Recently, me and my partner explored the food cabinets in Shanghai, a newly-emerged food delivery system which we believe also functions as a part of the culinary infrastructure. Through the web system, the food cabinet automatically collect the information of the order, the location of the customer, and the delivery progress of the deliverymen. It emancipates the deliverymen by creating a new relation inside the food delivery system – the relationship between the machine and the customers replaces the relationship between the deliverymen and the customers. In this way, it allows more possibilities of exchanging the take-out over space, and brings more profit to the delivery system.

Quoting from Brian Larkin, the poetics of infrastructure also “points to the sense of desire and possibility”, and what Benjamin would term “the collective fantasy of society”. The roads and railways are not just technical and commuting objects, but also things that encode the dreams of individuals and societies and made the fantastic “economically real”. So does the food cabinet. People always have a desire about “speed” when they ordered a delivery food from the Elema or Meituan app. They could allow themselves one hour to finish the lunch if they go outside, but they could not stand even five more minutes if the take-out do not deliver to them in 30 minutes. The food cabinet however, precisely grasps the collective desire about “speed” and makes it more time-saving to send every delivery food.

Food Cabinet of Meituan

In The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, Larkin states that “many infrastructures are copies”, they are funded and constructed everywhere in the cities and nations. The repeating of the infrastructural projects creates the modernity of a place to some extent. Comparing to numerous visually impactful restaurants in culinary infrastructure, food cabinet has a lower sense of visual appreciation, but a stronger advantage of repeating itself and participating in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of “what it means to be modern”. The second locker imitates the look of the first locker. The second batch imitate the first batch of cabinets. The delivery infrastructure spread from the backend data, to the yellow-colored or blue-colored workwear flashing across the street, and eventually, to the similar-appearance food cabinets. The terminal of the delivery infrastructure endows it with a kind of industrial aesthetics which visualize the delivery technology. The huge, cube-like food-keeping machines may not able to “investigate waves of societal progress”, but they indeed qualified as “mechanisms to control time”.

“This is Dragonfly. Dragonfly has 28,000 eyes, blinking 40,000 times per second.” 

– A robotic AI voice-over (Dragonfly Eyes, 2017)

Dragonfly Eyes is an experimental feature film directed by Xu Bing, one of China’s most esteemed contemporary artists. In the film, Xu uses fragments of reality and recycles a found visual language to tell a fictional story. Without a cameraperson or an “actor”– rather, it was created solely by downloading more than 10,000 hours of publicly accessible video surveillance footage, many from Chinese live-streaming sites. Then the footage were compiled, edited, and dubbed into a relatively coherent storyline with a narrative of stranger sociality. The 81-minutes film is believed to be the first one to combine the technologies of over 245 million global surveillance cameras and cloud computing, turning out to become a technological spectacle itself. 

The name “Dragonfly Eyes” is a metaphor of the saturated surveilling cameras, just like a compound eye with a cavalier perspective. It is well known that surveillance capacities can be massively augmented by information technology, which resonates with the point that infrastructures can act as force amplifiers for the human bodies. For China’s case, Skynet tracks more than twenty million surveillance cameras; it can identify a person in seconds and is used to provide real-time security updates; Sharpe Eyes, a nationwide system, connects private and commercial cameras to a centralized database. The public surveillance cameras, along other high-tech digital tools to record, track, monitor, and influence the behavior of 1.4 billion individuals, such as GPS monitoring, advanced facial recognition software, and artificial intelligence, constitute an extensive surveillance media infrastructure in the post-socialist China, a reality of our new virtual information transparence. 

Stripped of its unconventional form of artistic representation, Dragonfly Eyes is a classic romance story about self-identification in essence. To be more specific, the story illustrates a kind of visible absence, and anonymity under the panoptic power. In the first half, we follow the composite “protagonist,” Qing Ting (which means exactly “dragonfly” in Mandarin), as she leaves the Buddhist monastery where she’s been grown up from a child to take up a series of low-paying jobs in the city as a “grassroot”. She first finds work at a dairy farm, where she is spotted by Ke Fan, the “male savior”, on the closed-circuit system that monitors its employees. After she’s fired from the dairy farm, Qing Ting takes a job at a dry-cleaning business and, later, at a restaurant. Then the turning point of her life comes: one day on the way home from work, she passes by a plastic surgery clinic and gets offered a special discount. Having been suffering from adversity and instilled with the common idea that physical beauty is crucial especially for women in today’s society, Qing Ting takes a chance to get the plastic surgery as an attempt to gain social mobility.

Screen Stills of Dragonfly Eyes

Paradoxically, we don’t really know what Qing Ting looks like in the first place, not to mention who she has become after she changes her face. Therefore, the second act of the film is narrated by Ke Fan, who holds the same uncertainty of Qing Ting’s whereabouts as he has been in jail for several years. The story veers toward absurdist parable. After investigation, Ke Fan is convinced that surgery has turned Qing Ting into Xiao Xiao, a popular online host. Because of her ridicule of another celebrity’s looks in a live broadcast, Xiao Xiao becomes the target of a toxic online hate campaign that pushes her offline and, it seems, to suicide. Here Xu reveals the absurd reversal of public emotion that feels sorry for the scandalized girl’s falling with a presumption of her death, which as well is often the case in real life. 

Then the story comes back to the point of surveillance when the police are looking for as a missing person. The fact is that they cannot even identify Xiao Xiao for there are so many similar “plastic faces”. “That Xiao Xiao is turning up everywhere,” one police officer says. “If we can’t tell them apart, what chance do surveillance cameras have?” Confronted with the new reality that appearance is no more fixed, the camera-eye shows its very limit for reliance on visibility. It is this epidemic of virality that finally overwhelms the state’s surveillance apparatus and fundamentally challenges the notion of “epidermalization.” 

The weird strategy of resistance presented in the film reminds me of the five lessons in invisibility Hito Steyerl offers in her short video work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File (2013). Advanced face-lifting technology may be another means of “seeping out” to envision in such an age of over-visibility. By changing appearance and resembling each other in reference of a standard model, body becomes a replicable iconic symbol. In other word, images use our body as a visual medium in the simulacra process. It is a reiteration of the current prevailing phenomenon, that new technologies of vision have introduced a certain abstraction in our visual experience, as we no longer are able to control the relation existing between an image and its model. Thus individuality is erased for identification under the visual surveillance system. 

Screenshot of How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File

From a policing point of view, no matter the digital camera eyes are “panoptic” or not, the illusion of omniscience is almost as effective as the real thing for its imperceptible and uncertain characteristics: You don’t need to watch everyone if you can get everyone to behave as though they are being watched. However, actually Chinese citizens’ relationship to surveillance is not totally passive and repressed by the central state. Xu contended in an interview with WSJ: “Our understanding of surveillance for the most part is control, management, and supervision… But now it’s expanded from the government to everyone.” The government’s digital infrastructure is merged with social media, residential cameras, and commercial surveillance systems to create and disseminate surveillance data as a social collusion, a consensually-based control, and a normalized discipline. 

For citizens, on the one hand, they embrace the technological prosthesis and entertain to surrender our privacy in order to tap into social networks, consumer convenience, and a sense of security; on the other hand, they are burdened with fears and anxieties about electronic surveillance. The expository habits not only make us vulnerable to punishment but also shape new pleasures, identities, and desires. In terms of the citizen-generated data, “prosumers” consume surveillance data they produce and produce new content while consuming those data in and through the digital mediascape. Therefore, the infrastructures of electronic surveillance does have panoptic potentiality, but it is less like a dichotomy of centralized or decentralized power, than a complicated in-between status. 

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.