Abstract
The Undersea Network is a story of nature, cables, and geopolitics. It provides a rare view inside the networks that organize large-scale communication capacities, from the telegraph to Internet. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Nicole Starosielski takes the reader into a range of different locales where communication networks are installed, maintained, represented, and debated – cable stations, cable landing sites, islands, engineers’ meetings, marine science labs, among others – and into their representation in media and pop culture. She moves beyond a simple hagiography of cable networks to instead present them through the frictions that emerge at each of these places.
At the center of Starosielski’s book are sets of tensions that are each used as heuristic devices. The first and most obvious tension is between visibility and invisibility. Her ethnography is an in-depth study to uncover the materiality, politics, and representations of cable networks that are under the water or in remote locations. She introduces her investigation with this first tension to quickly add a second one, between the topology and the topography of the network. While the former emphasizes the abstract nature of the network as a set of nodes and links, the latter grounds the network into the contingencies of the world. Creating and maintaining undersea cables require the management of different ecologies and local environments, each with specific difficulties. The third tension presented is between insulation and interconnection. In the most literal sense, the materiality of the cables has to insulate the signal from the water to reach its destination; at a more abstract level, maintaining the network of cables requires the creation of ‘internal breaks’ in the local politics and industries, environmental contingencies, or competing companies. But insulation comes with interconnection to the environment, as illustrated by the reliance on local knowledge to maintain the cable, or negotiation with local populations and industries.
Starosielski’s book is an important contribution to the field of media infrastructure studies. More precisely, the investigation of how cable networks organize communication is representative of the dialogue between infrastructure studies scholars and media and communications studies scholars. As Sandvig (2013) puts it, the former perspective, championed through the work of Bowker and Star (1999), emphasizes the relational nature of communication systems, while the latter highlights what is material within culture and communication practices. The work of Starosielski fits perfectly into this double articulation. She manages to reveal what is social in cable networks: for example, how the opening of a new line or the maintenance of existing networks requires constant adjustment to local politics and knowledge. And yet, this book also shows how everyday use of communication technologies is far from virtual, but instead is inherently material and emerge through an adaptation to the natural environment.
With this theoretical positioning and the above-mentioned frictions in place, what do we learn from this remarkable ‘infrastructural inversion’? (Bowker and Star, 1999). Among many things, and perhaps unsurprisingly but well narrated, is that the life of cables is strongly related to politics and geopolitics. This is illustrated by the case of California, where the elaborate animals protection laws (e.g. for the protection of snails and frogs) are a constant source of frustrations for cable companies. Another example is given from Fiji and demonstrates how political instability acts as a disincentive for cable companies to invest and extend their network there. Relatedly, cable networks are a central piece in geopolitics. If the link between infrastructure and colonialism has already been widely documented elsewhere (e.g. see Rossiter, 2016, for telegraph networks), ethnography and archival research shows here how cable stations have constituted pockets of colonialism, reproducing what Starosielski calls a ‘microcosm of empire’ abroad, both self-sufficient and insular (p. 99). After the period of decolonization, stations remained owned and operated by foreign countries while being in the territory of former colonies, extending this geopolitical tension in a new configuration.
Starosielski also shows how discourse plays an important role in the life of the undersea networks. As creating a cultural narrative about undersea cables is now a sine qua non with the existence of informed publics, Starosielski analyzes the presence of the undersea network in popular culture and various media products to extract a typology of the various associated infrastructure imaginary (Parks, 2015), between connection, disruption, nodes, and transmission.
Starosielski also explores beyond the cable, suggesting that it is perhaps the cable stations that are the key points for understanding the reliance of cable operators on local knowledge about the environment. The everyday maintenance of cable is something that is developed through practice and relies extensively on situated knowledge that workers acquire and share with each other. Additionally, the creation of an undersea network has required, since the beginning, specific knowledge about the undersea context, through deep-sea data collection by sensing. More precisely, reliance on mapping and other monitoring technologies has led to the creation of knowledge on the undersea world and cable, which was passed from the military to the scientists to eventually the telecommunication companies.
Finally, Starosielski contrasts the contingent nature of cable with their crucial importance in sustaining Internet access around the world. Despite their importance to contemporary communication, cables are inherently fragile achievements, and the book offers numerous illustrations from how a simple domestic accident can harm the Internet connectivity of a whole country, to how cable companies have long battled to reduce the damage on the infrastructure against local industries, such as trawling.
This book is original in three aspects. First, it comes from the study of objects. If many cultural histories of the Internet have already been written (see Abbate, 1999; Edwards, 1996), this book is the first comprehensive and ethnographic investigation focusing on undersea cable networks. Second, it makes a strong case for the analysis of the ecological dimension of media. By showing that maintaining the signal traffic necessitates a series of carefully managed environments, it also suggests that we cannot understand the current state of information infrastructures without acknowledging the tension between the materiality of the network and its environment. Finally, it provides a new methodological approach to the study of media infrastructure. The book presents the method of network archeology, which foregrounds the history and the materiality of the network to understand its current shape and uses. And while this methodology is not as developed in this text as in some of Starosielski’s other articles, it offers a promising bridge between media studies and infrastructure studies. To summarize, this book constitutes a deeply original study of the Internet and illustrates the strength of investigating communication infrastructures through their material and ecological dimensions.