Øyvind Vågnes (ØV): Ten years ago, you contributed a piece to a portfolio in Television & New Media (2009a) entitled ‘My Media Studies’, where you suggested that the intersection of television and new media provided ‘an opportunity for us to rethink what television is and could be, and as well what the study of television is and could be.’ We could imagine TV, you wrote, ‘not only as a form of commercial entertainment but as a set of technologies of seeing/knowing from a distance’, and thus ‘implicit in fields as diverse as geography, astronomy, and archaeology’. Have you seen a shift in the way we think about what television is and how we might envision it? And what would a piece titled ‘My Media Studies’ look like for you today, if you were to write it and look into the near and more distant future?
Lisa Parks (LP): What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is the emergence of new metaphors for television, whether video streaming, connected viewing, or flexible micro-casting. These concepts try to account for television’s industrial and technological transformations in the digital era. Thus, in addition to continuing to think about television as a set of potentials to see and know from a distance, there is also an urgent need among scholars to consider new models and forms of ‘television’ emerging from Silicon Valley entities, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Twitch. What aspects of entertainment television will persist? Given the success of these new media giants, will ‘television’ gradually be absorbed into a broader rubric of streamed online content that includes films and games as well? The current moment underscores the need to think both about television’s historical structures as well as to remain open to new critical conceptualizations and sites of analysis (examples of important work in this regard include Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanson’s book Connected Viewing, 2013, and TL Taylor’s Watch Me Play, 2018). So, instead of thinking narrowly about television, we need to be thinking about it as live streaming via the internet and as video genomes and machine learning algorithms used by Netflix, Amazon and other providers as they organize digital content on servers on the back end, and market and distribute it to users on the front end.
Information about such processes is very hard to access because it’s protected by intellectual property laws and non-disclosure agreements. So, it’s challenging to know exactly what Silicon Valley ‘television’ systems look like on the back end. Yet these issues have always been a challenge for TV scholars – the Big 3 networks were also protective of information about their internal operations. Suffice it to say, I think we need to continue to be flexible and agile, intellectually, with the way we think about what ‘television’ is. Television also looks very different when we’re thinking about diverse international contexts. For instance, in African countries such as Zambia or Tanzania, most citizens lack electrical grid access and do not have funds for high speed internet, yet have innovated ways of producing and distributing locally made content in conditions of economic scarcity (Parks, 2016a).
Asbjørn Grønstad (AG): In the same interview, you used the term ‘televisual epistemologies’.
LP: I think when I invoked televisual epistemologies, I was thinking about dialectics of distance and proximity, and ways of seeing and knowing from afar that are associated with television technologies or disciplines that aspire to a kind of diachronic omniscience. One could think about television in terms of industrial formations, such as programming or genres that come out of an entertainment complex. But it is also possible to think about televisual epistemologies in relation to other disciplines, like geography, astronomy and archeology that are premised upon the capacity to see and know from a distance and through time. Beyond this, I think that televisual epistemologies continue to transform and remain relevant via the smart phone, which maps, monitors, manages and displays users’ movements and activities through time/space. Smart phones can also download and stream content and in the process participate in new modes of television distribution. The point, I guess, is that televisual epistemologies are not fixed and lodged within a commercial entertainment culture, but also can be activated across different disciplines, media, or platforms. My interest in discussing televisual epistemologies involved a desire for playfulness, experimentation and pushback against the tendency to overdetermine or reduce television given its deep entrenchment in commercial regimes.
While it is important to keep diverse conceptualizations of television out there, I also think that we are in a cycle of really compelling entertainment TV. We are in a situation where there is so much to watch, and not enough time to watch it all. And so the question of temporality becomes even more urgent in TV studies right now. The output of TV industries has seemingly exceeded human capacity to consume it. Circling back to a topic I brought up earlier, this is also why TV scholars need to learn about and engage with machine learning tools, neural networks and AI. How are these computer systems watching television? What kind of reports or ‘interpretations’ are they generating? What can be learned from the way computers ‘watch’ TV? Only high-speed computers, it seems, have the capacity to process and organize the massive database of TV content that exists on the planet. Given this, critical dispositions toward television will likely shift again and another wave of digital TV studies focused on machine learning and AI tools may emerge.
AG: How does the concept of televisual epistemologies apply to the narrative and aesthetic aspects of television?
LP: I’m not sure it does. Scholars have adopted or inherited certain generic categories from film and radio industries that were rolled over into television. And of course, historically, the television industry has created its own genres as well. Television scholars have spent the past several decades creating a very rich critical vocabulary for television narrative and aesthetics, and much of that process was led by feminist television scholars who also built scholarly organizations for researching and studying television via the Console-ing Passions conferences and book series. Television content shapes the way that people come to know the world in one way or another, whether via news, talk shows, or dramatic series. And people’s understanding of and capacity to deal with the world are often shaped by the stories, settings and characters on television. Even shows or characters we cannot stand or that we love to hate provide necessary frictions in this regard. So television functions as a kind of macro-level filter for human processing of the world, and we cannot ignore that. It is interesting to note how scholars of the digital often leapfrogged TV when the internet first emerged, but now the internet is becoming more like television in the sense of increasing privatization, proliferating content, ubiquitous advertising and refined direct marketing. As online streaming or video-on-demand become more pervasive and normalized, narrative and aesthetics of television will mutate and get reconfigured, but they will not totally disappear. I think it is up to media scholars to articulate the mutations and reconfigurations of television, and I’m sure you two are involved in doing that as well.
AG: Is it the case that television narratives have been cinematized to some extent? In 2017, Sight & Sound pretty controversially listed the television series Twin Peaks: The Return as the second or third best movie of the year.
LP: Sometimes scholars like to make those claims, suggesting that when TV is very ‘high-quality’, it becomes more cinematic. But I like to hold out the possibility that television can be its own best thing too, without being positioned within a cinephiliac imaginary. There are all kinds of shows, like Sharp Objects, Atlanta, Empire, and The Handmaid’s Tale that are making incisive, political commentaries, and some are very ‘cinematic’. But they are also television series. And I think that those of us who have studied television for a long time are kind of gratified when we see quality shows that are very successful industrially and aesthetically, and also have social and political impact as well.
AG: Despite the high quality of many American television shows, though, is there not still a kind of homogeneity to the formal and stylistic narrative aspects of all of these shows compared to cinema? For me, film seems to be more formally varied, almost at any given moment in history. One would perhaps expect a medium in such rapid development as television to have produced more variety in terms of the formal aesthetic structures of the shows.
LP: Yes, there is definitely a certain amount of predictability to television formats. Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf edited a great book on this topic called Global Television Formats (2013). Particularly when there is a successful formula, networks and producers attempt to emulate it, and extract maximum value from it. If you watch television broadly, and not just the high ‘quality’ hits, there is a huge amount of variety in terms of structure, form and aesthetics. I am interested in the broad spectrum of what television is, and what it could become. But I also really love film. As a graduate student, I took classes with David Bordwell, who is a formalist and a narratologist, but I focused my studies primarily on television and took seminars with John Fiske, Julie D’Acci and Michele Hilmes. I like to learn and think across media, and try to avoid replicating the taste and class hierarchies that are often used to distinguish them. It’s important to understand film and television in their specificity, but to also explore them relationally. I try to teach my students to do that as well so that we do not become fetishists of certain media forms.
ØV: Has there been a shift toward a new materiality in current media research? Intriguingly, in writing about satellites as ‘obscure objects’, you depart from the notion of an object-oriented disciplinary approach (‘satellite studies’, like cinema, radio, or television studies), but rather suggest that the satellite could be treated as part of an integrated history of media, as a dispositif (in the journal Mediascape, Parks, 2009b). What would the implications of this be for future scholarship in media studies, or indeed for visual culture studies?
LP: This question builds on what we were just discussing, and the need for scholars of media studies to understand the specific and integrated histories of film, radio, television, digital media. They are integrated from an industrial perspective and in terms of narrative structure and genre as well. I have long thought that as media scholars we do not have to simply inherit the concepts and terms of the industry; it is also possible to be conceptual, experimental and creative with regard to the ways we think about and critically engage with the output of the media industries or state-run media institutions. It’s incumbent upon scholars and students to be inventive with their conceptualization processes so that we don’t idly accept, reproduce, and reify the capitalist brand-names and logics of the media industries. When I discuss a media object like a satellite, I try to think analytically and conceptually about what it is doing in terms of the globalization of media culture, and what its material impacts might be. In some work, I have tried to engage with phenomenological approaches. So, even though I have inherited a history of industrial logics or narrative and aesthetic terms from our field, I also rely on my own senses as a foundation from which to think and critique. This comes out of a post-structuralist, feminist, science and technology studies sensibility that involves recognizing embodied positionality as a site from which to theorize and account for what one is perceiving and encountering within a system of power. It involves trying to make power relations intelligible and palpable so that they can be subject to response.
ØV: Do you think that some of the challenges with doing that kind of work involve pragmatic questions, questions that have to do with departments and disciplines?
LP: I think our institutions put us in silos and compartments that are sensible for administrators. If you are a scholar who tries to meaningfully engage with objects of study that are relevant to multiple disciplines, and who works to create a language for understanding those objects across them, it can be challenging to satisfy standards within those disciplines. Since media studies is a relatively new discipline and since it is engaged with entertainment industries (as opposed to something like data sciences), it is difficult for some administrators to comprehend or assign value to them because of elite taste hierarchies, which have historically been inscribed within academic institutions. When I was at UC Santa Barbara, we had a Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts who understood and supported our emergent discipline. Because of this, we felt we had ‘standing’ in our institution and could take more intellectual risks and were in dialogue with scholars in political science, geography, history and computer science, for example. I value scholars who do deep specialization in a field, as much as I value those who meander beyond the boundaries of that field. I think we need both.
After being a media scholar in academic institutions for more than 20 years, I do feel that we, film and media scholars, could be better ambassadors for our field and work to make it more legible to administrators who may be open-minded but have no idea what we really study or teach. Too often we are so overburdened with workloads and so immersed in what we are doing that we do not have the time to reflect upon and communicate the significance of our research and teaching within the institution and to publics at large. It would be helpful to have some kind of document that could help deans and upper-level administrators understand what fields such as media studies or visual culture studies are, why they matter, and why they must continue to be supported.
ØV: In providing a definition of surveillance in the present moment, scholar David Lyon (2018: 6) suggests this one: surveillance is ‘the operations and experiences of gathering and analyzing personal data for influence, entitlement and management’. He continues: ‘The point of using the concept of surveillance culture is to distinguish it from notions such as surveillance state or surveillance society by focusing on the participation and engagement of surveilled and surveilling subjects’ (p. 16).
How do we as scholars across the humanities come to terms with surveillance in our research – is surveillance a dispositif and thus part of an integrated history of media? What are the major concerns facing surveillance studies presently and in the near future?
LP: Some of my research has focused on surveillance, but there are other scholars who are much more specialist in that area than I am. I am certainly interested in the topic, and I became interested in it a long time ago, in graduate school, when noticing close-circuit TV cameras scattered across urban spaces, and wondering what it would be like to sit and monitor a huge wall of those monitors over a period of time. After that, I started doing research on satellites and thinking a bit about spy and remote sensing satellites and realizing that there is pretty much no place on Earth that has not been imaged by a remote sensing satellite. So when they say that there is no place to hide, there really is no place to hide. With the emergence of the internet, there has been growing interest in personal information surveillance. Scholars such as Gary Marx (1989, 2015) and Oscar Gandy (1993) had done crucial work on surveillance before the current wave of research focused on the internet, digital media and biometrics. And, of course, David Lyon has been an extremely prolific scholar of surveillance. But these scholars do not sufficiently deal with gender or racial differences in the ways that Simone Browne (2015), Kelly Gates (2011), Shoshona Magnet (2011), Rachel Dubrofsky and Shoshona Magnet (2015) and Caren Kaplan (2017) do.
Some of the more recent work has been to talk about surveillance in relation to an ethics of care (Bauman and Lyon, 2012; Molotch, 2012). While I understand that critical move, I also maintain a bit of skepticism about it, because I think that argument ignores the positions of people who are vulnerable and marginalized in societies, including people of colour, people whose immigrant status is uncertain or unclear, people who may come from particular religious backgrounds and be racialized and othered as a result. Just as much as surveillance may generate concerns about an ‘ethics of care’, privacy, or free speech, it is vital to note that, for disenfranchised people, surveillance can raise threats of detention, deportation and death. Privacy, free speech and care can almost come off as luxuries in the face of such threats. I was reminded of this by the brilliant filmmaker, Assia Boundaoui, who just directed a film called The Feeling of Being Watched (2018), which I highly recommend. It explores the lives of Muslim American communities who live near Chicago, and who have been under FBI surveillance for decades, long before 9/11.
In the United States right now, organizations like ICE have been deployed by the Trump administration to go into communities and interrogate people about their immigration status, and extract them from homes and workplaces, imprisoning and deporting them often without explanations. We need to be tracking the technologies and practices the state uses to conduct such operations in the US and elsewhere. There is a lot of important research that has come out on the so-called ‘lateral surveillance’, ‘participatory surveillance’, or ‘social surveillance’, that is happening online in social media. These internet practices have normalized and privatized certain types of surveillance activities and built them into everyday media culture to the point where most users do not even know about or question them (Albrechtslund, 2008; Andrejevic, 2002; Marwick, 2012). Beyond this there is still much to investigate with regard to emergent technologies of biometrics, machine learning and AI, and their integration within the surveillance apparatus.
AG: There is also the kind of surveillance related to the rapid commodification of personal information.
LP: Yes, the relationship between surveillance and capitalism is something that needs ongoing critical attention. Books ranging from Joseph Turrow’s The Aisles Have Eyes (2017) to Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) have recently engaged with these issues. Beyond the commodification of personal information is the question of how to conduct research on platform owners or other Big Tech companies that aggregate personal information while enjoying intellectual property rights and other protections. These companies do all kinds of things to gather personal information, and then they do all kinds of things with the data that they have gathered. This is a challenging area to research because of the blackboxing of information that Big Tech companies engage in – they conceal information about their technological and labour practices in the name of intellectual property ownership and business competition. Because of this, we are entering conditions, unless we push back, of what Nick Couldry and Vicki Mayer (2018) have called ‘the unresearchable’. It is impossible to conduct research on personal information gathering as a form of surveillance when Big Tech companies are patently unwilling to provide and share information with us about their internal practices.
ØV: You write in Signal Traffic (Parks and Starosielski, 2015: 6) that ‘infrastructures are defined by their invisibility.’ As editors of a volume on the topic of invisibility (Grønstad and Vågnes, 2019), we are particularly interested in hearing what you think the implications of this might be? You have been among the forerunners in creating critical awareness of the material existence of infrastructure. Are we in the process of grasping more fully the implications of this existence in our professional and private lives?
LP: My interest in thinking about infrastructures and their ‘invisibility’ was born out of a recognition of my own socialization not to notice them. Over time I have become increasingly aware of technological objects in the built environment that are relevant to global media economies – telecom towers, satellite Earth stations, data centres and other infrastructure sites. I learned the language of cinema. I knew how to read a TV text. But I did not really understand the mechanics or physical arrangements of systems used to distribute audiovisual content to screens or interfaces. It was that moment of recognizing that this was really a problem of disciplinary training and knowledge, but also of gendered socialization. Historically, topics such as infrastructural operations did not fall on the desks of feminist humanities scholars. In the early 2000s, I worked on a 3-year collaborative project called ‘Trans-Cultural Geographies’ with Swiss artist, Ursula Biemann and Greek–German artist, Angela Melitopoulos. The study was funded by the German Ministry of Culture and enabled each of us to conduct fieldwork, explore a particular infrastructure and create a language for visually rendering it, beyond the network map or flow diagram. Angela focused on a highway system between Germany and Turkey. Ursula studied a new BP oil pipeline in the Caucasus region and I examined satellite and wireless systems in the former Yugoslavia (building on research I had done for my first book, Cultures in Orbit, 2005). Working relationally on these infrastructures, we each invented our own critical and visual discourse for these systems. By thinking across disparate sites and creating different visual renderings, we were able to develop a micro-level inventory of ways of thinking about infrastructure, which turned into a book called B-Zone (Franke, 2007), as well as an art exhibition at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. This was a crucial moment for me; I learned so much by working with artists who were thinking about issues of scale, site and visualization in rigorous and embodied ways. This project allowed me to experiment and present my research findings in written and artistic forms. This work also inspired me to do more fieldwork and use phenomenological practices to engage with various media infrastructure sites. Following this work, I studied objects ranging from cables to transmission towers to satellite dishes, exploring where they are located, what they are connected to, what they are doing, who owns and operates them, and whether publics in their vicinity know about them or not. Scholars in anthropology, urban studies and geography have also used materialist and other approaches to study infrastructures.
There are now quite a few young scholars and graduate students interested in researching and theorizing various aspects of media infrastructures. With any concept or sub-topic in a field, an entropy can start to set in when lots of people gravitate to a concept at once. Suddenly, the term starts to become overloaded and not as useful any more. I argue that we need to have more sub-level concepts in media infrastructure studies, concepts that help to account for the diverse socio-technical relations that materialize media infrastructures in different parts of the world.
ØV: Site-specific work – going places, meeting people there – seems to be important in this context?
LP: The irony for me as a media scholar is that I have learned a lot more about media in recent years by moving away from the screen and interface, and by examining how media infrastructure is embedded in particular locations and listening to people talk about it as part of their everyday lives. I have visited places that most media scholars would not necessarily be interested in or gravitate to. I’ve tried to engage with sites, artifacts and communities that are often overlooked within the dominant rubrics of media studies. It has been important to me to not only focus on media production and consumption, but to explore the different arrangements of distribution – considering how media content materially moves through the world from place to place and what meanings and potentials surface with these arrivals and departures. I still have a lot to learn about these processes. Understanding infrastructure requires some specialized knowledge and engineering expertise that I do not have, but I try to learn in partial and incremental ways.
I also try to be self-reflexive about field-based research practices. Some say, ‘white scholars going to different parts of the world to investigate infrastructure sites is just another kind of colonial power.’ While I understand the impetus for articulating this viewpoint, this is obviously not a position or paradigm that I wittingly want to participate in. I recognize that in doing international fieldwork it is impossible to ignore the persisting tensions of colonial pasts and structural inequalities of the present. Scholars make choices about what research they do and how they spend their time doing that work. It has been important for me to try and get outside post-industrial Western contexts and learn about media technologies and cultures beyond the world’s media capitals. My understandings of media have been transformed by media users and innovators that I have met with in Zambia (Parks, 2016a) and Tanzania, Mongolia, and elsewhere. Conducting research in these countries has forced me to listen carefully, unlearn my privilege and rethink the materialities of media through a diverse array of positions and experiences.
ØV: You often suggest avenues for further research in your work (for instance, in writing about the emergence and uses of the IMSI catcher, Parks, 2016b) and you have also contributed very specific recommendations in processes outside academia, for example in addressing (in a report) how satellite capacity can be used to support peace-building in East Africa (Parks, 2015). How significant do you see the entanglement of scholarship and social engagement to be in your career and more generally? How can visual culture studies be better fitted to address global questions, and transregional and transcultural issues? Big questions!
LP: Yes, those are big questions, but they are important questions. Ideally, visual culture scholars know how to use visual forms, visual content, to help articulate their arguments. It’s not just about having a critique of technology or a certain kind of analysis of the IMSI catcher, it’s also about trying to use the visual to mount those critiques and make them salient and compelling to publics. So, if you’re a scholar of surveillance and a lot of personal information gathering is happening behind the scenes in ways that users cannot perceive, how does the scholar perform a critique that also creates a visual language that can help make these conditions more perceptible?
By studying infrastructure, surveillance and satellites, I have consistently been interested in sites or objects of media that are not readily perceptible or graspable, yet that have very high stakes implications for social subjects and bodies because of the ways they extend and apply power. I’ve tried to re-contextualize or create visual forms to bring awareness and intelligibility to those processes so that publics can think about how to respond and proceed.
On the other hand, a critique of visual culture studies has been that we privilege the visual way too much. I think this is true and we have to listen to this critique and aspire toward more synaesthetic approaches. Where are the other senses located in visual culture research? There is incredible research on sound and on tactility, mobility and disability studies as well. I think it’s really important for the Journal of Visual Culture to continue engaging with those other fields and foster productive relationships in that regard.
ØV: In writing about aircraft, rockets and satellites, you have often called for a higher degree of public knowledge on aero-orbital space and one of your significant contributions is to direct our attention to what you describe as vertical mediation (Parks, 2018). How do you see vertical mediation figuring in the near future, and what forms of political resistance are possible in the age of vertical mediation?
LP: One of the things happening right now in orbital space is the emergence of a new set of satellite operators. Silicon Valley companies are joining the satellite industry. I’ll just mention three of them: SpaceX, OneWeb and O3b are satellite operators who want to deploy constellations of thousands of satellites in medium Earth orbit and low Earth orbit ostensibly to ‘connect the unconnected’. By deploying these new non-synchronous satellite constellations anyone on the planet, they claim, will be able to have access to high-speed internet at any time. These are audacious and bold promises. How is the satellite industry defining ‘the underserved’ exactly? As a person in a low-income, rural community in the global south? Yes, but also as a wealthy yacht owner at sea who doesn’t have high-speed internet to be able to download Netflix. The business models for sustaining these systems have not yet been worked out (Graydon and Parks, 2019).
Every time there are commercial aircraft, drones or satellites above the Earth, they are not only impacting the circumterrestrial space around the Earth, they are also reshaping material relations on Earth. Vertical mediation can be thought of as a dynamic interplay of relations between orbit and the surface of the Earth. Vertical mediations are audiovisual discourses that enact, materialize, or infer conditions or qualities of the vertical field. They demonstrate what is happening in the air, spectrum or orbit, and how those happenings impact life on Earth. In doing so, they render power relations of the vertical field intelligible.
It is possible to think about vertical mediation in different ways, but one way is to consider how new non-synchronous satellite constellations are going to reshape certain kinds of conditions and practices on Earth. How many satellites are going up? Who owns and is responsible for them? What kind of orbital congestion will happen as a result? Is the International Telecommunication Union regulating these new constellations sufficiently? Suddenly there will be a much higher density of objects in orbit and this will inevitably affect what’s happening on Earth. It will require more frequent launches, the construction of new Earth stations, the distribution of new types of consumer satellite dishes which are way more expensive. You can’t just take a trashcan lid any more, hammer it into a dish shape, and mount it to get a signal. You’re going to have to get a specialized satellite dish that rotates in order to get services.
With regard to the question of political resistance, I think the first act is being aware of political, economic and material conditions of aerial and orbital domains, not only from a commercial standpoint, in terms of satellites and aircraft, but also from a military perspective. There are all kinds of military industrial technologies and activities taking shape in vertical domains that impact peoples on Earth. We need to be involved in monitoring these practices and pointing out when they are illegal – such as US drone wars – or when they violate international treaties such as the UN Outer Space Treaty (1967), which indicates that states cannot claim sovereignty in orbit or outer space, and these domains should be used in the interests of all humankind.
AG: In the next few years, what some already describe as the Greta Thunberg Generation will arrive at our campuses. In view of their priorities and perspectives, which might be radically different from those of preceding generations of students, what do you think the implications might be for teaching and researching media in the years to come? How do we cater for generations that might have completely different needs and interests, and how will that potentially alter the whole infrastructure of the humanities?
LP: This is an essential question, and we can’t afford to wait until Thunberg’s generation arrives on our campuses. In the United States and in Europe too there’s a lot of new research in an area called environmental media studies, research that engages with feminist STS, environmental studies, biology, theories of the non-human and so on, and situates objects of media and questions of mediation in relation to a planetary biosphere and concepts such as the anthropocene. There are many new works in this area, including Sean Cubbit’s Eco Media (2005), Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s Life After New Media (2012), Jim Schwoch’s Wired into Nature (2018), Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker’s Sustainable Media (2016), Rick Maxwell and Toby Miller’s Greening the Media (2012), and Richard Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn (2015), to name a few. Just think about the lifecycles of media devices: Where are they manufactured? What material resources are required? When and where do they end up as e-waste? How can manufacturers design devices so that they are more environmentally friendly? Media scholars need to continue to think within and beyond screen culture to engage with the current environmental crisis. We can hardly predict what the next environmentally-savvy generation will require of us and our field. It will likely involve critically examining big data sets of satellite images and lots of photos and stories about extinct species that once existed if we don’t act quickly.
At a minimum it is possible to think more about the contingency of the global media economy upon energy, which is sourced in various ways. We could try and track renewable or non-renewable energy sources used in the production and distribution of media content, and create a green energy rating system for media devices and media entertainment. I’ve been making the case recently for an energy–media lexicon to foster awareness of the energy demands of different media formats. There’s certainly a need for more critical consciousness of energy sources used to produce, distribute and consume media, and we need to keep conducting research and lead these conversations now, and be prepared to listen up and respond as the Greta Thunberg generation arrives on our campuses.
To prepare to teach future generations it is also crucial to integrate critical understandings of machine learning and AI in media studies. Filmmakers like Harun Farocki and artists like Trevor Paglen (Paglen, 2016) have taken the lead in developing forms that enable us to consider how machine vision works and what its aesthetic and political impacts might be. Beyond this, numerous scholarly works have emerged that demand our attention and engagement. Media studies may lose students to fields such as data sciences unless they are able to develop new critical paradigms, histories and curricula that engage with algorithmic cultures. Books such as Algorithms of Oppression (Safiya Noble, 2018), The Burden of Choice (Jonathan Cohn, 2019), Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O’Neil, 2016), Computing Taste (Nick Seaver, forthcoming), Custodians of the Internet (Tarleton Gillespie, 2018), Design Justice (Sasha Costanza-Chock, forthcoming) are provoking and inspiring a new generation of media scholars. It’s vital for scholars of visual culture and media studies to mention that it’s not all new; the classification and sorting of media content has happened for a long time. Having said this, there is a lot of new research out there to engage with and situate within media studies. Just as media scholars have performed historical analyses of global media industries, it is important to consider the big players in emergent machine learning and AI systems with regard to structures of their production, distribution and consumption/operationalization. Media studies has formulated political economic approaches for exploring such structures in global media contexts. Similar approaches can be used to study emergent AI systems so that we determine who the big players are, where they are located and what they are making/doing. The more ‘immaterial’ or ‘automatic’ digital phenomena seem to be, the more we need materialist approaches for their critical investigation.
As AI tools are operationalized across borders, they – like media technologies – can be used to destabilize national sovereignty and human rights. This occurred, for instance, during the US drone wars in Pakistan or in the context of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Meanwhile, think tanks and nonprofits continue to celebrate the potential of AI tools to accelerate global development. Given these contradictions, we might begin to address this area of concern by specifying which countries or regions have the resources to innovate and contribute to AI technologies and industries, and which ones are being positioned as recipients, subjects, or beneficiaries. What do the vectors of the global AI economy look like? Who are the dominant players? Where are their workforces and exactly what labour are they performing? What are the top-selling AI tools and how do their supply chains correlate with historical trade patterns, geopolitics, or conditions of disenfranchisement?
Given the power of AI tools to impact human behaviour and shape planetary conditions, it is vital that a political, economic and materialist analysis of the technology’s relation to global trade, governance, natural environments and culture be conducted. This involves adopting an infrastructural disposition and specifying AI’s constitutive parts, processes and effects as they take shape across diverse world contexts. Only then can the public understand the technology well enough to democratically deliberate its relation to ethics and policy.
AG: With these developments, the future will probably be a mix of what intensifies attention to artificial intelligence and also to the ecological crisis, and to anthropocene media studies in a sense. Do you see anything that’s worth salvaging from the whole history of media studies or film studies or in the humanities, and will new generations of students be interested at all in those historical facets of the knowledge that has been accumulated in these fields, if that knowledge is not seen as necessarily bearing upon, or having an effect on, the future?
LP: Definitely there are many things from media’s deep and near-pasts that are worth not just salvaging, but prioritizing! Vital things, like storytelling. I’ve been watching a lot of older movies lately. It sounds like a cliché but I miss the days when you felt like there was a story unfolding in a 90-minute narrative film. And today it’s so much about special effects, CGI and spectacle that stories get lost and don’t have the same kind of poetic force, at least in contemporary Hollywood cinema. As an educator, I want to make sure that what I’m doing in the classroom and with my research is connected somehow to the world that students are facing. I take the pedagogic aspects of academic labour seriously and feel the need to address contemporary formations in the media sector such as social media, for instance. Yet, at the same time, I do miss things from film and media studies that seem to be slipping away, whether that’s the intensity of close analysis, discussions of the politics of representation, or water-cooler shows on network television. Today, critical attention in media studies has shifted to an array of issues, including climate change, surveillance, fake news, AI and social media, but perhaps it’s nonetheless incumbent upon us to make sure that such earlier aspects of film and media studies – including storytelling, close analysis, the politics of representation, or the experience of shared cultures – feed into this array of newer, urgent issues.
) and Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018). She is co-editor of the books, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke University Press, 2018), Signal Traffic (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and Planet TV (NYU Press, 2003).