Dalia Hatalova Core Post #1/5 Blog Post #5/15

 The connection between infrastructures, access, and equality was a throughline in several of this week's texts. In Lisa Parks' "Water, Energy, Access: Materializing the Internet in Rural Zambia," the emphasis on the local probed questions about the cultural place that the digital via infrastructures plays in the lives of individuals and communities. Meanwhile, in Nicole Starosielski's "Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure," the approach took on a much larger transnational scale. While Starosielski pointed to issues of global political importance in access that Parks' analysis missed, her text failed to delve into the impact on individuals as was possible through Parks' case study on Zambia. Through viewing examples from these two texts, I want to examine not only the benefits of access but the complex balancing act between being in possession of access to internet infrastructure and the negative potential of attempting to resolve issues primarily through digital means. 

Parks' work takes on what could be termed by Paul N. Edwards as the 'micro' and 'meso' scales of infrastructure, relating the struggles for gaining access to the internet by individuals in rural Zambia. As Edwards describes, "infrastructures consist not only of hardware, but of legal, corporate, and political-economic elements" (Edwards 12); meanwhile, the political elements in Zambia are also directly impacted and impactful on the individual level of what he calls the micro-scale. When viewing the telephone, Edwards describes how "users appropriated telephone technology to their own ends, and they employed it for a decidedly pre-"modern" purpose: sociability" (13). Writing about the situation in Macha, Zambia, Parks describes how many women in the area have never even heard of the internet. However, more crucially, Parks points out that "the women we spoke with seemed somewhat disinterested in the question and relatively content without the technology, foregrounding the reality that the digital divide may be as much an invention of Western humanitarianism and/or digital capitalism as it is a salient concern among Macha's rural residents" (Parks 132). Questioning the need for such infrastructure is crucial, particularly as international digital cable systems, as both Parks and Starosielski point out, are implicated in data collection and surveillance.

In Shannon Mattern's perspective, "infrastructures have distinctive temporalities and evolutionary paths" (103). Acknowledging these evolutionary paths reveals that different technological systems present the same cultural functions. Whereas tracing history from a technological standpoint leads to a much more recent place of origin, as Mattern argues, focusing on media from a usage standpoint reveals a much deeper time and richer evolutionary history. Through this position, it is possible to see not only a longer trajectory but how different mediums or technologies can cover the same function. Similarly, Edwards writes that on the macro scale, "new infrastructures at first supplement, then sometimes replace, existing ones" (Edwards 15). Hence, evaluating the digital as means for specific functions that have historically been completed through other forms of media infrastructure is crucial because it reveals that the digital may only be necessary for communities only as long as other infrastructures are unable to provide the services rendered through the internet. These issues place Parks' work in Zambia and her observations of the lack of lack, one could say, as relevant in evaluating the role of the internet not just in rural localities but more globally. 

Nevertheless, both Parks and Starosielski articulate the connection between adequate infrastructural access and access to the larger economic play between local communities and the global. Parks' example of farmers gaining an understanding of market prices is neatly paralleled by Starosielski's description of the functioning of large-scale markets, where a fast internet connection provides an edge to investors. Starosielski's analysis centers on understanding the corporeal nature of underground cables that uphold the speciously ethereal and gossamer wireless structures. She argues that comprehending the physical can allow us to see that "cables implicate users within new and unseen structure of power" (56). Starosielski substantiates her claim with a similar example to Park's of local markets, stating, "high-frequency traders on global stock markets use computer algorithms to take advantage of the slight price changes in different locations, secure trades at slightly quicker rates, and exploit short cable paths for profit" (65). 

Viewing both Parks's and Starosielsk's respective analyses together reveals that viewing the internet infrastructures as either positive or negative is not as pertinent as viewing which social/economic/political interactions have transitioned primarily to the digital realm. In the evolution of media infrastructures, we need to maintain a balance between different technologies that can provide the same functions. Thus, otherwise, the internet infrastructure becomes a monopolistic structure – likely already extant – which, in my opinion, is the core problem that is instigating a power imbalance.