Lisa Parks: Media Infrastructures and Globalization

17 May 2022

GINA NEFF: Hello and welcome, thank you for joining us. I am Gina Neff, and I am the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy and welcome to our latest event here at the centre at the University of Cambridge.

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So with that, it is my great privilege and pleasure to introduce Hunter Vaughan and we are joined by Lisa Parks. Hunter is a Senior Research Associate here at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy. He is an environmental scholar and cultural historian focussing on the relationship between digital technologies, the environment, social justice, democratic agency and infrastructures. He's currently co‑PI on a project on Sustainable Subsea Networks, funded through the Internet Society Foundation. And a co‑PI on an AHRC funded project Global Green Media Network. Dr Vaughan's also co‑founder and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Environmental Media, and his latest book is Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of Movies. We are pleased to have Hunter here and Hunter will introduce Lisa. I will turn over to him.

HUNTER: Thank you, Gina and thanks everyone for being here, thanks to the team for organising this event. Of course, mostly thank you Lisa for taking the time to share your expertise and your research with us. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where people are. I am thrilled, very pleased to be joined today by Lisa Parks, who is one of the great trail blazers in the sub field of environmental media studies as well as really emergent research and scholarship and thinking at the intersection of technology and social justice. Lisa Parks is a distinguished Professor of Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage, the War on Terror, Cultures and Orbit, Satellites in the Televisual and Mixed Signals, Media Infrastructures and Globalisation, which is currently in progress. She's also the co‑editor of Signal Traffic Critical Studies of Immediate Infrastructures, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare and Down to Earth Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures. Among other books. She's been a PI on major grants from the National Science Foundation, and the US State Department. And is committed to exploring how greater understanding of media and communication systems can assist citizens, scholars and policy makers to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice and human rights. Dr Parks directs the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab and is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. It is always a delight to be in conference with you Lisa, thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to joining the conversation with you in a bit and in the meantime I will be watching the Q&A bar for any questions from the audience so that we can engage in wider conversation. But for now, I happily turn it over to you.

LISA: Thank you, Hunter and thank you also to Gina and the Minderoo Centre. And to Jeremy for helping out. I'm going to share my screen now. Hopefully, this will work out.

This is excerpts from a book I am working on now. I will just get started. The terrible make signals generally refers to a continue in which a communicator sends a message that is somehow contradictory, misleading or confusing. The receiver typically tries to parse or clarify the message but often the condition of contradiction persists. Some might say that all communication is ultimately about mixed signals.

In this book, I mobilise this generic meaning to evoke a variety of conditions related to the current conjuncture of media globalisation. First, I use the term mixed signals to point to the materialities of modern media as electronics and focus on technologies of media distribution. Second, I use the term to call attention to the multiple and overlapping satellite footprints wireless covered zones and cloud regions that criss-cross and reconstitute the earth's surface as expansive signal territories. Third, the term is helpful in pointing to the contradictory messages publics receive from states and companies about media systems and services, increasingly in these messages public equals auctioned free speech equals capture, participation equals surveillance, services equals traps and so on. Fourth, the term mixed signals registers the rich hetero generality of media content forms and formats in circulation, and the possibilities of assembling combining and remixing them within affective media economies.

Finally mixed signals hints as the productive ambivalences and frictions within scholarly understandings of the terms "media, mediation and media globalisation". This book sets out to engage these issues by investigating media infrastructures in post‑war, pose‑socialist and post colonialist contexts. The book suggests those who have grown accustomed to media abundance have much to learn about media technologies from those beyond the world's political, economic and cultural capitals. In case studies presented in this book, people have sorted through the ruins of war to rebuild media after socialist broadcast and telecoms systems were bombed from above. They have oscillated between fraying colonial telecom infrastructures and emergent systems of neoliberal capitalism and they have drawn on local resources knowledge and labour to create their own links to the global media economy, often after being ignored for decades by state and commercial providers. Because people in the outskirts often inhabit remote areas with smaller populations and limited incomes, they are overlooked and deemed politically economically and technologically "insignificant" by states and media telecom companies.

As I demonstrate throughout this book, however, people in such communities create media technologies and distribution practices that challenge contemporary mappings of world media systems, disrupt knowledge hierarchies around the technological, confront energy scarcity and other ecological matters and help to produce and sustain media economies that support local cultures and labourers. This book redirects the study of media globalisation away from media capitals and toward the outskirts. The term outskirts, outskirt, refers to "an outer border or fringe, an area on the outer edge, especially of a town, city or district". The word can function as a noun, usually pluralised, verb or adjective.

The OED traces its use back to 1633 to characterise the positions of families and areas relative to the state of Ireland. By 1835 the adjective was used to characterise "less civilised outskirt nations", of the British Empire. The term has since been used to refer to an area that exists beyond yet around or adjacent to another. Often the term is connotatively associated with disenfranchisement, neglect or informality. Though not always. My 1990s use of the verb to outskirt went to outmanoeuvre, plus outskirt is a multivalent identifier associated with dynamic acts of border inquiry and boundary making as well as the imaginaries and politics of borrowing, sharing reinventing, bypassing and outdoing. By exploring media distribution on the outskirts, the study builds on scholarly critics of media studies. These critiques call out the "myth of the mediated centre, which Nick Couldry reminds us "it's always a construction, its imaginary spatial form conflicts with the very different form that the media's spatial operations actually take. “Couldry uses the concept of scatter to suggest media processes can be understood as "a world with many centres that produce and distributes media messages".

Critiques of the media centre also recognise the importance of what Christina calls thinking regionally while at the same time complicating the area studies paradigm which as has been argued tends to reinforce the super powers world carving an organisation of the planet, into post‑World War II spheres of influence. The question is how to conduct research and right in a way that evokes the relational unpredictable and power related dynamisms of media globalisation. This cannot be reduced to the study of macrolevel in international flows or patterns across national contexts. Tracking of powerful multi‑national conglomerates or analysis of cultural policies that many people are either unaware of exploited by or refused to abide by.

Though such work is important, there's also a need for more basic research on the everyday conditions in which people in different parts of the world live, work and think with media technologies. Such research is often carried out by anthropologists who have generated a rich and extensive body of research on uses of media and information technologies in particular cultural contexts. Certainly, there are overlaps between research on media in anthropology and film and media studies, but there are differences in training, critical dispositions and purpose as well. As a post structuralist feminist I was trained to question the foundational assumptions of western anthropology and reflect upon the power differentials inherent and conducting research. I learned from feminist post-colonial critics to approach research as a process of unlearning, listening and critical reflexivity, rather than aspire towards longitudinal emerging or mastery.

I have tried to formulate understandings of media technologies and globalisation. I have adopted a site specific idiosyncratic and relation app approach to investigate media infrastructures and globalisation in part because nation states companies and regulators have not shone much evidence that their priority is to support diverse publics. Rather than learn about media infrastructure from the centres of power then, I try to understand it from an array of particular perspectives. In this book I approach the concepts of global media and media globalisation as sites of problematisation and critical enquiry rather than as givens. I am inspired by the work of feminist theorist Carolyn Caplan who in their path scattered hegemonies their conceptualisation of trans national sets out to problematise a purely locational politics... across different contexts.

Their conceptualisation of trans‑national sets out to problematise a purely locational politics of global local or centre periphery in favour of the lines cutting across them. As feminists who note the absence of gender issues in all of these world system theories, we have no choice but to challenge what we see as inadequate and inaccurate binary divisions. “Their work insists on the possibilities of reading and drawing relations of power across disparate sites rather than seeking to fit them into a rationalised world system, or order. By invoking the outskirts as an organising principle of the study, I do not mean to fetishize the peripheries or margins or to prioritise relations of space over time. Rather I critique the tendency of global media research to privilege formalised national framework and corporate brands, international flows, capital concentrations and uni-directional models of technological innovation and difficult fusion and in the process to exclude most of the world's people.

While it is essential to track those in power and try to understand their strategies and impact, researchers often ignore most people’s everyday experiences with media technologies. Given this, my approaches in dialogue with recent work such as the work on individual users, and the work on informal media economies, as well as research on race, class and or gender and technology by scholars such as Ruha Benjamin, yet the designation of mediated doe mains or practices as visible or invisible, formal or informal, tends to diminish the value of people's labour and creativities from the get go, by casting them within an economic or industrial model, when in fact their contributions may assume different dimensions, whether socio cultural, educational or ecological. Building on research on informal media, there's a need to expand the critical awareness of in the vocabulary for the uneven material conditions varied socio technical relations and diverse epistemologies that shape people's knowledge and experiences of media technologies. People's media experiences I argue cannot be reduced to national systems, media capitals or area studies approaches. They demand more situated phenomenological and conceptual approaches, that recognise everyday social struggles, agencies and creativities which are vital to understandings of media globalisation ‑ the processes and practices by which media materialise in diverse sites around the world. Far from being near end points, terminals or last mile solutions, technologies of media distribution are embedded in local epistemologies and practices of everyday life.

Rather than embrace western philosophical understandings of "media and technology" that are often built upon universalising assumptions I understand technologies as socio technical relations and situated knowledges that are contingent upon the dynamic diverse and differential material conditions of everyday life. Media technologies are not simply tools that show case varying degrees of human virtuosity or industrial advancement. They are not metrics or indexes of human capacities of efficiency, rather media technology take shape within specific territorial and cultural contexts and become part of particular individuals and communities attempts to process participate in and interpret the complex planetary conditions in which we live. While there is an exciting turn in the field to broaden the conceptualisation of media and mediation to include geologies, oceanic, air, atmospheres and other elemental media in this book I approach media for the most part as electronic or digital audio visual content. I think there's so much to learn about the ways such content has taken shape and been distributed in various parts of the world. I am really skipping around here in the introduction, so there are large stretches I'm not going into, so I apologise if it is a little disjointed, but I am going into another section here.

My goal in this book is to offer insights based on research across disparate sites that enables unlearning of dominant assumptions that are lodged in global media and or media globalisation. The outskirts then can be thought of as a scattering of sites and socio technical relations wrapped together with critical analysis. The selection of these sites has been guided by a feminist politics of positionality and partiality, the book's case studies took shape largely through professional and personal relationships across multiple sites both in person and online for over a decade. And research on one topic on side site or with one collaborator often generated questions and counters or opportunities that led to another.

Rather than dismiss these research paths as too personal, or nonsensical, I embraced the process as a critical practice or method or discovery. It is also an experiment in method, how to study globalisation and media infrastructure, in ways that are attuned to the derational multi‑sighted and interventionist potentials of media research. Case studies emerge on the outskirts as gatherings threaded themes and layers as research conducted if a splintering of directions rather than a linear path. And because of this what follows is a much more mediated plura verse building on the evocative term as it is a rendering of media globalisation. I'm going to read you a little bit from a section in the intro called energising media. So when thinking about the term media globalisation, it's important to recognise the variable material circumstances in which media consumers live.

Most people in the world do not have access to Broadband power, these conditions must inform how scholars think about media globalisation. Historically those in rural communities have relied on the wealth generated by local agricultural co‑operatives to subsidise local media and link to national and global systems. In communities in southern and eastern Africa, for instance, costs of media access consumption and or participation are often contingent upon the sale of crafts, such as soy beans and sun flowers. Because of this agricultural and other resources remain integral to the study of media globalisation. State and commercial providers often fail to extend media infrastructure and services to remote areas with smaller population densities since it is deemed to be not politically profitable. At the same time tech companies make constant promises regarding their efforts to provide global connectivity. Not only have Facebook and WhatsApp and now TikTok, become primary media infrastructures in much of the world, but honours of new others such as SpaceX and OneWeb have tried to pick up where state have left off, targeting rural low income incomes and promising to serve the underserved or the so‑called bottom billion, who lack internet connectivity and thus far the underserved users of these new satellite constellations have included wealthy yacht owners under way at sea and in need of Broadband not those who lack internet and media services altogether. Just because corporations celebrate technologies of global connectivity and promotion does not mean that their service provision actually occurs.

The question is how do we critique entities and structures of power nomination through processes of media globalisation, while also holding on to the power to imagine and recreate these technologies at everyday relations in situated contexts. A key factor that prevents universal service provision is the dependence of modern media on electricity. To participate in media culture most people in the world cannot simply plug their devices into the wall. They must constantly think about how and where to get an electrical charge, to charge their devices and they must plan for this in daily life, thus there is an added labour and time involved in people's efforts to consume produce or share media.

These conditions have resulted in local and formal economies of cheap energy related equipment, including solar panels, batteries, power banks, adapters and cables, which people use to build systems to charge their devices, receive signals and data and consume and share media. Such energy practices seem almost inconceivable to many consumers and scholars in post war contexts who enjoy study flows of grid power and high speed network services. Those who live in conditions of energy surplus have much to learn, from those who contend with daily energy scarcity. For these consumers have a much stronger sense of constraints, limits and priorities. Giving concerns about the global climate crisis, it is not viable to continue operating and using media infrastructures and devices guided by mind sets and practices of energy surplus. Each text message, phone call, Google search, social media post, streamed movie requires energy and therefore contributes in some way to climate disruption. Should we move towards device use standards for individual organisational, national internet that are not geared towards screen time limiting but toward reducing energy expenditures and environmental impacts.

The emergent field of environmental media studies is beginning to ask such questions. But there's also a need to recognise that people around the world who have by necessity adopted sustainable ‑ There's a need to recognise that people around the world who have by necessity adapted sustainable practices long before it registered as a critical concern in western academic contexts. I am suggesting there have been sustainable practices among people who live in conditions of energy scarcity for a long time, but they are often just completely overlooked by a lot of their work in environmental media studies. So scholarship that sets out to de-westernise media studies does not assume everyone in the world needs network connectivity to thrive politically, economically and culturally. Rather such research carefully considers socio conditions in agencies, that is the imaginaries desires and interests of diverse peoples.

While it is vital for media globalisation researchers to investigate and analyse global media conglomerates for big tech companies, scholars cannot become intellectually beholden to or enraptured by these companies and their operations alone. Echoing Donna Haraway, it matters where we conduct our research what we choose to focus on or not, which material conditions we explore, and what conceptual frame works we rely on as they will shape and inform scholarly understandings in this case of media globalisation.

Moreover, there are trade‑offs in the ways that research on media globalisation can emerge and take shape. For instance, engaging with one national or local context over a long period of time, may generate deeper or more nuanced cultural understandings and insights, conducting research trans nationally on the other hand in and across different locales may build limited yet more relational understandings. Both approaches can aid in grasping dynamics and materialities of media globalisation and infrastructure. The study of media globalisation values the particular over the universal and the idiosyncratic over the systematic. It represents a shift away from state systems and corporate brands and towards situated studies of socio technical relations in different contexts and the goal is not to explore how powerful western forces of globalisation are localised and hybridised or localised, but rather to listen to and learn from creators, inventors and users of media technologies on the outskirts and offer critical insights concepts and mode of understanding based on those engagements.

I have a final short section to talk a little bit about how I do this work. So in efforts to delve into the issues discussed, I have experimenting with research on media infrastructures for almost two decades, it's kind of embarrassing to say, time flies! The book is about that process of experimentation and what I have learned and the research has involved using network maps, field work, interviews, and photography to explore material conditions around particular facilities, installations nodes and communities. These sites include earth stations and cell towers, broadcast transmitters and data centres and when at infrastructure sites I ask basic questions, even if answering is not always straightforward. What is it, who owns it, how long has it been here, what was here before, who owns the land? What kinds of materials and equipment are here? How did they get here? Who brought them? How long did it take to build the site? Who does it serve? What is it connected to? What operates, maintains, repairs and secures it? How is it related to other systems of energy, water and transportation? And this approach emerged out of the recognition that I was socialised not to know about the infrastructures which I and other people around the world use daily and subsidise.

Studying infrastructure then involves studying at least for me, it involves studying what I was socialised not to know about and trying to find a language for making sense of it. In my work as a media scholar, I have tried to adopt an infrastructural disposition and engage with infrastructure materialities and outskirts, not as givens but as sites about difference, relationality and power that demand investigation, specification and analysis. I sought to create research approaches that were more vernacular ad hoc and experimental, and these approaches involve learning through my own phenomenological engagements, embracing feelings of strangeness, learning from people who live in the vicinity of infrastructural and media objects and collaborating with users, scholars and artists in different cultural contexts.

Based on this research, I have been trying to formulate ideas about what media infrastructure is and how it takes shape and becomes meaningful across these contexts. Findings have led me to question the accuracy of network maps, face the complex biospheres and geopolitics that infrastructures are entangled with and register the various kinds of informal labour required to sustain vast layered systems. Sometimes people quote about infrastructure being boring stuff and I appreciate her remark but I also feel infrastructure is only boring if we idly accept or normalise static ways of mapping perceiving or understanding it.

So I will end there and this is just, I have in the book, quite a few different case studies that I go into and I haven't had a chance to do that in this short talk today. But hopefully maybe this has piqued your curiosity and you will follow when this comes out. But thank you and I will end my talk there.

HUNTER: The Q&A function is open if you want to ask any questions. I have a few that I'm happy to get started with. If that doesn't take us many hours into the future, then we will definitely try to make time, or will make time to come back for any of the audience questions and comments. We would love to get everyone out there more involved in this. I had an order of questions based on content and methods that I wanted to ask. But because of the way you ended, I figure I will reverse that and start at the last thing that you spoke of, which involves the methods of this multi‑decade existential adventure. Which I appreciate both is not at all boring, and also the way I think a personal life investment in scholarship should be structured.

So I applaud that commitment. And longevity. You are working with a lot of stuff here. And trying to balance as you put it ways of coming up with language to render legible to render visible, to render comprehendible or comprehensive, these things that we are socially trained not to see, socially trained not to talk about. But also you work with communities that, as you put it, are historically or conventionally meant to be seen on the outskirts or on the periphery of mainstream tech power, economic power, but also to a degree research focus, which as you pointed out, global media studies, for big power and for the larger infrastructural players.

Over the last few years we have in research seen a big shift in funding and emphasis. On to working with communities, working with marginalised groups, working with under‑represented stakeholders, and people, which always carries with it the challenge and even the danger of further extracting knowledge and time and different types of academic or value or capital. From those groups. So I am wondering, both in terms of your interdisciplinary forays into working across anthropology, STS, media studies and humanities, and the arts, but also in terms of your working directly with communities in Zambia or Tanzania, what have been some of the challenges, what have you found out really was an asset, or a beneficial tool or successful approach to trying to maintain that sense of appreciation, respect and empowerment of the communities that you are working with?

LISA: It's an important question. It's something that I think about a lot, how to ‑ what kind of relationship as a researcher is appropriate to have with communities when doing research. I have tended to believe it is better to engage with communities even though it may reiterate and reproduce particular kinds of western tropes, rather than occupy a position of isolation. I'm willing to risk those potential critiques because I find that I unlearn so much of my western training and my western proclivities when I engage with communities in different contexts that I feel like I am unravelling my own education in a way and reconstituting myself, each time I have an opportunity to do field‑based community research. Especially in communities that are rural and relatively economically disenfranchised. I grew up more in a working class environment and I think I just was a little more hard wired to be interested in how people make do and use the material resources they have around them in everyday life. And I think I share that, even though I grew up in North America and I am more in a situation of affluence, my class background is a little bit more in line with some of the making do that I see. And so I guess I'm just trying to get at this issue of a lot of people say, oh, I'm not an anthropologist, so I cannot do field‑based research. Well, I am not an anthropologist to be sure, but I am a media scholar who is really interested in understanding how these technologies are materialised, used and thought about in diverse contexts in different parts of the world. So I have tried to figure out a way to formulate partial understandings of these issues through those engagements and I do try to in my writing emphasise ideas, like situated knowledge and partiality and limits of my own insights and contributions as well. So it might be a long‑winded answer to your question, but it's worth a whole seminar on this topic I think. So thanks for bringing it up.

HUNTER: As an ongoing challenge for anyone that wants to do research in this field ethically and not from isolationist perspective. Just to extend that, did you find certain methods participatory, structuring of research, or community‑based activities that seemed to help really build senses of community agency? Can you share any particular examples, or is this a read the book answer?

LISA: No. That was another part of your question I think. In some circumstances as part of this research I did bring students with me and we did either workshops or community tech projects. Sometimes we would elaborate with compute ‑‑ collaborate with computer scientists, that is what we did in much of Zambia. My part of the team would do interviews with people about what they thought about internet services and mobile phone services whether they needed them or wanted them or not. Then we would share those findings with the computer scientists who would try to develop systems that were related to the needs and interests of the community. Those projects are always fraught, difficult and problematic.

I think in one way or another, there's a whole field called ICT for D research which I think is filled with generally very well intentioned scholars and activists and community workers. But often we have expectations that when those projects take place, there will be like long‑term impacts and changed conditions. What I have found is that in some cases when doing this field‑based research, I was coming in after a second generation of scholars had been there and already tried things that didn't work for one reason or another and then try to pick up the pieces and doing with the frustration of community members who were saying, oh, another one of you, why are you here, what are you doing, can you really help, or are you just going to set something up and leave like the last people. And so sadly, what we see sometimes when you do more, when scholars are doing more tech oriented projects, in developing contexts, they leave behind equipment, it doesn't work.

An article that came out recently where I talk about this in northern Tanzania and I call it infrastructural inertia, because what happened is a German team came in and set up this whole Wi‑Fi network for the community, and all these towers were up that people could see in their communities every day, but they only worked for a few months and then all of this hope and optimism around this international alliance to build this tech, and set up this new infrastructure, just led to resentment and anger and disappointment so I think it's difficult when states and corporate entities are not thinking about these communities and then scholars and non‑profits go in and try to fill in the gaps and help out. But it often leads to frustration and this condition of infrastructure inertia, where the community members see the equipment is there, they know it's not working and they can't use it. So I think the psychic dimensions of this type of research are really complex and take time to tease out and it's important that we don't put utopian spin on really complicated material conditions in these types of contexts.

HUNTER: That's really helpful. Also just really interesting to think about the sort of, the psychic dimension, the frustration, but also those material reminders of disappointed promises and that's really a powerful image. Gina, did you raise your hand?

GINA: I just want to tie in and ask a quick question and then we have a question in the Q&A as well. And remind people if you have a question for Lisa, ask it now. Just very briefly, what I really love about this presentation, Lisa is that you are calling for urgency of attention to the relational in our media environments, that this idea of the partialities of global media urge us to think in very relational terms. I see your project is really rescuing the idea of connection from a pretty flattened connection that we have in social media, that connection will be one way, defined in a certain prescribed set of terms and you are really calling for that innocence of urgency. I wondered if you could take that relational, and that sense of urgency around coming to this question and go back to that phrase that you said in the talk, about how our infrastructure is so dependent upon electricity, that there's something really vital here that your work is trying to do about reconnecting people in a moment when the climate crisis is so urgent.

HUNTER: You got to my second question. I was going to energy next.

LISA: I do think there's different cycles of media scholarship, but there's a tendency for us to think that creative potential occurs in the realm of content. With social media we have much more templated spaces for expression and communication, and so even though people still are creative with content, what I found in a lot of my work is how creative people were with the hardware and especially when it came to conditions of energy scarcity and finding ways to repair and re‑use technologies and make sure that they were charged so they can be used. So there were informal economic organisations like charging services propped up in different communities, where an entity that had access to grid power would organise an informal business and pay somebody $30 a month to sit there and charge people's phones and they would have trust and drop them off and they had a whole system for charging them and redistributing them to people.

I also found incredible resourcefulness and ingenuity, people just don't have cash to replace things in the same rates that we tend to have the post-industrial West. So elaborate businesses are set up in Dares Salem where people bring their phones to be repaired and rebuilt. The people I observed and met with over time, know the inside and outs of most mobile phones on the planet. They know what pieces they have stocks of spare parts that they've collected. They know what breaks and why. And they have mastered so many different models of feature phones, basic phones without the smartphone features and smartphones that a Tanzania group of mobile phone repair men created their own mobile phone design based on what they had learned about breakdowns of other devices. And ironically they wanted to take the design to Fox Con to have them make the first Tanzanian mobile phone. What I am getting at in responding to your question is just this sense of ‑ I think in North America and Europe, it's really important for us to be aware of the relationality to people who are part of the so‑called global media society, but have very different material relationships to these devices and it makes me sad when they are, it's most people on the planet and they tend to be left out of understanding a lot of the literature, not all the literature but a lot of the literature by choosing to focus on particular kinds of formations and entities forgets about most people. Most people do not have access to grid power on the planet. Yet most people have at least one mobile phone. So there's a lot more research to be done on this and to explore also with regard to environmental, Hunter may be working on these things given his expertise in environmental media studies.

HUNTER: I appreciate the confidence there. We have a question in the Q&A box that actually adds a temporal dimension to that spatial geographical issue, thanks for this very interesting presentation. I would be interested to know also about the historical grounding of your cases. For example, social Yugoslavia was very actively working on computerising the society, producing hardware and software and being quite advanced in the field. To what extent the positionality of being outskirts or periphery is something that is itself fluid in time? And how do historical legacies shape current media practices and industries? Another question worth an entire seminar or two on its own!

LISA: Thank you for the question. In my case studies I start the chapters by trying to do some socio historical contextualisation, it is extremely important and it's challenging for me, because each of these sites could be its own massive book length project and so the challenge for me as a scholar is how to scale down these case studies and set them into dialogue relationally, especially when for many of my readers they are not going to make much sense in relation to one another. And so I have a challenge of establishing the socio historical context of each site and then combining the multi‑modal research and data I have collected and trying to flesh this out in each of the chapters. So I do appreciate this question, because that is why this project is taking me so long, because it has required a lot of contextual and background research. And then as the media scholar I'm not trained to have deep cultural competency in each of these sites. So I have had to rely quite a bit on partners in locations, on translators, on different kinds of modes of investigation, and all the while trying to flag my own limits. So I think the question was mostly about contextualisation but there might have been another part I am missing. Can you remind me, was there another part I should address?

HUNTER: I know we are running short on time, but there was a question really about how outskirts and peripheries something that's fluid in time.

LISA: Thank you for just zooming right in on this, because this is a topic that I have gone back and forth about whether outskirts just reinscribes the notion of periphery in a very contrite way. I went back to the etymology of the term because I was interested in how it could be used to out‑manoeuvre, outskirt meant out‑manoeuvre, and that's why I stuck with it. Because I felt there was something I was finding where in these sites, people I was talking to and interviewing were smarter about media technology than a lot of my colleagues who just don't know how these things work or wouldn't know how to repair them, can theorise the hell out of them but don't really have a material palpable sense of these machines and these socio technical contexts. So I stuck with this term and I'm still fleshing it out in the Manu script of the book, but I do take the point that does it just kind of ratify the periphery to come up with another metaphor which could be synonymous with it. It's something that I'm reflexive about. I do appreciate the question coming up. I just think that maybe there's a need to value those peripheries these sites and to bring that forth further. Thank you for the questions and comments. It helps me a lot as I am thinking through this.

GINA: It's our turn to thank you Lisa. Thank you for a great talk, thank you for joining us today. Thank you Hunter for deftly handling the discussion and questions. Thank you all of you joining us today wherever you are. Details on our future events can be found on our website which will appear in the chat. It's mctd.ac.uk. Please follow us on Twitter and other social media platforms @mcdtCambridge.

Our next event is in‑person only here in Cambridge on Friday, where we will host Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistle‑blower, to discuss trust in digital tech and big tech's role in national security and that will be with me and with John Naughton. So that promises to be quite exciting. Details for that event can be found on our website. Thank you all so much for being a part of our speaker series this year and we look forward to seeing all of you again. Thanks.