ABSTRACT
Most people are socialised to know very little about the infrastructures that surround them in everyday life, whether electrical systems, sewer pipes or broadcast networks. Not only are people socialised to be unaware of such systems; infrastructures are often designed purposefully to be invisible or transparent, integrated with the built environment, whether submerged underground, covered by ceilings and walls, or camouflaged as ‘nature’. Further, since infrastructures often extend across vast territories they are impossible to grasp in their entirety and are difficult to describe. Much has been written about the social history of transportation and communication infrastructures. Studies by Wolfgang Schivelbush, Harold Innis, James Carey and others have helped us to understand the railway, telegraphy and broadcasting in relation to structures of industrialisation and modernity. Insisting upon the relevance of culture to such systems, Carey writes, ‘Technology, the hardest of material artifacts, is thoroughly cultural from the outset: an expression and creation of the very outlooks and aspirations we pretend it merely demonstrates’ (Carey 1992: 9). This chapter explores the topic of infrastructure from a cultural perspective using a partial, object-centred, and knowledge-oriented approach. Here we might access the work of cultural studies scholar John Fiske and consider what it might mean to study infrastructure from a perspective of ‘popular knowledges’ and ‘technostruggles’. 1 As Fiske reminds us, ‘The multiplication of communication and information technologies extends the terrains of struggle, modifies the forms struggle can take, and makes it even more imperative that people grasp the opportunities for struggle that the multiplying of technologies offers’ (Fiske 1996: 240).
