Mapping the mast

Branch, James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6815-7974 (2016) Mapping the mast. Communication Design: Interdisciplinary and Graphic Design Research, 3 (1). ISSN 2055-7140

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Abstract / Summary

There is currently widespread popular, professional and academic interest in communications infrastructures, particularly with the material networks that enable our seemingly immaterial systems to function. For example, Andrew Blum’s22 Blum, Tubes takes us inside places like the former AT&T telephone exchange on 60 Hudson Street, New York, to reveal the overlooked physical stuff that comprises the Internet. Similarly, Timo Arnall’s recent film, Internet Machine (2014), reveals something of the ‘cloud’, in cloud computing, via a filmic tour of a giant Telephonica data-centre in Alcalá, Spain. These works echo a concern within media scholarship for the materials and infrastructures of the ‘network society’ and the power relations that surround and shape these systems. In this article, I discuss how designers are involved in efforts to make infrastructures more legible and report on a practice-research project that explores a contested mobile mast in Winchester, UK. The project responds to media scholar Lisa Parks’ call to analyse mobile media networks by paying close attention to specific nodes in the network, local stories of development and the practices that surround mobile telecommunications infrastructure systems once they are activated.

Item Type:	Article
ISSN:	2055-7140
Subjects:	History, Geography & Environment Communication
Depositing User:	James Branch
Date Deposited:	15 Jun 2021 09:00
Last Modified:	15 Nov 2024 11:57
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/3287

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