Navigating New Studies of Media and Technology

It is a pleasure to highlight a few books that have been especially insightful and helpful to my recent thinking, research, and teaching on global media technologies. Each of these books is so densely textured it is a great challenge to do them justice in just a few pages. Nevertheless, I shall try. The first is Brian Larkin's Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Trained as an anthropologist, Larkin has developed a richly researched study of media cultures in Nigeria. Equipped with language skills and a nuanced understanding of local Muslim religious practices and traditions, Larkin offers a vivid account of the emergence of modern Nigerian media infrastructures. Building on work by Simon Marvin and Stephen Graham, Saskia Sassen, and others, Larkin uses the concept of "infrastructure" as a rubric for understanding the macro- and micro-level operations that generate and sustain media cultures, focusing on the city of Kano. In Larkin's words, infrastructure refers to the "totality of both technical and cultural systems that create institutionalized structures whereby goods of all sorts circulate, connecting and binding people into collectivities."¹

Using a combination of ethnographic, discursive, and textual approaches, Larkin is careful to historicize this concept in relation to Nigeria's colonial experience. The book opens with a chapter called the "Colonial Sublime" that details the construction of bridges, roads, railroads, and later radio networks that tethered the colony to the British empire. Such technological campaigns were integral to the formation of a particular colonial subjectivity. As Larkin explains, "Railways, roads, and radio broadcasts were erected to bring into being a technologically mediated subject proud of his past but exposed to new ideas, open to the education, knowledge, and ideas traveling along this new architecture of communication."²

As the book unfolds, Larkin proceeds to investigate how this technologically mediated subjectivity has transformed along with Nigeria's changing political conditions. While the book's first half concentrates on colonial infrastructure, radio networks, and mobile film units that brought state newsreels to villages, the second investigates the rise of commercial cinema, video-film rental stores, and informal economies of piracy that have bloomed within postcolonial conditions. Attentive to the vicissitudes of power, Larkin notes that piracy "depends heavily on the flow of media from official, highly regulated forms of media trade, but then develops its own structures of reproduction and distribution external and internal to the state economy."³ Larkin's many strengths include abilities to conceptualize across different historical moments, different media and technological systems (radio, mobile film units, cinema, digital video) and different scholarly disciplines (such as anthropology, film and media studies, science and technology studies, African studies, and urban studies). Signal and Noise inspires new ways of thinking about what media technologies are, how they have emerged in different ways in different parts of the world, and how local and national Nigerian actors have contended with the forces of the global media economy.

While Signal and Noise analyzes the modern mediascape of Nigeria, James Schwoch's Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69 offers another spin on global media, examining "the architects and carpenters of global television from the Cold War era." Global TV sets out "to show how global television was significantly shaped by the theory and practice of Cold War geopolitics."⁴ That television's globalization is intertwined with the history of global security is a fact often sidestepped in more cultural accounts of the medium's past. After immersing himself in so many archival collections (of various US presidents, the USIA, CIA, and the US State Department, etc.) Schwoch has acquired an insider-like understanding of global television's marriage to global security concerns.

Schwoch's revelation that cold war tensions over various "extraterritorialities, or spaces beyond the traditionally understood borders and perimeters of nation-states" were formative to television's globalization guides his historical analysis.⁵ After the International Telecommunications Union resolved how to regulate the extraterritorial space known as the electromagnetic spectrum, as Schwoch points out, cold war tensions persisted in relation to other extraterritorialies such as...