The Interstate Commerce Act developed for regulating the railroads has continued to influence the development of the legal framework for all the subsequent network technologies — petroleum pipelines, trucking, civil aviation, and telecommunications, among other technologies. Here metaphors were effective vehicles for the transfer of conceptual frameworks from one technology to another because they were all point-to-point networks for the movement of materials and information from one point to another. We focus on a case where this process of transferring metaphors from one technology to another broke down — the case of radio. The development of broadcasting created what we call a “metaphor vacuum,” as there were no readily available metaphors to think about the new technology. We are interested in understanding how the legal system dealt with the central problematic of the “metaphor vacuum.”  Here, on the one hand, there was a radically new technology for which no clear precedent was available.  On the other hand, the case law could not proceed without a precedent.  One way this tension could be resolved was by taking an established metaphor and stretching it and that was what was done in the case of radio, as the concept of Public Interest Convenience and Necessity (PICON) from the world of railroads was stretched to generate for a framework for regulation of radio.  We examine how this stretching process works.

Harmeet Sawhney is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests focus on how telecommunications networks are envisioned and created.  His research articles appear in Telecommunications Policy; Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media; Media, Culture, & Society; Info; Prometheus; Entrepreneurship & Regional Development; Communication Monographs; Annual Review of Information Science & Technology; Science Technology & Society; European Journal of Legal Studies, The Information Society and book chapters in edited volumes. He has been visiting faculty at University of Michigan, London School of Economics, and Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, London.  He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of The Information Society.

Venkata Ratnadeep Suri is a doctoral student in the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. His academic background includes: MA in Mass Communications and Development, University of Hyderabad, India; M.A., Communication, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. His research interests include new communication technologies (ICTs), and the role and use of ICTs in development.

Hyangsun Lee is Research Fellow at Office of Planning and Management, Korea Communications Standards Commission, Seoul, Korea.  She completed her doctoral studies in 2008 at the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. Her prior academic background includes: BA in English Literature & Linguistics, Korea University; MA in Telecommunications, Indiana University. Her research interests focus on technology and law.

Even for those writers who may be in overt denial of any digital mediation of their practice, networked services are likely to provide crucial points of reference during the composition of their texts. If this is the case, then terms have literally been agreed. The writer has conceded that he or she is happy both to supply something—typically a large number of search phrases—to various services and then to receive, read, and transact with results produced by algorithms. We may claim that we have a generalized understanding of these algorithms’ behaviors, however the detailed workings of such processes are jealously guarded as proprietary and are considered highly valuable for reasons that may be entirely divorced from or at odds with the intent of the writer’s queries. The underlying transaction is very different from looking up a word in a dictionary.

This paper will address these circumstances and attempt to think through selected consequences for digitally mediated, aesthetically engaged practices of writing.

John Cayley writes digital media, particularly in the domain of poetry and poetics. Recent and ongoing projects include The Readers Project with Daniel C. Howe, imposition with Giles Perring, riverIsland, and what we will … Information on these and other works may be consulted at http://programmatology.shadoof.net. Cayley is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, where he teaches writing in and for digital media, including electronic writing, and writing for immersive artificial audiovisual environments. Presently Cayley is obsessed, agonistically, by Writing to be Found with=against Google and other similar ‘services.’

What makes a material network a navigable social space? In my contribution, I will try to demonstrate that the relation of built structures and their media of representation forms a fundamental aspect of network histories. As opposed to pre-modelled, planned networks, the history of the London Underground train system is emergent and evolutionary. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, representations of the subterrean lines are mostly cartographic. There hardly is an aesthetic of topological nodes and links to be found, until the unknown draughtsmen Henry C. Beck delivers a revolutionary redesign of the conventional map of London trains. Although there a precursors to the icon of modernity the London Tube Map was about to become, it turns the sheer materiality of the railroads into something new–a concise diagrammatic network with regular meshes, a calm interface to the dynamism of the metropolis.

But what are the historic relations that inscribed themselves in the London Tube Map? I propose a different understanding of the famous diagram which re-explains the contexts of its introduction. Three aspects will be especially important. (1) Beck’s invention owes a lot to the specific perception of the Underground passenger who is an expert of everyday ‘nodality’ (Castells). As Beck himself has put it: “connections are the thing”. (2) The design follows a general approach of London Transport’s publicity director Frank Pick to make the public train system navigable by a unified semiotic and material style. (3) Beck’s London Tube Map must also be understood as a way of synchronizing a mostly asynchronous network. Its spatiality owes a lot to the mostly unknown train timing and recording practices of London Transport: Before the diagram of the map, there exists a multitude of clocks and their diagrams. (4) Without the contemporary political background a complete graphic network would hardly have been imaginable. The year 1933 happens to be the year of an governmental unification of the competing railroad lines of London. What the London Transport Passenger Board (LPTB) is to the citizens, the Tube Map is to the passenger.

Built networks as social spaces unfold in time. Although this is generally true for 18th and 19th century representations of reticular material structures, it becomes *the* prominent feature of 20th century networks in general. An archaeological approach to the materiality of networks has to account for that kind of “becoming network”: Temporality is the key to relationality.

Sebastian Gießmann, Internet Policy Advisor to the Greens in the German Bundestag. Formerly research fellow at the Excellence cluster TOPOI and research assistant at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Monographs: Netze und Netzwerke. Archäologie einer Kulturtechnik 1740 – 1840, Bielefeld 2006. Forthcoming: Die Verbundenheit der Dinge. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Netze und Netzwerke, 2012. Editing: “Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften”, “ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft”.

Digital media moved from a speculative opportunity in the 1990s to a widely adopted consumer commodity in the 2000s and is now archaeological. This paper extends Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle and Cumulative Adoption S-Curve schematics of technological change to propose a three-phase theory of media transformation: new media phase, consumer commodity phase, and archaeology phase.  Gartner’s models propose that media technologies go predictably through a cycle of technology trigger, a peak of inflated expectations, disillusionment, maturation, widespread consumer adoption, and obsolescence.  Although Gartner’s models are targeted at analyzing the sales of consumer products, they serve as useful starting points within the discipline of media theory to articulate and visualize a chronology of change that encompasses newness, commodities, and archaeologies.

The Gartner Group's Hype Cycle

Garnet Hertz (Ph.D) is a Fulbright Scholar and contemporary artist whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is Artist in Residence and Research Scientist in Informatics at UC Irvine and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in thirteen countries including SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and DEAF and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based lecture series on DIY culture, electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News. More info: http://conceptlab.com.

In the introduction to their new media archaeology anthology, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka propose that “[m]edia archaeology should not be confused with archaeology as a discipline. When media archaeologists claim that they are ‘excavating’ media-cultural phenomena, the word should be understood in a specific way” (3). In this talk I propose that much can be gained in a study of mediated sites by considering how archaeologists understand excavation, and by productively “confusing” media archaeology and archaeology proper. As I’ve studied relationships among historical media networks and the material spaces of cities, I’ve looked for material evidence of the “older” media systems that laid the foundation for our cities’ contemporary media. Such work has required that I dig both metaphorically and literally into urban terrain. Many archaeologists and urban and architectural historians have wielded shovels before me, and I’ve come to appreciate how much media history has to learn from these fields.

I then present a case study that relies on such a “triangulation” of interdisciplinary methods. Examining New York’s sonic history – particularly its role as a site for radio broadcast and as a space for public address – requires that we understand how radio and sound waves have interacted with, and even shaped, the material city. To excavate the material spaces that made possible these various forms of broadcast, I draw on recent work in sound studies, a field that has informed media and design studies and practice, as well as the humanities and social sciences at large.

Shannon Mattern is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School. Her research and teaching focus on relationships among media, architectural, and urban space. Her book, The New Downtown Library, was supported by the Graham and Mellon foundations and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2007. She has been awarded a Visiting Scholarship at the Canadian Centre of Architecture and an Innovations in Education Grant from The New School to support her current work on “urban media archaeology.”

The Rays, a 1970 videotape by the Raindance Corporation, shows something curious: As the three collaborators record each other, rhythmic waves flow across the screen. In each wave there are bits of recognizable images – cartoon rabbits, glossy spokes models, and news footage. The video camera inadvertently picks up television images broadcast from the tall antennas in the background. Television is all around the artists, not just in their homes, but also on their skin and in the air that they breathe.  The images Ryan plucks from the air and traps on the tape are “his rays” – they belong to him. This is partially true: the airwaves are, technically, public property, but this electric commons was publically owned but practically inaccessible for independent videomakers. Guerrilla Video’s sensational infiltration of cable and broadcast television in the 1970s is largely a myth. The moments that Guerrilla Video appeared on corporate and public television were aberrant moments. The half-inch video that spooled through artists’ cameras in the 1970s was officially unbroadcastable by FCC standards. Contrary to scholarly accounts, it was tape, not television, I argue, which was the important medium for the movement. It was the very materiality of the tape that afforded its radical potential, both aesthetically and politically. Half-inch videotape posed a challenge to the mechanisms of network and cable television in that it allowed for the creation of alternative networks for distribution that were completely outside of corporate and FCC control: guerrilla videomakers drove the tapes around the country, sent them out in the mail, and used illegal pirate stations to transmit them over the air.  Only by actively disrupting, displacing, and replacing the officially sanctioned channels of television distribution could Guerrilla Video become an explicitly political movement as well as an aesthetic one. This guerrilla action depended on the containerized cassette tape and improvised, lo-fi means of getting it to individuals, not to the masses.

Kris Paulsen is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Film, Video, and New Media in the Department of the History of Art and Program in Film Studies at The Ohio State University. Her current research addresses artistic engagements with television and experiments with telepresence. She is currently finishing a book manuscript, “Real Time over Real Space: Telepresence and Contemporary Art,” and has recently begun a new project, “Mass Medium: Artists’ Television 1965 to the Present.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, renowned neurophysiologist, John C. Lilly, received funding from several U.S. government agencies including NASA and the U.S. Navy to conduct experimental research on the feasibility of human communication with dolphins. This paper explores the short-lived human-dolphin communication network that emerged from Lilly’s unorthodox experimental devices and techniques for breaking what he called the “interspecies communication barrier.” The modes of interspecies communication at Lilly’s Communication Research Institute suggest that both “communication” and “network” during this period had an array of competing meanings, some of which drew upon established models of telecommunication and broadcasting while others, like Lilly’s, emerged from fields influenced by cybernetics, such as neural nets, brain modeling, artificial intelligence, psychiatry and biocomputing. The paper analyzes the material and discursive construction of the human-dolphin communication network using Lilly’s designs, published papers, photographs and media coverage. Drawing from Andrew Pickering, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour and John Durham Peters, I argue that Lilly’s techniques and technologies enacted a distinctly cybernetic approach to network-building in which the aim was not to increase transparency in communication or maximize control but rather to produce zones of uncertainty in which new organizations of agency could evolve. Revisiting the human-dolphin network thus troubles the role that is commonly attributed to cybernetics in conventional histories of network media and highlights the often neglected diversity of materials – chemical, acoustic, biological, electronic – in the experimental communication networks of the postwar period.

John Shiga is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, working under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Sterne. His current research focuses on sound and subjectivity in interspecies communication research.

Alongside the cameras and projectors sold in typical early film catalogues, in 1911 the French company Gaumont advertised a more revealing, if unexpected “film” device. Gaumont’s redresseurs statiques – static inverters – were designed to aleviate two problems for film exhibitors: first, the inverter ensured that light sources would be bright enough to project clear images (boosting luminosity, the ad claims, up to 75%). Second, and more importantly, by converting the alternating current available on many city power grids to the direct current used by Gaumont’s film machines, it guaranteed that exhibitors could perform in any part of Paris, which was served by a non-standardized system of AC and DC electrical networks. That Gaumont should produce such a device is no great surprise. The company’s studios and factories in Paris’s working-class northeast lay beyond the municipal grid and would not see electrical lines until after World War I.To power its growing business, Gaumont had to build its own substations and develop expertise in electrical technologies alongside films and standard filmmaking machines.

This paper will describe how Gaumont’s need for power pushed the company to link cinema’s industrialization with scientists’ and engineers’ efforts to develop electrical and communications networks into the 1920s. Under the guidance of inventors and industrialists, Gaumont’s film studios, workshops, and manufacturing facilities housed research and development that shaped modern cinema while also contributing to the emergence of Parisian electrical networks and wireless communication systems. Gaumont’s efforts to interface with Paris’s emerging technological networks, I will argue, helped lay the groundwork for today’s forms of media “convergence” and point to the importance of investigating the long and tangled histories of the public and private developments that shape media infrastrutures and technological systems.

Brian R. Jacobson is Assistant Professor of Screen Studies in the Department of English at Oklahoma State University. He specializes in film and architecture, early cinema, the history and philosophy of technology, and visual studies. During 2009-2010 he was a Fulbright Advanced Student Fellow to France and a Social Science Research Council fellow. His current project – Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and Early Cinema – examines film studio architecture and urban infrastructure before 1915 in France and the US.

This project consists of an academic paper as well as a ten minute video documentary. I intend to screen the documentary while offering supplemental discussion from my paper. Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible. Built in the 1930s as the global headquarters of Western Union, 60 Hudson Street was ready-made for the Internet: the conduits once used for telegraph lines are now filled with fiber optic cables. Featuring interviews with Stephen Graham, Saskia Sassen, and several industry professionals, the documentary explores why this concentrated piece of Internet infrastructure located in a dense, mixed-use neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, paying particular attention to the role of path dependence. The project has been featured by The Atlantic, Rhizome, and Boing Boing.

Ben Mendelsohn is a media scholar and documentary filmmaker from New York City. He earned his MA in Media Studies from The New School, where his thesis project, “Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors,” examined the economic geography and material history of Internet infrastructure.

This paper uses a comparative analysis of published appearances of “ether” by computer scientists in the 1970s and physicists in the 1880s.  In 1973, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), computer scientists created a prototype for the Ethernet, what would become the most prevalent system for connecting local area networks. At that time the Ethernet consisted of several computers linked via a series of coaxial cables, and these cables the scientists referred to as the “ether.” Why is “ether” in the “Ethernet”? The term “ether” carries with it a vexed history from the perspective of natural science.  Physicists in the 19th century referred to “ether” as the substance through which electromagnetic energy traveled. Before the publication of the theory of special relativity in 1905, many physicists worked to find mechanical models that explained electromagnetism in a way that fit with Newtonian physics. Ether was central to these modeling efforts, since electromagnetic energy must travel through a physical substance in keeping with the tenets of classical mechanics. Ether was thought to be everywhere yet invisible. Despite numerous attempts, the existence of the ether was never verified through experiments, and as the paradigm shifted, the word “ether” disappeared from theories of electromagnetism only to be picked up as a signifier for radio and television waves.  When explaining their use of “ether,” the scientists at the Xerox PARC state that they intended to invoke the usage by 19th century physicist, not the 20th century use with broadcasting technology. What does the redeployment of “ether” tell us about how computer scientists viewed early network infrastructure? When old terms are used to refer to new types of digital technology, these words carry with them vestiges of their previous use, as argued by Tarleton Gillespie, Lev Manovich, Ben Peters, and many others.  This paper argues that a transcendental hope for universal access to communication networks shaped the naming of Ethernet and its constituent parts. This analysis sheds light on contemporary misconceptions of internet infrastructure, particularly the idea that network infrastructure is universal and immaterial much like the conception of ether by Victorian-era physicists.

Peter Schaefer is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at Marymount Manhattan College.  His work has appeared in the journals Critical Studies in Media Communication and New Media & Society as well as in the anthologies The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Newness in Context and iPod and Philosophy.