Nicole Starosielski

Guardian: What lies beneath: the growing threat to the hidden network of cables that power the internet

August 13, 2024
Jonathan Yerushalmy

It was the opening days of 2022, in the aftermath of a huge volcanic eruption, when Tonga went dark. The underwater eruption – 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima – sent tsunami waves across Tonga’s nearby archipelago and blanketed the island’s white coral sands in ash.

The strength of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption severed internet connectivity with Tonga, causing a communication blackout at just...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/09/what-lies-beneath-th…

The Undersea Network

Nicole Starosielski
2015

In our "wireless" world it is easy to take the importance of the undersea cable systems for granted, but the stakes of their successful operation are huge, as they are responsible for carrying almost all transoceanic Internet traffic. In The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. In doing so, she charts the cable network's cultural, historical, geographic and...

Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment

Nicole Starosielski
Janet Walker
2016

Sustainable Media explores the many ways that media and environment are intertwined from the exploitation of natural and human resources during media production to the installation and disposal of media in the landscape; from people’s engagement with environmental issues in film, television, and digital media to the mediating properties of ecologies themselves. Edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, the assembled chapters expose how the social and representational practices of media culture are necessarily caught up with technologies, infrastructures, and...

Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures

Nicole Starosielski
Lisa Parks
2015

In Signal Traffic, editors Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski use the term "media infrastructure" to signal a shift in critical focus and approach that questions the international telecommunication network as a given. Contributors instead confront vital questions concerning the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways they are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.

Exploring such issues leads some of the essayists to examine the physical objects...

Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media

Nicole Starosielski
Matthew Hockenberry
Susan Zieger
2021

The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics. The contributors interrogate topics ranging from the logistics of film...

Media Hot and Cold

Nicole Starosielski
2022

In Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort....