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Circuitous routes: from topology to topography -- Short-circuiting discursive infrastructure: from connection to transmission -- Gateway: from cable colony to network operations center -- Pressure point: turbulent ecologies of the cable landing -- A network of islands: interconnecting the Pacific -- Cabled depths: the aquatic afterlives of signal traffic -- Surfacing

AbstractThis article poses the question: what are the ends of media studies? It discusses a turn to "nature" and the elements that has pushed media studies beyond its traditional objects and subjects. While the conceptualization of environments and bodies as communicative substrates offers new avenues for media research, mediation has also been taken up in a wide range of disciplinary and intellectual contexts. Rather than establishing limits or an essential core of media studies, the article suggests that media scholars take an etic orientation and attend to the questions whose invisibility is constitutive of the field. Using the example of undersea cable systems, the article describes some of the many conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical ends of media analysis.

This article documents how thermal manipulation is critical to the transformation of the earth's raw materials into media and to maintaining those materials as media. Through an examination of thermal practices, including mineral extraction, the use of air-conditioning in media manufacturing and preservation, and thermal infrared imaging, thermal control is shown to be essential to the conversion of geological matter into circulations of media on a mass scale. In each of these cases, cultural assumptions and imperatives—the drive toward purity, the development of standardization, and the demand for homogeneity across elements and media objects—organize temperature management. The thermocultures of media inflect its composition, movements, and temporalities and embed it within existing regimes of capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. The study of thermocultures offers an alternative to traditional infrastructural and geological analyses, one oriented less toward the excavation of elements from deep time and the depths of the earth and more toward the conditions in which geologic matter's potentials are actualized as media. It also opens up a new set of genealogies for investigation, including the historical role of thermal management in the differentiation of gendered bodies.

"The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus. Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri"--

Since the commercial aviation boom in the 1960s and 70s, the subsea cable industry has relied on global air travel for network development, infrastructure maintenance, and market penetration. However, COVID-19 disruptions forced a shift to remote work, challenging traditional travel practices and presenting an opportunity for carbon emission reduction. This study investigates the industry's response to the "new normal" and its implications for mobility and sustainability. We employ a media industries approach and conduct open-ended interviews with industry leaders to examine the potential balance between remote work benefits and essential in-person aspects, questioning whether the industry should return to pre-pandemic travel levels or embrace remote work's ecological and financial benefits. Our findings indicate that remote work suitability varies depending on project stage, involved personnel, and the existing social fabric. To facilitate travel-related carbon footprint monitoring for cable consortiums, we developed a calculator to determine the industry's emissions when adopting remote work. Our interdisciplinary study also emphasizes mobility's intricate role in subsea cable systems and broader media infrastructure studies. By scrutinizing corporate cultures, communication practices, and transportation infrastructures, we enhance the scholarly comprehension of the social fabric underpinning global digital networks and investigate potential shifts toward a more sustainable media industry.

Abstract
Over the past three decades, corporate branding has trended strongly towards environmental conscientiousness and green rhetoric, often heralded under the term "sustainability" – a broad and mutable rhetorical strategy that not only serves industry self-interest but is mobilized by civil society actors as well. This tension is especially apparent in the information communication technologies (ICT) sector. Employing Wittgenstein's concept of the language-game, this article describes how sustainability has been deployed by tech companies, and how these efforts have also been contested – and strategically mobilized – by activist environmental non-profits and critical scholars seeking to reform tech sector practices. Combining environmental communication, political economy, and discourse analysis, we investigate the conceptualization and communication of sustainability as a discourse within and against the sector.

Some assembly required / John Durham Peters -- Introduction: The logistics of media / Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger -- Habits of assembly / Stefano Harney and Fred Moten -- Inter: Storage solutions -- "Shipped": paper, print, and the Atlantic slave trade / Susan Zieger -- Inter: Logistical magic -- Pan-African logistics / Ebony Coletu -- Inter: The march of data -- The pulse of global passage : listening to logistics / Shannon Mattern -- Inter: beneath the Great White Way -- Colonization's logistical media: the ship and the document / Liam Cole Young -- Inter: Always already assembled -- "Every man within earshot" : auditory efficiency in the time of the telephone / Matthew Hockenberry -- Inter: Logistical software -- Logistical media theory, the politics of time, and the geopolitics of automation / Ned Rossiter -- Inter: "It's loud and it's tasteless and I've heard it before" -- Carry that weight : the costs of delivery and the ecology of vinyl records' revival / Michael Palm -- Inter: Sound from a music container -- Supply chain cinema, supply chain education : training creative wizardry for offshored exploitation / Kay Dickinson -- Inter: Forklift cinema -- The politics of cable supply from the British Empire to Huawei Marine / Nicole Starosielski -- Inter: Who watches the watchers? -- Laugh out loud / Tung-Hui Hu.

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Infrastructures of Time: An Introduction to Hardwired Temporalities -- Part I Media Philosophies of Time Patterning -- 1. The Suspension of Irreversibility: The Fundamental (and Futile) Task of Media -- 2. Time and Technology: The Temporalities of Care -- 3. Problems of Temporality in the Digital Epoch -- 4. Suspending the "Time Domain" : Technological Tempor(e)alities of Media Infrastructures -- Part II Microtimes -- 5. Infrastructuring Leap Seconds : The Regime of Temporal Plurality in Digitally Networked Media -- 6. Life at the Femtosecond -- 7. Artificial Intelligence and the Temporality of Machine Images -- 8. Intervals of Intervention : Micro- Decisions and the Temporal Autonomy of Self-Driving Cars -- Part III Lifetimes -- 9. Grounded Speed and the Soft Temporality of Network Infrastructure -- 10. Unruly Bodies of Code in Time -- 11. Screwed: Anxiety and the Digital Ends of Anticipation -- 12. Beep: Listening to the Digital Watch -- Part IV Futures -- 13. Captured Time: Eye Tracking and the Attention Economy -- 14. Ahead of Time : The Infrastructure of Amazon's Anticipatory Shipping Method -- 15. Artificial Neural Networks, Postdigital Infrastructures and the Politics of Temporality -- 16. Technics of Time: Values in Future Internet Development -- Index