Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices presents a collection of texts by distinguished international media and cultural scholars that addresses fundamental relationships between the logistic, symbolic, and infrastructural dimensions of media. The volume discusses the role of traffic and infrastructures within the history of media theory as well as in a broader cultural context: Traffic is shown to constitute an important epistemological and technical principle, a paradigm for exchanges and circulations between discoursive and non-discoursive cultural practices. This opens an encompassing perspective of media ecology, and at the same time illuminates the formative power of traffic as structuring time and space: material and informational traffic creates, maintains, and undermines power, configures meaning, and facilitates appropriation and resistance.
Marion Näser-Lather, Dr. phil., is postdoc researcher at the Institute of European Ethnology/ Cultural Science at
Philipps University Marburg, Germany, and board member of the “Society for Social Responsibility in Science”
(GVW e.V.). Her research interests include activist movement studies, Mediterranean studies, net cultures, and
infrastructure.
Christoph Neubert, Dr. phil., is lecturer for media history at the Department of Media Studies at the University
of Paderborn, Germany, and senior member of the research training group “Automatisms.” His research
interests include media theory and history, traffic and logistics, and the history of ecology.
Marion Näser-Lather and Christoph Neubert: Traffic – Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices: Introduction
Section 1: Theorizing Traffic
John Durham Peters: Infrastructuralism: Media as Traffic Between Nature and Culture
Gabriele Schabacher: Traffic as ‘Dirt Experience’: Harold Innis’s Tracing of Media
Jana Mangold: Traffic of Metaphor: Transport and Media at the Beginning of Media Theory
Hartmut Winkler: Traces: Does Traffic Retroact on the Media Infrastructure?
Section 2: Traffic of Concepts
Grant David Bollmer: Technobiological Traffic: Networks, Bodies, and the Management of Vitality
Norm Friesen: Dewey’s Cosmic Traffic: Politics and Pedagogy as Communication
Richard Cavell: McLuhan, Turing, and the Question of Determinism
Martina Leeker and Michael Steppat: Data Traffic in Theater and Engineering: Between Technical Conditions and Illusions
Section 3: Time, Space, and Power
Menahem Blondheim and Elihu Katz: Communications in an Ancient Empire: An Innisian Reading of the Book of Esther
Peter Krapp: Nomads of the Technical Sublime
Wolfgang Suetzl: Street Protests, Electronic Disturbance, Smart Mobs: Dislocations of Resistance
Wolf-Dieter Ernst: Performing Traffic: On Mobile Aesthetics in Contemporary Theater and Travel
All interested in Media Theory and History, Cultural Studies, Infrastructure Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Mobilities Studies, Social Movement Studies. Relevant for academic libraries, undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars.