This course will focus on the history, theory, and experience of old and new media technologies.

The digital “cloud” is a real place. It is a patchwork of subsea fiber optic cables (the highways of the internet), internet exchanges (the transit hubs of the internet), and data centers (the interconnection points and storage centers of the internet). Although almost all global media transits through these infrastructures, they remain largely invisible—even to businesses, governments, and publics that rely on them. This course will give you a broad introduction to the technological infrastructures that supports almost all media circulation today. It will introduce you to the fundamentals of the internet's physical installations and the people and companies in the digital infrastructure sector. This will include not only large-scale examples such as Google’s massive data centers and Meta’s continent-encircling 2-Africa submarine cable, but also lesser-known companies and sites. While digital infrastructure has historically been obscured from public view, this course gives you a peek into the internet’s complex physical installations, and the technologies and social processes that undergird them. One of the fundamental problems facing the digital infrastructure industry today is visibility. On one hand, digital infrastructure is incredibly complex technically, economically, and socially. On the other hand, it has historically been obscured from public view. For many reasons, digital infrastructure is becoming–and needs to become–more visible. The media that is out there, however, does not typically reflect its complexity. The central task for you in this course will be to develop a creative and rigorously-informed vision of digital infrastructures–a new form of infrastructure literacy. Central questions of this course include: Where does the internet live? Who builds it? What challenges do they face? How do we capture and represent this invisible system?

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