Lisa Parks

Kwiizya: local cellular network services in remote areas

Cellular networks have revolutionized the way people communicate in rural areas. At the same time, deployment of commercial-grade cellular networks in areas with low population density, such as in rural sub-Saharan Africa, is prohibitively expensive relative to the return of investment. As a result, 48\% of the rural population in Africa remains disconnected. To address this problem, we design a local cellular network architecture, Kwiizya, that provides basic voice and text messaging services in rural areas. Our system features an interface for development of text message based applications that can be leveraged for improved health care, education and support of local businesses. We deployed an instance of Kwiizya in the rural village of Macha in Zambia. Our deployment utilizes the existing long distance Wi-Fi network in the village for inter-base station communication to provide high quality services with minimal infrastructure requirements. In this paper we evaluate Kwiizya in-situ in Macha and show that the network maintains low delay and jitter (20ms and 3ms, respectively) for voice call traffic, while providing high call Mean Opinion Score of 3.46, which is the theoretical maximum supported by our system.

Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening

For the past several months I have been conducting an experiment at airport security gates, shooting photographs of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) facilities and screeners to determine how long I can go on before I will be asked to stop. After shooting photos in 12 airports I have received only one warning at the US-Canada border while taking a picture of a twenty-something woman of colour being interrogated by TSA workers after she was physically searched in a nearby makeshift room. I only became visible to the TSA at the moment I witnessed her visibility, but in general as a white woman I go relatively unnoticed in a US security regime largely based on racial profiling. If I were a person of colour it is possible that many of these images would not exist, that my camera would have been taken, the images destroyed, or I might not have even taken the risk in the first place. In any case, it has become clear to me that the airport is no longer just a ‘non-place’ as Marc Auge (Auge, 1995) famously described it over a decade ago, but in the context of the US-led war on global terror it has possibly become ‘the place’, a charged and volatile domain punctuated by shifting regimes of biopower.

Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

When the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in 2003, fans mourned the death of the hit television series. Yet the show has lived on through syndication, global distribution, DVD release, and merchandising, as well as in the memories of its devoted viewers. Buffy stands out from much entertainment television by offering sharp, provocative commentaries on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and youth. Yet it has also been central to changing trends in television production and reception. As a flagship show for two U.S. “netlets”—the WB and UPN— Buffy helped usher in the “post-network” era, and as the inspiration for an active fan base, it helped drive the proliferation of Web-based fan engagement. In Undead TV , media studies scholars tackle the Buffy phenomenon and its many afterlives in popular culture, the television industry, the Internet, and academic criticism. Contributors engage with critical issues such as stardom, gender identity, spectatorship, fandom, and intertextuality. Collectively, they reveal how a vampire television series set in a sunny California suburb managed to provide some of the most biting social commentaries on the air while exposing the darker side of American life. By offering detailed engagements with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s celebrity image, science-fiction fanzines, international and “youth” audiences, Buffy tie-in books, and Angel’s body, Undead TV shows how this prime-time drama became a prominent marker of industrial, social, and cultural change. Contributors . Ian Calcutt, Cynthia Fuchs, Amelie Hastie, Annette Hill, Mary Celeste Kearney, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Jason Middleton, Susan Murray, Lisa Parks

Mapping Orbit: Toward a Vertical Public Space

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map (Figure 3.1) first surfaced as a sketch in 1927 entitled “One-Town World.” A decade and a half later, in 1943, Life magazine published a refined version of it called the “Air Ocean World map.” By 1954 the Dymaxion Air Ocean World map had become the full expression of what Fuller referred to as “Spaceship Earth” (Marks, 1960, p. 50). As it circulated, one of Fuller’s biographers explains, “many geographic facts, not usually observed, became dramatically apparent” (ibid., p. 50). The final version of the map represents the planet as an island in one ocean without any visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas and without splitting any continents. It is relevant to the mapping of orbit for several reasons. First, it exemplifies an experimental and conceptual approach to the mapping of earth that challenges methods and assumptions of traditional cartography, which tend to reinforce elements that divide societies, obscuring the relational patterns emerging from processes of globalization. Second, it foregrounds principles of contiguity and integration by presenting the earth, air and oceans as continuous domains, and in so doing implies that change in one inevitably affects conditions in another. Third, it became a template for the demonstration and analysis of the unequal distribution and use of world energy resources, and thus articulated broader global political, economic and environmental concerns (ibid., pp. 50-53). Finally, the map changed the ways in which the public thought about the world as well as the ways in which geographers thought about mapping it.

Insecure Airwaves: US Bombings of Aljazeera

Homeland security is a concept invented from a perspective of US interiority. That is, it was developed to guard US citizens from external threats, whether runaway planes, airborne diseases or volatile information. In this essay, I move the discussion beyond the homeland to suggest that US security is undermined when the US military drops bombs on Arab television stations abroad. US military attacks on commercial broadcasters such as Aljazeera constitute an unprecedented form of media violence, one that represents a disregard for international journalists’ integrity and safety, threatens the circulation of Arab viewpoints and voices, and symbolizes US officials’ devaluation of democratic principles such as free speech and dissent. If security is achieved in part through the recognition of difference (or, as Jacques Derrida might put it, through the impossibility of not ‘‘living together’’ in this world), then the US bombings of Aljazeera represent an especially disturbing development in that they expose the US’s patent attempts to quash difference in the mediasphere by destroying Aljazeera’s facilities and resources, killing and detaining its employees, and interrupting the circulation of its signal. Aljazeera first emerged in 1996 five years before 911, but most Westerners only became familiar with the Arab satellite television network after it broadcast videotapes from Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and began reporting on the war on terror as it played out in Afghanistan and Iraq. Partly financed by the Emir of Qatar, Aljazeera, which means ‘‘peninsula’’ in Arabic, generated coverage of wartime events in ways that differed from those of US cable networks, in part because of reporters’ deeper understanding of Muslim countries. Further, since Aljazeera’s reporters speak and read Arabic languages, they could eavesdrop on militias, communicate with civilians, and venture into conflict zones to expose grim scenes of US invasion and occupation. After the network broadcast messages from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Bush administration publicly condemned the network as the

Cracking Open the Set

Searching for col lect ibles in a Mid west ern antique mall one day, I came across a 1955 TV ser vice man ual called Basic Tele vi sion. As I flipped through the book, I dis cov ered faint pen cilled notes and dia grams scrib bled across its pages—the fifty-year-old traces of the man behind the man ual (see Fig ure 1). Sur prised to find signs of life in this dusty book I scru ti nized the notes a lit tle more closely, think ing I could incor po rate them into my research. What became most strik ing about these traces, how ever, was the feel ing of total incom pre hen sion they evoked in me. In my mind, there was noth ing “basic” about this book’s account of tele vi sion, and no mat ter how hard I tried, I could n’t under stand these high-tech doo dles because I lacked the tech ni cal knowl edge to decode them. I want to use this per sonal anec dote as a way to begin a dis cus sion about the cir cu la tion of tech ni cal knowl edge about tele vi sion dur ing the period 1949-1955. By tech ni cal knowl edge, I am refer ring to the mechan i cal and elec tri cal oper a tion as well as the instal la tion and main te nance of the tele vi sion set. From 1949 to 1955, the con sump tion of tele vi sion sets sky rock eted. The num ber of tele vi sion sets in Amer i can homes grew from 910,000 in 1948 to 37,590,000 by 1955 (Hansen 1956, 790). As con sumer demand for tele vi sion sets increased, so too did demand for tele vi sion repair. Knowing about the tech ni cal oper a tion of this new “dream machine” also meant

Orbital Performers and Satellite Translators: Media Art in the Age of Ionospheric Exchange

The ionosphere is a space 70–80 kilometers above the surface of the earth, a space composed of gases that have been ionized by ultraviolet radiation from the sun and is filled with free electrons. Because of this, it can reflect electronic signal transmissions from the earth, making it possible to bounce radio waves from one hemisphere to another. The first satellites launched during the 1960s in effect replaced the charged ionosphere, and their transponders became sites for real time inter-continental transmission and exchange. The development of the satellite, then, can be conceptualized as a prolonged attempt to achieve long-distance communications by going ‘beyond the ionosphere.’1 I present this image of the ionosphere not only in a functionalist gesture, but as a metaphor as well. Invoking the Benjamin’s discussion of “aura” in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I imagine this ionospheric image as a massive collection of all the “auras” separated from works of art in the past century, displaced from the earth and manifest as the bright shadow of authenticity encircling the planet.2 One might call this image the aura’s ruse in the age of the satellite. Often imagined as distant relay towers in outer space or as top-secret mechanisms of national security, satellites lie beyond the horizon of everyday visibility. Since they are seemingly so out of reach (both physically and financially) we scarcely imagine them as part of everyday life. In part because of this, publics around the world have both been excluded from and/or remained silent within important discussions about their ongoing development and use. Although satellites emerged as part of Cold War geopolitical struggles and as a global springboard for the information economy (though often in the shadow of the computer), it is important to resist technological determinist logics that preclude alternative (or countercultural) uses of even the most tightly held machines of the state. As Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz suggest, “It is crucial to avoid positing universal descriptions or analyses of what it is that technologies mean . . . and do (both in terms of their hegemonic

Limits to Internet Freedoms: Being Heard in an Increasingly Authoritarian World

The Internet is a critical tool for communication and knowledge acquisition in societies across the globe. Unfortunately, its use has become a battlefield for governments, corporations, and individuals to censor speech and access to information. In this paper, we present research into the use of social media for free speech in Turkey, Mongolia, and Zambia as a basis for discussing the limits of Internet freedoms. We discuss the actors, adversaries, social and technological limits, as well as limitations of existing tools for the free exchange of ideas on-line. We conclude with a discussion of how design and development choices for technology can affect marginalized communities, as well as the ethical and technical considerations for developing tools and applications that support Internet freedoms.

From platform jumping to self-censorship: internet freedom, social media, and circumvention practices in Zambia

ABSTRACT This article describes the complex media environment of urban Zambia based on qualitative interviews with 42 active ICT and social media users in Lusaka. After a contextual discussion of media censorship and Internet freedom, the article draws upon interview data to delineate four circumvention practices: (1) platform jumping; (2) anonymity; (3) self-censorship; and (4) negotiation of legal challenges. Rather than approach circumvention as a set of techniques disseminated from the information capitals of the world to those in the “global south,” this study approaches it as a set of cultural practices that emerges within particular sociohistorical conditions and platforms of communication.

Orbital Viewing: Satellite Technologies and Cultural Practice

Satellites have made the news headlines a lot lately.’ On 30 September the world’s first commercial spy satellite jointly owned by Lockheed, Kodak, and Mitsubishi captured a high resolution image of people walking through the intersection of 14th and Constitution in Washington DC. Last year in a move that was deemed alternately visionary and silly, Al Gore called for the launch of Triana an educational remote sensing satellite that would monitor the earth in real time. In May 1998, communication satellite Galaxy IV malfunctioned and the news media were filled with reports of information systems gone haywire. During ’the worst outage’ in satellite history, ATM machines withheld their cash, 45 million pagers refused to beep, CNN’s airport television service