Data centers and the infrastructural temporalities of digital media
Julia Velkova and Jean-Christophe Plantin introduce a New Media & Society special issue on data centers:
Most Internet content and data today pass through and get stored on these facilities. As we are writing this text, large and small territories on Earth’s five continents, underground, underwater, and in space are being envisioned, planned, and zoned for the construction and operation of new data centers. From Singapore to Iceland, and from Cape Town through Chile to Northern Ireland, data centers have become critical to large-scale industrial projects that render climate, energy, and the planet “knowable” and exploitable through data. … The timely operation of platform services, computation on demand, streaming video, and social media are thus critically dependent not just on software or data capture but also upon organizing and managing their timely provision from within data centers.
Other contributors to the issue include Devika Narayan, Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, Tonia Sutherland, Mél Hogan, Vicki Mayer, A.R.E. Taylor, and Patrick Bresnihan.