Kathleen Oswald

Using a number of technologies that manage media, energy, data, and services, today's "smart" consumers rely on the manipulation of multiple infrastructures to participate in connected life. Informationalization – the integration of information into previously "dumb" processes – makes this negotiation possible. This paper focuses on one of the dark sides of infrastructure convergence: cyberwarfare. After reviewing recent developments in cyberwarfare law and policy, I argue that cyberwarfare and cyberdefense are emerging topics that not only warrant, but further demand our attention as consumers, citizens, and scholars.

As the public and private sector spend and invest billions of dollars maintaining, repairing, securing, constructing, and informationalizing infrastructure, scholars of communication continue to neglect the central role of infrastructure in shaping contemporary mediascapes. This neglect stems from a number of tendencies in the field of communication, including a move away from the transmission model of communication, a separation in thinking about the communication of information and the communication of people and objects, and a tendency to think about technologies in terms of their historical development, mediation, effects, uses or potentials rather than to understand technologies as cultural forms subject to alternative arrangements. While these academic biases make the study of communication, mobility, and technology challenging, my work takes an interdisciplinary approach that recognizes and works to move past historical divisions in the disciplines in the interest of exploring the ways in which informationalization is changing communication, culture, and mediascapes.

I locate informationalization—adding a data layer to processes through instrumentation, interconnection and intelligence—at the center of changing articulations of communication, transportation, information and housing infrastructure. I take as central a double reorganization of infrastructure under two competing logics: a utopian view that positions the informationalization of networks as “smart” and can be traced across a variety of popular, industry and government discourses as a compelling argument for connection; and a logic that positions infrastructure as “critical,” which while intensified by post 9/11 sensibilities, has clear origins in earlier beliefs about the dystopian potentials of connection, including computer crime and cyberwarfare. I first develop a set of working definitions for a variety of terms as they relate to informationalization. I then explore specific contexts of informationalization, examining utopian discourses of connection as “smart” in a growing market for electrically powered automobility, dystopian discourses of informationalization in terms of critical infrastructure and cyberwar, and finally to disconnection, examining the grid and “grid away from the grid” life assurance solutions. Through these cases, I work to understand informationalization as an apparatus that rearticulates infrastructure according to a new infrastructural ideal and an associated politics of security that are coextensive with both utopian and dystopian discourses of informationalization.

I ultimately argue that communication and mobilities scholars must look to processes of informationalization with a particular emphasis on those infrastructures that are designated both “smart” and “critical” in order to reveal the ways in which smart infrastructure can mean more than informationalized infrastructure, and to discern to what and to whom critical infrastructure is critical. It is my hope that this project will serve as a starting point for productive and meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration concerning a process that promises to radically alter the way that we access and use communication, transportation, housing, services and infrastructures.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the way the hacker has been subjected by the vectoral class as well as explore the hacker’s potential for creating a new way of relating to the self. The subjection of hackers is discussed using Althusser’s notions of Ideology, Repressive State Apparatuses, and Ideological State Apparatuses, exploring government (RSA) and media (ISA) as examples. The conflict stemming from difficulty in interpellating the hacker into ideology is discussed, and Foucault’s techniques of the self are offered to examine why the hacker is not interpellated into ideology. The hacker’s relation to Foucault’s techniques (production, signs, power, and self) suggests a way of being that enables the hacker to escape subjection. The thesis argues that the hacker may serve as a model for a way of being that makes technoculture navigable.

This article argues that smart transportation-understood as convergences of communication and transportation infrastructure to facilitate movement-has long been manifested in what John Urry has described as nexus systems, or those that require many elements to work synchronously. 1 Understanding smart infrastructures as those aligning with twenty-first-century sensibilities concerning technology, convenience, safety, and security, I demonstrate a longer trajectory for this seemingly new trend in three cases: (1) the synchronization of the train with the telegraph, (2) the organization of early automobility, and (3) information-rich/connected automobility and the driverless car. Rethinking smart infrastructure historically reveals a long-existing tendency rather than a new one to manage movement via communication technologies.

This paper explores the debate concerning tiered access and network neutrality models of broadband internet access in the US as spaces following Lefebvre's Production of Space. Comparing the development of early radio with the current broadband debate in the US, the paper explores the ways in which these spaces are conceived, lived, and perceived. The paper demonstrates that because technologies are inherently political, the point at which change can be effected in the system is at the technical rather than the political level. The paper examines the concept of a “critical juncture” in the context of Lefebvre’s spatial triad, making the argument that the politics inherent in technology should be taken into account when considering the point at which technological regulatory structures are mutable.