Panel Abstract
This panel interrogates tensions along a spectrum of networked infrastructures where hope drives mobility and/or its discourses. When thought about in relation to infrastructure, ‘hope’ can take the form of ‘techno-optimism’—the idea that technology can solve the major problems of our time (Alexander & Rutherford, 2019)—with all of that lens’ complications included.
The hope that infuses mobile infrastructures is presented in multifaceted case studies from fieldwork in Germany, Turkey, Sweden, and Mexico. The affective nature of infrastructure is made visible in Hartmann’s presentation, which demonstrates the mobilizing role of optimism as unhoused people in Berlin engage in the labor of accessing basic digital infrastructures that are taken for granted by those who are always easily plugged in. Then, Duru critically explores how combined digital and analog media build an imaginary infrastructure knitting together a long-separated community of Burgaz islanders, which ultimately creates a hopeful bridge back to the island. The final two papers consider both the hopes and consequences embedded in the development of emerging infrastructures that support remote work. Andersson’s study of the mobile workplace highlights how virtual assistants in Sweden pay for liberation from the office with precarity and gigification, while Polson points to how the seemingly magical solution of using remote workers to bring investment and renewal into local communities can have disastrous socioeconomic consequences, as in Mexico City. Through these papers, we are reminded that to be hopeful, digital infrastructures should be grounded in history, social relations, and place.
Maren Hartmann- Affective infrastructuring: Unhoused media / media use of the unhoused
Many technical infrastructures are near-invisible or have become so routinized that we do not even name them when asked about technology use. Infrastructures are not just there – as most other technologies, they need to be ‘made’ through recognition and use. This combination of existing infrastructures with the question of design in everyday use is a process called infrastructuring. This paper focuses on a field where neither the taken-for-grantedness of infrastructures nor the taken-for-granted nature of everyday life is a given: it is the field of mobile media use by unhoused people. For many of these people, infrastructures are hard work: they need to travel on a specific bus for hours to charge smartphones or need to know where in
the public library to find a power outlet—practices closely intermingled with structures of feelings.
This presentation concentrates on optimism as an affective quality of the infrastructuring taking place in this context of media use by unhoused people. The presentation builds on a recently concluded three-year research project on digital media use by unhoused people in Berlin. Long ignored in media and communication studies, this group has recently received more interest. After introducing the research project and other recent work in this field, the presentation will focus on infrastructuring and the possible role of affects therein. While it starts off with optimism, other, less optimistic affects will also be addressed.
Deniz Neriman Duru- Hopes and limitations of digital and non-digital media in the exploration of conviviality and solidarity in Burgaz, Istanbul
This paper explores how Burgaz islanders of Istanbul use digital and non-digital media to reunite a separated community of islanders. By writing novels, shooting documentaries, distributing them on Youtube and Vimeo, launching a Facebook group of Reunion, the remaining Burgaz islanders aim to bring back their friends who left Turkey following the restrictive minority policies of successive Turkish governments. Across digital and non-digital media productions, Burgaz islander authors and documentary-makers articulate memories of conviviality and narrate collective acts of solidarity and resistance during the 1955 pogrom (when Muslims attacked the stores and houses of non-Muslims in Istanbul and other Princes’ Islands of Istanbul, while Burgaz islanders collaborated with the local police, and kept attackers off the island).
Building on 15 years of ethnographic research, combining media anthropology and cultural studies, I analyse representations of diversity, conviviality and solidarity in literary and filmic productions, conducting interviews with the authors of novels and producers of documentaries, and exploring the islanders’ reactions to these productions and their social media engagement in organising a reunion on Burgaz, which made those left come back to visit. I explore emic terms and metaphors that islanders use in representation of diversity and solidarity, and put these in dialogue with the etic concepts of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. By doing so, I aim to discuss the hopes and limitations of both conviviality as a theoretical framework in criticising multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and of digital and non-digital media in bridging geographies and reuniting separated people of this island.
Magnus Andersson- Workplace, what workplace? The modern office as a mobile infrastructure
In the history of office work, technology has been both a centripetal and centrifugal force. While typewriters and word processors pulled women to the office during the 20th century, networked and mobile media has shaped the disintegrated office of today. The modern office has become,Richardson (2022: 13) argues, a mobile infrastructure through which office work is articulated. This is a development that has increased the freedom for many workers. It means for example that not only white-collar workers, but also pink-collar workers, such as secretaries, may work remotely.
Yet, development of ICT is not only about the potential to do office work from wherever you want. It is also the recurrent threat of the automated office making all clerical workers redundant (Haigh 2008). In addition, technology is, via platforms, related to the actual conditions of employment. Clerical work has become “gigified”. Starting off from these processes I will in this paper discuss the future of office work through the case of virtual assistants. This is a new category of workers in the Swedish labor market, representing a new type of gig work: clerical work performed remotely that organizations may procure via platforms (Klaus & Flecker 2021). Hence, due to the office as a mobile infrastructure virtual assistants have the freedom to work from anywhere – for the price of unsafe employment conditions.
Erika Polson- AirBnB(itterness)? The hopes and disappointments of “Live and Work Anywhere”
The exponential rise in Internet-enabled remote work has led dozens of countries and municipalities to launch efforts to attract remote workers as part of economic and community development schemes. Over fifty countries have now created some form of ‘digital nomad’ visa to enable traveling workers to stay for longer terms, hoping they invest into local economies without taking local jobs. The global home-rental company, Airbnb, is at the forefront of this effort by partnering with localities to develop its “Live and Work Anywhere” initiative, promising “to help support destinations to become the most desirable and remote-worker friendly locations around the world.” Highlighting “the life-changing possibilities of remote work,” the company assures potential partners that its mission is to develop a sustainable infrastructure that will consider the priorities of local people and environments. However, the pro-mobile optimism built into the platform’s discourse is at odds with the impacts on people and places being reported as Airbnb saturates remote work hot-spots around the world.
This paper presents research from Mexico City, where the city made a deal with AirBnb to promote the capital as a global remote-work hub despite residents protesting the dissolution of neighborhoods due to impossibly high rents created by an influx of these workers. Through examination of government and Airbnb statements about the deal, interviews with activists in Mexico City, and analysis of news articles and social media posts protesting Aibnb gentrification, this presentation explores how a hopeful solution for community development became a new form of geosocial stratification.