Professor of media, culture and communication, Nicole Starosielski’s recent publication the undersea network (2015), looks to recalibrate public understandings of the materiality of global digital networks. The work “traces [in detail] how today’s digital circulations are trafficked underground and undersea, rather than by air, through winding cables the size of a garden hose that run along the ocean floor”. “The work unpacks the material infrastructure that underpins this global information economy: the fibre optic cables and pipes that carry information - data voice, and multimedia content - between and amongst continents”. In producing an interdisciplinary investigation of these communication cables, their narrative tropes, and the complex cultural, economic, and political entanglements they are embedded within, Starosielski asserts that rather than being wireless, the contemporary global information network is, and will continue to be constructed of decentralized wires that safeguard the global transmission of information. By surfacing the narratives surrounding these cables, there is a stark rejection of their alignment with the ephemeral, immaterial, and ahistorical, their development is instead contextualized amongst the environments they simultaneously transform and inhabit.

This work is twofold in its scholarly endeavours, addressing two communities simultaneously with distinct arguments. For general public, the work looks to aid the reader in rejecting popular understandings of data transmission and internet usage as dependant upon satellites and intangible data technologies. Although presented as wireless, via handheld devices, laptops, and routers, understood as entirely separate from the earth and existent within cloud-based technologies, according to Starosielski, mother earth is in fact the contemporary motherboard. By tracing the longstanding histories of these digital infrastructures the work looks to imbue the reader with a material sense of how the digital world operates. As Lisa Parks argues, it is only with knowledge of these digital infrastructures that they enter public consideration and political engagement. In this way, the text calls for state and public support for the development of “new cable networks, the triangulation of existing nodes, the expansion of network use to reject dependance upon a narrow range of routes built by conservative private companies, all this to give traction to a more robust, resilient and equitable global network.

For academic audiences this work functions as an effort to counter the tendency in new media scholarship to focus on the emergence of ‘cloud’ computing as a kind of vague, insubstantial set of associations, increasingly untethered to earthly infrastructures. Joined by scholars like Tung-Hui Ho in his Prehistory of the Cloud (2015), John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds (2015), and Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, this work provides new lenses and vocabularies through which to understate the materiality of global digital networks and interpret their earthly effects on varying cultures and ecologies. Through this expansion of the scholarly discourse, the work looks to probe scholars to produce other interdisciplinary explorations of the ecological consequences of the global information network. It is only by motivating further scholarship on this subject, that the material consequences of digital information will enter the public consciousness and be effectively and equitably addressed by corporations and governments globally.

As a research document, the undersea network (2015) is an incredibly generative text, utilizing novel research methods and producing active vocabularies through which to understand digital information structures. Central to this generativity is the author’s methodization of what they term network archeology. This term defines a “...call to investigate networks past and present - using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry… drawing upon historical cases to inform [contemporary] understandings of networked culture”(22). Starosielski expertly wields this method, combining detailed analysis of technical processes with the close historical reading of a specific site. As argued by new media scholar Alan Liu, this method “regenerates a sense of history that tamper[s] the presentism of digital culture all too often experienced as instantaneous and simultaneous”. Although network archeology, moves far beyond Manovichian understandings of media archeology, the author does not go to great enough lengths to situate its development as a method. Here, they forgo the longstanding tradition of historical media investigation that network archeology is in debt to. Notwithstanding this lack of contextualization, the approach broadens the study of networks with productive new alleys for scholarly investigation.

Critical to the implementation of network archeology and its use in the understanding of information networks, Starosielski asserts that digital scholarship must move away from network topology and instead develop a topography of the network. As detailed in chapter one Circuitous Routes, scholarship must move beyond the mere topological study of digital networks which simply investigates the mathematical structures and connections within information networks. Network topography, instead, allows for the analysis of how digital networks have been embedded into historical, cultural, geographic environments. This push for consequential investigations of the digital network comes to shape the text through narratives that follow. Starosielski divides the history of network structures into the early, middle, and contemporary periods. The text then details technological, social, cultural and ecological advancements as they relate to the development of the digital networks along the Pacific Rim. Through this dedication to topographic investigation through narrative, the text masterfully expands available discourses around networks in an engaged and accessible way.

The specific narrative forms which Starosielski utilizes are equally significant within the text. As developed in chapter two Short-Circuiting Discursive Infrastructure, traditional narratives detailing digital networks are divided into binary categories known as disruption or connection narratives. These narratives detail either the inception of a network cable or it’s dissolution. Connection narratives are often aligned with cordial agreements amongst nations or easing national divides. Disruption narratives often detail the actions of global terrorism or natural disasters. Both narratives are reductionist, limiting the investigation of digital networks and excluding the enormous work involved in the production and upkeep of these systems. Instead Starosielski turns to alternative narrative forms they deem either nodal or transmission narratives. Nodal narratives focus on a node or a point of intersection in cable networks, and human or ecological interactions with these nodes. Transmission narratives speak about signals moving through information infrastructure. While seemingly minute, this shift in narrative form has wide-ranging implications, as it expands the parameters through which digital networks can be investigated. They simultaneously reject the historical hegemonic discourses about networks that limit their relevance and study. The vacuum opened by Starosielski is left open to future scholars to fill. ( )