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Lunch talk with Asta Vonderau: Infrastructuring Connectivity – Materializing the Virtual
Wednesday, 21 June 2017 · 1pm · HIIG Kitchen

In popular media, political programs and IT promotional discourses the Internet is usually pictured as immaterial and fluid. The heavy industry and vast energy-consuming infrastructure securing the functionality of web services, as well as that industries social and environmental effects, remain invisible in such representations. My presentation is based on an ethnographic study of the implementation of the first European Facebook data center in Sweden. It aims to show how global data streems are entangled into and shaped by the local political and economic contexts. What aspects of digitization become visible regarding the Internet from the infrastructural perspective? Why is the infrastructural approach interesting for social science research?

Asta Vonderau is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Anthropology University Stockholm. She is a principal investigator of the research project “Farming Data Forming the Cloud: The Environmental Impact and Cultural Production of IT Technology”.

The lunch talk is open to the public, please register via the form below.