MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURE: ACCESS, MOBILITY, AND SOCIAL FORMATIONS

Through an analysis of communication infrastructure, this dissertation offers a study of the overarching systems that shape our communicative processes, and the ways these processes are commodified. Infrastructural systems always combine both hard material apparatuses and soft forms and uses, and as such they can offer a way to examine the interrelation of content and conduits. Innovations in communication infrastructure, both hard and soft, mobilize communication in new ways. The forms of communication mobility are material practices that create and shape space by adding meanings and values to it. Access to these communicative spaces is structured through technological and social systems, which position communicative space as a natural resource. This resource is then struggled over, and most often privatized, through the institution of cultural forms. These forms define access to communicative resources through a process of commodification, which generates value from these resources by retroactively structuring them as limited. The result of the commodification of communicative resources generated by infrastructural innovations is particular media formations, wherein infrastructures are assumed to generate discrete communication forms that are intrinsically related to their material apparatuses. The case studies in this dissertation analyze the innovations and struggles that create infrastructural systems as media formations. The first case study explores the ways in which early uses of radio technologies shaped access to the electromagnetic spectrum, and how the spectrum itself came to be understood as a resource. The second case study examines the implementation of coaxial cable for television distribution, and the effects this innovation had on the forms and uses of televisual communication. The final case study investigates changes in Internet infrastructure, and forms of commodification, especially as they pertain to current debates over net neutrality. Each study examines how innovations restructure access to particular communicative resources, as well as generate new ones, and then how these communicative resources are struggled over.Doctor of Philosoph

Another World Was Possible: 911 and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism in the United States

This thesis focuses on anti-corporate globalization struggles within the United States, and how 911 became a trope around which these activist discourses had to function. Due to specific constructions and interpretations of this event, the United States saw a limiting of protest space, increased measures of security, and an increase in concern around issues of war, surveillance and the national. The nature of this shift disrupted immanent practices of resistance that sought to create alternative social and political configurations within the spatial-temporal existence of anti-corporate demonstrations. This ultimately served to foreclose certain means of resistance such as carnivalesque production of symbolic/utopian spaces, and networked production of an alternative common. Given the national-militaristic dominant discourse post-911, activists were interpellated into a defensive position. In responding to crises rather than promoting alternatives, activists' methods were necessarily altered

Disabled Laborers And The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOCs) Nightmare

In 2012, EEOC v. Henry’s Turkey Service was one of the largest disability settlements in American history.  Henry’s Turkey Service was ordered to pay $240 million for paying mentally disabled workers with I.Q.s estimated in the 60-70 range, 41 cents per hour and housing them in unsafe housing and health conditions (Hsieh, 2013).  Over forty years, Henry’s Turkey Service relocated hundreds of mentally disabled workers from Texas to Iowa where they were subjected to horrendous living conditions with unlawful, minimal pay—about$65.00 per month, while they worked at a local turkey processing factory in West Liberty, Iowa.  The actual case shows a pattern of violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and Americans with Disability Act, 1990. After a raid of the bright blue, florescent colored, century old school house in Atalissa, Iowa, these employers were brought to justice.  This case study is about one of the largest EEOC settlements in the history of the United States; yet due to federal damage caps was cut to $1.6 million for all of the men and their estates. The graphic account of the inhumane treatment and degradation of the labors presented in this study is not provided for gratuitous or salacious purposes; rather, it places into context what can occur when governmental regulations and laws go unheeded, unenforced and when authorities are apprised of wrongdoing possibilities stand idly by and in this case, do nothing for 35 years.

Real-Time CARS Imaging Reveals a Calpain-Dependent Pathway for Paranodal Myelin Retraction during High-Frequency Stimulation

High-frequency electrical stimulation is becoming a promising therapy for neurological disorders, however the response of the central nervous system to stimulation remains poorly understood. The current work investigates the response of myelin to electrical stimulation by laser-scanning coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) imaging of myelin in live spinal tissues in real time. Paranodal myelin retraction at the nodes of Ranvier was observed during 200 Hz electrical stimulation. Retraction was seen to begin minutes after the onset of stimulation and continue for up to 10 min after stimulation was ceased, but was found to reverse after a 2 h recovery period. The myelin retraction resulted in exposure of Kv 1.2 potassium channels visualized by immunofluorescence. Accordingly, treating the stimulated tissue with a potassium channel blocker, 4-aminopyridine, led to the appearance of a shoulder peak in the compound action potential curve. Label-free CARS imaging of myelin coupled with multiphoton fluorescence imaging of immuno-labeled proteins at the nodes of Ranvier revealed that high-frequency stimulation induced paranodal myelin retraction via pathologic calcium influx into axons, calpain activation, and cytoskeleton degradation through spectrin break-down