| 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. |
