Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations is a co-edited book that emerged from a conference entitled, "Infrastructures and Inequalities: Media Industries, Digital Cultures, and Politics" at the University of Helsinki in October 2019. We worked on the book via Zoom internationally during the pandemic. The book was published in the Geopolitics of Information series of University of Illinois Press in fall 2023.
Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the still-evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the Netflix recommender system, algorithmic backends of Spotify, and backend sourcing and provisioning of video-on-demand services in India.
