Edited by: Gabriele Balbi and Roberto Leggero

Link to access the contents (3 chapters in Open Access)

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003424536/communication-maintenance-longue-dur%C3%A9e-gabriele-balbi-roberto-leggero?fbclid=IwY2xjawFx0GVleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHYkXfgNcwq4Kxrl5b-tYl_oGeXJm1GQZACIbskoP7EDGR0_YIuI2MyI1dg_aem_y9Myk8Ammo7udpkYosyfYg

Description

This interdisciplinary volume focuses on the politics, economics, technologies, uses, and cultures of maintenance of different forms of communication over long time or in Longue Durée.

Throughout the chapters, contributors from a wide range of fields explore transversal and trans-temporal issues of communication maintenance. Among these are the struggles to keep communication infrastructures functioning, the hidden work of maintenance done by both experts and non-experts such as everyday users, the political significance of maintaining communications (or not maintaining them), and the different habits and significance of maintenance in different times and world regions. The forms of communication covered include broadcasting, telecommunications such as the telegraph and telephone, digital and popular media as computers and mobile phones, mostly forgotten media like pneumatic tubes, transportation infrastructures, maps as used as tools to politically control land, the clock as a medium and a material artifact, and many more.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of communication and media studies, the history of science and technology, general history, geography, maintenance studies, and other related disciplines.

The Introduction, Chapter 5 and 8 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Table of content

Communication Studies Long for Maintenance Cultures: A Theoretical Introduction to the Book

Gabriele Balbi and Roberto Leggero

Part 1: Temporalities

1. The Clock of the Long Now in Longue Durée: Maintaining a Communication “Cool Tool” Through Millennia

Julie Momméja

2. Endless Frontiers of Maintenance: The Longue Durée of Communication Infrastructure in the United States

Andrew L. Russell

3. Sense Perception and the Maintenance of Pneumatic Mail Tubes in the Longue Durée: Feeling the Air, Preventing and Fixing Failures

Laura Meneghello

4. The “Technical Time” of the Luxembourgish Telephone System: Reflections on the Transformative Power of Maintenance

Stefan Krebs and Rebecca Mossop

Part 2: Theorizing

5. Power and Maintenance in the Alpine Middle Ages: A Long-Term View

Roberto Leggero

6. Maps as Maintenance. Designing and Controlling the Kingdom of Sardinia and the State of Milan’s Boundaries and Rivers in the 18th Century

Blythe Alice Raviola

7. Communicative Redundancy as a Maintenance Resource. The Dose Makes the Poison

Kirill Postoutenko

8. We Are All Maintainers: Everyday Practices of Media Maintenance in the Domestication of Technologies

Corinna Peil

Part 3: Infrastructuring

9. A Low Place in High Country: Maintaining Infrastructural Clearance Along the Backbone of the World

Sam P. Kellogg

10. Large-Scale Infrastructure System in Lisbon: Politics of Repair and Maintenance in the European Periphery in the 20th Century

Felipe Beuttenmüller Lopes Silva

11. Maintenance of a Monopoly: The Digitalization of the Telephone Network as an Attempt to Preserve the Telecommunications Monopoly for the Longue Durée

Matthias Röhr