Infrastructure- Chloe Whelan

Since the early twentieth century, infrastructure has been loosely defined as the parts of a foundation or substructure.  The meaning has expanded over time, used in reference to various industrial and technological advancements.The shift from the industrial revolution to the digital revolution has influenced the way that infrastructure is viewed, as the idea of labor as a mode of sustaining infrastructures has shifted from physical to immaterial labor.  Media infrastructures, referring to the systems that distribute audiovisual content to sites globally, have only recently been addressed in media studies. These media infrastructures rely on “immaterial labor”, a term I hadn’t known prior to doing the reading, to function and sustain their power. As the reading describes, immaterial labor is the idea of the invisible labor reliant on “social skills, services, and modes of care.” Like the internet, various forms of media infrastructures rely on “invisible” labor from their users, as they are constantly competing for their users’ attention and time. An example of a media infrastructure that has experienced a dramatic decline in users due to this lack of immaterial labor, is cable TV. Because streaming services such as Netflix allow users to access thousands of programs with no restriction on when they can watch them, the number of people choosing to pay for both cable and streaming services has decreased dramatically. The ability to binge a whole season has become more appealing, whereas watching an episode and waiting for it to play again in a week is seen as less convenient. People simply don’t have the time, attention, or funding to continue using both cable television and streaming services, and why would they choose cable when streaming services provide them with access to all of the same programs at once. This very reason is why cable TV has lost the essential immaterial labor it needs to survive, which has resulted in its fast decline from user attention.