Keyword author Lisa Parks postulates that modern media infrastructure is more than simply the wires, cell-towers, and satellites that make up our ability to connect. While this technology is obviously a necessity, companies’ invisible structures such as their capital are constantly shifting and are dependent on user information and demands. Specifically, Parks suggests that although the internet used to be a free utility intended for the public, it has morphed into a reciprocal entity which she refers to as “utility publics”. This is because as information is provided to users, it is also derived from user actions which subsequently alters a particular space. Jay Parikh, Facebook’s head of engineering and infrastructure, shared with CNet News that in 2009 Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was buying off-the-shelf servers from companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard to create his platform. However with 2.2 billion using Facebook and other related entities today, the company had to develop their own long-haul fiber-optic links, which has only been done by a few other large-scale companies such as Google. With users receiving updates to the site approximately every three hours, Facebook has had to invest their capital into new technologies to be able to support such a large demand. Zuckerberg certainly reaps the rewards of these new technologies.
References:
Shankland, S. (2018, July 20). Facebook updates its service 10 times faster than a decade ago, even though it’s 10 times bigger. CNET. Retrieved October 27, 2021, from https://www.cnet.com/news/how-facebook-operations-got-10-times-faster-while-getting-10-times-bigger/.
It is interesting that you point out how Facebook was such a large and complex network that they effectively had to invent their own infrastructure in order to run it. Obviously without the necessary infrastructure nothing would properly function which makes me wonder what other media or inventions we are missing out on since the proper infrastructure just doesn’t exist.