[Methods review] Media Archaeology in Mattern’s Code + Clay, Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Situating people in historical technologies: exploring Mattern’s media archaeology through an ethnographic lens
In Code + Clay, Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, Shannon Mattern employs mixed methods to conduct a “media archaeology” of technologically mediated environments. In addition to reading her media archaeology book, I got to sit down with Professor Mattern and ask her some questions on how she sees her media archaeology in relation to anthropology and design, a topic of my great interest. As such, this writeup draws on both Mattern’s writing, as well as our 30 minute conversation about the book. The central task of Code + Clay is to show that many ‘old’ forms of media are still widely used today. In conversation about her book, she remarked, “it’s easier to look at old social contexts [of media] than you think because they are still alive. ‘Old’ forms may not be the most efficient and fast, but rather are the most enabling of social cohesion”. Mattern’s media archaeology study in Code + Clay delivers a historic perspective on important forms of media and their roles in shaping urban infrastructures, and social landscapes.
When asked about how ethnography fit into media archaeology, Mattern said she drew on multi-sited ethnographies in various parts of the world to study how media shapes cultures in urban settings. Doing so assisted her investigation of how we imbue our media with social values, and how common forms of media emerge in different times and spaces. Although media archaeology is not ethnography per se — and indeed, Mattern notes that media archaeology has been criticized for being an anti-humanistic discipline — Code + Clay’s investigation of historical media is simultaneously an interest in the forms of human sociality that revolve around these media. If archaeology is a historical study of human artifacts, then it is easy to draw connections from media archaeology to the intersection of anthropology and design, as well as to the field of sociotechnical studies. Reframed such, Mattern’s media archaeology in Code + Clay focuses on the technological ethnographic objects that have historically been, and continue to be, embedded in human sociotechnical infrastructures. Mattern proposes that we look at media in their actual social contexts. In doing so, she shows that “old” media and technologies are not actually old at all, but rather continue to reproduce themselves in new forms for modern social contexts
Mattern presents her media archaeology in an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. Each of her chapters focuses on a specific set of media which have shaped forms of human social organization: sound broadcasting, writing, building, and speaking. Within these topic-focused chapters, she jumps around in historical context to show the nonlinear emergence (and reemergence) of media forms at different times throughout history. In her first chapter focusing on sound and information broadcasting, she opens by observing the effects of “radio” space on urban infrastructures. Today, radio broadcasting technologies have contributed to constructing the centrality of urban areas. Predating electronic radio technologies, Mattern shows how “radial” forms have long been implemented in urban planning and city architecture as infrastructural media optimized for broadcast. Through this analysis, she shows how access to broadcast historically delimits physical boundaries between neighborhood tiers in urban settings. Moving to the interconnected “smart” technologies of today’s Internet of Things, Mattern describes how millions of telecommunications devices embedded in city infrastructures collect data, track populations and monitor behaviors in urban spaces. Whether a person is ‘out of earshot’ from the town center, or outside of the priority zoning for urban telecommunications infrastructures — one’s proximity to the sites of broadcast media has historically indicated one’s political and social standing. This analysis makes clear the role media plays in projecting human social ecosystems, and shaping our material urban infrastructures.
Mattern defines this relationship between material and social infrastructures as “signal space” which is defined by “intersecting protocols that direct our connections, facilitate or close of access, and thus subtly shape the geographies … we are then able to explore” (p.37). In her fourth chapter on the human voice, Mattern shows how the projection of the human voice has the power “to ‘catalyze’ the creation of new spatialities and collectivities” and “creates or claims space and constitutes the listening and sounding publics who can then occupy it” (p.137). And thus, signal space is not merely a framework for observing how dominant social groups chisel out elite urban enclaves, but also for observing how marginalized social groups make claims over and control space through their own forms of broadcast media. Matter claims that “every decentralizing force seems to be joined by a corresponding centralizing tendency” (p.37). The telephone, for example, simultaneously concentrates the urban centers of capital flows, and allows for the interconnected suburbs of urban sprawl. In this example of her presentation style pulled from her first and fourth chapters, Mattern shows how urban infrastructures are shaped through media, and how those forms of mediation are used to direct both the centralization, and the decentralization of human organization.
Mattern’s historical presentation of urban media includes a focus on the “gaps and exclusions in the record” to examine “cultural processes of erosion, destruction, and erasure” as well as cultural politics and epistemologies (p.xxiv-xxv). In doing so, she challenges the idea of technological progress, and considers how dominant narratives around new technologies can reflect normativities within human social and political organization. She frames the opening of her book by addressing the high-tech Hudson Yards development in New York City. Mattern voices her skepticism that “smart” cities are a new arrival to human urban organization, and instead purports that our cities have been imbued with “smart” technologies for millenia. The chapters of her book are structured around essential technologies that have mediated human settlements over history. These groups of technologies and the forms of social organization they enabled demonstrate the deeply rooted human histories surrounding our modern technologies. In the face of current utopian and dystopian dreams and fears about future technologies, Mattern posits this book as a historical precedent by which we may consider which values we want our media to embody.
Such a historical investigation shows that technologies have always been sites of human urban organization — and thus political struggle — to delineate boundaries, disseminate information, and develop symbol systems. Mattern explains how our urban media have long been sites of power struggles, and often simultaneously present opportunities for the centralization and decentralization of human power and sociality. I asked Professor Mattern why she found it important to foreground the historic ties to the modern technologies many experience as “new” today. Her answer was to counter the “willful ahistoricism” in technology development cultures today. In conversation, Mattern spoke further about how technology developers persist a rhetoric of “innovation,” and rely on forecasting and projections to conjure techno-dreams and generate consumer demand. She pointed to the smart city project in Toronto led by infrastructure tech company Sidewalk Labs, saying they “have rewritten urban history to position themselves as the apotheosis of history”. However, Mattern notes that this conception of “new”-ness can lead to social engineering projects which only rehash the time-old issue of inclusion and exclusion in urban media and infrastructure. It is in this context of ethics in human social organization that she posits her media archaeology, in hopes that “urban and architectural designers and engineers of all stripes can consider how they might honor and integrate the ‘deep time’ of urban mediation” (p.xxvi).
Mattern’s Code + Clay, Data + Dirt presents a guidebook on the political ontologies embodied by our urban media, and encourages designers and engineers to consider the political context of their claims on innovation. Mattern rephrases this, noting “it’s this fetishization of ‘the new’ that media archaeology is intended to counter, in part by encouraging consideration of the epistemologies materialized in different historical media formats” (p.153). Against the backdrop of the current technological excitement over smart cities, Mattern cites the dystopian fear that our new “information-rich” cities may cease to help us communicate with each other. However, her book should neither be read as a pessimistic argument highlighting the centralizing political capacities of urban media. Indeed, her historical research has also shown that “our urban voices often resist containment” and that the possible futures of antisocial technologies are “unlikely to be regarded as socially sound without offering sites and opportunities for serendipitous soundings, for messy interminglings of myriad mediations” (p.145)
It is here, at the end of Mattern’s final chapter, that the intrinsically human element of her media archaeology becomes self-evident. According to Mattern, “media” are the many devices and structures we humans use to organize our communities — which always, Mattern notes, is done messily. It is precisely this historical messiness which allows Mattern to present her case against the “fetishization of ‘the new’”. Mattern’s book establishes her media archaeology as a historical reference for the technologies we use today. In doing so, she shows that ‘new’ technologies may not cause as much social disruption as they are expected to bring. Instead, Code + Clay outlines forms of social inscription enacted by four distinct sets of media, and shows us how we might interpret ‘new’ technologies through the lens of these more familiar historical categories of media. Thus, although not explicitly an ethnography, Mattern’s book has much to teach on human forms of social organization, and media as it relates to the production of human culture. If design industries are going to engage in the speculation and conjuring of techno-utopias, this book helps project our media histories into the present — at the very least, to temper technologists’ utopian (and dystopian) dreams.