Nautical Media

1. Why did you choose this topic?

Short answer: because I saw control operators explain in a news item they were no longer in control. Longer answer: because the ideal and practice of control through media technologies come together and help explain how mobility, infrastructure, and the nautical work. Organisations like to promote their control room facilities, pop culture celebrates it, but how does this influence the work? And what is it like from the water, navigating in an networked age, managing distance and proximity?

2. What new perspectives does your book offer?

Humanities and social science have long been terrestrial, ignoring water. Here I combine perspectives from the water and land. Moreover, media technologies tend to receive scholarly attention dependent on the amount of users and visibility. Instead I look at how media are used by a small and isolated group at the heart of nautical infrastructure, crucial for economic productivity in Western Europe. Media do draw things but only while safeguarding critical margins (physical, profit, regulatory).

3. What makes your topic relevant for current research debates?

Methodologically I show how a vast aray of practices through ethnography, archival research, oral history can be studied together. This does not merely show what emperically grounded media studies could look like, but also that one necessarily then has to engage with literatures from workplace studies, sociology, anthropology, and STS. A path is shown towards not just to what our technologies mean, but towards what we do with them and they to us, and thus what they make known.

4. Choose one person you would like to discuss your book with!

With my ancestors who navigated Dutch waters which have since been largely turned into land. In a Back to the Future scenario we would actually sail the congested waters in which margins have become so narrow and temporality so multiple. I am convinced we would find a place in traffic orderings, while everyone else navigating has the capacity to account for us.

5. Your book summary in one sentence:

Infrastructure is not something one uses, but an order reproduced daily by all involved, for which they are utterly dependent on scaling media.