Opening up, closing down: An interview with Lisa Parks on Media Backends

by Judith Keilbach and Linda Kopitz

Lisa Parks is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, which explores uses of media technologies – from satellites to television and mobile phones – in diverse international contexts. Her work on media infrastructures brings together critical technological and political concerns through themes of ownership, access and surveillance, and has been widely published – for example in the books Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke Press, 2005), Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018), and the co-edited volume Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Her most recent book Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (University of Illinois Press, 2023), co-edited with Julia Velkova and Sander de Ridder, brings together different perspectives on the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. The metaphor of the ‘media backend’ as something to be opened, both physically and metaphorically, connects to Lisa Parks’ earlier research on media infrastructures as ‘cracking open the set’ (2001) and ‘stuff you can kick’ (2015).

In this virtual conversation – following from a joint symposium visit in Amsterdam in April 2023 – Judith Keilbach and Linda Kopitz spoke to Lisa Parks about the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of researching media backends – as well as both the book and her research in connection to the issue’s focus on #Open.

Judith Keilbach: Your new publication Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations, co-edited with Julia Velkova and Sander De Ridder, focuses on ‘media backends’. So as our first question: Could you briefly explain what ‘backends’ are?

Lisa Parks: We think of media backends as a conceptual space for humanistic, scholarly inquiry regarding the socio-technical relations that enable mediation. So the backend would encompass the materialities, including labor and energy, of systems on the other side of interfaces. It also includes the strategic efforts by corporations to privatize, conceal, suppress, or regulate access to information about those systems.

We are positing the backend, then, as a concept that invites further critical focus on the sociotechnical relations of mediation, which are often ignored or occluded in aesthetic or text-based media studies. These relations are sometimes assumed to be in the purview of electrical engineering or computer science rather than media studies. To focus on the backend compels thinking about which directions media studies – as a field – has taken and not taken. The goal is not simply to ‘expose’ or ‘reveal’ this other side of the screen or interface, but to grapple with the question of what objects we choose to face and what kinds of technological knowledge/power becomes possible as a result.

In the book’s introduction we engage with media and communication studies scholarship by Irving Goffman, Sara Ahmed, Frank Pasquale, and others in our conceptualization of media backends. We explore how some ways of knowing sociotechnical systems and phenomena are valued and sanctioned, while other ways are devalued, ignored, or dismissed. We have been inspired by feminist STS scholarship and queer theory in raising questions about the politics of knowing and non-knowing around media and information systems and recognize the extent to which uncertainty and non-knowing shape much contemporary life relative to these systems.

Judith Keilbach: To pick up on the knowing of sociotechnical systems that you just mentioned in this conceptualization: ‘sociotechnical systems’ is frequently used as a definition of infrastructure. So, as we are talking about concepts, what is the relation between the backend and infrastructures?

Lisa Parks: Great question, but before we get to that, I want to add a footnote to the term ‘sociotechnical systems’. This term emerges historically from STS scholarship and is associated with an approach known as the social construction of technology. When I think about media or information technologies I imagine them as objects or sites that are materialized by sociotechnical relations. In other words, the term ‘sociotechnical’ insists that the social is always already a dimension of the technical. So, when I am talking about the backend or infrastructure, I imagine them always in relation to this term. That is, sociotechnical relations dynamically materialize the backend or infrastructures. My foundational assumption is that you cannot talk about the technical or technological without talking about the social, whether that social is thought of as human, non-human, or more-than-human.

So, to get to your question, what is the difference between the concepts of the backend and infrastructures? The terms are certainly related to one another. In past publications, I have conceptualized media infrastructures as physical network installations of the built environment that are used to distribute signals or data. Conceptualizing infrastructure in this way was part of an effort to try, as a media scholar, to draw further critical attention to the complex practices and processes of media distribution, and to historicize and register the localized conditions and impacts around particular infrastructural nodes. Other scholars have conceptualized infrastructure much more broadly. For instance, Benjamin Bratton has talked about ‘the stack’ that supports and capacitates digital systems. This involves thinking about infrastructure as including the software that is used to design or operationalize modern network systems. So, to sum up, I understand the backend as a supplement to or an appendage of the term ‘infrastructure’. It is there to bring forth questions about which sociotechnical relations or media objects are faced/not faced or known/not known and to ask, what are the implications of such conditions?

Media backends include the consumer electronics, algorithms, and labor relations that enable digital media. Until recently, most of these practices and processes have remained largely unintelligible to media scholars. Media studies as a discipline, at least in North America, has been built largely in relation to what humans can perceive and interpret. Understandably, the discipline has been very much entrenched in a hermeneutic tradition. Studying media backends involves bringing forth or imagining objects and processes that are not readily perceivable and intelligible to the human body, whether the scholar’s or consumer’s. It involves trying to conceptualize, name, and specify those objects and processes and attempt to understand how they are part of power relations.

Linda Kopitz: In the book, ‘media backends’ is introduced and referred to as a concept – and concepts in turn as something ‘to trouble, expand or unlearn’^[1]. But throughout the book, as well as in how you are just describing your understanding of this term, media backends appear to become more than a concept: A way of thinking but also a way of doing media studies. So especially if we are trying to engage with media, or parts of media objects, that usually remain closed, hidden, unintelligible, do we need to adapt our methods as well? If we are confronted with the technical, the electrical, the mechanical, the domains of engineering and production, that seems to pose a methodological challenge to media scholars.

Lisa Parks: Absolutely. The more media studies scholars interact with fields like computer science or electrical engineering, the more we come up against the limits and thresholds of our own expertise, training, and specialization. The very idea of the backend is meant to register these limits. The term is not geared toward mastery but around an awareness of the orientations of one’s own training, and how we are socialized to know some things and not know others. So on a more meta level, the backend as a concept makes us aware of the ‘order of things’ within media studies – to invoke a Foucauldian concept – and how and why scholars investigate some objects, sites, and/or relations and not others. There is a feminist dimension to this, too. It is about the question of positionality, what is faced or not faced, how we are oriented as scholars, and how that orientation came about and how it can remain dynamic and changeable. We do not have to inherit the academic mandate of mastery, specialization, and expertise. The intellectual trajectory of media scholars could be more peculiar. We can investigate different things and we can investigate things differently.

Linda Kopitz: There is an emphasis on ‘explorative and speculative’ practices in your engagement with MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), which I find really interesting. And then your chapter in the book is in a larger section on ‘Sensing, Automating, Mediating’ – and sensing, the sensory, in this list seems crucial to me. For your own research, but also for exploring backends more broadly, what role does tactile engagement and embodied knowledge play in thinking about and engaging with media backends?

Lisa Parks: Tactile engagement and embodied knowledge are core to the study of media backends, as is a willingness to experiment with different modes of research and critical inquiry, whether conceptual, phenomenological, or archival. More specifically, it can be really helpful to explore how to develop an embodied understanding of how a given system works.

Personally, I have found drawing very helpful in that regard. Seeing an image of a tiny sensor like a MEMS device in a smartphone, and then trying to draw it and the phone’s motherboard allows a partial understanding of their morphologies, components, and functions. To take the time to draw every little piece of a MEMS device or a smartphone motherboard can make one more aware of the labor involved in manufacturing every single little part. The time and labor it takes to draw electronic parts implicitly facilitates an awareness of the laborers who manufactured and assembled the parts needed to make MEMS and motherboards. Drawing can serve as a speculative attempt to think through what that the phone is made of and how parts on its backend organize and enable its mediating potential.

Judith Keilbach: Listening to you talking about time and space but also bodies in our research practice reminds me of a symposium (organized by Sebastian Scholz, Marek Jancovic & Jolanda Veldhuis) that we attended together in Amsterdam. In your presentation, you did something that stuck in my mind: You threw your phone in the air to demonstrate. As another step in engaging with media backends: What does this expanded understanding of media objects mean not just for our ways of doing research, but also representing our findings?

Lisa Parks: Thanks for reminding me of this. To put this into context, I had been doing research in Tanzania on mobile phone repair workers, and then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. As I could not continue my field work during this time, I thought, how do I shift my focus in relation to the smartphone? We were all in lockdown and I started to think about the smartphone right in front of me for further inquiry: What is it? What is on the other side of the screen? How do the sensors work inside it? What can I do with this thing other than stream content? And so the pandemic gave me an opportunity to fixate on the smartphone itself. After learning about the MEMS devices inside it – in particular the accelerometer, microphone, and radio frequency filter – I started doing some physical experiments to see how these MEMS work in relation to various apps.

I decided to test the Netflix app and determine whether it would keep streaming content when I was throwing the phone up and down in the air, or stretching out my arm and moving it around in circles really fast 10 times. I found that Netflix kept streaming, even when I was doing those things. So I learned that the Netflix app is designed to keep streaming content on a device, even if the person is not able to watch it. And it became interesting to me to think about how apps are designed to operate with data from MEMS and other sensors in the phone. You would think that if the smartphone was being tossed into the air and rapidly moved around in circles, the Netflix app would shut down because there is no way a user could be watching the streamed content. I only found this out by doing a physical experiment, and discuss this more fully in my chapter.

Linda Kopitz: We have talked about how to engage objects physically and playfully, and how to use our bodies in doing and presenting research. But then there also seems to be a part of media backends that can only be explored through other media – apps, technological devices – which  in turn have their own media backends. When do we arrive at the ‘end of the backend’, so to say? Or does everything become part of the backend at some point?

Lisa Parks: The concept may catalyze some inquiry, but, just like all concepts, it also has limits. I gave a talk at Cornell University recently, and one scholar, Jen Liu, who does research on labor and electrical infrastructure workers in the US South, asked me whether the backend to a media scholar in the humanities might be the frontend to an infrastructure worker or someone in consumer electronics manufacturing. This vital point took me back to the question of orientation and Sara Ahmed’s powerful work on this issue. What is faced and not faced in media studies is, of course, interwoven with all kinds of differential politics, training, and power relations. Which media objects and sociotechnical relations a person foregrounds or backgrounds is correlated with diverse positionalities that people inhabit in the world, as manufacturers, repair workers, consumers, or researchers.

Your question about the end of the backend, and whether it starts to take on different dimensions and layers, is a very provocative question. It makes me think of the labyrinth as both an architectural environment and a sociotechnical relation that is designed to go on and on and on and on and on as an unresolvable enigma. There is something about the mystery and opacity of the backend that has the potential to animate creative, critical interventions relative to media and information technologies.

Judith Keilbach: What makes the metaphor of the backend so productive is – well, that it is a metaphor, right? The idea that you can open the backend and have a look what is behind it has something very visual. But how do we deal – conceptually and methodologically – with media backends that cannot be opened, that remain inaccessible and intransparent? Something that is locked, that does not want to be opened, that remains closed.

Lisa Parks: First of all, I would say that the idea is not just to open the backend and see what’s there, right? There has been a lot of critique of the notion of making something visible and then … so what? The question might be put this way: what happens when you encounter or open a technical object that you have been socialized not to know about, that has literally been enclosed, boxed in, and glued shut to inhibit or foreclose understanding? The act of ‘opening’ it can be a curious embodied response to investigate occluded objects and knowledge, but it can also be a job.

One of my very first publications was called ‘Cracking Open the Set’. It was about television repair men during the 1950s and how TV set owners were socialized to have someone come into the home to repair their TVs because the sets were cast as dangerous objects and electronic hazards. Female homemakers sat and watched as repairmen entered the home and cracked open the set to replace tubes, rewire connections, or adjust antennas.

Today, this hardly ever happens anymore as consumer electronics – whether TV sets or desk top computers – are blackboxed. Because of this, they are often replaced rather than repaired. This reduces opportunities for knowledge circulation about media backends. In my chapter in the book, I discuss the group Ifixit.com because they are  invested in equipping consumers with information about their devices. Much of that information is proprietary as manufacturers lay claim to it as their intellectual property. Because of this, a ‘Right to Repair’ movement has taken shape over the past decade linking to organizations like the European Parliament, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and PIRG, among others. Implicitly, this movement also involves consumers’ right to know about the electronics inside of devices and how they work.

Apart from the ‘Right to Repair’ movement, I always thought of the opening up of consumer electronics as a feminist intervention since it involves investigating and studying technical objects that women are typically socialized not to know about. It takes a lifetime to become an expert in a field like electrical engineering, but it may be possible to develop partial knowledges and limited expertise via playful investigations and wacky experiments.

Linda Kopitz: I really like this notion of being wacky and being playful with our methods and our research, especially because at the same time, there is an undercurrent of seriousness in this playfulness as well. To what extent is it also a critical, socio-political responsibility of media researchers to try to open technological backends – particularly ones designed, manufactured, controlled, and restricted for and by global corporations?

Lisa Parks: We cannot succumb to the idea that the backend is the untouchable intellectual property of the manufacturers or the algorithm designers or the platform owners. Media scholars have a responsibility to investigate the fullness of what media technologies are, and how and where mediation processes can happen. I was very inspired by the work that went into the book Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (MIT Press, 2023). Co-authors Maria Eriksson, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau actually created a research practice to try to understand how Spotify works on the backend. They got lots of pushback from the corporate owner of the platform and that was a very telling indication that they were onto something! We need to know how Spotify and other platforms work in order to teach students about them in media studies. We might not have all the expertise and training we need to understand the backend of every platform, device, or system but we have to start somewhere. This makes me think about Wolfgang Ernst at Humboldt University in Berlin and Erkki Huhtamo at UCLA who both have been extremely clever about teaching students about these issues from a media archaeological perspective, collecting, disassembling, and reassembling an array of technical artifacts. I have always deeply admired their work yet would weave further discussion of social difference and power relations into such artifactual investigations.

Judith Keilbach: Are you also pushing us as media studies scholars to be more activist, to be more political with this? There definitely is a political perspective in what you are describing here, in opening up objects and systems. I would be curious if you see this as an explicit call to media studies scholars – whoever that might be – to be more involved in activism?

Lisa Parks: I should preface my answer to the question by saying that I was trained to do close analysis of film, radio, and television content, and I am a cinephile and an avid consumer of media content of all kinds. By making a call to investigate the backend, we are not, in any way, trying to suggest that this type of aesthetic or text-based scholarship is not important. Such work is vital and we need many kinds of media scholarship! It is important to remain dynamic in our thinking about what scholarship in media studies is and can become. So I have taken the training that I received, and the close attention to detail that it taught me, and have applied it to other media objects, sites, and relations. Back in the day, I did a minor in STS, so in addition to close analysis of content I have long been interested in the socio-technical relations of media. This means I am not only tuned in to analytical thinking around media systems that generate entertainment but also systems that sense and organize the built environment, structure financial transactions, and reshape governance.

How will media scholars engage with and set new critical agendas relative to AI? We have to stay agile and tactical in how we position ourselves within our field and be smart about engaging with this era of so-called ‘smart media’ and artificial intelligence. Some departments are being told by university leaders, ‘you must deal with artificial intelligence or you will become irrelevant and lose funding’. We need to think about these institutional mandates and techno-political issues within our field, and not shy away from them.

Linda Kopitz: Could we also consider public funding mechanisms and academic institutions as part of the complex relations of the media backend? And how does research on ‘opening’ up media backends link to hierarchies of knowledge and power?

Lisa Parks: At least in North America, in the United States, humanities-based media scholars are eligible only for certain grants, which offer a very small amount of funding. But if you’re a media scholar who also explicitly studies social dimensions of science and technology, you can partner with scholars in STEM disciplines and become eligible for collaborative grants that are much larger and that fund graduate student researchers in the humanities. Being aware of how institutions are set up to financially support certain kinds of fields – and not others – is quite important. By thinking about the backend, we also try to create a conceptual space for different kinds of collaborations to emerge in universities. For instance, conversations could emerge between media scholars, electrical engineers, computer scientists and environmental studies scholars. Such transdisciplinary conversations are not easy, given that we all have been trained in university silos. We have our own languages and paradigms for making sense of the phenomena that we study. But such conversations – and especially the frictions and uncertainties they create – can push us into different spaces where crucial issues, problems, or ways of seeing start to come forth that we could not have anticipated. Multidisciplinary collaboration is not easy, but it is filled with surprises and can create conceptual openings.

Linda Kopitz: For the special issue of NECSUS that this interview is published in, we are drawing on the theme of #Open to think about openness both as a conceptual lens and a practical consideration in media research. So following up on what you were saying about not just opening up ‘our’ objects but also our ways of working and collaborating beyond our disciplines and networks and terminologies, of finding new ways to stay open to thinking and doing research: In what ways does ‘openness’ resonate with your own work?

Lisa Parks: Openness is a fascinating, important, and complicated term. As you were asking your question, I started to think about Paul Virilio’s book Open Skies (Verso, 1997) and the idea of openness as a trap as well. The idea of a free open sky becomes somewhat of a farce when we consider the historical mobilization of aerial and telecom technologies that have historically set up to control the sky and airwaves or spectrum. The concept of open also makes me think of Wendy Chun’s vital work, too, and the inherent tension between freedom and control that materializes around the internet. It is not open; rather, it is a domain of oscillating fantasies, visions, and power struggles. So the term ‘open’ may catalyze and invite curiosity but, at the same time, we cannot think about openness without thinking about the enclosure, acts of closing down or foreclosing. I think it is important to think about ‘open’ as a space, as a verb, and as a fraught concept. I am inspired by the fact that NECSUS is using that as a term of critical inquiry. I also can imagine some scholars asking, ‘Open for whom?’ Open is about access, permeability, and sensibility, too, and not everybody is evenly set up for its conditions. Taking a term and considering all the tensions within and around it what poststructuralist feminists and media scholars do. We tend to trouble even the terms that we want to embrace.

Authors

Judith Keilbach works in the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University. Her research interests include television theory and history, media infrastructures, and the relation of media and sustainability. Together with Michał Pabiś-Orzeszyna she founded the Sustainable Media workgroup of NECS.

Linda Kopitz has studied at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Miami, USA, and holds a Research Masters in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Her research – situated at the intersection of urban studies and media studies – explores the entanglement between real and virtual environments imaginations of the everyday. She is currently working as a Lecturer in Cross-Media Culture and continues to freelance as a Creative Director and writer in the arts and cultural sector.

References

Eriksson, Maria, Rasmus Fleischer, Anna Johansson, Pelle Snickars, and Patrick Vonderau. Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.

Parks, Lisa. “Cracking Open the Set: Television Repair and Tinkering with Gender 1949-1955.” Television & New Media1, no. 3 (August 2000): 257–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/152747640000100302.

———. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Console-Ing Passions. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

———. Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror. New York ; London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.

———. “‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures.” In Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, 355–74. The MIT Press, 2015.https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9465.003.0031.

———. “The Other Side of the Smart Phone: MEMS Sensors and the Tiny Matters of Mediation.” In Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations, edited by Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder. The Geopolitics of Information. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023.

Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. The Geopolitics of Information. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Parks, Lisa, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder, eds. Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations. The Geopolitics of Information. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023.

Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Radical Thinkers 35. London ; New york: Verso, 1997.

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[1]  Parks 2024, p. 14.