What At Stake?

1. patron-client network

   Annotations:

   • 庇护网络，恩庇－侍从关系。 state为了加强统治，获得认同，赋予地方派系一定的权力，扮演庇护者的角色，地方派系经过长时间的发展壮大，拥有了自己的power，进而会产生对state的分离和抵抗，进而从state power进入in dividual的自制。这是讨论中央和地方互动关系的一个政治模型。 In the disaggregation from networked electricity to autonomous generators lies the shift in Nigerian society from the development state to new forms of individual, competitive, liberalism.
   1. Conceptual Infrastructures

      Annotations:

      • ‘networks of production’(Latour): the institutional, discursive contexts that accompany objects and which establish them as facts in the world.  This is similar to Foucault's interest in the archive not as a collection of documents or things but as the form of political exteriority that makes objects appear to have certain meanings. (Larkin)
      1. exteriority (Foucault)

         Annotations:

         • There is a confrontation between subject and technology staged by the enormous efforts of colonial administrators, Islamic leaders, technical advisors, and nationalists, whose efforts combined in various ways to give technology its meaning in colonial/postcolonial Nigeria. My (Larkin) aim has been to highlight the political exteriority from which infrastructures emerges. This is what I mean when I argue that infrastructures are not only technical but also conceptual objects.
         1. political subjection: symbolic power of infrastructures

            Annotations:

            • Infrastructures were claimed to be provided as a universal public good i which every member of society was presumed to be equal to everyone else.  It is easy to critique the ideological basis of this offer: to note that infrastructures were organised for the economic exploiration of the colony. 并且对不同地区不同国家的剥削是不equal的。 To dismiss the egalitarian command of infrastructure would be a mistake: not only a key ideology of colonial rule, it passed easily into the postcolonial period and was a major part of nationalist African agendas. 总结一下：尽管殖民政府宣称平等，但其实不平等，但是又有一点是共同的，平等的，就是蕴含在infrastructure 之中的统治意识形态（ideology）
            1. mechanism: contradictory rule

               Annotations:

               • I laid out how colonial governments attempted to tie infrastructures to a mode of rule.
               1. difference
                  1. sublime

                     Annotations:

                     • On one hand, infrastructures were part of the colonial sublimes, an attempt by rulers to use technology as a mode of difference to show the superiority and power of colonial rule and the world of science and technological expertise it represented. －－殖民者的技术优越性和强大。
               2. similarity

                  Annotations:

                  • On the other, the governmental promise that colonial tule proffered: Nigerians who accepted this rule could be made to be more like Europeans.--用我们的设施，我们教你们技能，你们就能变得跟我们一样强大，先进。
      2. Angle of Postcolonial studies

         Annotations:

         • In the postcolonial period, the tie to European rule was lost, but it is remarkable how much of the modernist ideology of infrastructure remained. Media role: Radio talks on the workings of the water supply system might have been replaced by newsreels of nationalist leaders opening factories, inaugurating power plants, or welcoming dignitaries to the commemoration of bridges and dams, but the intense effort to stabilize and fix the symbolic logic of these technologies was sustained.
   2. Technical Infrastructures
      1. power maintain/resistance

         Annotations:

         • None can maintain that power: 1) With the passage of time the work of technology becomes familiar and quotidian, and the ability to use the sublime for political purposes is made vulnerable by the need for constant technological renewal. 2)The sublime was also threatened by the technical and material qualities of infrastructures, which created possibilities for action in excess of the colonial ability to fix order: e.g. massive theft of railroad keyse.g. The television system launched in 1961, designed to represent Hausa traditional culture and to promote development with Western programming, was immediately besieged by demands (by the Hausa members of the Broadcast Corporation Advisory Committee) that it show Hindi films. 
         1. materiality of the signifier (Keane) ------critique of Culture Studies

            Annotations:

            • Material objects are funded and initiated with specific intentions in mind, but, 1) the physical life of objects can 'expose semantics to objective circumstances' making them vulnerable to 'all that can happen to things'; (Keane) 2)'process of bundling': the material   quality of embodiment inescapably binding qualities to other qualities, which gives rise to new signs in an unending process of signification:e.g. redness of apple/fire engine (Keane) 3) The physical embodiment of objects is crucial to their ability to be resignified and recontextualized over time. (Myers)
            1. materiality of media

               Annotations:

               • It is this materiality of media as objects, their sensual qualities and the contingencies those qualities exert, that generates the excess (or lack) which creates a seminar fragility. Objects break down, power plants fail, water supply dries up, radio broadcasts are sometimes too weak to be heard, bad phone lines render voices unintelligible, and connections fail.
   3. Producing urban space in Africa

      Annotations:

      • In treating media technologies as parts of a much wider logic and form of infrastructure I have sought to open up new ways of thinking about the production of Nigerian urban space over time.
      1. shift in study angle: imaginative forces

         Annotations:

         • African urbanism was too focused on issues of poverty, economic and political exploitation, and unequal relations between developed and developing societies. In urging attention to the richness of popular urban life, Hannerz was promoting the idea that, as David Hecht and Maliqalim Simone put it, 'the need to survive does not... swallow up the need to imagine.' e.g. leisure practices and cultural forms of its inhabitants ('creativity of practice')
         1. infrastructures themselves as imagination forms
            1. being objects of desire

               Annotations:

               • The creativity in the Nigerian film industry lies as much in its forms of economic organisation and distribution as in the brightly imagined images of the films themselves.
            2. being conduits shaping the networks of urban life

               Annotations:

               • Infrastructure has to be established creating the material channels that allow transnational cultural flows to occur. 'Flows,' for all their seemingly disembodied nature, require material conduits.
               1. flaky space (Lefebvre)

                  Annotations:

                  • Lefebvre argues that as space is continually reformed by the necessities of capital, newly developed networks do not eradicate earlier ones but are superimposed on top of them, creating a historical layering over time.--mille-feuille pastry rather than homogenous and discrete. At any one point, then, urban space is made up of the historical layering of networks connected by infrastructures. These are the conduits that dictate which flow of religious and cultural ideas move and therefore which social relations get mobilised in their wake. Their historical layering helps explain why dormant cultural, religious, and economic forms can suddenly gain purchase again, reawakening and becoming reenergised in a new situation. e.g. Nigerian films are all consequences, often unintended, of infrastructural orders established under the British that have been progressively distorted and reshaped into something quite different.
2. aims and considerations

   Annotations:

   • One of the starting points of my research and this book was to pose the question of what a theory of media would look like if it began from Nigeria rather than Europe or the United States.Would it look the same? a case of exceptionalism? technology determinism? ...... My intent has been to use a sustained analysis of media in Nigeria not to emphasize difference for its own sake but to give greater analytic prominence to problematics common to media but often underexamined: - heterogeneous nature of culture flows - competition between discursive systems (religious, colonial,nationalist) that attempt to stabilise the logic of media - the ontological instability of technologies themselves At the same time, my research has tried to use media theory and film theory to broaden the frame of anthropology, to take seriously the cultural forms through which social  life is objectified, and to force the consideration of media as central to the experiential sense of what it is to become and be urban.(mediation???)
   1. meaningful difference: Africa

      Annotations:

      • Emphasizing difference also made it difficult to see the popularity of film traditions and cultural styles emanating from elsewhere in anything other than negative terms
   2. fight against cultural imperialism: African cinema

      Annotations:

      • These films were often based on the politics of affirming African cultural values and forms through cinema.

Annotations:

• centers/peripheries: --Europe, US/ South America,.....Silicon Valley/ the rest of the world --(digital technologies)elites/citizentry --high-tech/traditional --Peru: the urban/ the rural------horizontal network??????? 

1. center/periphery
   1. from centre to periphery/ from periphery to centre

      Annotations:

      • 1) exchange of role: Conserving centers as exclusive sites of origination and invention, of course, also neglects another crucial detail- that the centres of the present were once on the periphery.  2) destabilizations and realignments of prior centres:  e.g.2008 Financial crisis
   2. role of periphery
      1. active and inventive

         Annotations:

         • Such technological hacks and local improvisations are an everyday part of the periphery's technology landscape. By applying methods and techniques that previously have been unapplied and unimagined-in innovation centres, these places on the 'digital periphery' build new structures and spaces 
      2. productivity of periphery

         Annotations:

         • Far from merely lagging behind or mimicking centres, the dynamic activity from peripheral sites suggests how agents once holding minor status- and even the notion of 'the copy' itself- can emerge instead as fresh sources of distinctly optimised or unencumbered productivity.
      3. vibrant minor narratives and situated stories

         Annotations:

         • Minor narratives, similar to minor chords in musical scales, can be read as complementing and decentering the movements of their major twin. Social networking technologies originally developed and launched years ago by US IT firms seem to have come of age in the hands of users in remote and distant elsewheres:--center 发明的技术在periphery手里发扬光大 e.g. 2011 Arab Spring--from Spain's 15-M Indignados movement to North American Occupy movements e.g.the wave of social protests in the Middle East starting in early 2011 and the online corporate protests of the Anonymous global hacker network (Coleman) e.g. popular uses of digital technologies have been associated with social movements in sites as diverse as Mexico, Iran, Philippines and Ukraine
         1. break of either/ or of central diffutson model

            Annotations:

            • Prior explanations recirculated of the Internet's global diffusion as  1)either-by nature-fostering greater liberty and democracy through the extension of technological openness, 2) or fostering precisely its opposite through the extension and acceleration of open markets, economic globalisation, and ultimately, a digitally paced capitalism that served only a limited collective of technological elites in such centres. (Anderson; Castells; Qiu; Sey; Kelly; Ross; Shirky) ----------  Predictions that digital technology would produce either freedom or oppression as defined from centres simply didn't match the contours of digital culture at the periphery. ----------- 意义在于：举了个例子--FLOSS Collectives of free software advocates sought to reframe the adoption of open technologies as not just an issue of individual liberty and free of choice, as it had been for FLOSS (free, fibre, open-source software) advocacy in the US, but of cultural diversity, state transparency, and political sovereignty from the monopolistic power of transnational corporations in the Global South.
            1. case of Peru

               Annotations:

               • In peru, such evidence had visibly accumulated by the early 2000s-bringing a range of distinct actors and interests into unexpected and often contradictory proximity. In working around the digital in Peru, such actors inevitably confronted the contradictions of what it meant to build new links and exchanges between spaces of the rural and the urban, the high-tech and traditional, and pitched appetites for the global with intensive commitments to the local.
               1. global integrations: Peru/centre
               2. Connecting the nation: urban/rural in Peru
            2. other

               Annotations:

               • To watch these 'other' stories unfold was to watch the details of each spill over the edges of the existing frameworks and dominant narratives of digital culture.
2. stakes

   Annotations:

   • Such local and periphery encounters, as much as those of global connection, prove indeed to be ever-critical stakes of digital engagement that depend on the cultivation of interfaces among distinct interests and communities across spaticial, political, or economic divides--that prove to be anything but merely innocent undertakings.
   1. power

      Annotations:

      • Cultural ambivalence and technological complexity, much as they do in technological centres, weave diverse and surprising tales around digital connection at the periphary. They involved the interruption as well as expression of new extensions of power.