Across these varied contexts, where political activity is largely restricted and freedom of expression violently repressed, new media such as social networking platforms and mobile technology were credited with heralding a new era of political participation and dissent. The revolution, some argued, will be tweeted, and the socially-mediated network, many noted, managed to leverage individual discontent for collective action. With the aim of interrogating this techno-utopian outlook, amidst the entrenched inequalities and repressive politics that continue to plague the region, this conference seeks to move the conversation from the front-end to the back-end of media: from networks, as it were, to infrastructures.
How does a focus on the material conditions and labor that channel and process communication flows unsettle what we understand media to be and what they can accomplish in the Middle East? How can an inquiry into media infrastructures inform our understanding of the economic, political, and cultural boundaries and flows that constitute the Middle East as region? And, what are the political stakes of this infrastructural turn? If infrastructure is the “basic physical and organizational structures and facilities…needed for the operation of a society or enterprise," then we can think of media infrastructures along these same lines – as the building blocks of our entire mediascape. Platforms, data centers, software, algorithms, and human labor shape and transform media industries and everyday media practices. This conference explores how these technological and organizational infrastructures are embedded within and reproduce power relations and inequalities, but also how they condition human agency and struggles for social justice.