Media Infrastructure: Visibility and Space Building in Working-class Neighbourhoods Through Piracy.

Abstract

This work explores how urban spaces are experienced in relation to exposed infrastructure. It examines how exposed infrastructure is utilized by residents of Dahieh to mitigate being technologically marginalized. The thesis brings forth the concepts of hard and soft piracy to highlight the physical work that residents perform to gain access. By juxtaposing hard and soft piracy, I demonstrate that soft piracy, which has been written about extensively in the field of Media Studies, needs to be preceded by hard piracy, at least in the case of Dahieh. I focus on the working-class neighborhoods of Dahieh, on the peripheries of Beirut, to uncover how media infrastructure is dealt with on the phenomenological level in order to combat the technological exclusion that marks the experiences of living in these areas. I argue that living on the margins of Beirut also means being on the margins of technology. As such, material interactions with media infrastructure, such as wire rigging and channel hacking, become inevitable. The question of space comes to answer how media infrastructures are implicated not only in building space but also defining how this space is experienced. As a result of the shortcoming in the urban organization in working-class areas in Beirut, media infrastructure exists in visible form. This visibility enables technologically excluded citizens to come in contact with media infrastructure and mitigate the impact of marginalization, and thus, an experience of space is produced. A discussion of media infrastructure’s contribution to building spatial experiences can draw an understanding of how media infrastructure and infrastructure in general function under the prevalent economic system.