This book traces how today’s digital circulations are trafficked underground and undersea, rather than by air. It follows signals as they move at the speed of light, traveling through winding cables the size of a garden hose. En route, they get tangled up in coastal politics at landing points, monitored and maintained at cable stations, interconnected with transportation systems and atmospheric currents, and embedded in histories of seafloor measurement. Cable infrastructures remain firmly tethered to the earth, anchored in a grid of material and cultural coordinates. The Undersea Network descends into these layers to reveal how such environments—from Cold War nuclear bunkers to tax-exempt suburban technology parks; from coasts inhabited by centuries-old fishing communities to the homes of snails, frogs, and endangered mountain beavers—continue to underlie, structure, and shape today’s fiber-optic links. From this vantage point, apparently outside the network, one can see the hidden labor, economics, cultures, and politics that go into sustaining everyday intercontinental connections. Rather than envisioning undersea cable systems as a set of vectors that overcome space, The Undersea Network places our networks undersea: it locates them in this complex set of circulatory practices, charting their interconnections with a dynamic and fluid external environment.

In our "wireless" world it is easy to take the importance of the undersea cable systems for granted, but the stakes of their successful operation are huge, as they are responsible for carrying almost all transoceanic Internet traffic. In The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. In doing so, she charts the cable network's cultural, historical, geographic and environmental dimensions. Starosielski argues that the environments the cables occupy are historical and political realms, where the network and the connections it enables are made possible by the deliberate negotiation and manipulation of technology, culture, politics and geography. Accompanying the book is an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs.

The Undersea Network offers a new way to look at digital media systems in ecological terms. Although research on media ecology—from Neil Postman’s studies of mass media to Matthew Fuller’s Media Ecologies—understand the environment as a world of content, The Undersea Network extends the environment to encompass the social, architectural, and natural ecologies through which this content is distributed.54 Here, global information flows are not positioned as equalizing, deterritorializing, and antithetical to fixed or hierarchical structures, but instead are always routed through dynamic fields made up of varied directional circulations. The challenge for networked circulations today is not how to overcome fixed barriers, but how to navigate in a world where everything is already mobile. The title of this book, The Undersea Network, thus refers not simply to the cables that are being analyzed, but to the book’s methodological intervention: to see networks as always embedded within complex and multidirectional circulatory practices—not a static territory, but a fluid environment in which our connections must be both insulated and grounded.

In this book, I hope to convey how the network looks to the people who build, operate, and use it. I visited cable installations in thirteen countries, as well as the offices and homes of numerous cable workers who have contributed to these systems. As a white American woman, I was unfamiliar with the culture and language in many of these places, and I relied on people who were in the industry and resided in these geographies to make the systems legible. Almost always, it was men—an analyst at a cable company in New Zealand, a distant relative in Guam, and a software developer in Yap—who broadened my mobility and helped me gain access to cable networks. While the cable industry is overwhelmingly male, many women have also been involved in the industry, particularly in labs and in project management, sales, marketing, route surveying, and legal affairs. To get to cable sites, I also relied extensively on the infrastructures of transportation (roads, boats, planes, and trains) with which the cable systems have been interconnected. My own subject position—as I traversed heterogeneous infrastructures and environments, often feeling out of place—heightened my perception of cables’ ongoing requirements for interconnection as well as their vulnerabilities and need for insulation.