Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The shorthand we use to describe the apparatus of modern telecommunications invokes a clean, precise, and rationally ordered infrastructure. When we speak to somebody on the telephone, they are on the other end of “the line”; we also go “on-line” to browse “the net,” using computers powered by electricity that reaches our homes and businesses through “the grid.” Information is stored in “the cloud” – a less rectilinear but still inappropriate euphemism, given that the vast majority of Internet traffic is through underwater cables. My research looks beyond the flattening metaphors we use to describe telecommunications to instead consider electronic communication from a material and ecological perspective. Focusing primarily on the construction of telegraph and telephone networks in the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico, from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, I concentrate on the materiality of telecommunications construction, from the human and animal labor enrolled to bring thousands of wooden poles across mountains and deserts, to the mining of copper in Sonora, and the distillation of tar to coat wooden poles in order to stave off predation by woodpeckers and insects. In particular, I ask how an electrically-powered infrastructure of communication affected non-human forms of communication and movement; specifically, how migratory animals adapted to changes in the landscape introduced by modern communication apparatuses. In this paper, I focus on the desert bighorn sheep, a species whose ancestral knowledge of the geography of the US Southwest has been threatened by the construction of an infrastructure of human knowledge exchange.