Publications by Vicki Mayer
New Media and Society, 2023
Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local ... more Regional authorities and development experts wax about data infrastructures’ importance to local labor, both in terms of modernizing the past and creating new jobs in the future. This data infrastructure time of labor and jobs establishes a temporality of a region, and its leadership, as on the way to a progressive and calculable future. Using the example of a Google hyperscale data center which leaders extolled in Groningen, in the Netherlands, we explore how data infrastructure time shapes the temporalities of the workers whose jobs were presumed to be founded and futured by this event. By exploring these relational chains of power in the political economy of data infrastructures, I illustrate the ways that work temporalities are connected to broader social, political, and ecological forces in the region, while also offering new methods in understanding what global infrastructure companies mean to regions outside of global cities.
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The Information Society, 2023
Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? Thi... more Would technological changes increase the need for human workers or eliminate them altogether? This uncertainty has produced an unresolved tension, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the information society. The data center industry has been largely invisible in public debates about this question. Yet the same tensions exist within the industry itself: Will automation create data center jobs or kill them? In this article, we work inside the “black box” – the data center, to examine uncertainties faced by those who work there. We do so through interviews and observations, first, of data center managers and executives at international trade expos, where anxieties about the shortage of data center workers but also their irrelevance were palpable. Then, we turn to a remote data center in Finland, where security guards and technical operators negotiate employment uncertainties through the biopolitics of their labor. In both sites, the uncertainties about data center employment are manifest and embodied, even if they are expressed and experienced in different ways. On both the top and bottom levels of data center hierarchies, people are discomfited by the possibility of their own redundancy. At the same time, they present the sunnier sides of data center work when they talked about their efforts to resolve ongoing issues of worker shortage, the lack of diversity in data centers, and the routines that could easily slide into boredom or anomie. We situate our findings on the long arc of capitalist transformations and discuss the insights they might provide for today’s data-driven economy in general.
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Popular Communication, 2022
A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered ... more A reflection on my uncomfortable laugh on hearing the news that film workers would be considered 'essential workers' during the COVID-19 lockdown, I argue that all cultural workers might be considered essential at this time.
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Television & New Media, 2020
What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How ... more What would a manifesto look like for media and creative workers in the twenty-first century? How would we account for decades of the transformation of work to fit the political economies of labor and data? This essay for the twentieth anniversary of Television & New Media attempts to answer these questions.
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European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, compe... more This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions.
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Culture Machine, 2019
https://culturemachine.net/vol-18-the-nature-of-data-centers/the-second-coming/
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A genealogy of feminist studies of media policy and governance.
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Interventions: ICA Theme Book 2017
Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (I... more Taking our conversations at the 2017 conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) as our cue, we delve into the gendered patterns of authorship and citation in review articles written about the discipline. These review articles have proliferated via a publishing industry bent on selling handbooks. Using the standard methods used in other forms of gender network analysis, we focus on the citations in the first 100 articles of The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, the ICA’s resource guide to the study of communication. Our data show strong disparities with regards to the number of women authors and articles about women’s scholarship as well as the citation of scholarly sources written by women in articles written by men. Based on the empirical evidence, we believe it is time for an intervention in communication scholarship. We suggest standards to enforce both personal and structural accountability. We want to make sure that violators of a feminist commitment to diversify our discipline be called on to make change happen, or else.
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Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, red... more Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably.
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Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despi... more Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.
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Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions ... more Online link to co-authored paper on MediaNOLA and digital archives, Published in Reconstructions 16.1 (2016).
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To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC ... more To be published in the book Precarious Creativity, edited by Kevin Sanson and Michael Curtin, UC Press, 2016.
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This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communicati... more This is my short essay together with a translation of the excellent work by Brazilian communication scholar Cicilia MK Peruzzo. Published in CSMC 2015.
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Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Inv... more Book chapter in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets, edited by Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby, Lexington Books, 2015.
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May 2015 Louisiana Cultural Vistas Magazine
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The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation th... more The film and media industries have turned New Orleans into “Hollywood South,” a transformation that regularly reorients residents’ relationships with their physical environment. In this essay, I describe the connections I see between the privatization of public space and the impacts of these respatializations on New Orleans as a place. The images in the essay provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geographically but also as part of the ordinary experience of everyday life in a city still and always posited as “recovering” from hurricanes and other disasters.
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Publications by Vicki Mayer
Using the lens of cultural studies to examine media production, Production Studies, The Sequel! takes into account transnational production flows and places production studies in conversation with other major areas of media scholarship including audience studies, media industries, and media history. A follow-up to the Production Studies, this collection highlights new and important research in the field, and promises to generate continued discussion about the past, present, and future of production studies.