Icelandic Information Infrastructure and the Making of Marginality

My doctoral research examines information infrastructures in Iceland, taking data centers, internet exchanges, and fiber-optic cables as vectors of power.  My dissertation, “Compromising Connections: Icelandic Information Infrastructure and the Making of Marginality,” argues that such information technology (IT) has been developed on the promise of connecting the “isolated” island to global centers of influence and capital; however it has been at least equally productive of distance, difference, and marginality.  As such my research questions the ideal of “connectivity” (a charismatic concept from the European Enlightenment to techno-utopian discourse today), showing how the practical work of making technological connections has the potential to isolate, instead.  

Information infrastructures have been sited in the Arctic for is cool climate, abundant energy, and “low population density”; yet in Iceland I have found that these new concentrations (of data, machinery, investment and investors) also have the effect of re-arranging national identities, local ecologies, and postcolonial politics.  By tracing the (colonial and military) histories of such networks, and following everyday, embodied encounters with infrastructures on the ground, my research maps ambivalent socio-spatial effects of IT.  Key to my work are concepts of remoteness and connectivity, mobility and marginality.