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Paper short abstract:

The talk will present the Telecommunications industry development in Lithuania with the focus on the Internet emergence and maintenance through my ongoing, STS-inspired research.

Paper long abstract:

The telecommunications industry as a type of applied technoscience is concerned with the development and maintenance of data transmission technologies, of which the Internet is a part of. In my talk, I will give a brief overview of the development of telecommunications industry in Lithuania in the '90s - after the disintegration of the Soviet Union - by focusing on main actors and events that were constitutive to its emergence. In addition to the macro view, I will briefly present my ongoing research on the production of the Internet in Lithuania as an interplay between local and foreign actors, and labor practices. I applied the "infrastructuring" (Susan Leigh-Star) and media ethnographic (Lisa Parks) approaches during my fieldwork, in order to situate the Internet in Lithuania, by bringing my attention both to the post-colonially inspired description of the field, and also by focusing, for instance, on the inherent construction of the past in the presence in the current labor practices of the Internet maintenance and development.