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Accepted Paper:
Imagining the cloud: infrastructures, technological visions, and negotiation of visibility
Asta Vonderau
(Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research at the Facebook data centre in Luleå, Northern Sweden, the paper asks how “the cloud” is culturally imagined and socially negotiated.
Paper long abstract:
In the metaphoric imagery commonly used to describe the Internet, the world wide web has been pictured as being immaterial and fluid, like an ocean to be navigated. The complex infrastructures and heavy industry securing the functionality of web services backstage are seldomly part of popular imagination and remain part of an invisible deeper ecology.
My presentation is based on empirical research conducted in a place where the materiality and immateriality of the Internet meet - the northern Swedish town of Luleå where Facebook opened its first and largest European data center in 2013. Ever since, the data center has become key to this city's self-image and a generator of collective and individual future visions. My presentation shows how visions of the cloud as an open free floating network and a secure industrial site come together and are integrated into local identity construction processes.