Starosielski plumbs the history of the cable network, offering us a view of the spaces through which our signal traffic passes haunted by a colonial past. Unearthing the cables means uncovering the lives of the workers who laid and maintained them, and the islanders whose land the cables passed through. She exposes the cables as an agent of colonial modernization, documenting the portrayal of native populations and the body performances of “becoming modern.” The bodies of the cablemen were “the place where the border between the network’s inside and outside was enforced, the guarantor of quality performance”  [Starosielski 2015, 106]. Beyond the obvious effects cable work had on the laborers, Starosielski demonstrates how the body of worker and body of land converge on the “clarity of the message” which “directly reflected the skill of the operator and his geographical location”  [Starosielski 2015, 106]. Bodies were also a location through which “global currents and local practices could disseminate through the network”  [Starosielski 2015, 106]. This information exchange signaled changes ranging from “technological developments to excessive drinking”  [Starosielski 2015, 105]. These locations and the people who worked in them helped influence the designs that have shaped our modern digital infrastructure. As cable lines came ashore, they were often met with conflicting attitudes. Many islanders saw the cable networks as agents of colonialism. While the encroaching networks brought the promise of economic growth, they also threatened to flatten culture and tradition. While residents in Hawai’i resisted the cable networks, other islands, such as Tahiti, view the cable landings “as an important site in local education, integral to the transmission of cultural knowledge”  [Starosielski 2015, xii]. The undersea cables link the islands to the global network, which suggests both threats to the location’s culture and the ability to transmit local knowledge to the entire world.

The Undersea Network reveals some surprising places where the lives of humans and the network cables snare. Such intersections range from the “intensification of fishing and shipping in coastal waters”  [Starosielski 2015, 54] at the turn of the twenty-first century, to “[c]oncerns about deliberate attacks and a new ‘asymmetric terrorist threat’” which included the cables recently considered part of national critical infrastructure [Starosielski 2015, 54]. The threat of cable damage or takeover played out in many ways, but perhaps most comically in an exchange Starosielski records between a prospective cable builder and a government official:

They got a bit offended when I told them this. I just said, “Your army could take it over,” and they said, “Well, we don’t have an army.” “I see. Okay, your police.” “Police?” I said, “Okay, who in this country has got guns? Someone’s got guns. Someone with guns could take it over.” They said, “Yeah, you’re right. Someone could.’”  [Starosielski 2015, 59]

Fears of attacks on the network had serious impacts on investments, and the companies’ successes or failures impacted the regions in which they operated and the people they employed. Starosielski also details the loss of numerous jobs during the bankruptcies which occurred in 2001, as companies found themselves unable to recoup the costs of laying cable [Starosielski 2015, 53]. With the loss of these workers came a loss of industry knowledge, leaving many of the companies that began to reemerge in 2005 with a lack of essential information.

Starosielski offers rich means of looking at environments in which we communicate. She destabilizes bifurcated distinctions of “nature” and “culture,” showing how entangled the two are in our world-wide network of cables. These cables traverse built and natural spaces, and Starosielski traces them through deep ocean and remote backcountry as well as the many cities and towns where they pass through the lives and nations of people, land, and animals. Likewise, she pushes us away from talking about place in terms of the rhetorical moves made by telecommunications companies, who portrayed places like New Zealand as remote and isolated. Such moves position “cable technology as bringing a new and complete connection, despite the fact that it was used by an elite”  [Starosielski 2015, 169]. Here her signal paths depart from that of the traditional travel narrative, revealing the ways in which these locations had already been connected, such as in the case of New Zealand which was linked “via ships, migrations, news circulation, and the postal service” long before the telegraph wires emerged out of the sea [Starosielski 2015, 173]. Cables are shaped by the places through which they pass, and the places are in turn transformed by their connections.

“Surfacing.in” further complicates our view of digital and material environments, blending visualized objects of cables, environments, and cultures with digital images of networks to render these narrative elements spatially. The project has users move through the digital network, first coming ashore through a cable in a disorienting manner. As you surface and dive, seafaring through the network, “narratives about the history of the cable network, the companies that construct it, and the ecologies that it runs through will orient you in your journey”  [Starosielski et al. 2015]. Part of this re-orienting involves facing some of the horrors of colonial practice, such as how “the infrastructures of colonial empires could not have been built without the labor of slaves and indentured servants” and that “the expenses saved through this practice made transoceanic networks both possible and profitable”  [Starosielski et al. 2015]. Through different levels of view, “map,” “place,” “theme,” and “image,” we can zoom in on the intersecting locations, issues, images, information, and history and see how they converge and cross in an inseparable mesh. The digital project makes visible the new and old ways in which cables connected these Pacific Islands.

Starosielski argues that these islands are not seen in contemporary American culture as part of networks. Instead the two concepts “islands and networks appear to be mutually exclusive”  [Starosielski 2015, 172]. She points out how the word for island actually indicates “isolating and insulating” and that “isolation and boundedness are what make [geographical islands] special”  [Starosielski 2015, 172]. Thus, these island spaces are threatened by the emergence of the network cables in the “cultural anxiety that islandness will disappear”  [Starosielski 2015, 173]. Yet, Starosielski explores how networks and islands act in triangulation in order to produce the global network. The Undersea Network reveals that places and materiality are as much a part of the nodes through which our signal traffic passes as the digital applications and the cables themselves. Through her exploration, Starosielski offers a model for thinking about the digital world in relation to the physical environment and the histories that play out there. This collection challenges notions of non-networked spaces, revealing how even cable-free islands offer buffer zones, anchors, and other means of protecting the integrity of the cable network.