Shannon Mattern’s Deep Time of Media Infrastructure radically expands the temporal and conceptual horizons of media studies by arguing that infrastructures of communication long predate modern telecommunications and are inseparable from the historical formation of cities themselves. Rejecting the narrow tendency to associate infrastructure exclusively with electronic networks, cables, and digital systems, Mattern proposes a geological and archaeological understanding of media through which urban space appears as a layered accumulation of communicative forms sedimented across millennia. Drawing upon archaeology, urban history, media theory, and infrastructure studies, she demonstrates that cities have always functioned as media environments: not merely sites represented through media, but infrastructures actively shaping vocality, inscription, memory, governance, and social coordination. Particularly significant is her argument that the earliest cities—Eridu, Uruk, Athens, Rome, Cairo—were constructed not solely for economic exchange but equally for ceremony, communication, and public address. Through analyses of the Roman Forum, Greek agoras, Union Square, and Islamic epigraphic urbanism, Mattern reveals how walls, plazas, facades, and urban voids historically functioned as transmission media, sounding boards, and substrates for inscription. The image on page 6 depicting Union Square’s nineteenth-century redesign exemplifies how urban form was intentionally configured to facilitate civic speech and democratic assembly, while the aerial photograph on page 8 of Ta’izz visually demonstrates the “spiral” morphology through which writing practices and urban spatial organisation became structurally entangled. Central to Mattern’s thesis is the concept of residual infrastructure, derived from Raymond Williams, whereby older communicative systems persist within contemporary environments rather than disappearing through technological succession. Consequently, modern cities emerge as palimpsests in which oral, textual, acoustic, visual, and digital media coexist within overlapping temporal strata. Equally influential is her insistence that infrastructures are not autonomous technological systems but techno-socio-spatio-material entanglements involving institutions, architecture, labour, everyday practices, and historical path dependencies. Ultimately, Mattern transforms media archaeology into an urban archaeology of communication itself, demonstrating that understanding contemporary digital infrastructures requires excavating the deep temporal layers through which cities have always operated as material architectures of mediation.
Mattern, S. (2015) ‘Deep Time of Media Infrastructure’, in Parks, L. and Starosielski, N. (eds.) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 94–112.
