Cultures in Orbit: Satellites And The Televisual (Console-ing Passions)

Roaming across the disciplines of media studies, geography, and science and technology studies, Parks examines uses of satellites by broadcasters, military officials, archaeologists, and astronomers. She looks at Our World, a live intercontinental television program that reached five hundred million viewers in 1967, and Imparja tv, an Aboriginal satellite tv network in Australia. Turning to satellites’ remote-sensing capabilities, she explores the U.S. military’s production of satellite images of the war in Bosnia as well as archaeologists’ use of satellites in the excavation of Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria, Egypt. Parks’s reflections on how Western fantasies of control are implicated in the Hubble telescope’s views of outer space point to a broader concern: that while satellite uses promise a “global village,” they also cut and divide the planet in ways that extend the hegemony of the post-industrial West. In focusing on such contradictions, Parks highlights how satellites cross paths with cultural politics and social struggles.

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• Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• Paper: Paging Through History
• Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge Classics)
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• Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
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