Communication Maintenance in Longue Durée

Gabriele Balbi is Full Professor at USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland), where he acts as Prorector for Education and Students’ Experience. His latest book is The Digital Revolution: A Short History of an Ideology (2023). Roberto Leggero is Lecturer-Researcher at USI Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland) and a founding member of the Italian Society for Environmental History. His works include “The Construction of Local Political Identity in Lake and River Communities in North-West Italy (12th to 14th C.)” in Wim Blockmans et al., Empowering Interactions (2016).

Communication Studies Long for Maintenance Cultures: A Theoretical Introduction to the Book Part 1: Temporalities 1. The Clock of the Long Now in Longue Durée: Maintaining a Communication “Cool Tool” Through Millennia 2. Endless Frontiers of Maintenance: The Longue Durée of Communication Infrastructure in the United States 3. Sense Perception and the Maintenance of Pneumatic Mail Tubes in the Longue Durée: Feeling the Air, Preventing and Fixing Failures 4. The “Technical Time” of the Luxembourgish Telephone System Reflections on the Transformative Power of Maintenance Part 2: Theorizing 5. Interruptions, Divestments and Reactivations of Maintenance in the Alpine Middle Ages: A Long-Term View 6. Maps as Maintenance. Designing and Controlling the Kingdom of Sardinia and the State of Milan’s Boundaries and Rivers in the 18th Century 7. Communicative Redundancy as a Maintenance Resource. The Dose Makes the Poison 8. We Are All Maintainers: Everyday Practices of Media Maintenance in the Domestication of Technologies Part 3: Infrastructuring 9. A Low Place in High Country: Maintaining Infrastructural Clearance Along the Backbone of the World 10. Large-Scale Infrastructure System in Lisbon: Politics of Repair and Maintenance in the European Periphery in the 20th Century 11. Maintenance of a Monopoly: The Digitalization of the Telephone Network as an Attempt to Preserve the Telecommunications Monopoly for the Longue Durée