Better Television Signal: Local Designs and Emergent Media Infrastructures in Colombia Since the Eighties

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - III

Abstract

Big satellite dishes cover the roof of several community centers in city neighborhoods and towns in contemporary Colombia. Their visibility is a reminder to a moment in history in which the construction of community satellite earth stations accelerated the access to international media content, years before the consolidation of subscription television in Colombia. As satellite dishes spread all around the country, political and economic changes since the 1990s made these informal community antenna television projects, an object for transforming the informal into the formal. While licensed subscription television companies bought some of these infrastructures, others, turned into what the government started to call “community television”, a model developed to encourage local media production.
In this presentation, I explore the role of local design in the production of technological devices in Latin America. Following recent work on media infrastructures and Latin American historians of technology, I trace the transition to private television distribution through the role played by local entrepreneurs in the business of electronic parts. By turning into a technological device like the early version of satellite dishes, I emphasize the production of ephemeral devices which play a central role in supporting some of the socio-economic changes introduced by globalization. Following the work of Argentinian STS scholar Hernan Thomas, rather than focusing on a global planning of technology national production, I emphasized what Hernan Thomas called “a level of pragmatic response of local isolated producers”.

Author

• Fabian Prieto-Ñañez, Virginia Tech