PROJECT 02: MEDIA, POWER, AND ECOLOGY AT THE GOOGLE DATA CENTER IN THE DALLES, OREGON
type: CreativeWork
description: The climate emergency and the accompanying ecological and cultural crises challenge existing modes of critique in the humanities. Described by terms such as Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, these crises are distributed across large scales of space and time and confound simple notions of causality, requiring new paradigms for research in the humanities. Recent work in media studies engages these concerns by examining the ecologies of media and media infrastructures. The Internet is arguably the most critical media infrastructure. Media studies augments cultural analyses of the Internet by focusing on the materialities of this Internet, foregrounding ways that information, infrastructures, cultures, and materialities are—and always have been—intimately entwined.Data centers—the massive server farms that store data, perform cloud computing, and host much of the Internet—are critical sites of the Internet’s computational power. Project 02: Media, Power, and Ecology at the Google Data Center in The Dalles, Oregon contributes to existing work on data centers by focusing on Google’s first hyperscale data center—named “Project 02” in early permitting documents. In media studies, Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau’s “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure,” and a series of articles by Mel Hogan address the imaginaries of data centers, the discourse around them, and the ecologies they produce. While this work on data centers is foundational, it relies on insights derived primarily from promotional materials and brief site visits. These methodologies address data centers as static objects rather than emergent processes, circumscribing scholars’ ability to address ongoing changes in an industry defined by rapid change and constant growth. Further, these studies often tacitly accept the data centers’ own definition of their spatio-temporal boundaries rather than challenging them. Because data centers ar…
abstract: The climate emergency and the accompanying ecological and cultural crises challenge existing modes of critique in the humanities. Described by terms such as Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, these crises are distributed across large scales of space and time and confound simple notions of causality, requiring new paradigms for research in the humanities. Recent work in media studies engages these concerns by examining the ecologies of media and media infrastructures. The Internet is arguably the most critical media infrastructure. Media studies augments cultural analyses of the Internet by focusing on the materialities of this Internet, foregrounding ways that information, infrastructures, cultures, and materialities are—and always have been—intimately entwined.Data centers—the massive server farms that store data, perform cloud computing, and host much of the Internet—are critical sites of the Internet’s computational power. Project 02: Media, Power, and Ecology at the Google Data Center in The Dalles, Oregon contributes to existing work on data centers by focusing on Google’s first hyperscale data center—named “Project 02” in early permitting documents. In media studies, Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau’s “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure,” and a series of articles by Mel Hogan address the imaginaries of data centers, the discourse around them, and the ecologies they produce. While this work on data centers is foundational, it relies on insights derived primarily from promotional materials and brief site visits. These methodologies address data centers as static objects rather than emergent processes, circumscribing scholars’ ability to address ongoing changes in an industry defined by rapid change and constant growth. Further, these studies often tacitly accept the data centers’ own definition of their spatio-temporal boundaries rather than challenging them. Because data centers ar…
author: Diller, Adam
language: eng
keywords: Information technology, Data centers, Google, Media studies
license: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
date published: 2021
date modified: 2026-07-27T21:22:26Z
provider: Temple University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Temple University. Libraries

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/7227