“Walking Phone Booths: Public Wireless Telephony in Mongolia”
Lisa Parks, Associate Professor, Dept. of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

“The cybernetic imaginary of cellular telephony”
Michael Graziano, PhD Candidate, Screen Cultures Northwestern University

“The National Science Foundation and the Creation of a Standing Army for Science”
Jason Gallo, Dissertation Fellow, Center for Nanotechnology and Society University of Wisconsin

Respondent: Mats Fridlund, Associate Professor, Technical University of Denmark

Paul N. Edwards argued “the Cold War can be best understood in terms of discourses that connect technology, strategy, and culture: it was quite literally fought inside a quintessentially semiotic space, existing in models, language, iconography, and metaphor, embodied in technologies that lent to these semiotic dimensions their heavy inertial mass.” Technological imaginaries – the intentions, aspirations, and ideals that motivate technological innovation and development – are constructed semiotic spaces influenced by the political, cultural, and rhetorical dimensions in which they are conceived and cast. The technologies examined in this panel have their scientific, technical, and political roots in the Cold War and the atmosphere of Cold War science. Yet these technologies have trajectories that in some cases precede and, each case, outstrip the chronological and metaphorical boundaries of the Cold War. While we do not wholly disagree with Edwards’ thesis, our goal for this panel is to scrutinize claims about the effects of ‘Cold War’ epistemology by exploring the various intended and unforeseen ways Cold War-influenced technologies and technical systems have developed in its wake.

Lisa Parks’ paper, “Walking Phone Booths: Public Wireless Telephony in Mongolia,” examines the particular development of public wireless telephony in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, as a significant socio-technical innovation, that employs a new class of workers, combines the collectivist ethos of communism with aspects of digital capitalism, and reinvents nomadic practices in urban space. The paper argues that simply reducing communist and post-communist media infrastructures to “closed systems” ignores their varied and particular histories and ignores the subtleties of their unique development. Through the examination of infrastructure diagrams and footprint maps, the print press, interviews with corporate executives and members of parliament, and ethnographies of mobile phone operators, Parks draws a complex picture of the Mongolian public wireless telephony system that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s from the geopolitical, transportation, and communication history of the “inner asian frontier.”

Michael Graziano’s paper, ““The cybernetic imaginary of cellular telephony,” explores the underrepresented cybernetic genealogy of cellular network architecture developed in the United States. The paper argues that the key principles of cybernetics – the improvement of human interaction, behavior and performance through a trans-disciplinary application of technology and technical principles developed in the wake of the Second World War – were present and influential in the discourse of radio and communications engineers formulating cellular network architecture at Bell Laboratories. By examining the currents of cybernetic principals prevalent during the construction of cellular telephony’s imagined future, Graziano explores how cellular network architecture is ‘embroidered’ with the concerns and ideals of cybernetics that emerged in the postwar and early Cold War era. The paper complicates the history of cellular network architecture through an examination of the influence of Cold War power dynamics on the divergence of a technology’s imagined and actual trajectory and impact on contemporary practices.

Jason Gallo’s paper, “The National Science Foundation and the Creation of a Standing Army for Science,” looks at the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and argues that the scientific and institutional foundations of the NNI are deeply rooted in the Cold War era and shaped by its historical contours despite a shift in rhetoric from Cold War military supremacy to the maintenance of US commercial competitiveness. The involvement of the NSF in the NNI represents a broad, long-term federal commitment to achieving technological and economic advantage in an international competition to develop this emerging field, based upon its Cold War history of supporting scientific manpower and its role building the nation’s research infrastructure. Gallo examines the evolution of the NSF’s role in support of science and technology, and argues that its role as “puny partner” in federal constellation of agencies that support science and technology forced it to a develop strategy of support for university scientists and facilities that would maintain its existence. This strategy of support for scientific manpower and facilities, developed in part by necessity during the early Cold War, would lay the groundwork for support of nanotechnology and US economic competitiveness.