Critical Nodes, Cultural Networks: Re-mapping Guam's Cable Infrastructure

Abstract

Undersea communication cables are durable and cost effective infrastructures supporting the interconnection of America, Asia, and Australia. Many of these cables, which carry almost all transpacific Internet traffic, are routed through the island of Guam. Historically, more cables have landed on Guam than in either Hawai’i or California, two other major hubs for signal exchange. The cartographic representation of undersea cables, however, often abstracts them as mere lines of interconnection, rarely ascribing significance to the geographies they intersect. This representational strategy makes it difficult for viewers to connect cables on the ocean floor to the cultural landscape above them; it implies that information flows effortlessly, without political force or resistance, across the oceans. From this vantage point, the concentration of cables on Guam appears to be an anomaly, a site that should have been bypassed once cables began to extend directly across the Pacific. These images, like the narrative...