From peat to Google power: Communications infrastructures and structures of feeling in Groningen

Abstract

This article further develops Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling as plural, competing and sometimes antagonistic. This theoretical work is done through capturing the dual structures of feeling surrounding the development of a Google data center in the Groningen region from 2015 to the present. To understand how people understood this industrial development, the article traces both a regional and an urban structure of feeling back more than 400 years through the histories of other infrastructures in the Northern Netherlands. Conflicts around the meaning of the Google data center thus can be better understood as extensions of longer communications infrastructural histories and their embedded social tensions. This article is based on a paper presented at the Media in Transition symposium (Utrecht, June 28, 2018), in the Industries and Infrastructures panel organised by Judith Keilbach. Also published in this issue of ECS are Amanda D. Lotz, ‘Unpopularity and cultural power in the age of Netflix: new questions for cultural studies’ approaches to television texts’ and Jennifer Holt & Michael Palm, ‘More than a number: the telephone and the history of digital identification’.