“City Inside the Oven”

Abstract

Since 2010, concerned citizens in India argued that cell antenna signals had heating effects on bodies, and media campaigns compared the experience of living in cities with cell towers as being inside the oven. I argue that mediation of cell towers in newspapers and lifestyle shows as potentially emitting cancer-causing radiation was key to shaping public perceptions about them. Through their disruptive nature, cell towers call into action a technoscience public consisting of a variety of stakeholders, including radio-frequency scientists, cellular operators, journalists, tower builders, activists, municipal corporations, and building owners. Technoscience publics and media publics intersect and shape each other, and this article presents “mediated technoscience public” as a theoretical framework for an ethnographic intervention in media studies. This framework involves the tracking and comparison of media coverage about technological infrastructure as well as the ways humans emotionally perceive and interact with those infrastructures.