Technological systems are routinely narrated through a rhetoric of the “high-tech”: futuristic, frictionless, dematerialized, and planetary in scale. Such rhetoric directs the attention of media technologies toward the newest platform, the most advanced infrastructure, the most spectacular feat of engineering. Yet every high-tech system is sustained by processes that are decidedly low-tech: extraction of raw materials, energy consumption at industrial scale, manual and low-wage labor, informal repair and maintenance, grassroots appropriation, and amateur practice operating at the margins of official technological narratives. The “high” is never self-sufficient; it is built on, and constantly obscures, the “low.”

This panel takes the tension and the mutual dependence between high and low technology as a critical lens for rethinking how media systems, historical and contemporary, are conceived, built, maintained, and contested. Rather than treating “high-tech” and “low-tech” as a fixed hierarchy or a simple binary, we are interested in how this distinction is actively produced, narrated, and naturalized — and in what becomes visible when we reverse the usual hierarchy of attention, asking not what a technology promises, but what it requires, consumes, and displaces in order to function.

We invite papers that engage with questions of scale, energy consumption and extraction, labor (wages, class position, amateurism, informality), infrastructure, grassroots and vernacular practice, materiality, and geopolitics across any media-technological context, historical or contemporary. We are especially interested in work that unsettles linear or triumphalist narratives of technological progress by foregrounding what high-tech systems render invisible, peripheral, or disposable. Papers might consider, among other approaches:

• Grassroots, amateur, or informal engagements with large-scale technological systems, and the histories they produce outside official or corporate narratives
• The environmental and material costs of media infrastructure: extraction, energy, waste, and disposal
• Invisible, outsourced, or low-wage labor within seemingly “advanced” technological systems
• Disaster, breakdown, and failure as moments of technological visibility
• The geopolitics of technological self-sufficiency, dependency, sovereignty, or competition, and how these are staged through discourses of “high” and “low” technology
• Comparative or historical approaches that trace continuities between older and newer media forms across the high/low tech divide

We welcome papers from media and film studies, science and technology studies, labor history, environmental humanities, infrastructure studies, and related fields, as well as papers that draw on archival, ethnographic, or theoretical methods. Please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio (100 words) to Jingrui Yan (reyan@uw.edu) and Suchen Ding (suchend@uci.edu) by Monday, August 20. The SCMS proposal deadline is August 28, so this earlier deadline will allow time to organize the panel and prepare the final submission.