Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the air the communications equipment that channels our calls, texts, and downloads. For security reasons, their locations are never advertised. But it’s our romantic notions of connectivity that hide them in plain sight. We want the network to be invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous. The cell tower stands as a challenge to these desires.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Les mer
1. Cellspotting
2. Invisible waves
3. Camouflage
4. Ethereal connections
5. Design
6. Coverage
7. On Earth
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Overall, Cell Tower provides useful insights into an infrastructural system so essential to our everyday engagements, yet rarely noticed and understood.
Explores our collective desire for invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous connectivity, however much steel, cement, and cable it takes to sustain that desire.
The Object Lessons series, published in association with The Atlantic, explores the hidden lives of ordinary things and uncovers the lessons they hold about ourselves and the modern world
Object Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation—and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way. Featuring contributions from writers, artists, scholars, journalists, and others, the emphasis throughout is lucid writing, imagination, and brevity. Object Lessons paints a picture of the world around us, and tells the story of how we got here, one object at a time.
Les mer