How does news circulate in a major post-industrial city? And how in turn are identities and differences formed and mediated through this circulation? This seminal work is the first to offer an empirical examination, and trace a city's pattern of, news circulation. Encompassing a comprehensive range of practices involved in producing, circulating and consuming 'news' and recognizing the various ways in which individuals and groups may find out, follow and discuss local issues and events, The Mediated City critiques thinking that takes the centrality of certain news media as an unquestioned starting point. By doing so, it opens up a discussion: do we know what news is? What types of media constitute it? And why does it matter?
This book is an interdisciplinary empirical investigation of how people interact with public screens in their daily lives. In more and more surprising locations, screens of various kinds appear within the sightlines of passers-by in contemporary cities. Outdoor advertisers target audiences which are increasingly mobile, public art uses screens to interrogate urban change, while postmodern architecture finds electronic imagery a suitable tool of expression. Traditionally, urban sociology research has assumed that people seek to filter urban stimuli, but recent accounts of public screens suggest producers design and position display interfaces site-specifically, so as to engage with those moving past. This study offers insight both into the dynamics of actual encounters and into the long-term process of how people learn to live with repeated invitations to consume media in public spaces. The book includes four cases: street advertising, underground transport advertising, and installation art in London (UK) and media façade architecture in Zadar (Croatia). Krajina shows that maintaining familiarity with everyday surroundings in media cities that change beyond citizens' control is a temporary achievement--and a recursive struggle. Finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation book award, 2014
In this utterly original look at our modern "culture of performance," de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time. Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University. "Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend-the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside of your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions."-O magazine "A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media...."-Washington Post "Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."-Publishers Weekly
With the majority of the world's population now living in cities, questions about the cultural and political trajectories of urban societies are increasingly urgent. Media and the City explores the global city as the site where these questions become most prominent. As a space of intense communication and difference, the global city forces us to think about the challenges of living in close proximity to each other. Do we really see, hear and understand our neighbours? This engaging book examines the contradictory realities of cosmopolitanization as these emerge in four interfaces: consumption, identity, community and action. Each interface is analysed through a set of juxtapositions to reveal the global city as a site of antagonisms, empathies and co-existing particularities. Timely, interdisciplinary and multi-perspectival, Media and the City will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, cultural studies and sociology, and of interest to those concerned with the growing role of the media in changing urban societies.
Going beyond current scholarship on the “media city” and the “smart city,” Shannon Mattern argues that our global cities have been mediated and intelligent for millennia. Deep Mapping the Media City advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities. Mattern explores the material assemblages and infrastructures that have shaped the media city by taking archaeology literally—using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern city’s roots in time. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
As the social media revolution embeds itself in our daily lives, and as those who once consumed media become producers, established broadcast media producers are witnessing the dissolution of trust in their established authority. Mediated Space critiques contemporary intersections of Architecture and broadcast media that exploit spaces and places that are real, imagined or hybrids of the two in order to re-establish and strengthen the power of traditional capitalist mechanisms of production and consumption. Examining eight spatial constructions in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Mediated Space embarks on a global exploration of how architecture, spatial design and technology conspire in the service of global capitalism. In three thematic parts that focus on the automotive space of the city, the journalistic space of the news room and the mediated skyline of the city, Mediated Space makes an architectural critique of spaces that are rarely designed by architects but that are experienced every day by millions of people.
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
This book investigates the production of public space in contemporary urban contexts as conditioned by the suffusion of urban life with digital technologies. A “social production of technology” approach is taken to frame the digitally-mediated city as a communal social and cultural project. Acknowledging the multivalent and shifting nature of public space and the heterogeneity of the urban actors who form it, the “agency” of these different actors in appropriating digital technologies takes center stage. The dynamics of negotiations between regimes of control and impulses towards freedom and experimentation, the entanglement of the spatial commons and the digital commons, changes in the notions of what constitutes membership in a public or counterpublic, and evolving relationships between the various individuals and groups who share and constitute public space, are all revealed in different actors’ appropriation of digital technologies in the formation of public spaces and the conducting of public life in cities. The book is divided into two sections. Drawing on classic and contemporary scholars on public space, and on digital culture, Section I explores the implications of the convergence of these bodies of knowledge and lenses of critique and examination on the present urban condition, establishing a conceptual foundation upon which public space discourse is brought to bear on an interrogation of the “wired” or “mediated” city. Structured by the core concepts that underlie Hannah Arendt’s notion of agency in the constitution of the public sphere, Section II is devoted to discussing, and demonstrating through myriad concrete examples, how different “affordances” of digital technologies are implicated in the production of public space and in the interplay between urban governance and control, urban life and citizenship, and urban commodification. The topics in this book are of broad and current international relevance, and will appeal to scholars and students in architecture, urbanism, design, sociology, and digital culture.
The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city. The chapters demonstrate how urban technologies shape, and are shaped, by fundamental concepts and principles such as citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. The many authors herein explore how to think of technologically mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of the philosophy of technology. This perspective also contributes to the discussion and process of making cities ‘smart’ and just. This collection appeals to students, researchers, and professionals within the fields of philosophy of technology, urban planning, and engineering.
Considers how film and related visual media offer insights into the city, looking at the built environment as well as a lived social experience. It brings together an international group of filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers and media journalists who critically read, reinterpret and create narratives of the city. 80 b/w illus.
