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Place, Space, and Mediated Communication investigates the human experience in the process of being altered by digitally changing perceptions of spatial relations. Because our belief in a stable reality rests on shared spatial understandings, the disruption of those understandings can be rightly described as 'context collapse'.
This volume details that phenomenon in a variety of settings. It appears in the new cognitive and spatial complexities of digitally enabled warfare that place in doubt older understandings of the moral relations among combatants. It governs how Iranian videogame creators are re-mapping ideological encounters between the West and Islam. It reflects how gay Parisians in search of intimate connections find themselves digitally liberated from physical menace but facing new relational dilemmas. It is seen in the digital penetration of privacy that once insulated Rio de Janeiro's affluent classes, now subject to intrusive surveillance. Context collapse has also been a feature of earlier eras of technological change, as when printed images of the Roman basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura began to travel globally in ways that restructured experiences of sacred space. These and other cases in this cross-disciplinary collection of essays show how communication and space are co-constituted, and model exciting new paths of inquiry for researchers.
Place, Space, and Mediated Communication is suitable for upper level and postgraduate students as well as scholars of media and communication studies. This book may also be appropriate for those studying cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology.
List of contents
- Drone Media: Grounded Dimensions of the US Drone War in Pakistan
Lisa Parks
- Location-based services in Brazil: Reframing privacy, mobility and location
Adriana de Souza e Silva, Mariana S. de Matos-Silva and Ana Maria Nicolaci-da-Costa
- Proximity awareness and the privatization of sexual encounters with strangers: the case of Grindr
C. Licoppe, C. A. Rivière and J. Morel
- Dispossession and the Right to the City
Margaret Kohn
- The Space of Architecture as a Complex Context
Richard Wittman
- Revolution Reloaded: Spaces of Encounter and Resistance in Iranian Video Games
Vit Sisler and Ebrahim Mohseni
- Democracy, protest and public space: does place matter?
Jeremy Németh and Evan Carver
- State, Space, and Cyberspace
David G. Post
About the author
Carolyn Marvin is the Frances Yates Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of
When Old Technologies Were New (1988) and
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999).
Sun-ha Hong is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His work investigates how new media and its data become invested with ideals of precision, objectivity, and truth through apparently non-rational means. His upcoming book is titled
Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty.
Summary
Place, Space, and Mediated Communication explores how new communications technologies are able to disrupt our spatial understanding, and in so doing, reorganize the boundaries of human experience: a phenomenon that can rightly be described as ‘context collapse’.
Individual essays investigate ‘context collapse’ in a variety of geographical and temporal settings, including: the US drone war in Pakistan, social media and sexuality in Paris, privacy and privilege in Brazil, and videogames and resistance in Iran. This cross-disciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how communication and space are co-constituted, and models exciting new paths of inquiry for researchers.
Place, Space, and Mediated Communication is suitable for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology.
