The Power of Place and Perspective. Sensory media and situated simulations in urban design (2015) (original) (raw)

2015, Mobility and Locative Media. Mobile communication in hybrid spaces, edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mimi Sheller

(hbk) It may be said that a Copernican turn in media is underway. Increasingly, we are set free from the physical constraints of traditional media locations for our regular information feed, be it the cinema house, the TV set, the radio, or our favorite reading chair. Instead, information in its many forms and the interfaces we activate to access, produce, and share it, gravitate around us as individuals. They follow us everywhere, and always, and, importantly, they do so as we move. This gives new meaning to the significance of location and perspective. Added to these dimensions is the further condition that dynamic information media engage us with the sensorial in the situations of their use. While earlier media were conceived as sensorial extensions of our nervous system (as championed by McLuhan 1964), now the metaphor applies to the handheld media devices themselves. These terminals are no longer only subordinate augmentations of our human sensory system, but have their own complex sensorial capabilities as well. We may say, then, that we are experiencing the age of situated and sensory media.