The Medium Has a New Message: Media and Critical Geography (original) (raw)
Media geographies: Always part of the game
Aether. The Journal of Media Geography, 2007
Television, cinema, books, newspapers and the Internet mediate our experiences of place and geography. Geography is a visual discipline that is an embedded means of documentation, orientation and representation in appearance of maps, globes, travel descriptions, landscape sketches and paintings, photographs, and films. Mass media pose an interesting spatial problem to geographers and related fields, not only because media representations are part of individual and societal conceptions of the world but also because of media’s power to conceptualize and spread political ideas and reinforce hegemonic orders
Locative Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to Media Geography
Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, 2010
At present, nearly every media-related subject field appears to be "locative", or with the prefix "geo" attached, be it the discussion on geoart, geosurveillance, or geocaching. Within this context, recent geographical and phenomenological studies on mobile media practices, in particular, reveal a trend toward a revaluation of place and placiality. While social sciences, media and cultural studies label this re-materialization of place "spatial turn," a cultural, humanistic and media turn is acknowledged in geography. Currently, the two converging developments are still marked by differing conceptual formations: locative media and mediated localities. This paper as well as this issue are concerned with both sides-the spatial turn in media studies and the media turn in geographical studies-and provides a sketch of the subject area "geomedia" from a phenomenological perspective and the field of "media geography" from a dsciplinary perspective. As a theoretical framework for media geography in general and geomedia in particular, this article favors the actor-network theory for three reasons: a) The actor-network theory tends to conceptualize places prior to the network of heterogeneous agents; b) it reveals itself to be a suitable heuristic for locative media as through the geotagging of objects instead of people, the actor-media theory permits a manifestation of what Bruno Latour means by the "Internet of Things" and, c) on the other hand, the actor-network theory puts us in a position whereby mediated localities can be described as if there is nothing more in the territory than what is in the map. Based on this argument, the conclusion can be drawn that media geography therefore also constitutes a new discipline for overcoming the very distinction between physical and human geography.
Newsmaking geography: communicating geography through the media
Geographers have undertaken important work exploring the role of the media in projecting and producing imagined worlds. This work needs to be extended to consider how the products of our labours might be broadcast most effectively to the public through the media. This paper presents a case study of media responses to research in South Australia by one of the authors to illustrate how the media shaped and represented the findings. From the case study, the paper outlines three lessons for geographers who either deal with the media or are involved in training students in professional skills. Geographers need to develop a ‘newsmaking geography’ by: first, understanding the nature of the media as a set of institutions that encapsulate and communicate our works; second, positioning ourselves as ‘authorized knowers’ – people known to have something credible to say about a specific range of issues; and third, developing effective strategies for delivering information and ideas to the media. Engagements with the media may allow us to publicize the vitality that has characterized parts of geography in the past two decades, help overcome the power/knowledge ineffectiveness of academic publications, and fortify our public activism.
A new form of diversity appears nowadays when theoretical geographers rethink the importance of geographical space, place, distance or other principal notions. This paper aims to introduce how geographical approaches to the phenomena, which evolved in the so-called information age, got diffused in everyday life. Statements considering spatiality or geography of information economy and society are basically influenced by the type of space being applied in examinations, such as physical, network, or web space, or virtual realities. This diversity primarily influences the discussions on modern interpretations of geography. The traditional concept of place will be revalorised: it actually dissolves in virtual space, meanwhile the role of discrete place disappears by the possibility of spatial independency, while on the other hand, spatial dependency differentiates space again, and appreciates selected places. The importance of physical distance has unambiguously decreased, instead of that the role of network distance and social distance can be emphasised. The paper tries to call attention on those numerous different ways in which geography is being revaluated in the 21st century.
Geographic Media Literacy: An Introduction
Geojournal, 2009
In a media saturated world of globalization, information flow and knowledge economies, an interesting paradox exists: geographic literacy appears to be on the decline while geographic information is on the rise. In this introduction to a collection of essays on geographies of the media, we explore this paradox and use Baudrillard’s (1994) work on Simulacra and Simulation to argue that increased mediated information does not produce more meaning, but rather leads to a catastrophe of meaning and the medium. Drawing from McLuhan’s axiom, ‘‘the medium is the message,’’ we posit that with more mediated information there is less meaningful information and as such we need to address geographic media literacy as a primary mode through which to address geographic literacy.
Beyond the centrality of media and the centrality of space
First Monday, 2013
Starting from the middle of the twentieth century human geography has allowed social sciences to escape the prison of Euclidean, abstract space. In that prison, social actors performed within an empty, static container known as “space,” which was more or less a background to their actions. This liberation had many fathers. We could quote Henri Lefebvre’s writings on spatial production (Lefebvre, 1991), Michel de Certeau’s notion of “space as practiced place” (de Certeau, 1984), and Yi–Fu Tuan’s (1976) treatment of “humanistic geography” among the most known “co–conspirators” of this escape. Breaking free of the notion of abstract space, meant to develop the powerful theoretical tool of socio–spatial production. Space emerged as a product of human interaction and at the same time as a context structuring those practices. By the mid–1980s, Massey expressed the circular relationship between space and the social in no ambiguous terms. “Space is a social construct ... [but] the spatial is not only an outcome: it is also part of the explanation [of social processes]” (Massey, 1984). Producing the space we inhabit meant that the more people were in a space, the more rapidly and often unpredictably it changed. And the more diverse the people, the more diverse the way they thought, and what they did in space. Therefore, the more rapid and unpredictable were the changes.
Contemporary Geopolitics and Digital Representations of Space
Croatian International Relations Review, 2018
This research is premised on two theoretical constructs: that maps do not objectively depict space and that traditional cartography produces a geopolitical narrative. The research aim is to investigate geopolitical influence in modern, digital representations of space, and vice versa. This paper is divided into three parts: In the first, the digital representation of space is introduced and explained, and two widely acknowledged digital cartographic services are established as the empirical foundation of the research – Google (Google Maps and Google Earth), designed by cartographic and geo-data professionals, and OpenStreetMap, built through crowdsourcing. In the second part, the geopolitical features of traditional cartography are discussed in the context of digital mapping, including ethnocentricity and hierarchical representations of space, similarities to geopolitische karte, and " minor geopolitics. " The final part asks and answers a key question about geopolitical subjectivity: " Who benefits from the geopolitical narratives in digital representations of space? "