The Medium Has a New Message: Media and Critical Geography (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Communication as Spatial Production: Expanding the Research Agenda of Communication Geography
Space & Culture, 2016
The founders of the interdisciplinary field of communication geography argue that the field carries the potential to provide a processual view of communication as spatial production. This article sets out to delineate this under-explored aspect of communication geography. The aim is to expand the research agenda of communication geography by acknowledging the role of everyday social interaction on the one hand, and media environments on the other, in producing and maintaining peoples’ taken-for-granted senses of space. This focus is guided by combining central insights of social phenomenology and medium theory. In synthesizing these positions, a research agenda emerges that emphasizes the capacity of media to “mould” the scope and character of communication that in turn maintain the scope and character of taken-for-granted space in everyday reality.
On Geopolitics: Spaces and Places 1
The study of international relations sits at the convergence of human inquiry that crosses both time and space. The aim here is to elaborate on the spatial context of international relations, to contrast it to the temporal context, and to indicate broadly the continuing importance of the geopolitical spatial context to the study of international relations. I briefly demonstrate how this relationship is based not on an earlier approach based on geographic determinism, but rather possibilism-the possibilities presented by the spatial, geographic, and geopolitical context. In elaborating on space and place, I return to the central research focus of my career: the dynamism and importance of the spatial context for understanding international relations, along with the need to take both time and space into account, the need to appreciate both a locational view and the perceptual/symbolic/constructed view of space and place, and to do so within an increasingly globalized, interdependent, and transnational world system.
Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces
2011
Although time traditionally dominated the perspectives of the humanities and social sciences, space has reasserted itself in the contexts of postmodernity, postcolonialism, and globalization. Today, a number of emerging critical discourses connect geography, architecture, and environmental studies, among others to literature, film, and the mimetic arts. Bertrand Westphal'sGeocriticism explores these diverse fields, examines various theories of space and place, and proposes a new critical practice suitable for understanding our spatial condition today. Drawing on a wide array of theoretical and literary resources from around the globe and from antiquity to the present, Westphal argues for a geocritical approach to literary and cultural studies. This volume is an indispensible touchstone for those interested in the interactions between literature and space.
2015
This interview with Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (associate professor of English at Texas State University) aims to highlight the strong interrelation between literature and space from the starting point of Geocriticism. With this term, which was coined to define a new discipline able to interact with “literary studies, geography, urbanism and architecture” (Tally 2011: xiv), in fact, Tally offers a theoretical basis for spatiality in relation to literature.
Introducing Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media
While “media geography” has coalesced in recent years as an identifiable subdiscipline of human geography, media geography did not emerge from a linear history, nor does it have a clearly defined or singular focus. Compiling this edition, participating in media geography networks at conferences and elsewhere, and teaching media at our respective institutions have all abundantly revealed that media geography is a subdiscipline with many different routes and trajectories. People come to identify as media geographers as a result of an interest in a particular medium such as film, television or radio, through the literature on the Internet and geographies of cyberspace, through critical and popular geopolitics, through questions of development and the digital divide, through media and cultural studies, through communication studies, through scholarship on the city and urban studies, and through GIS, the geoweb and geospatial technologies.Media geography intersects with social and cultural geography, development geography, political geography, feminist geography, economic geography and GIS. One of the major contributions of media productions, spaces and analyses are the opportunities they offer for providing an entryway into understanding places and communities that we may otherwise rarely, if ever encounter—but this can be problematic when the representative and/or desirable. The contributions in this collection pay close attention to such opportunities and challenges posed by a range of media formats, contexts and methods. These diverse entry points make for a rich emerging field in which a number of voices and perspectives are present. The field is further complicated and enriched by scholars in media studies who have turned to human geography and human geographic concepts, in order to take space, place and scale seriously in their analyses of media texts, industries and audiences. Given the diversity of the field, we thought it valuable as editors to write three position pieces that situate our work, and us personally, within the broader project represented by the scholars in this volume.