Publicly Sited

Arriving into a large city by train, metro or subway, it's very likely that the concrete or brick sidings you see out the window are covered in graffiti. As you make your way off the train, into the streets you might see all manner of stylised inscriptions and names, written in black permanent marker on buildings and street furniture; or murals painted into their material location with a precision...

If you live in a city which is changing rapidly, construction sites might begin to seem like processes of erasing, copying and pasting, remixing or remediating the city. And it also may be that the new buildings being put in place have more and more forms of media or communication, such as illumination or interactive screens, built directly into their exterior surfaces. The apparent embedding of m...

There is an old adage about cinema: that it may seem a principally visual medium; but in fact, its soundtrack and sound design are just as important. So it is with our more general encounter with the city. While it may seem that we are surrounded and even overwhelmed by an assemblage of visual inputs, our experience of the city is multi-sensory. And sound, in particular, is fundamental in constitu...

One way or another, you most likely watch television in some form. You might use a device explicitly called a ‘television’, sited in a room in which televisions tend to be, such as a lounge or family room. Or perhaps you use a remediated version of television: via a device such as a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or even projector. And the content you’re watching may itself be only loosely televis...

If you’ve ridden public transport over a number of years, you might think printed material is declining. You may have once been surrounded by people immersed in newspapers and books, but more and more people seem to be cradling smart phones, tablets or laptops. Playing video games, watching downloaded on-demand programmes, listening to music, using their camera as a mirror, or catching up on work....

When you move through the city, you move through mediation. This is because what we call media and what we call the city (or the urban) are in a nexus: they are intimately connected. On the one hand, the practices, the rhythms and the motilities of urban living compel certain uses, exposures and desires in relation to media technologies, forms and industries. On the other hand, these media forms,...

If you have been fortunate enough to travel to new cities, in countries other than your own, it is more than likely your travels in and through this new city was mediated. Not just in the myriad ways we’ve been discussing so far in this series, but increasingly through a specific kind of media form: ‘platforms’. Your accommodation and sightseeing arranged through Airbnb or TripAdvisor; your local...

It’s an entirely banal and simple act for many contemporary Londoners: to type, or even dictate, an address or location into a service such as Google Maps, or Citymapper, and be presented with a series of route options: walking, cycling, public transport, driving. And not just these options, but their predicted duration, based on for instance real-time traffic data, and also, perhaps, whether the...

This is a short message to listeners of The Mediated City podcast series. UK listeners, and certainly my students, will know that the University and College Union (UCU) is currently taking industrial action. This action centres on two disputes. The first is focused on pensions: a typical member of the USS pension scheme is set to suffer a dramatic 35% drop in their guaranteed retirement income if...

If you live in a city which is changing rapidly, construction sites might begin to seem like processes of erasing, copying and pasting, remixing or remediating the city. And it also may be that the new buildings being put in place have more and more forms of media or communication, such as illumination or interactive screens, built directly into their exterior surfaces. The apparent embedding of m...

There is an old adage about cinema: that it may seem a principally visual medium; but in fact, its soundtrack and sound design are just as important. So it is with our more general encounter with the city. While it may seem that we are surrounded and even overwhelmed by an assemblage of visual inputs, our experience of the city is multi-sensory. And sound, in particular, is fundamental in constitu...

One way or another, you most likely watch television in some form. You might use a device explicitly called a ‘television’, sited in a room in which televisions tend to be, such as a lounge or family room. Or perhaps you use a remediated version of television: via a device such as a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or even projector. And the content you’re watching may itself be only loosely televis...

If you’ve ridden public transport over a number of years, you might think printed material is declining. You may have once been surrounded by people immersed in newspapers and books, but more and more people seem to be cradling smart phones, tablets or laptops. Playing video games, watching downloaded on-demand programmes, listening to music, using their camera as a mirror, or catching up on work....

When you move through the city, you move through mediation. This is because what we call media and what we call the city (or the urban) are in a nexus: they are intimately connected. On the one hand, the practices, the rhythms and the motilities of urban living compel certain uses, exposures and desires in relation to media technologies, forms and industries. On the other hand, these media forms,...

Policymakers, politicians, activists, businesspeople and even ordinary people are more and more sceptical of digital platforms like Facebook (or shall we say, Meta). This scepticism is not just about the murky decision-making power of algorithms. It’s also that there is increasing awareness about the operation of digital platforms as private entities. Entities that do not exist for our own individ...

There is now widespread awareness of, suspicion about, and even opposition to 'algorithms'. As widespread as the multiplicity of situations and domains in which these mysterious entities seem to be making more and more decisions: around welfare payments; university places; travel routes; and police patrol routes. Algorithms are also pervasive in media and communications. They build you customised...

One of the more celebrated aspects of contemporary media is that it seems so much more participatory. In principle, at least, anyone can for example establish a Twitter or a YouTube account, and share their experiences or views with minimal censorious intervention. Some have explained this apparently more participatory media culture with reference to the capacities of technologies. After all, peop...

Media technologies today seem to be everywhere. Assisting us in – or invading – each and every corner of our daily existence. We have already discussed how this ubiquity is embedded into a huge range of physical infrastructures; environments where media technologies surround us. And yet, we also increasingly carry media around with us, in our pockets, hands, ears, across our eyes, around our wrist...

We have already discussed the importance of paying attention to how media technologies are powerful when they are ordinary and relatively invisible. When they work like ‘appliances’ in daily life. This was the key message of McLuhan’s ‘medium theory’ as well as theories of media domestication. These perspectives are limited, however, in that they tend to imagine media technologies individually: th...

Most people know very well that social and cultural transformations are complex. And yet, we often seem prepared to think of individual media as bringing change. We believe that there was a situation before this or that media, and then another situation after. Sometimes there are worries about this subsequent situation; or nostalgia for how things were before. In other instances, people wager hope...

It is often said that media technologies provide us with a ‘window on the world’ beyond our own experience. A window not only connecting us to a distant world, beyond our immediate reach, but also to one which we can join into, and share simultaneously. One term for describing how media afford this window on the world is ‘liveness’. The most obvious example is live news coverage: journalism that i...

By now, you will have noticed we are not spending much if any time trying to understand media technologies in isolation. Instead, we have been and will keep putting media technologies into the settings on which they depend as well as help shape. One prominent academic concept for scholars seeking to understand media technologies in such settings is that of ‘domestication’. This refers to how media...

The terms media and communications are often offered as a couplet, or even used interchangeably. But communication is a broad idea with a very long history, and the arrival of media technologies are usually seen to make possible a special form of communication, in which physical co-presence was unnecessary. The printing press, for example, is often argued to have made nations, democracies and bure...

Technological talk is everywhere nowadays. All manner of novel developments, good or ill, are associated with the supposed impact of technology. But when we invoke the term ‘technology’, whether in relation to media or in general, just what do we mean anyway? Do technologies drive human history? Or are technologies just tools, extending deeper social, economic, political or cultural structures? In...

In this short update, I'm announcing a new series, The Mediated City, out in January 2022. Also, there's a second edition of the Media, Technology and Culture podcast series coming out tomorrow. This is not a sequel of all new topics, nor a complete remake of the first series. It's a more modest set of minor tweaks to go along with the new academic term - but do stay tuned for the end, and there w...