Geomedia Studies

Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds

Karin Fast, André Jansson, Johan Lindell, Linda Ryan Bengtsson, Mekonnen Tesfahuney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315410197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book introduces and develops the concept of geomedia studies as the name of a particular subfield of communication geography. Despite the accelerating societal relevance of 'geomedia' technologies for the production of various spaces, mobilities, and power-relations, and the unquestionable emergence of a vibrant research field that deals with questions pertaining to such topics, the term geomedia studies remains surprisingly unestablished. By addressing imperative questions about the implications of geomedia technologies for organizations, social groups and individuals (e.g. businesses profiting from geo-surveillance, refugees or migrants moving across national borders, or artists claiming their rights to public space) the book also aims to contribute to ongoing academic and societal debates in our increasingly mediatized world.

1 Introduction to Geomedia Studies

Karin Fast, André Jansson, Mekonnen Tesfahuney, Linda Ryan Bengtsson and Johan Lindell

Introduction

If the map was nothing less than a revolution in geomediating and imagining the world in the ‘age of discovery’, digitalization and the gamut of new media proffer a second revolution in geomediating and imagining the world. In contrast to the mappa mundi of old, the new media engender novel ways of orienting and re-envisioning the self, the world and one’s place in it, not only in the intimate and embodied sense of orientation, but also in terms of making and remaking the world and one’s place in the scheme of things. Geomedia studies tries to capture and make sense of the new cartographies that have emerged in the wake of new media, that recast presence/absence, here/there, subject/object in radical ways and chart and problematize their manifold histories and consequences. How to capture the power-geometries and differential geographies of geomedia? Which constellations of capital in the wake of the revolution in mapping and orientation emerge in the era of widespread digitization? What are the historical roots and trajectories of these developments? As we all know, there is no revolution without motion. As Hardt and Negri (2000: 362) hold, the human community is in itself constituted through circulation. Therefore, this book attends to the manifold mobilities and flows that are necessary to the very constitution of the social.

When the ‘World Wide Web’ and ‘The Information Highway’ gained momentum in the 1990s, telecom companies, in unison with many politicians, policy makers and researchers, praised the ‘revolutionary’ potentials of the Internet (Mosco, 2004). Today, when the Internet has become an integral part of everyday modern life, a new type of revolution has surfaced – one driven by mobile and connected media. Nowhere is this discourse as prevailing as in statements left by technology inventors. For instance, IBM’s visionary report, The Individual Enterprise: How Mobility Redefines Business asserts that ‘mobile networks – and the devices that exploit them – are radically changing the way we interact with the world’ (IBM, 2017: 1). Along the same line, Swedish electronics giant Ericsson’s report Networked Society Essentials predicts that connected devices leave us ‘on the brink of an extraordinary revolution that will change our world forever’ (Ericsson, 2017: 2). ‘Mobile connectivity’, the Ericsson report continues, ‘is empowering us as individuals’ (2017: 8).

While companies like IBM and Ericsson have an evident self-interest in promoting the ‘revolutionary’ aspects of the technology they sell, it is arguably hard to deny that contemporary media devices and the networks that connect them have an impact on how we lead and organize our everyday lives. At the very least, it is reasonable to claim that mobile media and their software, under certain circumstances, change how we relate to time, place and other people. The smartphone is perhaps the device that most effectively symbolizes our new, mobile and connected media life, in which temporal and spatial constraints might feel less imposing. However, if we can share with innovators and businesses the notion that media-induced changes are currently taking place, and that they do have an impact on our lives, as researchers we should endeavour to offer nuanced, critical and potentially contrasting interpretations of, and perspectives on, those changes – as well as of latent continuities. Such questions may pertain to issues of inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and exploitation, justice and injustice, equality and inequality. Indeed, as the contributors of this book make evident, the ‘empowering’ potentials of mobile connectivity might be hampered by existent power structures that determine what technology is being used, when, where, how and by whom.

This book introduces the research field of geomedia studies, which deals precisely with such critical questions. The intensification of various mobilities (notably tourism and migration) and the huge expansion of digital media systems (notably various forms of geopositioning systems and location-based services) speak to the need for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of media and communication studies and geography. Geomedia studies, as a field, reflects the communicational turn in geography (Adams, 2009; Adams and Jansson, 2012) and the spatial turn in media and communication studies (Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006) and hence borders on, nurtures from and feeds into related research fields or subject areas, most notably perhaps communication geography (Adams, 2011; Adams and Jansson, 2012). However, whereas the communicational turn is currently taking place within geography and the spatial turn emerges within media and communication studies, geomedia studies is in essence an interdisciplinary endeavour equally driven by geographers and media and communication scholars (as well as scholars from adjacent disciplines and fields). Thus, the geomedia in geomedia studies is first and foremost meant to signal the truly interdisciplinary nature of the research field. Geomedia studies constitutes, as McQuire suggests in his contribution to this volume, a space of encounter. Additionally, the term geomedia, as it has come to be used by both businesses and scholars, signals the new technological regime that IBM, Ericsson and other agents describe with great enthusiasm. Importantly, though, whereas new and old media technologies are accepted as potential drivers of change and gain attention from many geomedia researchers, geomedia studies, as the chapters of this book make evident, engages not so much with the technology per se as with questions about the role of media in organizing and giving meaning to processes and activities in space. In what follows, we attempt to bring further clarity into what geomedia studies is – and what it is not.

What is Geomedia Studies?

Geomedia is a relatively new term that has been given only a few definitions so far (see Thielmann, 2007, 2010; Lapenta, 2011, 2012; McQuire, 2011, 2016). What these definitions have in common is that they refer to geomedia as a particular technological condition. This condition, in turn, is associated with the most recent decades of rapid digital development, which has led to the interweaving of ‘locative media’ and ‘mediated localities’ (Thielmann, 2010). Thielmann argues that geomedia should be seen as the subject area of media geography, whose relevance is currently revolutionized by the spatialization of media and corresponding digitalization of place. While the former part of this development has been discussed in the rapidly growing literature on ‘spatial media’, ‘geo-tagging’ and other articulations of location awareness in media (see, e.g., Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013; Wilken and Goggin, 2015), the latter part has been explored by, for example, Kitchin and Dodge (2011) in their influential book Code/Space, where they show how various spaces (also taking into account the built environment) have become dependent on computer infrastructures and software for their functioning. Thielmann’s point is that these realms collapse into one another due to technological change.

Lapenta (2011) has suggested an even more technology-centred definition that includes only the first element of Thielmann’s argument. Lapenta (2011: 14) defines geomedia as ‘platforms that merge existing electronic media + the Internet + location-based technologies (or locative media) + AR (Augmented Reality) technologies in a new mode of digital composite imaging, data association and socially maintained data exchange and communication’. In this definition, geomedia is thus a label of media technology per se. McQuire (2016), in turn, points to much broader technological and social transformations and highlights four intersecting features of geomedia: ubiquity (that media are continuously available, even while people are on the move), real-time feedback (that many-to-many flows of information can be circulated immediately among users), location awareness (that media flows and contents are increasingly adapted to the users’ locations and movements) and convergence (that different media technologies, genres and institutions are fused together, and traditional distinctions are thus breaking down). In McQuire’s understanding, the transformation ‘from media to geomedia’ signifies the emergence of an entirely new technological regime that has far-ranging consequences for social life in general and urban life (where the density of media is particularly high) in particular.

A simple way of defining geomedia studies would thus be to refer to it as ‘studies of geomedia’, understood in the abovementioned sense and including the duality that Thielmann (2010) highlights. It is also possible to identify such an area of study, which has expanded rapidly during the last decade, despite that the very term geomedia has rarely been picked up. The intersections of ‘locative media’ and ‘mediated localities’ have been analysed perhaps most prominently in relation to urban spaces and the so-called media city (McQuire, 2008). For example, several studies have looked into how location-based and hybrid-reality mobile games amalgamate with the overall social fabric of urban space (e.g., De Souza e Silva and Hjorth, 2009). Licoppe and Inada (2012: 57) speak of urban public places becoming ‘‘hybrid ecologies’ in which different forms of access to a particular place (e.g., through embodied presence and through various screens and terminals) are somehow articulated’. In another study, Licoppe, Morel and Rivière (2015) explore how urban dating practices are reshaped under the influence of location-based dating services, whereby the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, public and private, are altered. Similarly, Polson (2016) discusses in her analysis of female Western expatriates in Bangalore how new forms of ‘geo-social media’ contribute to altered perceptions of the city and a sense of security and control when navigating foreign terrains. These and other studies point to the pervasive consequences of geomedia technology in today’s society.

In this volume, however, we want to advocate a more inclusive and less technology-centred understanding of geomedia. The notion of geomedia may then refer not just to the epochal shift that we currently witness in the area of spatial (re)mediations and spatialized media, but also to the expanding interdisciplinary research terrain at the intersections of media studies and geography where various ontologies and epistemologies of space/time and mediation/mediatization come together. Our suggestion is that geomedia should be taken as a relational concept that captures the fundamental role of media in organizing and giving meaning to processes and activities in space. This role has been exercised in various ways in different historical periods, through, for example, maps, compasses and newspapers, and is thus not restricted to recent developments within digital geomedia technologies. Geomedia incorporate both mediated representations of space/place and the ‘logistical’ properties of media that ‘arrange people and property into time and space’ (Peters, 2008: 40; see also Rossiter, 2015; Young, 2015). Whereas in the latter case the very notion of ‘media’ becomes slippery, ultimately pointing to pervasive cultural techniques like clocks and calendars, it is important to keep both aspects within sight in order to understand the historical roots and complex remediations (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) that make up and define contemporary forms of geomedia.

We thus argue that geomedia studies should take into account not just geomedia technologies in the narrow sense, but also the geographical qualities of media at large (texts, technologies and institutions), for example, the flows of digital signals between particular places and the infrastructure carrying those flows and how these both assemble and reconfigure social and material relations (see Wiley, Moreno, and Sutko, 2012). As already mentioned, this is not a new concern, and it takes us far beyond the confines of geomedia as a distinct technological category or regime. Similar questions were famously addressed by Innis (1951) in his study of how the dominant ‘biases’ of media have shaped entire civilizations in history. They were further developed and given a more phenomenological import by Meyrowitz (1985) in his analyses of how the rise of mediated communication paved the way for negotiated understandings of place, placement and belonging. There are also more recent examples in this tradition, such as Zook’s (2008) work on the geographies of the Internet industry and Parks’ (2005) work on how the development of satellite infrastructures, as well as discourses surrounding these infrastructures, altered people’s perceptions of the world, while at the same time extending the hegemonic power of the West.

A related issue concerns how commercially driven media discourses and technologies take part in the geosocial positioning of people and groups. Thurlow and Jaworski (2010) have shown in their analyses of tourism discourses, found in genres like inflight magazines and television holiday shows, how different types of mobility (and thus different tourists) are socially and ideologically coded. Yet another important area regards the ways in which spatial media representations per se have developed in different eras and sociocultural contexts and how these developments are related to society at large. A key question that has arisen in the wake of ‘big data’, for example, concerns the usefulness and power of data visualization. While new visualization techniques may help us understand the complex patterns of social relations, practices and experiences, we should also, as Wilken and McCosker (2014: 155) highlight, ‘be cautious about fetishising the sublimity of “beautiful data”’. The enticing fantasy of total knowledge is to be countered by critical discourses of symbolic power. This type of work furthers the various tasks and challenges of data collection, evaluation, (geo)visualization and management that geomedia studies should engage critically and put into historical perspective (see also Rose, 2016; Stadler, Mitchel, and Carleton, 2016).

Altogether, geomedia studies should analyse and problematize the relations between any and all communication media and various forms of spatial creativity, performance and production across material, cultural, social and political dimensions. Such analyses are bound to raise important political and ideological questions pertaining to, for example, the development and adoption of communication infrastructure and the spatially uneven patterns of access to such technologies. This unevenness underlies the often-critiqued digital divide or rather a host of different divides that mark access inequities between men and women, rich and poor, white and nonwhite, global north and global south, old and young and so on. It also brings us to the critical question of mediatization, which provides the structural context of this book.

Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds

The growth in connected and mobile media devices over the last three decades is astounding. According to the World Bank report, World Development Indicators 2017, in 2015 there was nearly one mobile cellular subscription for every person on earth, while in 1990 fewer than 2 per 1,000 people had one. The number of Internet users worldwide reached 3.5 billion by the end of 2016 (ITU, 2017). Overall, there is strong statistical support for the notion that we are currently undergoing a shift in terms of personal and professional media use. In this book, we use the notion of mediatization – and, by extension, geomediatization – to approach this shift. Importantly, though, the notion of mediatization points to processes that cannot be reduced to merely the voluminous increases in media devices or media content. Mediatization, as used in this book, involves new ways of understanding and relating to media – as content, technologies, institutions and social platforms. In line with previous definitions, we understand mediatization as a meta-process that, in parallel with other meta-processes (such as individualization, globalization and commercialization), reconfigures social life (cf. Krotz, 2007; Couldry and Hepp, 2013; Krotz, 2014; Jansson, 2013, 2018).

Mediatization research, thus, should attempt to capture the complexity of what it means – for citizens, governments, businesses, societies, etc. – to live with media. Analyses of the implications of the quantitative increase in new, mobile and connected media for various agents demand great levels of sensitivity to what Jansson (2018) refers to as the dialectic of mediatization. On the one hand, the media might come across as potential sources of emancipation, empowerment, autonomy, resistance and, ultimately, social change. Indisputably, the new technological regime liberates us from (certain) spatial restraints by offering the ‘magical’ possibility of ‘being in two places at once’ (Scannell, 1996: 91) and affords new forms of mobilities. They provide new public spaces, facilitate community formations and allow us to connect with other people, ‘wherever’ and ‘whenever’. On the other hand, and concurrently, the media might be viewed as agents of estran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction to Geomedia Studies
• PART I Theorizing Geomedia
• PART II Geomedia Spaces
• PART III Geomedia Mobilities
• List of Contributors
• Index