The Mediated City 10 (2025 New Release): Sentient Cities Publicly Sited podcast

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The Mediated City 10 (2025 New Release): Sentient Cities 33:05

12 days ago33:05

33:05

Software and networked devices are highly pervasive in the city, perhaps more than we tend to realise, and their consequences as urban media are becoming more apparent. The relatively sudden arrival of new, easy-to-use tools and streamlined interfaces sold under the broad banner of ‘AI’ may may be novel but serve as a sharp reminder of the more longstanding interdependencies of technologies in human life. Academic analyses already have several conceptual terms for these interdependencies: algorithmic cities; data-driven urbanism; and code spaces. Past episodes of this podcast have also already pointed to several specific forms of urban computational media, including surveillance systems, delivery apps, neighbourhood social media, locative infrastructures, digital out-of-home advertising, and digitally mediated street art. A question we haven’t yet broached is: what would it mean to say computationally mediated cities might be becoming ‘sentient’? And should we only connect this idea with novel digital technologies? In our first episode, we said we’d conceive of urban media across a much longer time horizon, of hundreds if not thousands of years. In this final episode, we stick with that plan, to both recognise the significance and novelty of computational forms of urban mediation and also question whether these forms are really such a break from the past or if, instead, they entail both continuities as well as profound challenges to the possibilities and power differentials for mediated urban life. Thinkers discussed: Nigel Thrift and Shaun French (The Automatic Production of Space); Adrian Mackenzie (Cutting Code: Software and Sociality); David Berry (The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age); Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life); Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell (The Smartness Mandate); Federico Cugurullo, Federico Caprotti, Matthew Cook, Andrew Karvonen, Pauline McGuirk and Simon Marvin (The Rise of AI Urbanism in Post-Smart Cities: A Critical Perspective on Urban Artificial Intelligence); Murray Shanahan (Talking about Large Language Models); Matteo Pasquinelli ( The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence); Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI); Nigel Thrift (The ‘Sentient’ City and What it May Portend); Gillian Rose (Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City: Exteriorization, Individuation, Reinvention); Donna Haraway (The Cyborg Manifesto); Bernard Stiegler (Various); Katherine Hayles (How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis); Sylvia Wynter (Briefly); Myria Georgiou (Being Human in Digital Cities); Shannon Mattern (The City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 09 (2025 Re-release): Platform Urbanism 33:18

22 days ago33:18

33:18

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 travels negotiated with the help of Google Maps or Citymapper; rides hailed through Uber or Lyft; evening meal delivered via Grubhub or Just Eat. When you are in your own city or locale, you probably use some of these platforms, alongside many others. What exactly constitutes a platform, in general, and in relation to urban life specifically, is somewhat up for grabs. In this episode, we explore different perspectives on platforms as new forms of urban media, whether that be as a form of communication, a type of service, a business model, an infrastructure, or even an institution. The popularity of such platforms is clear, and it is not a stretch to say residents and visitors alike find such media useful for grappling with urban complexities. But platforms have disrupted cities too, whether that be their housing markets, transportation services or local businesses. And this disruption seems to brought forth a situation in which platforms are becoming indispensable infrastructures, and maybe even emerging institutions, of urban life. Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Negotiating the Platform Pivot: From Participatory Digital Ecosystems to Infrastructures of Everyday Life / Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power); José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Emily West (Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly); Frank Pasquale (From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon); Jathan Sadowski (Who Owns the Future City? Phases of Technological Urbanism and Shifts in Sovereignty); Lizzie Richardson (Platforms, Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal); Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham (The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction); John Bull (Schrodinger’s Cab Firm: Uber’s Existential Crisis); Niels van Doorn (A New Institution on the Block: On Platform Urbanism and Airbnb Citizenship); Douglass C. North (Institutions); Benjamin Bratton (The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 08 (2025 Re-release): Networked Location 32:17

29 days ago32:17

32:17

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 intended destination will still be open at the predicted time of arrival. User of such services do not tend to reflect on how they are being delivered this information, and when do, they more likely think about the locative service or app. It us less likely they will be aware of the considerable organisational and technical complexities involved in pinpointing geographic location, or the other urban data which allows the city to appear digitally in these ways. In this episode, we explore the complexities involved in the networking of urban location, including but also beyond such simple acts of digitalised, mobile navigation. We will also think through how, experientially, we know urban locations or places via an increasingly digital and networked technological background, including for example search engines, neighbourhood social media, or the act of taking selfies. Such technologies are part of longstanding processes of technological change, through which we have learned and relearned to care for where we are, our place, in the city. Thinkers discussed: William Gibson (Neuromancer); Mark Graham, Matthew Zook and Andrew Boulton (Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code); Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World); William Mitchell (E-topia: "Urban Life Jim - But Not as We Know It”); Matthew Wilson (Location-Based Services, Conspicuous Mobility, and the Location-Aware Future); Jordan Frith and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Jordan Frith (Smartphones as Locative Media); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Rowan Wilken (Communication Infrastructures and the Contest over Location Positioning); Gerard Goggin (Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life); Shaun Moores (Media, Place and Mobility / Digital Orientations: Non-Media-Centric Media Studies and Non-Representational Theories of Practice); Germaine Halegoua (The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 07 (2025 Re-release): Urban Brandscapes 32:13

5 weeks ago32:13

32:13

As you move about myriad city spaces, you will probably recognise the regularity and intensity with which you are being exposed to a whole plethora of brands. Perhaps most noticeable will be all manner of advertising display. Ads plastered across roadside billboards or building walls, integrated into street furniture, consuming an entire section of a metro station, on – or even entirely covering – a bus or a tram, or spotted on private motor vehicles with no other apparent purpose but pulling around a hoarding boasting ad display. But brands appear in the city not only in advertising. Urban environments are increasingly understood as key venues of ‘brand building’ and ‘brand management’. These emerging techniques are often highly multisensory, involving the more general construction of brands through a combination of visuality, tactility, taste and smell. They are being applied to everything from large-scale urban events, to architectural design, to retail shops, to ordinary consumer objects. Altogether, the proliferation of brands raises questions about the highly commoditised nature of the cities we live in, not to mention how we might respond politically. In this episode, we explore different dimensions of what we will call ‘urban brandscapes’: how urban environments more generally are infused with branded character, feel and atmospheres. Thinkers discussed: David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); Anne Cronin ( Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban / Calculative Spaces: Cities, Market Relations and the Commercial Vitalism of the Outdoor Advertising Industry / Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms); Emma Arnold (Sexualised Advertising and the Production of Space in the City); Iain Borden (Hoardings); Kurt Iveson (Branded Cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape); Marc Gobé (E motional Branding: A New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People); Liz Moor (The Rise of Brands); Van Troi Tran (Thirst in the Global Brandscape: Water, Milk and Coke at the Shanghai World Expo); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form ); Scott Lash and Celia Lury (Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things) Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 06 (2025 Re-release): Street Arts 28:26

6 weeks ago28:26

28:26

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 suggesting time, and even permission, being given to complete the work. You may value all these markings on urban surfaces, seeing them as part of the vibrant public culture of the city – or even just cool. Or you may distinguish the value of some markings from others. Perhaps those tags, made in permanent marker, don’t meet your criteria for art. Institutional authorities, such as the transport police, or the local government, will certainly have their own fine distinctions too, between who might mark, and what may be marked, on urban surfaces. Writing and drawing on walls is an ancient urban practice, but its status today remains ambiguous. For some, it represents criminal activity or simple vandalism; for others it is to be celebrated: as subversive art forms, often giving voice to those on the urban margins; but also, increasingly, as art associated with an emergent, gritty, hipster-esque urban aesthetic. In this episode, we explore the evolution of graffiti and street art as urban media that have travelled from the streets into galleries, circulating online images, merchandise, commercial graphic design and even advertising. Thinkers discussed: Kurt Iveson (Publics and the City); Anthony Lee (Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco's Public Murals); Joe Austin (Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City / More to See Than a Canvas in a White Cube: For an Art in the Streets); Virág Molnár (Street Art and the Changing Urban Public Sphere); Luke Dickens (Pictures on Walls? Producing, Pricing and Collecting the Street Art Screen Print); Alison Young (Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination); Mark Halsey & Ben Pederick (The Game of Fame: Mural, Graffiti, Erasure) Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 05 (2025 Re-release): Media Architectures 29:50

7 weeks ago29:50

29:50

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 media forms into architecture has become one of the most prominent themes in recent debates about the relationships of media and cities. While buildings have long been communicative, novel uses of illumination, screen interfaces and inventive building materials seem to be underscoring a new age where buildings are media. And yet, the interconnections of media and architecture run even deeper than this. Not only might we consider sites whose explicit function is some kind of communication – such as museums, art galleries or libraries – but also the buildings inhabited by media industries, sometimes known as 'media houses'. And then from there, we could observe that architecture more broadly is a discipline building spaces for communication in general, both domestic as well as of labour and organization. As a discipline, architecture itself is defined by mediation, from the age of print, to the computational practice it has increasingly become. In this episode, we explore just some of the numerous intersections of media and architecture, with a broad conception of architecture, both as practice and realised design, as both mediated and mediating. Thinkers discussed: Friedrich Kittler (The City is a Medium); Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Scott McQuire (Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space); Zlatan Krajina (Negotiating the Mediated City: Everyday Encounters with Public Screens); Dave Colangelo (The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media / We Live Here: Media Architecture as Critical Spatial Practice); Adam Greenfield (Against the Smart City); Shannon Mattern (A City is Not a Computer); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Staffan Ericson and Kristina Riegert (Media Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality); Staffan Ericson (The Interior of the Ubiquitous: Broadcasting House, London); Sven-Olav Wallenstein (Looping Ideology: The CCTV Center in Beijing); Reinhold Martin (The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space); Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler (Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 04 (2025 Re-release): Urban Soundtracks 27:46

8 weeks ago27:46

27:46

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 constituting how we experience cities. People walking, standing and conversing; vehicles moving, stopping and reversing; pounding construction equipment; amplified music and announcements; pedestrian crossing beacons; the calls of birds and other animals; the reverberations of hallways and rooms. These and other audible effects and affects shape our urban experience, a fact not at all obscure for sight impaired urban travellers and explorers. In this episode, we consider the urban soundscape both generally, but also via personal sound devices, perhaps the most noted, and explicit kinds of sonic urban mediation. Such technologies have often been framed as a way to ‘manage’ the urban experience: to limit, cope or otherwise make more pleasant its noise, complexity, drudgery, dreariness, excitement and strangeness. Another perspective, however, is that such technologies are as much about urban engagement as disengagement; ways of re-modulating, remixing, reformatting or retuning our interface with urban life. Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Sounds Different: Listening to the Proliferating Spaces of Technological Modernity in the City); Martin Heidegger (The age of the world picture); Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the World); Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction); Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Erving Goffman (Behavior in public places); Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman); Michael Bull (Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life / Sound moves: iPod culture and urban experience); Matthew Jordan (Becoming Quiet: On Mediation, Noise Cancellation, and Commodity Quietness); David Beer (Tune Out: Music, Soundscapes and the Urban Mise-en-scène); William Mitchell (Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City); Betsey Biggs (Like it was a Movie: Cinematic Listening as Public Art); Allan Watson and Dominiqua Drakeford-Allen (‘Tuning Out’ or ‘Tuning in’? Mobile Music Listening and Intensified Encounters with the City). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 03 (2025 Re-release): Suburban Screens 29:48

9 weeks ago29:48

29:48

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 television: it may be live content (e.g. news, sports, or a a live-to-air programme); or perhaps your taking in programming via an on-demand streaming platform, or even just watching video clips. Regardless of these variations and contingencies, according to some scholars, this mediated situation has important technological and cultural connections with the suburb. Not just the suburb as a location, but as: a historically specific form of urban development; as an archetype for living; and above all, as an emergent configuration of mediation in the modern urbanising world. In this episode, we explore the ways this may have transpired, and may still endure today, from television in the postwar period, to its more recent and ambient urban appearances across urban spaces. Thinkers discussed: Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form); Marylin Strathern (Future Kinship and the Study of Culture); Delores Hayden (Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Jürgen Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere); Anna McCarthy (Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space); Marc Augé (Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity); Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-Games: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Media Uses); Lynn Spigel (Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs); Roger Keil (Suburban Constellations); Francesco Cassetti (Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 02 (2025 Re-release): Print Urbanism 30:45

10 weeks ago30:45

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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. But if you look a little harder, you will see the material traces of an enduring print urbanism: a panoply of banal or ambient texts such as signage, labels and messages; some people still carrying on reading books, magazines or commuter papers; and as for the others, using digital devices to read online news or an ebook, are they not undertaking a practice intimately connected with urban print culture? Even the act of riding public transport itself depends on a huge amount of published and printed information informing the operators, bureaucracy and expertise running the system. The relationships of print and the city run deep. In this episode, we take a long view, exploring how these relationships of print and the city can highlight the most elemental features of mediated urbanism today. Thinkers discussed: Shannon Mattern (Code + Clay … Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man); Mario Carpo (Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism); David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); John Nerone (The Mythology of the Penny Press); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Carole O’Reilly (Journalism and the Changing Act of Observation: Writing about Cities in the British press 1880–1940); Scott Rodgers (The Architectures of Media Power: Editing, the Newsroom, and Urban Public Space); Walter Bagehot (Charles Dickens); Peter Fritzsche (Reading Berlin 1900); Rolf Linder (The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School); Robert Park (The Natural History of the Newspaper); Ursula Rao (News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions); Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development); Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media); Scott Rodgers (Digitizing Localism: Anticipating, Assembling and Animating a ‘Space’ for UK Hyperlocal Media Production). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 01 (2025 Re-release): Surfaces, Depths, Fragments, Publics 31:13

11 weeks ago31:13

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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, infrastructures, and industries inhabit – and are increasingly ‘built-into’ – urban environments. Many might quite reasonably point out that media represent the city and urban life, in film, television, literature, news, video games and apps. In this opening episode, however, we introduce a focus on the city itself is a mediating environment. We begin to think how, through the urban we can find new ways to think about media, and how, through media, we can find new ways to think about the city. The aim here is modest. Rather than presenting a general framework for understanding the mediated city in the past, now and forever more, we start with four points of reference. These will loosely guide how we’ll think about the mediated city in the episodes to come: surfaces, depths, fragments and publics. Thinkers discussed: Simon Wreckert (Google Maps Hacks); Scott McQuire (An Archaeology of the Media City: Towards a Critical Cultural History of Mediated Urbanism); Shannon Mattern (Deep Mapping the Media City / Code + Clay … Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media); David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); Iain Borden (Hoardings); Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extension of Man); Friedrich Kittler (The City is a Medium); Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life); Erving Goffman (Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings); William Mitchell (E-topia: "Urban Life Jim - But Not as We Know It”) Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva ( Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World); Kurt Iveson (Publics and the City); Michael Warner (Publics and Counterpublics) Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers ( https://soundcloud.com/rodgers_scott/the-mediated-city-theme ). License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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Publicly Sited Update: The Mediated City re-release with new Sentient Cities episode 2:18

11 weeks ago2:18

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In this short update, I'm announcing the re-release of The Mediated City podcast series, coming out today. And, on top of that, the new release of this series' missing its final, 10th episode on Sentient Cities. In that final episode I hope will we a timely contribution to all the talk, concern, and hype about AI, in which we’re seeing renewed debates about the many forms of computational agency that have become normal parts of urban living, not to mention questions about whether cities can think. If you’ve not listened to The Mediated City before, maybe now is the time. If you have, perhaps you might have to a re-listen. Or at least, keep your eyes and ears open for the final new episode on Sentient Cities.…

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Media, Technology & Culture 10 (3rd Edition): Extractive Technologies 33:26

16 weeks ago33:26

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As we come to the end of this series, we seem to be circling around an important contemporary theme: the emergent scepticism about digital platforms. This scepticism is not only about the murky decision-making power of digital platforms’ technical systems, discussed in our last episode. It’s also that there is increasing awareness about their operation as private entities. Entities that do not exist for our own individual benefit. Entities which, even if they have some value as mediums of publicity, or have some public utility, are not publicly-owned. Put simply, whatever they say about their mission, digital services and platforms - ranging from Facebook to Google to Amazon to Airbnb to Uber to Open AI - are first and foremost about making money. Making money in a way that relies substantially on extracting data from and about us: what we do, when, where and how we do things, as well as our explicit signals about why. Often, this extraction also enables an approximation of who we might be. It is true that data mining can divulge intimate personal details about us. But what is principally happening in such processes is the construction of user models, a statistical profile which we match, often fairly precisely. A model of a situated user that can be targeted for advertising, or marketing, or triggered in various ways to remain faithful to the platform. And when users are faithful to these platforms, they generate yet more data for extraction. In this episode, we consider how these insights have inspired a revival of sorts amongst political economy and Marxist approaches to media, towards a new critique of digital or platform capitalism. But is this capitalism? Or is it, as suggested speculatively in a number of critical perspectives, something worse. Thinkers Discussed: Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Tarleton Gillespie (The Politics of Platforms); Jose van Dijck (The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media); Fernando van der Vlist, Anne Helmond and Fabian Ferrari (Big AI: Cloud infrastructure Dependence and the Industrialisation of Artificial Intelligence); Jose van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Wall (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); McKenzie Wark (Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?); Jodi Dean (Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Forclosure of Politics / The Neofeudalising Tendency of Communicative Capitalism); Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism); Joel Kotkin (The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class); Evgeny Morozov (Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason); Maïa Pal and Neal Harris (Capital is Dead. Long Live Capital! A Political Marxist Analysis of Digital Capitalism and Infrastructure); Clive Barnett (The Consolations of ‘Neoliberalism’).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 09 (3rd Edition): Predictive Technologies 35:44

17 weeks ago35:44

35:44

There is now widespread awareness of, suspicion about, and even opposition to the notion that computers seem to think. Or if not think, at least can learn things and then make decisions without our intervention, or indeed without us even knowing about it. Mysterious entities with names like ‘algorithms’, ‘bots’ and increasingly ‘AI’ seem to be making more and more decisions for us around welfare payment claims, the fastest travel route at a given moment, what shopping coupons are made available to you, or the neighbourhoods police patrol. These entities are also pervasive in media and communications. They help inform what movies you watch, the posts you see in your social media feeds, the way a matchmaking website pairs you with others, the overall summary you might draw from a search query, or what your music streaming over the past year reveals about cultural taste. Despite a more recent tendency to label these and other developments as ‘AI’, many scholars – not just in critical media studies, but fields like computer science – are keen to remind us that this is not intelligence, per se. Instead, we are seeing are mimicries of intelligence, which are in fact advanced forms of statistical prediction, based on enormous amounts of collected data, both personal and environmental. These reminders are helpful, though it still leaves murky how all of this happens. All this computational decision making, and its capacities at deep learning: it’s all so hidden; so obscure. In this episode, we think about the growing role of predictive technologies in shaping contemporary media cultures, from the early rise of apps and personalised ‘filter bubbles’ to the rather ordinary recommendation systems we rely on today. We also grapple with growing concerns for how deep structural biases around race, class, gender and sexuality are embedded into and reinforced by the way algorithms – such as those enabling facial recognition technologies – actually work. But we will also ask: is the adequate political response to just roll up our sleeves, pry these predictive black boxes open, reveal their internal biases, and perhaps correct them? Or it is that we instead need to better understand the problematic social and cultural conditions from which these predictive technologies sprout up, get nurtured and grow? Thinkers Discussed: Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff (The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet); Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You); Murray Shanahan (Talking about Large Language Models); Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb (Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence); Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas (Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture); Raymond Williams (Keywords); Daniela Varela Martinez's and Anne Kaun (The Netflix Experience: A User-Focused Approach to the Netflix Recommendation Algorithm); Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism); Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code); Fabio Chiusi (Automating Society); Axel Bruns (Are Filter Bubbles Real?); Frank Pasquale (The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information); Taina Bucher (If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics); Donna Haraway (Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective); Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 08 (3rd Edition): Participatory Technologies 35:54

18 weeks ago35:54

35:54

There seems to be widespread consensus that contemporary media is much more participatory. For some time, this was a point of celebration: anyone could, for example, set up a YouTube account, and with relatively low-cost or even free devices and software, generate and share their experiences or views with minimal censorious intervention. Recently, however, participatory media cultures have become a point of worry. That we now live in a mediated world where nobody seems able to agree on what were once pretty basic facts. And also, where this additional mediated participation is not necessarily all that liberating, but rather, a new avenue of surveillance, manipulation and ultimately power at the hands of governments, corporations and influential individuals. Whether one celebrates or worries about it, there are also different perspectives on where this participatory media culture comes from. Some have explained it with reference to the capacities of new technologies. After all, people can participate more easily when so many communication functions are collapsed into an internet-enabled device like a smartphone. And yet, for others, this technological explanation is flawed, underplaying longer-term cultural shifts, which new technologies might more properly be seen as crystallizing. In this episode, we begin with work by thinkers such as Henry Jenkins, who have notably opposed technological explanations for a participatory media culture, suggesting it is instead a momentous cultural shift towards new and potentially democratising forms of 'collective intelligence' that blur the old distinction between media ‘producers’ and ‘audiences’. We will consider the value of this perspective, while also questioning whether insisting on ‘culture’ bring us back to the same unsustainable technology/culture dichotomy we have challenged in earlier episodes. This includes addressing arguments that today’s so-called post-truth politics should be seen as a peculiar constellation of participatory culture and the technical affordances of social media platforms. Thinkers Discussed: Tim Dwyer (Media Convergence); Lev Manovich (Software Takes Command); Ithiel de Sola Pool (Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age); Thomas Friedman (Thank you for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations); Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide); Axel Bruns (Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage); Pierre Lévy (Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace); Bernard Stiegler (The Economy of Contribution); Jose Van Dijck (Users Like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content); Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne and Tamar Tembeck (The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age); Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene); Limor Shifman (Memes in Digital Culture); Noam Gal, Limor Shifman and Zohar Kamph (‘It Gets Better’: Internet Memes and the Construction of Collective Identity); Jason Hannan (Trolling Ourselves to Death? Social Media and Post-Truth Politics); Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 07 (3rd Edition): Embodied Technologies 33:36

19 weeks ago33:36

33:36

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 wrists. We wear media like clothes – and we may soon implant media within our bodies. This need not be seen in the guise of science fiction. It is more interesting to see it as really quite ordinary. For a long time, we humans have shared an intimacy with media technologies. They not only affect how we see ourselves, but modulate and help produce who and what we are. In this episode, we will begin our exploration of media as embodied technologies with the humble mobile phone. Through their aestheticisation, practical uses and technological development, mobile phones were an important precursor to the myriad mobile devices we know today. Contemporary embodied technologies however go beyond being portable, or affording wireless access to online content. They are increasingly built into and for our bodies, and modulate our interactions with environments: giving tactile responses through screen interfaces, automatically detecting one’s geographic location and orientation, or one’s bodily temperature and heartrate, or the ambient sound and lighting in a room. Ultimately, we ask why we have such intimate embodied relationships with media: the answer, in part, relates to how media are entangled with our identity. Thinkers Discussed: Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (Life After New Media); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordon Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces); Erving Goffman (briefly); Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken (Bodies and Mobile Media); Sherry Turkle (The Second Self / Evocative Objects); Harvey May and Greg Hearn (The Mobile Phone as Media); James Miller (The Fourth Screen: Mediatization and the Smartphone); Ian Bogost (Apple's Airpods Are an Omen); James Gilmore (Everywear: The Quantified Self and Wearable Fitness Technologies); Adam Greenfield (Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing); Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel and Tero Karppi (Our Metrics, Ourselves: A Hundred Years of Self-Tracking from the Weight Scale to the Wrist Wearable Device); Michel Foucault (Technologies of the Self); Judith Butler (briefly); Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity); Daniel Palmer (iPhone Photography: Mediating Visions of Social Space).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 06 (3rd Edition): Infrastructural Technologies 35:48

20 weeks ago35:48

35:48

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 tend to imagine media technologies individually: the television, the radio, the smart home assistant. They rely on an image of artefacts showing up in our home or office as specific ‘things’. As individual, user-friendly objects which extend our contact with others, or provide us with certain experiences. But these media appliances not only depend on us forgetting them as part of our daily tasks and routines. They also depend on various large-scale infrastructures, both physical and non-physical, which make their operation possible, as mediums of communication or experience.These infrastructures are also something we tend to ignore, but not because we treat these infrastructures as appliances. We tend to ignore media infrastructures because they are technical and boring; or often beyond, below, or even above our immediate reach. If we were to push the boundaries, we could point to all kinds of infrastructural dependencies related about by media: electrical power; water networks; or the mining or rare metals. In this episode, we focus on the internet as a technological infrastructure. This is perhaps the only case where it might make sense to refer to ‘the Internet’ as a proper noun, or a specific thing, with the ‘the’ and capitalised ‘I’. Thinking of the internet as an infrastructure takes on obvious importance when we look at its history, from its inception as ARPANET, a cold war project in the wake of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, to its more complicated interweaving with other technologies and ideas in subsequent years. While many still tend to describe the internet as an intangible or ‘virtual’ space, we will show that it in fact material, physical, fragile, environmentally consequential, and the focus of many political and economic struggles. Thinkers Discussed: Lisa Parks (‘Stuff You Can Kick’: Towards a Theory of Media Infrastructures); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Jo Pierson (Digital Platforms as Entangled Infrastructures: Addressing Public Values and Trust in Messaging Apps); John Durham Peters (The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media); Michel Callon (Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay); Susan Leigh-Star (The Ethnography of Infrastructure); Manuel Castells (The Internet Galaxy); Lori Emerson (Other Networks); Laura DeNardis (The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch / Hidden Levers of Internet Control: An Infrastructure-Based Theory of Internet Governance); Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle (The Internet of Things); Joana Moll (CO2GLE); Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 05 (3rd Edition): Computational Technologies 31:59

22 weeks ago31:59

31:59

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 that novel media might bring positive or empowering changes. When media technologies are seen as transformative, they have often been described as ‘new media’. The term ‘new media’ began to acquire some currency in the 1960s, in the age of television. But its use exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Why? Many used the term around this time to refer to a broad range of emerging media, often without giving its precise meaning. It was used to encompass the internet, interactivity, multimedia, mobile devices, user-generated content, and more. Some scholars observed, however, that all of these various new media had something in common: their relationship with the longer-term and more general development of the computer as a media technology. The computer was not just another individual media technology. Rather, it embodied the emerging backbone for potentially all mediated communication and experience. In this episode, we look at how this argument is exemplified by the work of digital media theorist Lev Manovich, who suggests that what makes new media ‘new’ is its creation, storage, distribution and display via the language (i.e. software code) and hardware of digital computation. On a basic level, computational media all share a basic metabolism of binary code: ultimately describable with nothing more than 1s and 0s. The question, however, is broader than this: beyond previous media formats becoming absorbed into the medium of the computer, are we seeing the rise of a specifically ‘computational’ culture? Thinkers Discussed: Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media / Software Takes Command); Mark B.N. Hansen (New Philosophy for New Media); Alexander Galloway (The Interface Effect); Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (Remediation: Understanding New Media); Jonathan Sterne (Analog); Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Magaudda (A History of Digital Media: An Intermedia and Global Perspective); Lewis Mumford (Authoritarian and Democratic Technics); Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism); Laine Nooney (The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal); Jennifer Light (When Computers Were Women); Mar Hicks (Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing); Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg (Personal Dynamic Media); David Berry (Against Remediation).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 04 (3rd Edition): Live Technologies 30:35

23 weeks ago30:35

30:35

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 distant or past worlds, beyond our immediate reach, but also to worlds we feel can join into, and share simultaneously. One term for describing how media afford this latter window on the world is ‘liveness’. The word ‘live’ might most immediately bring to mind live news coverage: journalism that is valued because it’s on location, at the event, brought to you the viewer live. But liveness is not just live coverage, whether that be of breaking news, sports or a programme like the Academy Awards. It refers to a more basic quality of mediated experience: that of placing a priority on the value of ‘now’ over later. In this episode, we explore liveness first via a vignette into the experiences of broadcast journalists covering the prison transfer of presumed Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who along with their viewers, abruptly found themselves witnessing a televised murder. From there, we will consider different approaches to liveness. These approaches have in the past been rooted in the study of radio and television. But the streaming comments, images and increasingly video of social media platforms clearly demand we revive and reimagine the concept to understand new kinds of networked real-time-like or live experience. Thinkers Discussed: Karin Van Es (Liveness Redux: On Media and their Claim to be Live / The Future of Live); Philip Auslander (Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture); Nick Couldry (Liveness, 'Reality', and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone); Annie Van den Oever (The Aesthetics and Viewing Regimes of Cinema and Television, and their Dialectics); Joshua Meyrowitz (No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior); Paddy Scannell (Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation); Ludmilla Lupinacci (Phenomenal Algorhythms: The Sensorial Orchestration of ‘Real Time’ in Social Media); Esther Weltevrede, Anne Helmond and Carolin Gerlitz (The Politics of Real-Time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines).…

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Media, Technology & Culture 03 (3rd Edition): Domesticated Technologies 29:37

23 weeks ago29:37

29:37

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 technologies – and really technologies in general – become more and more adapted to fit into everyday life. Sure, when media technologies are new, they tend to be seen as disruptive or threatening. But in time, they usually become just another ‘appliance’ used in our everyday existence, something utterly unremarkable, ordinary, even boring. In this episode, we consider this by exploring how the phonograph and early radio were intimately incorporated into social practices, structures and places, in the process shaping the nature of the media technologies themselves. Along the way, we will also consider the more recent arrival of newer digital technologies, such as smart speaker assistants and streaming services based on recommendation systems. Is a concept like domestication fit for purpose when it comes to understanding ubiquitous, algorithmically- and data-driven digital media technologies? Thinkers Discussed: Martin Heidegger (briefly); Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life / Domesticating Domestication); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-games); Lisa Gitelman (Always Already New); Alexander G. Weheliye (Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity); Shaun Moores (Media and Everyday Life in Modern Society); Stuart Hall (Encoding and Decoding); Paddy Scannell (Radio, Television and Modern Life); Michel Foucault (briefly); Saba Rebecca Brause and Grant Blank (Externalized Domestication: Smart Speaker Assistants, Networks and Domestication Theory); Ignacio Siles Johan Espinoza-Rojas, Adrián Naranjo, and María Fernanda Tristán (The Mutual Domestication of Users and Algorithmic Recommendations on Netflix).…

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Media, Technology and Culture 02 (3rd Edition): Located Technologies 34:35

25 weeks ago34:35

34:35

A conventional narrative in many historical accounts about the arrival of new media technologies is that media technologies have oftentimes made possible forms of communication in which physical co-presence is less and less necessary. Early media technologies like print allowed for unprecedented communication across distance, albeit with a time lag. But as time has gone on, mediated communication at a distance has become increasingly instantaneous. These kinds of narratives feed into a popular imaginary of media technologies progressively disconnecting us from localities or places. In this episode, we explore an alternative way to think about this: for sure, media technologies radically alter how we experience time, space and distance. Yet when we look a little closer, we can see that media technologies – in how we encounter them, in their sheer materiality – always depend on local circumstances. Thinkers discussed: Harold Innis (The Bias of Communication); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Myth); Doreen Massey and David Harvey (briefly); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); David Morley (Communications and Mobility); John Thompson (The Media and Modernity); Kate Maddalena and Jeremy Packer (The Digital Body: Telegraphy as Discourse Network); Jonathan Sterne (Thinking with James Carey); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form).…

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Media, Technology and Culture 01 (3rd Edition): Cultural Technologies 33:05

26 weeks ago33:05

33:05

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 this introductory episode, we consider different scholarly takes on how we might understand and conceptualise media as technologies. We start with one of the most famous ‘technological’ understandings of media: that of Marshall McLuhan, whose catchphrase ‘the medium is the message’ asserted that the historical or long-term effects of particular mediums were of greater significance than media content. Detractors of this assertion, such as cultural theorist Raymond Williams, argued McLuhan’s brand of ‘technological determinism’ put forward a crude and politically naive way of understanding media culture. As we'll see, though, the most useful position is probably somewhere in-between: of course technologies are cultural; but culture is also inherently technological. Thinkers discussed: Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Raymond Williams (Keywords / Culture is Ordinary / Television: Technology and Cultural Form); David Edgerton (The Shock of the Old); Ursula Franklin (The Real Life of Technology); Stephen Kline (What Is Technology?); Donna Haraway (The Cyborg Manifesto); Bernard Stiegler (Technics and Time 1); N. Katharine Hayles (How We Think); Michael Litwack (Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/Insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory); Sylvia Winter; Armond Towns (Toward a Black Media Philosophy); and Sarah Sharma, Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan).…

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Publicly Sited Update: New 3rd Edition of the Media, Technology and Culture podcast 2:28

26 weeks ago2:28

2:28

In this short update, I'm announcing the new third edition of the Media, Technology and Culture podcast series coming out tomorrow. This is not a sequel of all new topics, but it is a complete re-recording with new elements and tweaks to go along with the new academic term. It also includes two refocused episodes: one on located technologies, and the other on predictive technologies.…

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The Mediated City 09 (Re-release): Platform Urbanism 33:18

2 years ago33:18

33:18

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 travels negotiated with the help of Google Maps or Citymapper; rides hailed through Uber or Lyft; evening meal delivered via Grubhub or Just Eat. When you are in your own city or locale, you probably use some of these platforms, alongside many others. What exactly constitutes a platform, in general, and in relation to urban life specifically, is somewhat up for grabs. In this episode, we explore different perspectives on platforms as new forms of urban media, whether that be as a form of communication, a type of service, a business model, an infrastructure, or even an institution. The popularity of such platforms is clear, and it is not a stretch to say residents and visitors alike find such media useful for grappling with urban complexities. But platforms have disrupted cities too, whether that be their housing markets, transportation services or local businesses. And this disruption seems to brought forth a situation in which platforms are becoming indispensable infrastructures, and maybe even emerging institutions, of urban life. Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Negotiating the Platform Pivot: From Participatory Digital Ecosystems to Infrastructures of Everyday Life / Platform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Jean-Christophe Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards and Christian Sandvig (Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power); José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Emily West (Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly); Frank Pasquale (From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon); Jathan Sadowski (Who Owns the Future City? Phases of Technological Urbanism and Shifts in Sovereignty); Lizzie Richardson (Platforms, Markets, and Contingent Calculation: The Flexible Arrangement of the Delivered Meal); Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham (The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction); John Bull (Schrodinger’s Cab Firm: Uber’s Existential Crisis); Niels van Doorn (A New Institution on the Block: On Platform Urbanism and Airbnb Citizenship); Douglass C. North (Institutions); Benjamin Bratton (The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 08 (Re-release): Networked Location 32:17

2 years ago32:17

32:17

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 intended destination will still be open at the predicted time of arrival. User of such services do not tend to reflect on how they are being delivered this information, and when do, they more likely think about the locative service or app. It us less likely they will be aware of the considerable organisational and technical complexities involved in pinpointing geographic location, or the other urban data which allows the city to appear digitally in these ways. In this episode, we explore the complexities involved in the networking of urban location, including but also beyond such simple acts of digitalised, mobile navigation. We will also think through how, experientially, we know urban locations or places via an increasingly digital and networked technological background, including for example search engines, neighbourhood social media, or the act of taking selfies. Such technologies are part of longstanding processes of technological change, through which we have learned and relearned to care for where we are, our place, in the city. Thinkers discussed: William Gibson (Neuromancer); Mark Graham, Matthew Zook and Andrew Boulton (Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code); Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World); William Mitchell (E-topia: "Urban Life Jim - But Not as We Know It”); Matthew Wilson (Location-Based Services, Conspicuous Mobility, and the Location-Aware Future); Jordan Frith and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Jordan Frith (Smartphones as Locative Media); Nicole Starosielski (The Undersea Network); Rowan Wilken (Communication Infrastructures and the Contest over Location Positioning); Gerard Goggin (Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life); Shaun Moores (Media, Place and Mobility / Digital Orientations: Non-Media-Centric Media Studies and Non-Representational Theories of Practice); Germaine Halegoua (The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 07: Urban Brandscapes 32:13

2 years ago32:13

32:13

As you move about myriad city spaces, you will probably recognise the regularity and intensity with which you are being exposed to a whole plethora of brands. Perhaps most noticeable will be all manner of advertising display. Ads plastered across roadside billboards or building walls, integrated into street furniture, consuming an entire section of a metro station, on – or even entirely covering – a bus or a tram, or spotted on private motor vehicles with no other apparent purpose but pulling around a hoarding boasting ad display. But brands appear in the city not only in advertising. Urban environments are increasingly understood as key venues of ‘brand building’ and ‘brand management’. These emerging techniques are often highly multisensory, involving the more general construction of brands through a combination of visuality, tactility, taste and smell. They are being applied to everything from large-scale urban events, to architectural design, to retail shops, to ordinary consumer objects. Altogether, the proliferation of brands raises questions about the highly commoditised nature of the cities we live in, not to mention how we might respond politically. In this episode, we explore different dimensions of what we will call ‘urban brandscapes’: how urban environments more generally are infused with branded character, feel and atmospheres. Thinkers discussed: David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); Anne Cronin ( Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban / Calculative Spaces: Cities, Market Relations and the Commercial Vitalism of the Outdoor Advertising Industry / Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms); Emma Arnold (Sexualised Advertising and the Production of Space in the City); Iain Borden (Hoardings); Kurt Iveson (Branded Cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape); Marc Gobé (E motional Branding: A New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People); Liz Moor (The Rise of Brands); Van Troi Tran (Thirst in the Global Brandscape: Water, Milk and Coke at the Shanghai World Expo); Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour (Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form ); Scott Lash and Celia Lury (Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things) Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 06: Street Arts 28:26

2 years ago28:26

28:26

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 suggesting time, and even permission, being given to complete the work. You may value all these markings on urban surfaces, seeing them as part of the vibrant public culture of the city – or even just cool. Or you may distinguish the value of some markings from others. Perhaps those tags, made in permanent marker, don’t meet your criteria for art. Institutional authorities, such as the transport police, or the local government, will certainly have their own fine distinctions too, between who might mark, and what may be marked, on urban surfaces. Writing and drawing on walls is an ancient urban practice, but its status today remains ambiguous. For some, it represents criminal activity or simple vandalism; for others it is to be celebrated: as subversive art forms, often giving voice to those on the urban margins; but also, increasingly, as art associated with an emergent, gritty, hipster-esque urban aesthetic. In this episode, we explore the evolution of graffiti and street art as urban media that have travelled from the streets into galleries, circulating online images, merchandise, commercial graphic design and even advertising. Thinkers discussed: Kurt Iveson (Publics and the City); Anthony Lee (Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco's Public Murals); Joe Austin (Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City / More to See Than a Canvas in a White Cube: For an Art in the Streets); Virág Molnár (Street Art and the Changing Urban Public Sphere); Luke Dickens (Pictures on Walls? Producing, Pricing and Collecting the Street Art Screen Print); Alison Young (Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination); Mark Halsey & Ben Pederick (The Game of Fame: Mural, Graffiti, Erasure) Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 05 (Re-release): Media Architectures 29:50

2 years ago29:50

29:50

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 media forms into architecture has become one of the most prominent themes in recent debates about the relationships of media and cities. While buildings have long been communicative, novel uses of illumination, screen interfaces and inventive building materials seem to be underscoring a new age where buildings are media. And yet, the interconnections of media and architecture run even deeper than this. Not only might we consider sites whose explicit function is some kind of communication – such as museums, art galleries or libraries – but also the buildings inhabited by media industries, sometimes known as 'media houses'. And then from there, we could observe that architecture more broadly is a discipline building spaces for communication in general, both domestic as well as of labour and organization. As a discipline, architecture itself is defined by mediation, from the age of print, to the computational practice it has increasingly become. In this episode, we explore just some of the numerous intersections of media and architecture, with a broad conception of architecture, both as practice and realised design, as both mediated and mediating. Thinkers discussed: Friedrich Kittler (The City is a Medium); Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media); Scott McQuire (Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space); Zlatan Krajina (Negotiating the Mediated City: Everyday Encounters with Public Screens); Dave Colangelo (The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media / We Live Here: Media Architecture as Critical Spatial Practice); Adam Greenfield (Against the Smart City); Shannon Mattern (A City is Not a Computer); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Staffan Ericson and Kristina Riegert (Media Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality); Staffan Ericson (The Interior of the Ubiquitous: Broadcasting House, London); Sven-Olav Wallenstein (Looping Ideology: The CCTV Center in Beijing); Reinhold Martin (The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space); Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler (Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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The Mediated City 04 (Re-release): Urban Soundtracks 27:46

2 years ago27:46

27:46

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 constituting how we experience cities. People walking, standing and conversing; vehicles moving, stopping and reversing; pounding construction equipment; amplified music and announcements; pedestrian crossing beacons; the calls of birds and other animals; the reverberations of hallways and rooms. These and other audible effects and affects shape our urban experience, a fact not at all obscure for sight impaired urban travellers and explorers. In this episode, we consider the urban soundscape both generally, but also via personal sound devices, perhaps the most noted, and explicit kinds of sonic urban mediation. Such technologies have often been framed as a way to ‘manage’ the urban experience: to limit, cope or otherwise make more pleasant its noise, complexity, drudgery, dreariness, excitement and strangeness. Another perspective, however, is that such technologies are as much about urban engagement as disengagement; ways of re-modulating, remixing, reformatting or retuning our interface with urban life. Thinkers discussed: Sarah Barns (Sounds Different: Listening to the Proliferating Spaces of Technological Modernity in the City); Martin Heidegger (The age of the world picture); Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the World); Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction); Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life); Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces: Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability); Erving Goffman (Behavior in public places); Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman); Michael Bull (Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life / Sound moves: iPod culture and urban experience); Matthew Jordan (Becoming Quiet: On Mediation, Noise Cancellation, and Commodity Quietness); David Beer (Tune Out: Music, Soundscapes and the Urban Mise-en-scène); William Mitchell (Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City); Betsey Biggs (Like it was a Movie: Cinematic Listening as Public Art); Allan Watson and Dominiqua Drakeford-Allen (‘Tuning Out’ or ‘Tuning in’? Mobile Music Listening and Intensified Encounters with the City). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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Publicly Sited

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The Mediated City 03 (Re-release): Suburban Screens 29:48

2 years ago29:48

29:48

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 television: it may be live content (e.g. news, sports, or a a live-to-air programme); or perhaps your taking in programming via an on-demand streaming platform, or even just watching video clips. Regardless of these variations and contingencies, according to some scholars, this mediated situation has important technological and cultural connections with the suburb. Not just the suburb as a location, but as: a historically specific form of urban development; as an archetype for living; and above all, as an emergent configuration of mediation in the modern urbanising world. In this episode, we explore the ways this may have transpired, and may still endure today, from television in the postwar period, to its more recent and ambient urban appearances across urban spaces. Thinkers discussed: Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form); Marylin Strathern (Future Kinship and the Study of Culture); Delores Hayden (Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Jürgen Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere); Anna McCarthy (Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space); Marc Augé (Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity); Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-Games: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Media Uses); Lynn Spigel (Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs); Roger Keil (Suburban Constellations); Francesco Cassetti (Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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Publicly Sited

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The Mediated City 02 (Re-release): Print Urbanism 30:45

2 years ago30:45

30:45

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. But if you look a little harder, you will see the material traces of an enduring print urbanism: a panoply of banal or ambient texts such as signage, labels and messages; some people still carrying on reading books, magazines or commuter papers; and as for the others, using digital devices to read online news or an ebook, are they not undertaking a practice intimately connected with urban print culture? Even the act of riding public transport itself depends on a huge amount of published and printed information informing the operators, bureaucracy and expertise running the system. The relationships of print and the city run deep. In this episode, we take a long view, exploring how these relationships of print and the city can highlight the most elemental features of mediated urbanism today. Thinkers discussed: Shannon Mattern (Code + Clay … Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media); Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man); Mario Carpo (Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory); Aurora Wallace (Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City); Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism); David Henkin (City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York); John Nerone (The Mythology of the Penny Press); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Carole O’Reilly (Journalism and the Changing Act of Observation: Writing about Cities in the British press 1880–1940); Scott Rodgers (The Architectures of Media Power: Editing, the Newsroom, and Urban Public Space); Walter Bagehot (Charles Dickens); Peter Fritzsche (Reading Berlin 1900); Rolf Linder (The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School); Robert Park (The Natural History of the Newspaper); Ursula Rao (News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions); Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development); Lev Manovich (The Language of New Media); Scott Rodgers (Digitizing Localism: Anticipating, Assembling and Animating a ‘Space’ for UK Hyperlocal Media Production). Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )…

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