Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies

Paul C Adams, Barney Warf, Paul C Adams, Barney Warf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000467031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of media geography, focusing on a range of different media viewed through the lenses of human geography and media theory. It addresses the spatial practices and processes associated with both old and new media, considering "media" not just as technologies and infrastructures, but also as networks, systems and assemblages of things that come together to enable communication in the real world.

With contributions from academics specializing in geography and media studies, the Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies summarizes the recent developments in the field and explores key questions and challenges affecting various groups, such as women, minorities, and persons with visual impairment. It considers geographical aspects of disruptive media uses such as hacking, fake news, and racism. Written in an approachable style, chapters consider geographies of users, norms, rules, laws, values, attitudes, routines, customs, markets, and power relations. They shed light on how mobile media make users vulnerable to tracking and surveillance but also facilitate innovative forms of mobility, space perception and placemaking. Structured in four distinct sections centered around "control and access to digital media, " "mass media, " "mobile media and surveillance" and "media and the politics of knowledge, " the Handbook explores digital divides and other manifestations of the uneven geographies of power. It also includes an overview of the alternative social media universe created by the Chinese government.

Media geography is a burgeoning field of study that lies at the intersections of various social sciences, including human geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, communication/media studies, urban studies, and women and gender studies. Academics and students across these fields will greatly benefit from this Handbook.

1

Media geographies

An introduction

Paul C. Adams and Barney Warf

DOI: 10.4324/9781003039068-1

Media geographies are all around us. Networks of world-spanning infrastructure keep us in touch with family, friends, business colleagues, customers and clients. News companies headquartered in major cities form our sense of historical and contemporary reality by providing “the news,” a shared here and now that circulates through geographical and social space, on newspaper and magazine pages, large and small screens, radio and podcasts. These are media geographies, as are the maps and GPS that guide people’s movements through space, facilitating movements from shopping trips to vacations to intercontinental migration. Media geographies also include invented and fictionalized places created for the purposes of entertainment and escapism, including immersive games and virtual reality experiences. Media geographies surround us, guiding us, following us and taking us places.

Our understanding of the term “media” involves more than mere technology. Technologies alone do not communicate. Rather, communication depends on social processes of encoding and decoding (Hall 2001) that inevitably produce a shift in meaning, a kind of translation, between sender(s) and receiver(s), a process that reflects their positionality relative to social power and ideology. Producing and sharing meaning involves complex processes that conjoin the social, political, psychological, linguistic and geographical into a seamless whole. Media are sociotechnical processes (Marwick 2018) moving through all of the following: technologies (communication infrastructures and devices), matter (book pages, ink, wires, satellites, fiber optics, screens), codes (ways of making sense of marks and tracings in matter), information (data, facts, rumors, stories, discourses, narratives), actors (people, bookworms, companies, governments, algorithms, switching devices), and systems (economies, legislative apparatuses, bureaucratic organizations, libraries). The list could be expanded indefinitely, but the point is that a medium is not a technical object, a thing, but rather a network or assemblage, a hybrid mix of the tangible and intangible. Not all of the authors contributing to this volume would espouse actor network theory or assemblage theory, and our wish is not to promote a single approach to media geography; the issues our authors address treat media as neither wholly social nor wholly technical, but rather as sociotechnical phenomena and processes.

When we were making our first forays into media geography, there were particular media that interested us. Adams was interested in television (1992) and Warf in telecommunication networks supporting financial transactions (1989). Geographers interested in media usually focused on particular media, such as paintings (Cosgrove 1985), newspapers (Goheen 1990), writing (Barnes & Duncan 1992) and films (Aitken & Zonn 1994). This interest in particular media did not deny that various media “texts” interrelated to each other intertextually (Kristeva 1980), but it was assumed that literature, news media, telephones, television, music recordings and film were all distinct and separate media that could be studied on their own. Of course, no one in the 1970s or 1980s picked up a telephone to watch a movie, read a newspaper, play games, or monitor their bank account. Now these things are all commonplace, indicating a process of media convergence made possible by the digital revolution (Cupples 2015). One can still use a phone to call someone, but one can also check email, only to be interrupted by one’s calendar, or a reminder to order a prescription, or a ping indicating a friend has posted on social media. The phone is no longer just a phone, but also a mailbox, bank teller, pharmacist, calendar, movie theater, television, newspaper, toy, puzzle, game, notepad and tape recorder; we can also use a laptop or desktop computer for these very same things (Koeze & Popper 2020). When we speak in terms of “apps” rather than particular devices, we are speaking of families of software that can be hosted on various devices in a plethora of places. It becomes such a tangled mess that “media” has become a singular noun because it is hard to identify a particular medium. The media is a muddle of things from which most of us cannot escape.

Media geographies are, nonetheless, accessed to different degrees and intensities depending on one’s social position and geographic location. There are high and low degrees of accessibility whether one compares countries, regions or parts of a city. The typical American household includes seven screens, and two-thirds of the world’s population now has access to at least one cell phone (ReportLinker 2017; Taylor & Silver 2019). There are still many places where digital media are scarce and where traditional face-to-face media hold their own. Roughly a third of the world’s population does not have access to the internet, and for many people cyberspace is some distant, foreign continent. The digital divide remains a serious issue. Within any of these more or less connected places, people build their own distinct media environments, personalized by their contacts in their physical or digital phone books, their friendship networks and their social media. Media geographies are not just “out there”; they are also in us, in the languages we know, our highly internalized systems of meaning, the nonverbal communications we understand, the way our fingers find the right keys on keyboards and keypads, the way our speech automatically adjusts to various apps and interfaces, the way we sense our phone’s vibration even when it is silenced.

In addition, our lives are increasingly mediatized: daily routines, activities and social interactions evolve in response to configurations of media encountered, used and appropriated (Lundby 2009; Hjarvard 2013). Mediatization is the incorporation of media into our various projects, allowing things to be done across space rather than in place, letting people come together around shared interests, tasks and objectives without physically converging (Kwan 2000). Mediatization reflects, among other things, the increasingly information-intensive nature of capitalism, both in the domains of production and social reproduction, the proliferation of new technologies, and the growth of the demand for information of all kinds. It is the ongoing reworking of our “life paths” (Hägerstrand 1970) to incorporate media routines, cycling over spans of days, months and years. The substitution of physical gathering by mediated forms of gathering creates a risk of context collapse; as “social media environments become a place where person-to-person conversations take place around user-generated content amidst potentially large audiences” (Marwick & Boyd 2011, 129–130) the situational integrity of life breaks down. The boundaries between situations (such as home, work, school, the bank and the doctor’s office) that help us maintain control over aspects of our self-identity have become steadily eroded (Nissenbaum 2009).

Geographers can contribute to understanding the challenges of mediatization, the risks of context collapse and the threats to situational integrity, by returning to fundamental geographical concepts of space and place, and reconsidering them in light of sociotechnical transformations associated with new media. Geographers can “ground” media in the reality of lived experience and the highly variegated places in which people live. They can map, literally and figuratively, the flows of information that media create, linking the producers and consumers of information in complex webs of interaction.

Unfortunately, the geography of communication is still plagued by “invisibility,” as Ken Hillis noted more than two decades ago (1998). The reason for this lack of visibility strikes us as a truncated understanding of “geography.” Outsiders still view geography as studying a “space of places” and are unaware that the discipline has grappled with the “space of flows” (Castells 1989) for decades. To be sure, how the media relates to places is still a topic of significant concern (Halegoua 2019). Media geography as a subdiscipline addresses both patterns and processes, stasis and flows, communication infrastructure and “traffic” on that infrastructure. Nonetheless, we are optimistic that media geography is on the verge of broader recognition, in part because of the longevity of relevant concerns within the discipline, and in part because of the convergence of pertinent questions from all segments of society.

History of media geography

The earliest work in media geography can be traced to the 1970s. Geography’s “quantitative revolution” brought attention to human movement and information flows, which led in turn to the key observation that the speeding up of transportation and communication brings locations closer together in time-distance, progressively shortening the time required to move or communicate between points. Costs to move or communicate among places also tend to decrease over time, leading to cost-space convergence (Brunn & Leinbach 1991; Janelle & Hodge 2000). For this reason, media geographies are an integral part of the successive rounds of time-space compression that have swept the world repeatedly since the Industrial Revolution (Warf 2008). Viewed comprehensively, this process means that the spaces in which people live and act can be understood as shrinking, collapsing, compressing or converging.

Media have long played a central role in the reconstruction of relational space. By bridging space effortlessly, by bringing ever larger audiences into reach, telecommunications changed the scale of the community in which people imagined themselves. The telegraph, whose invention is often credited to Samuel Morse in 1844, was the first form of telecommunications and was essential to the expansion of the United States and the formation of a national economy (Pred 1977). Shortly thereafter telegraph lines crossed the Atlantic Ocean to link North America and Europe (Hugill 1999). The telephone, unveiled in 1876, was originally the preserve of the wealthy, only to become a household tool over time. Its use greatly expanded the spatial range of interpersonal networks, the opportunities for interaction, undermined longstanding boundaries between public and private spaces (de Sola Pool 1977) and helped in the formation of “communities without propinquity,” or people tied by common interests rather than physical proximity (Marvin 1988). The mass-produced camera, the creation of George Eastman in 1888, led to an explosion in photography and its acceptance as an accurate, unbiased and objective mirror of the world (Sontag 1977). Few innovations had such a power to make distant places seem near. The evolution of photography into the cinema represents one of the most powerful extensions of visual experience in the history of modernity. Cinema allowed people to “get a sense of the world without moving very far at all” (Allen & Hamnett 1995, 3). The radio, an outgrowth of wireless telegraphy, for the first time brought news and entertainment directly into the homes of the masses. Finally, of course, television stitched together the world as a collage of simultaneous sights and sounds divorced from their historical or geographical context. Television exceeds at entertaining (Postman 1985), and forces all other discourses to imitate it: education, religion and politics must be entertaining to be successful. In drawing the multitudes indoors, television helped to eclipse the public agora, deepening the bourgeois process of individualization and commodification. The world’s foremost source of entertainment and news, television has shortened attention spans, engendered immediate gratification, led to unrealistic stereotypes, desensitized viewers to violence and endlessly promoted commodities in a never-ending series of advertisements.

In the late 20th century, two major technologies—satellites and fiber optics—became the backbones of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1. Media geographies: An introduction
• PART I Control and access to digital media
• PART II Mass media
• PART III Mobile media and surveillance
• PART IV Media and the politics of knowledge
• Index