Boston Mass-Mediated

Urban Space and Culture in the Digital Age

Stanley Corkin

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781625348241, 9781625348258
• eBook ISBN: 9781685750961
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In the mid-nineteenth century, Boston fashioned itself as a global hub. By the early 1970s, it was barely a dot on the national picture. It had gained a reputation as a decaying city rife with crime and dysfunctional politics, as well as decidedly retrograde race relations, prominently exemplified by white resistance to school integration. Despite this historical ebb in its national and international presence, it still possessed the infrastructure—superb educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT, world-class sports teams like the Celtics and Red Sox, powerful media outlets like The Boston Globe, and extensive shipping capacity—required to eventually thrive in an age of global trade and mass communication.

In Boston Mass-Mediated, Stanley Corkin explores the power of mass media to define a place. He examines the tensions between the emergent and prosperous city of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its representation in a range of media genres such as news journalism, professional sports broadcasting, and popular films like Mystic River and The Departed. This mass media, with its ever-increasing digital reach, has emphasized a city restricted by tropes suggestive of an earlier Boston—racism, white ethnic crime, Catholicism, and a pre-modern insularity—even as it becomes increasingly international and multicultural. These tropes mediate our understanding and experience of the city. Using Boston as a case study, Corkin contends that our contemporary sense of place occurs through a media saturated world, a world created by the explosion of digital technology that is steeped in preconceptions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Mediated Streets and Digital Images: The Case of Twenty-First-Century Boston
• Section I: Space and the Crisis of the Post-Industrial City
• Section II: Sports and Mass Culture
• Section III: Boston on Location: Filming the City
• Conclusion. Ray Donovan and the Essence of “Boston”
• Notes
• Index