The paper aims to contribute to the study of new media technologies in urban environments. It unfolds at two levels, epistemological and substantive. First, it discusses the issue of the conceptual tools that we can deploy to understand new media, arguing in favour of notions and methods that enable research to capture the double nature, socio-technical and bio-political, of the new media in urban environments. In particular, the paper claims that new media can be seen as a continuation of the process of ‘urbanisation of territory’ described by Foucault, aimed at the creation of a flexibly controllable space of events. Secondly, it criticises substantively the techno-enthusiast user-empowerment ideology that surrounds new media and addresses issues of inequality, control and resistance in and through new media in the city. The argument is that the augmented, hybrid or mixed urban reality of new media like personal and locative media is neither determinist nor unboundedly mobile. While the freedom of movement and the diverging styles of mobility are becoming a crucial factor of stratification, new tensions and struggles over the nature of urban ‘events’ are likely to take place.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AdeyP. (2008) Airports, mobility and the calculative architecture of affective control, Geoforum, 39, pp. 438–451.
2.
AdeyP. (2009) Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body, Environment and Planning D, 27, pp. 274–295.
3.
AlleyT. R. (1985) Organism–environment mutuality epistemics, and the concept of an ecological niche, Synthèse, 65, pp. 411–444.
4.
AminA.ThriftN. (2002) Cities: Reimaging the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press.
5.
AmooreL.HallA. (2009) Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body at the border, Environment and Planning D, 27(3), pp. 444–464.
6.
AndersonB. (2009) Affective atmospheres, Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), pp. 77–81.
7.
AtkinsonR.BlandyS. (2005) Introduction: international perspectives on the new enclavism and the rise of gated communities, Housing Studies, 20(2), pp. 177–186.
8.
BaumanZ. (1988) Freedom. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
9.
BeckU. (1986/1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
10.
BeerD. (2007) Thoughtful territories: imagining the thinking power of things and spaces, City, 11(2), pp. 229–238.
11.
BissellD. (2010) Passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport, Environment and Planning D, 28, pp. 270–289.
12.
BolterJ. D.MacIntyreB.GandyM.SchweitzerP. (2006) New media and the permanent crisis of aura, Convergence, 12(1), pp. 21–39.
13.
BoullierD. (2010) La ville-événement: foules et publics urbains. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
14.
BowkerG.StarS. L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
15.
BrighentiA. M. (2006) On territory as relationship and law as territory, Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, 21(2), pp. 65–86.
16.
BrighentiA. M. (2007) Visibility: a category for the social sciences, Current Sociology, 55(3), pp. 323–342.
17.
BrighentiA. M. (2008) Revolution and diavolution: what is the difference?, Critical Sociology, 34(6), pp. 787–802.
18.
BrighentiA. M. (Ed.) (2009) The Wall and the City/Le mur et la ville/Il muro e la città. Trento: professionaldreamers.
19.
BrighentiA. M. (2010a) On territorology: towards a general science of territory, Theory, Culture & Society, 27(1), pp. 52–72.
20.
BrighentiA. M. (2010b) Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
21.
BuddL. C. S. (2010) On being aeromobile: airline passengers and the affective experiences of flight, Journal of Transport Geography (in press).
22.
BurkeP.BriggsA. (2000) A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press.
23.
CanzlerW.KaufmannV.KesselringS. (Eds) (2008) Tracing Mobilities: Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective. Farnham: Ashgate.
24.
CastellsM. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
25.
CramptonJ. W. (2009) Cartography: maps 2.0, Progress in Human Geography, 33(1), pp. 91–100.
26.
CrangM. (2000) Public space, urban space and electronic space: would the real city please stand up?, Urban Studies, 37(2), pp. 301–317.
27.
CrangM.GrahamS. (2007) Sentient cities: ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space, Information, Communication and Society, 10(6), pp. 789–817.
28.
CrangM.CrosbieT.GrahamS. (2006) Variable geometries of connection: urban digital divides and the uses of information technology, Urban Studies, 43(13), pp. 2551–2570.
29.
CrangM.CrosbieT.GrahamS. (2007) Technology, timespace and the remediation of neighbourhood life, Environment and Planning A, 39, pp. 2405–2422.
30.
Cranny-FrancisA.HawkinsC. (2008) Wearable technology, Visual Communication, 7(3), pp. 267–270.
31.
CresswellT. (2010) Towards a politics of mobility, Environment and Planning D, 28, pp. 17–31.
32.
DeleuzeG. (1990) Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle, in Pourparlers 1972–1990. Paris: Minuit.
33.
DenisJ.PontilleD. (2010) Petite sociologie de la signalétique. Paris: Presses des mines ParisTech.
34.
DennisK. (2008) Keeping a close watch: the rise of self-surveillance and the threat of digital exposure, The Sociological Review, 56(3), pp. 347–357.
FentonN. (2008) Mediating hope: new media, politics and resistance, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(2), pp. 230–248.
37.
FoucaultM. (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon.
38.
FoucaultM. (1977/2004) Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978. Paris: Gallimard-Seuil.
39.
GarfinkelH. (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
40.
GarrisonW. L.LevinsonD. M. (2006) The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment. New York: Oxford University Press.
41.
GibsonJ. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Perception. Boston, MA: Haughton Mifflin.
42.
GrahamS. (2004) The software-sorted city: rethinking the ‘digital divide’, in: GrahamS. (Ed.) The Cybercities Reader, pp. 324–331. London: Routledge.
43.
GrahamS. (2005) Software-sorted geographies, Progress in Human Geography, 29(5), pp. 562–580.
44.
GrahamS.ThriftN. (2007) Out of order: understanding repair and maintenance, Theory Culture & Society, 24(3), pp. 1–25.
45.
GreenfieldA. (2006) Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
46.
HaggertyK.EricsonR. (2000) The surveillant assemblage, British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 605–622.
47.
HansonS.GiulianoG. (Eds) (2004) The Geography of Urban Transportation. New York: Guilford Press.
48.
HarveyD. (2008) The right to the city, New Left Review, 53, pp. 23–40.
49.
IvesonK. (2009) The city versus the media? Mapping the mobile geographies of public address, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(1), pp. 241–245.
50.
JensenO. B. (2009) Flows of meaning, cultures of movements: urban mobility as meaningful everyday life practice, Mobilities, 4(1), pp. 139–158.
51.
JosephI. (1998) La ville sans qualités. La Tour-d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube.
52.
KeelingD. J. (2009) Transportation geography: local challenges, global contexts, Progress in Human Geography, 33(4), pp. 516–526.
53.
KwanM.-P. (2007) Mobile communications, social networks, and urban travel: hypertext as a new metaphor for conceptualizing spatial interaction, The Professional Geographer, 59(4), pp. 434–446.
54.
LahlouS. (2008) Identity, social status, privacy and face-keeping in digital society, Social Science Information, 47(3), pp. 299–330.
55.
LashS. M.UrryJ. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage.
56.
LefebvreH. (1974/1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
57.
LefebvreH. (1991) Les illusions de la modernité, Le Monde diplomatique-Manière de voir, 13, pp. 14–17.
58.
LefebvreH. (1996) Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.
59.
LöfgrenO. (2008) Motion and emotion: learning to be a railway traveller, Mobilities, 3(3), pp. 331–351.
60.
LüdersM. (2008) Conceptualizing personal media, New Media & Society, 10(5), pp. 683–702.
61.
LynchK. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
MannS.NolanJ.WellmanB. (2003) Sousveillance: inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments, Surveillance and Society, 1(3), pp. 331–355.
64.
ManovichL. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
MarcuseP. (1995) Not chaos, but walls: postmodernism and the partitioned city, in: WatsonS.GibsonK. (Eds) Postmodern Cities and Spaces, pp. 243–253. Oxford: Blackwell.
67.
MasseyD. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
68.
MasseyD. (2005) For Space. London: Sage.
69.
MasseyD. (2007) World City. Cambridge: Polity.
70.
McCulloughM. (2007) New media urbanism: grounding ambient information technology, Environment and Planning B, 34, pp. 383–395.
71.
MitchellW. J. (2003) Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge: MIT Press.
72.
OhtaY.TamuraH. (Eds) (1999) Mixed Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. New York: Springer.
73.
PiconA. (2008) Toward a city of events: digital media and urbanity, New Geographies, 0, pp. 32–43.
74.
SampsonR. J. (2009) Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited, The British Journal of Sociology, 60(1), pp. 1–31.
75.
ScanlanJ. (2004) Trafficking, Space and Culture, 7(4), pp. 386–395.
76.
SchiefelbuschM. (2010) Rational planning for emotional mobility? The case of public transport development, Planning Theory, 9(3), pp. 200–222.
77.
SennettR. (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. London: Faber & Faber.
78.
SimmelG. (1908) Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
79.
SinclairI. (2002) London Orbital. London: Granta Books.
80.
SloterdijkP. (2005) Ecumes. Paris: Hachette.
81.
de Souza e SilvaA. (2006) From cyber to hybrid: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces, Space and Culture, 9(3), pp. 261–278.
82.
StavridesS. (2010) Toward the City of Thresholds. Trento: professionaldreamers.
83.
TardeG. (1901/1989) L’opinion et la foule. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
84.
ThriftN. (2004) Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness, Economy and Society, 33(4), pp. 582–604.
85.
UrryJ. (2003) Social networks, travel and talk, British Journal of Sociology, 54(2), pp. 155–175.
86.
UrryJ. (2008) Moving on the mobility turn, in: CanzlerW.KaufmannV.KesselringS. (Eds) Tracing Mobilities: Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective, ch. 1. Farnham: Ashgate.
87.
VertegaalR.ShellJ. S. (2008) Attentive user interfaces: the surveillance and sousveillance of gaze-aware objects, Social Science Information, 47(3), pp. 275–298.
88.
VirilioP. (1977) Vitesse et politique: essai de dromologie. Paris: Galilée.
89.
VirilioP. (1988) La machine de vision. Paris: Galilée.
90.
WacquantL. (2007) Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality, Thesis Eleven, 91, pp. 66–77.
91.
WallaceA. (2009) Mapping city crime and the new aesthetic of danger, Journal of Visual Culture, 8(1), pp. 5–24.
92.
WattsL. (2008) The art and craft of train travel, Social & Cultural Geography, 9(6), pp. 711–726.
