After 3 years of hard work I finally defended my Master’s thesis on August 20, 2014. I am very grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, and to the committee members Dr, Maureen Engel, and Dr. Stan Ruecker.
I am now Master of Arts in Humanities Computing with the thesis Mobile Media: New Mediations in the Urban Space.
You can download my thesis here: http://hdl.handle.net/10402/era.39842
Here is the abstract and the table of content:
Abstract
The development of Information and Communication Technologies during the second half of the twentieth century established an accelerated process digitizing cultural objects, transcoding analog information into digital data. As the speed of digital networks increases exponentially and the Internet spreads out beyond its imagined scope, we enter the information age and the process of globalization is consolidated. Digital media has become the central nervous system of contemporary society, and the recent popularization of mobile media has intensified the dynamic process of mediation and communication in post-modern society to the point of a paradigm change: from the monopoly of mass media culture, to decentralized transmissions in a post-mass media era.
These technologies shift the place of mediation, affecting the way society explores, perceives, and interacts with the physical space. As a result, mobile media become an important interface in the production of social space: a new type of hybrid space, composed of digital layers that overlap the physical environment, is produced. Some commentators claim that this raises serious privacy issues, pointing toward a world of absolute surveillance and social control. Conversely, tracking, control and surveillance are actions taken in the digital layer in order to interact with physical places, which can empower people, enhancing direct participation in society, as well as encouraging (re)appropriation of private and public spaces.
This thesis builds on sociological approaches and media studies theories to understand how intensive use of wireless communication systems in conjunction with digital networks enables massive participation in the production and distribution of information, resulting in a decentralization of social mediation processes. In other words, it exposes how mobile technology, its social relations, and the relationship with the material and symbolic world in contemporary society, is reforming mass media and redefining our perception and experience in everyday urban life, and reinforcing the importance of space and place in the development of sociability and the construction of people’s identity.
Table of Contents
Introduction
- Spatial Turn
- Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1: Space and Place
- Space
- Social Space
- Space Non-space
- Here and There
- Community
- Mobility
- Mapping
- Downtown
- The Urban Space
- Global Cities
- Urban Reappropriations
Chapter 2: The Crisis of Mass Media Culture
-
Spring: and so they are born.
- Mechanical Reproduction
- Separation of the Message from our Body
- Political use of Works of Art
-
Summer: let’s go out and play.
- Broadcasting
- Media as Mobilizing Power
- Simulations
-
Autumn: the sky is falling apart.
- Digitization
- Digital Media
- Remediations
- Rhizome
-
Winter: the future is yet to come.
- New Mediations
- Democratization
Chapter 3: Mobile Media and New Forms of Spatialization
- What are Mobile Media?
- Reading Devices
- Photographic Equipment
- Digital Mobile Media
- History
- Affordances
- Locative Media
- Spatial Embodiment
- Mapping and Representation of Space
- Urban Digital Annotation
- Locational Mobile Games
- Smart Mobs
Conclusion: Responsive Attitude and the Near Future
- Surveillance and Power
- New Forms of Spatialization
- Blasé Attitude
- Responsive Attitude
- New Heterotopias
- Mediations of Space and Digital Reappropriations