In his paper "Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life", Stephen Graham interestingly proposes six starting points in analyzing the remediation of urban life, aimed at new media research:
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- Stress continuities with discontinuities: new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and infrastructures and spaces
- The need for a ‘spatial turn’: urban places as dominant hubs of new media activity: new media research needs to engage much more powerfully with the complex intra-urban and inter-urban geographies that so starkly define the production, consumption and use of its subject artefacts, technologies and practices.
- Excavating the material bases of new media: needs to excavate the often invisible and hidden material systems that bring the supposedly ‘virtual’ domains and worlds of new media into existence.
- Centre on contingency: generalizations about new media and cities, and the invocation of deterministic metaphors such as the ubiquitous ‘impact’, is hazardous to say the least (...) a wide range of relations are likely to exist between new media and urban structures, forms, landscapes, experiences and the cultural particularities of different urban spaces and times.
- Banalization and the ‘production of the ordinary’: new media have stopped being ‘new’ in the sense that they have already ‘produced the ordinary’ (...) This process of banalization is nothing new.
- Address the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power: be acutely conscious of the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power in contemporary societies.
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Why do I blog this? my favorite is certainly the 3rd one and I personally think that there is a very interesting vector or research along these lines. Surely something from the near future laboratory.