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Thursday, November 10
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MEC02
Method(ologie)s in the Study of Urban Communication
G. Aiello
1
1
University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom
The panel focuses on how to conceptualise and investigate forms and practices of urban communication in an age of pervasive digital mediation, smart
mobiles and networked mobilities. At the same time, we direct attention to the city itself as a spatially multilayered yet palpably material and multisensory
environment of communication and (inter)action. Our aim is to illustrate the variety of methods used in this burgeoning field of study and to call for a more
systematic discussion concerning related methodologies and their implications. Based on the dual focus of urban communication activities, on the one
hand, and of the city as a material medium, on the other hand, we highlight the epistemological commitments of different methodological takes. Moreover,
we illustrate what concrete methods have been and could be used in investigating, for example, spatial urban rhetoric, mediatedmodes of urban interaction
and self-presentation, uses of mobile and ambient media in urban space and people’s activities as urban audiences, publics or activists. By way of com‑
parison and joint reflection, we hope to expose major methodological challenges and discuss the fruitfulness of diverse approaches in the study of urban
communication in all its contemporary mediated diversity. With regard to enhancing methodological self-reflection and elaborating sensitive methods
for urban communication research, our panel expresses a dialogical orientation towards several other disciplines or disciplinary fields. Among the most
pertinent are urban geography, urban sociology, urban anthropology, mobility studies and science and technology studies (STS).While emphasising the ne‑
cessity and potentials of multi- and interdisciplinarity, we also seek to address the intricacies that crossing disciplinary borders entail.
PN 082
Decentering Media Studies for the Analysis of Urban Audience Activities
S. Ridell
1
, S. Tosoni
2
1
University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
2
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
Media studies scholars are ever more forcefully invited to address the pervasive digital mediation and its consequences in contemporary cities, together
with researchers from human geography, urban studies, science and technology studies, and mobility studies. Current studies of people’s uses of media in
urban space, in particular, could play a central role in shedding light on the mediatedness of urban daily life. Drawing on a review of research that focuses on
media use within the broader field of“urban media studies,”we argue in our presentation that participation of media studies scholars in the interdisciplinary
endeavor runs the risk of being hindered by overly media-centric methodological procedures. Their restrictive implications are most problematic in the tak‑
en-for-granted employment of“urban audience”and“urban media user”as key concepts in the study of how people relate to the digitalised urban environs
and how they use media in urban space. What we propose instead is to demarcate the research object by proceeding from the primary importance of urban
practices. This methodological decentering of media necessitates the“verbing”of the notion of audience, thereby shifting the research focus to the activity
of “audiencing” (media-related or not) and its interrelations with other urban activities. Conceiving of ‘audience’ as one specific mode of urban activity, in
turn, affords us to better capture the simultaneous diversity and power-relatedness of public life in contemporary multispatial cities.
PN 083
Near and Far: Recalibrating Ethnographies of Urban Media
S. Rodgers
1
1
University of London, London, United Kingdom
Recent research on media and cities has become firmly anchored on the turn to studying media as situated experience, or practices. Such a shift in focus
– where media research moves on from discrete media (i.e. texts, forms, technologies) towards exploring the mediated ensembles of everyday practical
situations – has invited renewed and reimagined urban media ethnographies. Studying urban media, it seems, is now almost axiomatically about studying
the experience of “technological environments rather than individual artefacts”(Gunkel and Taylor, 2014, p. 2). This paper applauds such a shift. Yet it also
sounds a cautionary note regarding its most apparent methodological blind spot: an implicit prioritization of ‘ordinary,’ ‘everyday,’ ‘routine’ media uses.
The problem with such a methodological prioritization is that urban spaces are more than complex media environments for daily experience. They are
also environments constituted by the layered agencies of organizations, professions, technical systems, codes and infrastructures. A city is not a singular
machine, but can be seen as a constantly mutating 'mechanosphere' (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 78) that is both fragmented, distributed and unpredictable as
well as organized, ordered and strategic. This paper argues for a recalibration of ethnographic approaches to urban media and mediation, so as to find new
ways to think about the urban settings of media production in particular. Media production is more than just the origin of media experienced elsewhere.
It is a form of media experience in its own right, as generative of the urban 'mechanosphere' as everyday motilities of media-in-use, meriting its own
ethnographic attention. But such a recalibration implies more than a demand for added ethnographic attention to urban media production sites. It sug‑
gests an expanded and retuned form of ethnography able to not only provide rich accounts of that which is ‘near’– the fine grain of situated urban media
environments – but also that which is ‘far’– the dispersed social and technical spaces brought into play through such practical environments. Drawing on
a recent small-scale study, I provide a modest example of what such a near and far urban media ethnography might involve. In summer 2015, I conduct‑
ed four walking-whilst-talking interviews with ‘hyperlocal’ media practitioners, whose experiments with location-based media had been funded within
the first round of UK charity Nesta’s Destination Local programme. In each case, we conversed during a walk through the local area related to their project,
and after a subsequent seated conversation, I retraced the walk alone, taking photos and making reflective notes. Before and after these walking interviews,
I undertook extensive desk-based research into a substantial volume of reports, studies, blog commentaries, social media contributions and video related to
Destination Local, and conducted in-depth interviews with programme consultants and managers. I will highlight how, in combining intimate with more
remote ethnography, I was to provide an account of urban media production as not only consisting in tacitly experienced or explicitly named place, but also
a geographically-dispersed and technological-layered UK hyperlocal media space.