Spatial media/tion

Abstract

This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as 'spatial media' to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives of 'virtual'-'real' spatial hybrids by instead understanding spatiality (as the nexus of material sociospatio-technical relations) as always-already mediated -i.e. as the ontogenetic effects of the contingent, necessarily incomplete comings-together of technical presences, persons, and space/place.

Digital turn, digital geographies?

“…These spatial media are having profound effects on the production of space/spatiality, mobility, and knowledge politics. As geographic spaces are being evermore complemented with various kinds of georeferenced and real-time data (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011; (Zook and Graham, 2007), net locality (Gordon and de Souza e Silva, 2011), augmented reality , and mediated spatiality (Leszczynski, 2015b). Spatial media mediate social encounters within spaces and provide different ways to know and navigate locales, enabling on-the-fly scheduling of meetings and serendipitous encounters.…”

“…The necessity for geographers to continue to move between enrolling the digital within critical geographic praxis whilst simultaneously engaging digitally-mediated knowledges is imperative in a present characterized by the diversification, rampant commercialization, and pervasiveness of locative media (Leszczynski, 2015b;Wilson, 2012); and the rollout of digital archives and repositories (Offen, 2013). As digital platforms simultaneously deterritorialize labour practices and re-entrench spatially uneven patterns of the precarious positioning of workers in content and commodity chains that reflect global core-peripheries , we need to attend to the geographies produced by the digital.…”

Introduction: Spatial Big Data and everyday life

“…Yet the ''routine, taken-for granted'' presence of geocoded and geolocatable content (data) ''in homes, neighborhoods and communities'' (Dyck, 2005: 234)-or what Taylor et al (2014) alternatively call ''the street''-is entirely unprecedented by previous socio-technical geographic information technology assemblages, genres of techno-cultural productions, or praxes. From the scale of the city (Graham, 2013) to that of the street (Taylor et al, 2014) and increasingly reaching into the intimate spaces of the home (Speed and Luger, 2014), our physical, emotional, and imagined landscapes, as well as our experiences of these spaces, are constituted, augmented, and mediated by data (Leszczynski, 2015b).…”

La vía ecléctica de producción y consumo de datos espaciales

“…El software de los sistemas de información geográfica (GIS) y por extensión los relacionados con las tecnologías de información espacial, han cobrado un gran protagonismo como elemento de mediación (LESZCZYNSKI, 2014b). El GIS es simultáneamente un bien de producción y un medio de comunicación (SUI y GOODCHILD, 2003).…”