engleski

Exploring the sense of place in a mediated city: everyday encounters with urban screens and methodological site-specificity

In this paper I offer evidence, referring to daily rounds in mediated cities, which requires us to rethink claims that electronic representations of other spaces – such as those featured on a variety of urban screens in public urban spaces – generate a placeless world. My ethnographies of interaction with advertising screens, installation art and media façades at four sites (a street, a square, underground transport and a promenade) in London (UK) and Zadar (Croatia), suggest that passers-by develop intimate knowledge of screens (technology, contents, mode of address) and, on repeated encounters, ‘domesticate’ screens as integral pieces of street furniture. Users repurpose screens in ways unimagined by their designers. Screens are given lasting, locally relevant roles, such as points of escapism, sources of street light or pieces of décor. As images keep changing regardless of pedestrians’ responses, local users keep glancing at screens so as to maintain familiarity with quotidian surroundings. In the end of my paper I suggest that this continuing significance of place in mediated cities is also a methodological one. Pursuing a situated study of the mediated sense of place requires considering a variety of situations (rushing, mingling, waiting) and thus developing site- specific sets of methods (rhythmanalysis, ‘walking diary’, covert and participant observation).

media ; place ; screen ; everyday life ; phenomenological geography ; domestication ; situational uses

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