Rethinking media space

Thinking about space today requires thinking about media space. It is difficult to imagine – (let alone experience) a space entirely beyond the reach of media. Media, whether as narratives, products, technologies, or practices, do not merely penetrate or occupy space. They produce and shape it. One could say that wherever we go, media follow, but the inverse would be just as accurate. As Couldry and McCarthy observe, ‘It is ever more difficult to tell a story of social space, without also telling a story of media, and vice versa’ (2004, 1). In telling those stories, they and others have noted that media space is anything but homogenous. Rather, it is constantly differentiated by modes of distribution and reception, legal issues, social norms, economic conditions, and geographical, topographical, and meteorological variables (to name only a few factors), which produce and address vastly different needs, understandings, and experiences.

The articles brought together in this special issue of Continuum indicate new, and perhaps unexpected, paths available to researching and theorizing the relationship between spatial conditions and mediated experience. In particular, they steadfastly explore the interpenetration of narrative spaces and the physical locations of production and exhibition in film, television, and music video to consider the potential impact on meaning, affect, and behaviour. This may seem like well-trodden and fully mapped ground, which is precisely the point. Scholarly discourse on media and space continues to grow and diversify, particularly around new media forms and networked, digital culture. The research presented here, in its focus on the intersection of established forms and public, collectively experienced spaces, demonstrates the continuing need to reconsider and revise accepted theories and histories of the relationship between the objects, products, and processes of the media and the spaces within which they are created, circulated, and consumed.

To varying degrees, recent studies of media's relationship to space as a range of heterogeneous practices occurring in a differentiated field owe a debt to the ‘spatial turn’ that marked theoretical models and research areas in the humanities and social sciences at the end of the twentieth century (Bhabha 1994; Soja 1996; Harvey 2001). That trend depended heavily on the writings of French critical theorists including Michel Foucault (1977, 1986), Michel de Certeau (1984), Henri Lefebvre (1991), and Paul Virilio (1991), all of whom explore the spatial characteristics of power relations, technological deployment, and the generation of meaning in post-industrial Western societies. Lefebvre's contention in The Production of Space that all social environments are culturally determined products remains a key tenet of this mode of thought. Written in the aftermath of the transnational revolutionary movements of May 1968, The Production of Space discards Euclidean and Cartesian theorizations of absolute space, elaborating instead a Marxist perspective extending from Immanuel Kant's conception of space as rooted in consciousness. For Lefebvre, physical, mental, and social space overlap and underpin each other (1991, 14). ‘The space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action’, he claims, ‘that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it’ (1991, 26).

Media, as industry and practice, have played an integral role in this process. Considering media space in the wake of Lefebvre, therefore, means not only addressing the terms of production and distribution, but also recognizing embodiment and diverse social conditions as part and parcel of the function and use of any contemporary mode of communication. This effort first developed within cultural studies, particularly in conjunction with cultural geography, post-colonialism, and urban studies (Warf and Arias 2009). It moved beyond hermeneutics and aesthetics of the text, mechanisms of sender-receiver transactions, and spectator or subject psychology to address the spatio-cultural and geographical specificities where these intersect.

Fortuitously or not, this change came amid radical transformations in our understanding and use of the media. This has meant a move in two directions when considering space in media studies and associated fields. The first privileges the transformative properties of decentred digital networks and mobile media, often with a paradoxical, centralizing bias towards a few ‘world cities’ such as New York, London, and Paris (Couldry and McCarthy 2004; McQuire, Martin, and Niederer 2009; Berry, Harbord, and Moore 2013). This inclination, while motivated by developments in global media since the turn of the century, may be seen as the heir to the simultaneous development in the 1990s of spatial studies, the worldwide web, correlated ideas of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘virtual’ space as potentially liberating spheres (Rheingold 1993; Mitchell 1995; Wertheim 1999; Dodge and Kitchin 2001), and the theorization of major cities as defining nodes of media globalization (Sassen 1991; Graham and Marvin 1996, 2001). In the shadow of post-2001 surveillance regimes and the 2008 global economic crisis, however, sanguine claims for networked, participatory media have ceded ground to inquiries into the role of convergence, crowd-sourced data labour, locative technologies, and associated phenomena in the increasing commodification of social interaction and community structures (Graham 2004; McCullough 2006; Varnelis and Friedberg 2008).

Diverging from this inquiry into the spatial parameters and cultural consequences of ‘new’ networked digital culture (now nearly twenty years old, after all), the second direction represents a resurgence in research on the spatial foundations and formations of ‘old’ media beyond the edges of the digital frame (McCarthy 2001; Berry, Kim, and Spigel 2010; Acland and Wasson 2011; Hallam and Roberts 2013). The articles united here follow in this vein, and their references acknowledge much of the new scholarship it has produced. By exploring the impact of space on producers and consumers of media products and delivery systems away from the familiar terrain of the global city or digital network, they bear affinities with the idea of ‘situated knowledges’ proposed by Haraway (1998). If, as she states, ‘Vision in the technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put forth the myth into ordinary practice’ (1998, 678), then these articles thicken vision and affirm situated bodies. They demonstrate the limits of all-encompassing myths, whether in theory, history, or contemporary media practices.

The opening contribution to this special issue, ‘Media as a spatial practice: Treme and the production of the media neighbourhood’ by Helen Morgan Parmett, examines the complex relationship between the production of space and the space of production in series-based television shot on location. Through the example of Treme, the HBO series set and shot in post-Katrina New Orleans, Morgan Parmett examines the political, social, and economic ramifications of production activity within specific spatio-cultural contexts of the neoliberal city. She argues for a critical approach to media space that is not limited to representations or consumption of the urban environment as narrative space, but rather addresses ways in which productions themselves will embody, intersect, and impact spatial practices of the city. By studying Treme's production strategy, New Orleans' plan for economic development, and neighbourhood participation in the series in material and labour terms, she contributes an exemplary analysis to the burgeoning field of production studies. Her research demonstrates how a production ‘takes up a position in and appropriates the daily practices, rhythms, and affects of neighbourhood space’ to create what she calls the ‘media neighbourhood’.

In ‘Visualizing place, representing age in hip-hop: converging themes in Scarface's “My Block”’, Murray Forman returns to neighbourhoods in problematizing ‘representing’ in hip-hop as it involves ideas of space, time, and identity. He asserts that theorizations of the relationship between artist, music, and the geographical specificity of the ‘hood – (already contested territory in hip-hop studies) should also take aging into consideration as the genre's first and second waves of artists mature. Describing what he calls ‘age representing’, Forman notes that ‘What we are witnessing in contemporary hip-hop is, thus, the rise of a new cartography of age and aging, a new means of charting social topography that facilitates the representation of hip-hop elderscapes’. Forman considers the codes of this shift through a close reading of Houston MC Scarface's 2002 recording ‘My Block’, and its accompanying video, within the frame of the artist's long and varied career. Forman underscores the sometimes tenuous relationship between the lyrics and the video's imagery (ostensibly shot on-location in the neighbourhood of Scarface's youth) as these meet in a visually seamless, mediatized representation of memory. Clearly demonstrating that the transformative effects of experience are already embedded within any understanding of representing, this study indicates the inherent complexity – and sustained potential – of the term, rather than any need to supplant it. In this way it implies intergenerational possibilities, manifested by ‘My Block’, for bridging hip-hop's growing age divide.

Amy Corbin's ‘Travelling through cinema space: the film spectator as tourist’ challenges established theories of the subject by recasting film watching as ‘spectatorial tourism’, a move that she claims ‘balances out the aspects of spectatorship that are about identification with an explanation for the appeal of displacement and exploration’. In her assessment, contexts of film exhibition and visual codes on screen can situate the viewer's subjectivity in ways that mimic the goals and mechanisms of packaged tourism, an assertion all the more provocative in the light of Morgan Parmett and Forman's considerations of socio-spatial media representations. Whether the viewer is mobile or fixed, in both film spectatorship and tourism she follows predetermined itineraries aimed at the production of ‘views’. Like watching the world from a tour bus, the potentially comforting, distancing effect of the cinema can transform even those places well known to the viewer into strange, unfamiliar locations. In revisiting film theories of embodiment and the mobilized gaze alongside key works from tourism studies and spatial theory, Corbin draws out salient references to space and spectatorship that would support this reading. Incorporating concepts of dwelling and mapping, while applying her theory to films as disparate as Broken Arrow and When Harry Met Sally, Corbin demonstrates that the ‘virtual travel’ of film entails fundamental processes that extend well beyond codes specific to moving image works centred on travel, such as documentaries and adventure films, to encompass a wide range of genres and narrative strategies.

The closing article on media space, Andrea Kelley's ‘From attraction to distraction: the Panoram machine and emerging modes of multi-sited screen consumption’, presents a neglected episode in the history of media distribution that highlights the recurrent difficulty of reconciling physical and narrative space. Kelley explores the history and ideology of the Panoram, a ‘film jukebox’ whose innovative commercial exploitation in 1940s America radically reconceived the role of audio-visual media in the social sphere. Kelley demonstrates how the Panoram's design and dissemination, as well as the images comprising its musical shorts – or Soundies, represent an important antecedent not only to broadcast television but also to contemporary mobile media and the codes of spatially constructed interactivity. Attempting to create new links between narrative space and viewers’ locations – (e.g. the barroom, hotel lobby, or train station) the Panoram sought to integrate the screen into multiple consumer spaces as an interface mediating the social relationships of the audience, much as television would in the private sphere. As Kelley shows, however, important discrepancies emerged between the narrative potential of the Soundie as audio-visual object on the one hand and the varying physical conditions of exhibition on the other. This difference mirrors the ‘dual responses of intrigue and of invisibility indicat[ing] certain ambivalences towards the Panoram’ that Kelley finds illustrated in the reflexivity of certain Soundies. Partly due to technological constraints (since each device held only eight Soundies), but also as a result of the device's ambiguous relationship to other media and the range of activities found in public spaces, the Panoram was an economic and cultural failure. Nonetheless, it introduced a new facet to ambient media and the commodification of space.

In many ways, our understanding of media culture's relationship to space, and how space may function as a medium in its own right, is still in its early stages. New epistemologies and practices, such as media archaeology, are fundamentally changing views on media's spatial properties throughout the historical record (Zielinski 2006; Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). The articles in this issue represent different subjects and approaches. Yet each demonstrates the need to consider media space in conjunction with other sociocultural factors, regardless of the specific medium, practice, or technology at hand. Hopefully, they indicate new paths of study while encouraging the elaboration and refinement of inherited theories and histories. At the very least, they should make clear not only the possibility but also the rewards of such an endeavour.

Acknowledgements

The editor wishes to thank the editorial board of Continuum, particularly Panizza Allmark, for their interest in, and support of, this project. He would also like to thank the peer reviewers and all those who participated in the Rethinking Media Space panel of the 2012 Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston, Massachusetts, for their helpful insights. He thanks Andrea Ciambra for lending the photograph that appears on the cover. Finally, he extends his gratitude to the contributors, who have demonstrated remarkable commitment to the project at every step.

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Notes on contributors

Stephen Monteiro

Stephen Monteiro is an assistant professor of media and visual studies at the American University of Paris, where he directs the Visual and Material Culture track of the Master of Arts in Global Communications. His writings on media and culture have appeared – or are forthcoming – in Screen, Grey Room, Photography & Culture, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Visual Resources, and Kritische Berichte, among other journals.