Abstract
When we move from a place and it is no longer regularly accessible to us, its value and significance become either consciously realized in a way that wasn’t the case when it was taken-for-granted, or considerably deepened because of the loss and the feelings of regret or yearning that accompany this loss. Place in this respect signifies attachment to a very particular spatial area, or to what commonly occurs in that area. It is only when that area becomes closely familiar to us that it constitutes itself as a place and we develop a specific sense of it as a place. We can see from this that place and mobility mutually interact in various different ways on various different scales. The question which then follows is how technologically mediated forms of communication contribute to and exert influence over this relationship.
Shaun Moores’ book addresses this question, and in doing so offers a critical synthesis of important theoretical perspectives on media, mobility and place. There are three main chapters in the book. In the first, Moores attends to the relationship between physical locations where we engage in face-to-face interpersonal encounters with those who are co-present with us, and the social environments created by communications media which permit access to and encounters with those who are physically absent from us. It may be a telephone conversation or participation in a chatroom, with attenuation from these kinds of two-way communication in the realm of parasocial interaction where there may be a felt sense of intimacy at a distance but also a concomitant loss of reciprocity. Moores discusses such phenomena initially via a critique of Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place and then through a consideration – with various examples from ‘old’ and ‘new’ media – of Scannell’s concept of the ‘doubling’ of situations or places through media use. Moores sees this, quite rightly, as a preferable alternative to Meyrowitz’s media-centric claims about placelessness.
The second chapter is the longest in the book, and the most important one in the development of Moores’ argument about the relationship between media, place and mobility. In it, he reviews various phenomenological approaches including Yi-Fu Tuan’s conception of place as experientially accomplished and known, Michel de Certeau’s pragmatics of everyday life, Nigel Thift’s non-representational theory and Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective. What brings these various approaches together is a shared concern with meaning as not being attached by the mind to objects in the world, but as arising from mundane activities and the closely aligned ways in which people engage practically with the lived contexts of their everyday lives. The perspective on familiar space which Moores develops stands in contrast with cognitive and representational approaches. He develops this in order to give fuller recognition to the sensuous and affective qualities of practices and of everyday environments – the many ways in which we inhabit the world before we represent it.
This is clearly of considerable benefit for the understanding he seeks to build of media uses as place-constituting activities, and it is usefully extended into his discussion of practical know-how and embodied dispositions in everyday life. Inter alia, the discussion takes him through summary outlines of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, and David Seamon’s everyday environment experience (Moores sees Seamon’s work as pioneering, and in need of re-evaluation). The major purpose in running through various different perspectives on the relations of habitus and habitat is that they help to establish how those who inhabit an environment make it familiar, with place-bearing qualities, through the embodied practices that are embedded in their mundane living. These include media uses and technologically mediated mobility, for these are themselves constitutive of places. Mobility is further explored in the third chapter, which focuses on transnational mobilities and the local/global intersections in which communications media play a central role. Here Moores surveys the relevant work of James Clifford, Arjun Appadurai, Doreen Massey, Manual Castells, and perhaps most significantly, John Urry.
Throughout the book Moores shows how the media have become integral to the experience of place, but the broader argument he develops is for a decentring of attention to symbolic representation and cognitive interpretation in media studies. Insofar as this will result in richer and more rounded forms of analysis, it is obviously to be welcomed, and Moores puts the case for it well in terms of his chosen focus on media, place and mobility. Whether it would be as valuable, or indeed as relevant, in relation to other topics and areas of enquiry remains to be seen. But the main problem with the book is its failure to recognize the significance of time, temporality, historical movement and change. What media, place and mobility are, or are taken to be, are not static but mutate and are modified over time. They do so at different rates and according to different rhythms, but they do not stand still or remain identical from one period to the next. Paying at least some attention to the temporal and historical dimensions of place and mobility would have given the book another, quite different perspective to set alongside those which have given it a rewarding interdisciplinary mix.