Geographies of media and communication I

I Introduction

Human geographies are dynamic processes of becoming rather than static patterns. The relative degree of interest in pattern versus process varies across the discipline. Patterns are often ontologically primary, whether articulated in terms of spaces, places, locations, regions, points, lines, areas, landscapes, landforms, land covers, land uses, or otherwise. In contrast, process-oriented approaches give ontological priority to flows, whether of people (e.g. studies of migration and mobility), non-human organisms (e.g. animal movement pattern analysis), energy (e.g. ecology), water (e.g. fluvial geomorphology), capital (e.g. world system theory), or combined flows (e.g. the world city hypothesis). Mobility has attracted sufficient attention in recent years to constitute a new paradigm (Sheller and Urry, 2006) with formidable proponents in geography (Adey, 2009; Cresswell, 2006). Scholars have worked to interrelate multiple flows including flows of people, capital, commodities, technology, media and ideology (Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1999, 2011, 2013; Christophers, 2009; Johnston et al., 2002; Sassen, 2005). Media and communication remain the most elusive flows within these synthetic models, and likewise geographical theories focusing on media and communication fall short of articulating a new processual, flow-based paradigm.

The disorganized and hesitant nature of media and communication research in geography may have to do with a surfeit of inspiration from outside the discipline. Communication issues have been exhaustively treated by scholars in media theory, journalism, mass communication, speech and rhetoric, anthropology, sociology, linguistics and philosophy. Geographers’ response to this embarras de richesses has been to dabble at random in the cognate disciplines. What is missing is a new communication paradigm, an approach rivaling the coherence of the new mobilities paradigm.

Despite these shortcomings, in regard to volume and scope geographical studies of media and communication are flourishing and building stronger bridges to cognate disciplines. A specialty that, as late as the 1990s, was essentially ‘invisible’ (Hillis, 1998) now cuts a distinct profile. Well over 200 articles and chapters focusing on media and communication have appeared in the geographic literature over the past decade. The relevant interests are now summarized in several edited volumes and a textbook (Adams, 2009; Adams et al., 2014; Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006; Lukinbeal and Zimmerman, 2008; Mains et al., 2015). While this corpus demonstrates the particularly enduring commitment by geographers to the study of literature, film, television and the internet, many other media are garnering attention at this point, including radio, billboards, road signs, graffiti, postage stamps, social media, virtual reality and videogames (Ash, 2015; Cronin, 2008; Finn, 2014; Hillis, 2009; Jones and Merriman, 2009; Pinkerton and Dodds, 2009; Raento, 2006; Warf, 2014). One can also see new theoretical emphases in studies of both old and new media including participation and performance, embodiment and affect, human and nonhuman agency, and the ontological tensions between materiality and immateriality. Despite interest in nonrepresentational theory (Thrift, 2008), questions of representation are, if anything, increasingly central to geographical scholarship, but discussions quite often extend beyond representation to include a range of new theoretical interests clustered around the idea that communication is not merely the transmission of ideas and information between places and between agents. Communication is also an event in which two or more agents encounter each other and come away altered by the event, slightly or substantially.

I would suggest that an emerging paradigm of media/communication geography is the idea of a metaphysics of encounter. The encounters in question can occur between humans and other humans, between humans and non-humans, or exclusively between non-humans (Adams, 2016). These encounters occur both in place and out of place, as well as within and beyond the bounds of what we conventionally recognize as ‘the media’, and they are perplexingly both mundane and transformative. ¹

This report deals with the newer contributions to the geographic study of media and communication. Questions of cartography, mapping and the creative arts will be set aside for later reports where I will consider how the study of media and communication intersects with other geographical interests and how geographical communication is evolving. The media under consideration in this first report include literature and film, which have garnered a respectable body of geographical scholarship over more than two decades. They also encompass photography, comics, stamps and banknotes, which have been more sparsely studied. Finally, I consider digital media, which have burst onto the scene since the 1990s with research emphases such as social media, virtuality, crowd-sourced databases, surveillance and videogames.

II Literary and cinematic geographies

In the 1970s and 1980s geographers showed that literature not only reflects but also fosters multiple senses of space and place, at scales ranging from the dwelling to the region (Pocock, 1988; Porteous, 1985; Tuan, 1978). Literary writings were embraced as a lens on distant times and places, their authors treated as unusually sensitive observers yet also representative of their less articulate peers. Poets and novelists were celebrated, in a parallel move, as exemplars for evocative geographical writing.

Literature continues to attract geographical attention, but with increasing interest in embodiment, affect, agency, materiality and ethics. Research now moves beyond familiar questions of semiosis and mimesis to explore material, embodied, and emotional dimensions of what Tomaney calls the ‘art of belonging’ (2010: 312). This move is partly a matter of asking how literature is appropriated, with attention to the variety of audiences and readings, and it is also partly about the ‘multiplication and turbulence of matter’ (Groves, 2011: 474). It now seems that it may be helpful to credit word assemblages with material qualities: ‘porous, spongy: [a good poem] knows of the erosions, to which it exposes itself’ (Celan quoted in Groves, 2011: 469). This material sensibility in turn suggests that when studying a poem the geographer’s purpose may no longer be ‘to cover the familiar ground of “sense-of-place”’ but rather ‘to explore how the poem is a kind of place and the way in which poems create space and place through their very presence on the page’ (Cresswell, 2015: 3).

In contrast to this new sense of materiality, there is also a ‘spectral’ literature that sounds the depths of literature’s immaterial, intangible qualities. Here we find ‘suspicion towards the claims of reason’ and disavowal of easy assumptions about presence and absence (Matless, 2008: 339, 350). This is not to say that literature necessarily deals with subjects whose presence is ghostly and insubstantial, but more subtly that literature converts ‘reality into fantasy…[Telling] lies that bizarrely tell the truth, that invent new truths, that lay bare truths we somehow relate to, almost instinctively, almost without being able to really see them’ (Merrifield, 2009: 381). Thus, literature is riven with ontological paradoxes of materiality and immateriality that went unrecognized by earlier geographical studies.

Much new geographical writing has to do with performance, and this interest is present as well in studies of literature. Place, region, and dwelling are translated into and out of narratives through performative social action (Prokkola and Ridanpää, 2011: 776). Writing serves as ‘a means of expressing an embodied, affective geopolitics’ that is empathetic and passionate rather than analytical and dispassionate (Madge, 2014: 179). But while ‘politics’ sometimes implies a strategic, objectifying mode of thought, this work puts the focus on the subject rather than the object, on moments of verbal communication that connect feeling agents to other feeling agents and build strategic alliances. This suggests that there is no representation without performance, and it makes no sense to separate signification processes from the embodied, emotional agents who achieve these processes. Current geographical research is therefore building on decades of interest in literature, expanding from questions of representation to paradoxes of the verbal encounter. These issues imply there are multiple spaces and places in and of the written word, ranging from material to spectral, political to emotional, objective to subjective.

We turn next to film – a topic at the forefront of early interest in geographies of media and communication (e.g. Aitken and Zonn, 1994). Geographers are extending this work but using ‘film’ to mean something more than it meant two decades ago. Some borrow film analyses of non-geographers and juxtapose them with findings from their own fieldwork (McFarlane, 2008), some borrow theories from outside the discipline and reinterpret them in light of a geographical sensibility (Dixon and Jones, 2015; Dodds, 2006), and others seek distinctly geographical theories and modes of analysis (Farish, 2005). Film geography still engages with space and place in ways that are relatively straightforward, like Lukinbeal’s (2012) study of the distribution of film-making sites in San Diego County, but there is a shift to conceive of more complex relationships, for example the causal links between film noir and suburbanization (Farish, 2005), or how practices of cinematic appropriation demonstrate audience ‘dispositions’ (Dodds, 2006). Even more elusive theoretical terrain unfolds if we investigate the ‘tactile topology’ of film (Dixon and Jones, 2015). Here the space created by touch (in Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion for example) is more easily understood in terms of topology than topography, a space ‘defined by its capacity to dissolve boundaries, to make proximate that which was far away, and, in doing so, not only rearrange our meta-physics of intimacy and distance, but also endanger any and all systems of order that rely upon distinction and separation’ (Dixon and Jones, 2015: 227). Similarly, a film can serve as an ‘event site’ where a ‘point of excess’ overturns the visual order with its overlooked aspects; in Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E, the robot WALL-E overcomes his own invisibility relative to an ‘inapparent’ or unseen power in an environment that promotes passivity, by acting autonomously as a bearer of life (Shaw, 2010). Such work reveals an evolution from studies that treat films as audio-visual objects that contain meanings, to studies that consider films as spaces of multisensory engagement defined by actors onscreen and off. It now appears that some of the most important filmic encounters happen beyond the conventionally understood bounds of the medium.

One can still detect a deeply established effort in cinematic geography to problematize the relationship between the reel (filmic worldview) and the real (world outside film). But geographers increasingly draw questions about production networks, audience engagement, affect, and political appropriation into their analyses. This is exemplified by Mohammad’s study of how Bollywood films rework Indian national space vis-à-vis the embodied, affective spaces of audiences inside and outside of India: ‘Hindi cinema performs the national and as a key player in the scripting of the nation shapes its meaning, signifying its internal and external borders’ (2007: 1020). The dynamic appropriation and articulation of nationalism is also addressed in Glynn and Cupples’ (2015) study of the television program Commander in Chief, although here it is methodologies of feminist discourse analysis that help reveal the program’s involvement in unsettling or queering what seems self-evident about political power. Even a single movie scene can point beyond the screen to social practices and relations, for example through ‘a reflexive aesthetic effect that forces the cinema audience to ask introspective ethical questions of how to appropriately respond as witness to interracial urban violence’ (Andersson, 2013: 704).

All of this work foregrounds the audience and its appropriations. The same move has been evident when some actors (both onscreen and off) are non-humans: in a sense ‘animals are kept fluid and alive’ by spectators of nature documentaries who are alternately sentimental, curious, sympathetic, disconcerted and awestruck by what they see (Lorimer, 2010: 252). In short, new work in cinematic and televisual geography does not deny the importance of representation, but it situates representational concerns within a broad and complex space of encounter extending in front and behind various cameras, in front and behind various screens, involving a growing array of ‘actors’.

III Geographies of banal media

While it is impossible to cover all of the less frequently-studied media, it is instructive to highlight media that are often viewed as banal. Such media are particularly important to geographers since scholarly attention to the ‘capillary functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1979: 198) has shown that cultural elements that are pervasive and taken-for-granted carry a subtle and insidious power. Examples of banal media include comics, photography, stamps and banknotes.

If cinematic geography has shown that people internalize perceptual habits from television and film, the images and text on the comic page take the reader to an alternate world with multiple, intersecting stories, each proceeding in its own space-time. Comics disrupt the ‘cinematic unconscious’ by offering radically different ways of constructing a four-dimensional narrative, and skilled comic readers know how to appropriate this visual-textual language and make sense of its various space-times (Dittmer, 2010: 223, 233). One demonstration of this is Building Stories, a box of comics by Chris Ware which articulates an urban assemblage in the form of tangled topologies and nonlinear connections among various human and nonhuman agents (Dittmer, 2014). Another example is Japanese shonen manga (comics for teen boys) which center on monsters that are not just scary looking, but also precipitate breaches of ontological propriety (Gallacher, 2011). These studies reveal the comic page as a space for vicariously re-embodied encounters occurring in radically disjointed time-spaces.

The urge to draw one’s own comics has enticed many children and even a few scholars. After attempting to include self-drawn comics in the book Growing up Global, Cindi Katz writes: ‘I fought hard…how about just one comic? But eventually I gave in. Made to feel like a precious lunatic, I let these little bits of deliciousness fall by the wayside, and conformed to the unitary register of storytelling in social science’ (2013: 769). Comics are open texts that invite audience interpretation and in her book they might have communicated something beyond the scope of ordinary academic discourse. But Katz’s editors seemingly judged them too unruly, too freakish or monstrous for academic discourse. This suggests the policing of the mediated spaces of academic encounter based on a fear that the unruly comic genre would contaminate and delegitimize the hierarchical virtual space of academic discourse.

Turning to photographs, new research reveals profound ontological challenges of the image. Despite its ordinariness, a photo is an enigma – a fluid space within a frozen surface. There are many ways of entering this enigmatic space of encounter. We can ask what happens when photographic images and words are juxtaposed (Heng, 2011), how photographs construct the invisible or unseen (Chari, 2009), how audience involvement with a photo exhibit can make incursions into intimate worlds (Brickell, 2014), how photographs flow through various places and times (Vasudevan, 2007), or how the act of capturing an image intervenes in place-making processes to foster beneficial encounters between photographers, subjects, and audiences (Loopmans et al., 2012). All of these approaches treat photographs as simultaneously immaterial images and material things, as hybrids or nexuses of relations. Photos are more-than-material performances; they are encounters full of affect and emotion (Hoelscher, 2014: 36).

When it comes to appreciating media that are marginalized in the academic literature because they seem too commonplace, Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism is particularly helpful. Jones and Merriman’s (2009) study of road signs in Wales finds a blurring of the distinction between banal (taken-for-granted) nationalism and hot (conflictual) nationalism as signs bearing English toponyms are defaced by Welsh nationalists. Other forms of banal nationalism include the iconography of postage stamps (Raento, 2006) and bank notes (Penrose, 2011). These studies all expose ways in which the processes creating and contesting national iconography depend on the intersecting agency of various individuals ranging from artists and graphic designers to postal workers and road crews, as well as ordinary citizens sending mail, driving the roads and buying goods. To reconnect the agency of these hidden actors, we must take care not to overlook the little things, like where and in what position a stamp is affixed to an envelope, what version of a place name is posted on a road sign, or which decorative elements are included around the edges of a banknote.

IV New media

Despite the scholarly merits of the previously mentioned research, the growing popularity of media/communication topics within geography is probably driven primarily by the diffusion of new digital technologies. There are at least six distinct reasons for extending communication geography in this direction: digital communication technologies increasingly guide and supplement mobility; place-based social networks are starting to replicate the logics of online networking; digital communications intervene in individual and collective memory formation; digitally-mediated practices promote borrowing, mixing, and interlinking diverse media and genres; digital representations provide new avenues to shift away from positivistic models of geographical reality; and, finally, it is ethically important to ask who encounters whom through digital media, in other words to revisit digital divides (Warf, 2013; Graham et al., 2014).

An important strand of digital media theory overlaps with cartography. New incarnations of the map are web-based and interactive, linked to social media as opposed to static, authoritative maps verified by authorities. The shift toward an ongoing, interactive cartographic practice – the map as an emergent space of digital encounter – goes hand in hand with a new ‘Web 2.0’ ontology of openness and multiplicity (Warf and Sui, 2010). New technologies may not make cartographic practice any less susceptible to bias and exclusion (Warf, 2013; Elwood et al., 2012: 583), but the rise of volunteered geographic information (VGI) has prompted a paradigm shift in notions of cartographic and geographic truth (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013; Kitchin, 2014).

While the participatory aspects of digital communication appear on the whole to be progressive in nature, digital communication presents a more ominous side as well. Bernard Stiegler’s concept of psychopower has been deployed to understand human-computer interactions as manipulating perception and entraining memory. As profits have been generated from the capture and control of attention by technologies such as computer games (Ash, 2015), as military intelligence is crowd-sourced (Pinkerton et al., 2011), and as people are trained to be ‘hyperattentive’ through the psychological and neurological conditioning in fast-paced, competitive types of virtual spaces, it is incumbent upon geographers to develop mediated interventions that cultivate a different kind of attention. This could mean replacing the intense immediacy of the gamer with a different kind of attention, one that recaptures the relationship between the attention and care (Wilson, 2015a: 187), a link indicated in the word attention, as it is derived from the Latin attendere, ‘to stretch toward, give heed to’. The struggle for audience attention has therefore suggested to some geographers that we are called on to intervene in the ways that digital media are reconstituting habits of memory, to cultivate the participatory quality of the digital interface, and to explore the political potential unleashed by playing with digital futures (Shaw and Sharp, 2013). Nonetheless, geographers must be cautious when using the data obtained from digital media. A comment from Wilson applies equally well to ‘big data’ as to any data obtained from digital media, VGI, or social media: ‘criticality in big data studies requires a duality similar to the technopositional stance of critical GIS – to both make critical use of big data and critically situate its provenance’ (Wilson, 2015b: 348).

By revealing more or less artificial spatial patterns and thereby creating more or less commodified interactions and activities, by multiplying data, by retraining the human sensory apparatus and brain to respond to new stimuli, or simply by packaging old data and stimuli in new ways, digital media pose a wide range of challenges that are psychological, political, ethical, and theoretical. Digital media are still media, however, and therefore they raise many of the questions raised for decades by geographers studying media and communication. These established concerns intersect with new, digital and networked ways of directing and training attention, propensities toward convergence, and the promises and perils of interactivity. All of this points again to the need to think in terms of a new paradigm structured around analysis of spaces of encounter.

V Conclusion

While providing only a glimpse of recent work in communication geography, this report has stressed what I see as the most salient emerging strands of inquiry: performance, agency, networks, politics, emotions and affect, materiality and immateriality. These trends can be connected, I suggest, by the idea of metaphysics of encounter. New work in communication geography is spiraling out from the conventional perspective of the representation as a thing, an object bearing meaning, to a newer sensibility of representation-as-practice, an ongoing process of making and remaking meaning. This paradigm shift embraces paradoxes of fantasy and deception, virtuality, psychopower, and unruly subjectivity.

Mediated communication no longer makes sense (if it ever did) in terms of the transmission of ideas and information – a model of interaction that assumes separation between actors. New theoretical shifts replace this model with the encounter. In the old metaphysics of encounter, people had to travel through space to temporarily occupy locations with other people and things in order for there to be an encounter (Hägerstrand, 1970). In the new metaphysics of encounter people engage with a wide range of different media and simultaneously encounter other people and things, near or far, still or mobile, perpetually redefining ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Spaces and places proliferate because of all of the differences in how communicational encounters can occur. From casual encounters between friends on social media which are slyly turned into marketable data (Wilson, 2015b: 347), to passionate and empowering encounters between authors and audiences (Madge, 2014), to disconcerting encounters between humans and non-humans (Dixon and Jones, 2014; Gallacher, 2011; Lorimer, 2010), to paradoxical encounters between symbols and matter (Groves, 2011; Vasudevan, 2007), to frustrating encounters between authors and editors (Katz, 2013), to vicariously-lived encounters between raced and gendered actors and the world (Anderson, 2013; Glynn and Cupples, 2015), the essence of mediated communication is the encounter – an infinitely malleable event. By focusing explicitly on the metaphysics of encounter, geographers with an interest in media and communication will be able to create new opportunities for analysis, empathy, and intervention.