In his paper “Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life“, Stephen Graham interestingly proposes six starting points in analyzing the remediation of urban life, aimed at new media research:

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1. Stress continuities with discontinuities: new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and infrastructures and spaces
2. The need for a ‘spatial turn’: urban places as dominant hubs of new media activity: new media research needs to engage much more powerfully with the complex intra-urban and inter-urban geographies that so starkly define the production, consumption and use of its subject artefacts, technologies and practices.
3. Excavating the material bases of new media: needs to excavate the often invisible and hidden material systems that bring the supposedly ‘virtual’ domains and worlds of new media into existence.
4. Centre on contingency: generalizations about new media and cities, and the invocation of deterministic metaphors such as the ubiquitous ‘impact’, is hazardous to say the least (…) a wide range of relations are likely to exist between new media and urban structures, forms, landscapes, experiences and the cultural particularities of different urban spaces and times.
5. Banalization and the ‘production of the ordinary’: new media have stopped being ‘new’ in the sense that they have already ‘produced the ordinary’ (…) This process of banalization is nothing new.
6. Address the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power: be acutely conscious of the growing invisibility of sociotechnical power in contemporary societies.

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Why do I blog this? my favorite is certainly the 3rd one and I personally think that there is a very interesting vector or research along these lines. Surely something from the near future laboratory.

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