The Mediated Urban – Our Idea

Now you know who we are, two girls who study humangeography, who like to go out meet friends and enjoy city live. In this blog we would like to talk with you about a big topic of our studies – the urban, media and urban society. Who doesn’t want to know what is happening around you, how things are connected and what is changing?

Human geography looks at society and space. Space and place are important elements. Geographers are broadly positioned. What is important is, that themes are approached from different perspectives and that a critical look reveals many a novelty. In order not to lose the point, because of the variety of topics and complex interactions, we like to orientate us on the quadrant of Paul Adams.

The illustration shows the four quadrants from Paul Adams. With an example for each field i will explain his concept.

• A newspaper where it is written about a special place (e.g. Germany won a Gold medal in Singapore) is an example for place in media. In our blog we will talk for example about different paces and how media can create certain images.
• Media in Place, we will look at advertisement and how media change or characterise places.
• Space in media means for example a connection in social media. If someone is chatting in Facebook or with his/her mobile phone. We will talk about what can happen with space through media.
• Lastly Media in space is for example google maps or any other navigation system. It shows a distance from one to another space.

Media in space and space in media connects and influence each other. The same with media in place and place in media. And also space and place are linked to each other. That is why it is important to look at all of the sections in different perspectives.
We would like to lead you through our blog by using this schemata.

This blog is built on the key question of “How does the urban gets produced by people/society and media?”.

Firstly if we are talking about media that term contains a wide range of products and services. It can be approached as a medium which transport information and images. For instance photographs, television, music, podcasts, movies, video games and many more.
Furthermore, it is always accompanied with a process of mediation. That means an images are getting produced by mediated content through these media products and services. Our focus is the interplay of the urban in relation with the society and media, because medialization changes society and urban spaces.

What is mediatization?
The word Mediatization contains several aspects:
Communication is deeply intertwined in a process of mediatization (mediated communication, media-related communication, emergence of media culture, mediatized forms of communication). Each part itself and especially all together are influencing cultural and social entities worldwide. New media is launched and spreads rapidly around the globe, accompanied with changing demands and expectations and media usage. Mediatization, is a concept which describes the changes in reference to media as well as its consequences and impact on societies. (cf. Friedrich 2014)

What do we mean if we talk about the urban?
Wirth (1938) defines the city through the people who live there, because that is what makes a city. The coexistence and interaction of people in a small space who have a similar lifestyle. So the urban is formed by people from society. This gives meaning to space. More and more differentiated we explain this to you in our next blog post.

And where is the importance of media in scientific field of human geography? Because more than half of the world population is living in cities. Media and the mediated urban are effecting how people live together (society), how the urban is getting produced through different types of media applications. Thus, it changes the perception of people due to the mediated information about places. It plays an important role in forming the urban setting and the movements inside it. As well as it changes the perception of people due to the mediated information about places, ideas and images.

We will lead you with varies topics through our four main chapters and hope you enjoy reading.

Forming the Urban

Media’s Influence on Urban Space

Urban Space as driving force of Change

Growing Influence of Media in Cities

References:

• Adams P. C. (2009): Geographie of Media and Communication
• Adams P. C. (2011): A Taxonomy for Communication Geography; Progress in Human Geography, 35 (1), 37-57.
• Adams P., Craine J., Dittner J. (2014): Introduction: Geographies of Media
• Wirth, L. (1938): Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1–24. Table