Geographies of media and communication I

Abstract

Media and communication are attracting increasing amounts of attention from geographers but the work remains disorganized and lacks a unifying paradigm. This progress report suggests a new paradigm for geographical studies of media and communication and indicates how recent research fits under this umbrella. The report presents recent studies of literature, film and television, digital media, photography, comics, stamps and banknotes. The range of theoretical concerns in this body of work includes performance, agency, materiality, immateriality, networks, politics, emotions and affect. Collectively, these concerns point to communications not merely as transmissions through infrastructure, space and time, but rather as encounters between various human and nonhuman agents. The metaphysical question is exactly what such encounters do to participants – how agents are transformed by other agents’ communications. This leads to synthesis in a new paradigm for media/communication geography: the metaphysics of encounter.