Place, Space, and Mediated Communication: Exploring Context Collapse

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication explores how new communications technologies are able to disrupt our spatial understanding, and in so doing, reorganize the boundaries of human experience: a phenomenon that can rightly be described as ‘context collapse’.

Individual essays investigate ‘context collapse’ in a variety of geographical and temporal settings, including: the US drone war in Pakistan, social media and sexuality in Paris, privacy and privilege in Brazil, and videogames and resistance in Iran. This cross-disciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how communication and space are co-constituted, and models exciting new paths of inquiry for researchers.

Place, Space, and Mediated Communication is suitable for students and scholars of media and communication studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and sociology.

Carolyn Marvin is the Frances Yates Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of When Old Technologies Were New (1988) and Blood Sacrifice and the Nation (1999).

Sun-ha Hong is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His work investigates how new media and its data become invested with ideals of precision, objectivity, and truth through apparently non-rational means. His upcoming book is titled Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty.