Media Geography Sessions

Organizers: Chris Lukinbeal, James Craine

Specialty Group Sponsors: Communication Geography; Cultural Geography

These papers examine geographies of the various forms of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation. These sessions include contributions to current issues surrounding media, beginning with the construction of space and place, cultural, society, and identity. Media extends beyond representational bounds so papers envision these geographies as part of a broader industrial and political complex in which culture is an economic commodity set within the broader frame of a global and postmodern era. These papers seek to explore new links between cultural politics, cultural industries and our daily lived experiences; from our cities, to streets, to living rooms, to imaginations. Papers investigate the production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption of all types of media as well as the critical, pedagogical and discursive logic of representations.

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA I: GEOPOLITICS AND MEDIA

1. CHAIR: Jason Dittmer, Ezekiel’s Geographies: “Left Behind” and the Popular Geopolitics of the End of the World
2. James Craine, See Your West: Standard Oil Markets Manifest Destiny
3. Ryan McLemore, An Ocean of Ads: The Dual Geographies of Indian Outdoor Advertisements
4. Tracy Edwards, Representation of the Irelands in American newsmagazines
5. Joseph Palis; David Kummer, Projecting the Absence/Presence of Filipinos in Biograph Films

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA II: COMMODIFYING MUSIC, CITIES & PUBLIC SPACE

1. CHAIR: John Finn,Commodification and Culture in Cuban Music
2. John Lindenbaum, The industry, geography and cultural practices of Contemporary Christian Music
3. Thomas Ott, The City in Disguise: Vancouver as a Stand-in for Seattle in Hollywood Movies
4. Bill Lindeke, Screening the City: TV, Mediation, and Public Space
5. Kim McNamara, Celebrities and the Reconfiguration of Public Space

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA III: AFFECT, MOBILITY AND MEMORY IN CINEMA

1. CHAIR: Leo Zonn, The 'Alamo' on the Road: Mobility and the Cinematic Experience
2. Tina Kennedy, Smoke Signals and Affective space
3. Christopher M. Moreno, Stuart C. Aitken, Deleuzional Geographies of Drug Addiction in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream
4. Ken Hillis, Dark Visions, Sunny Spaces: Enlightenment Spatial Strategies and the L.A. Film Noir
5. Kevin E. McHugh, Moral Landscapes and Memory

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA IV: JOURNALISM

CHAIR (Chris Morena)

1. Amy Potter, Haiti’s Identity Crisis: Representation in U.S. Newspaper Coverage
2. Thomas L. Bell, and Margaret M. Gripshover, Earth, Wind, and Fire: The Role of Newspaper Accounts in Public Perception of Suicide Rates After the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Chicago Fire
3. Mike Gasher, Journalism as a Practice of Cartography: Mapping the News Geography of Three U.S. On-line Dailies
4. Amy Siciliano, Stigma and security in the suburbs: Interrogating the 'mediated' discourse of the 'Year of the Gun' in Toronto and beyond
5. Scott Rodgers,‘Reporting Live from…’: Researching Spatial Ontologies of Journalism

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA V: ONLINE, GAMING AND SHOPPING

1. Phillipa Mitchell, A Long Way From Home? The Role Of Information And Communication Technologies In South Korean And South African Migrants’ Experiences As They Settle In Auckland, New Zealand.
2. Leigh Schwartz, Othering Across Time and Place in the Suikoden Video Game Series
3. Micheala C. Denny, Not So Sexy? ‘Big Girls’ and Shopping Space
4. Michael W. Longan, Centrality and Diversity in Online Representations of Northwest Indiana
5. Gregory Donovan, Campaign-casting: An Evaluation of Candidates' Online Spaces In The 2005 NYC Mayoral Election

Geography of Media VI: People's Guelaguetza: Oaxacans take it to the streets, a documentary film

Organizers: Joseph Palis, Chris Lukinbeal; Chair: Altha Cravey

Panel Members: Altha Cravey (UNC-Chapel Hill) Dan Klooster (Florida State University) Sarah Moore (University of Arizona) Linda Quiquivix (UNC-Chapel Hill) Holly Worthen (UNC-Chapel Hill); Discussant: Tad Muttersbaugh (University of Kentucky)

People's Guelaguetza is an up-close portrait of cultural politics in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca where pirate radio, street encampments, mega-marches, and artistic endeavors galvanized popular protest in the summer and fall of 2006. This documentary shows women activists seizing government media and airing video footage - for the first time – of a violent June 14th government attack on striking teachers in downtown Oaxaca. We also show a festive People's Guelaguetza (with 20,000 attendees) in which distinct indigenous groups from various parts of the state came together to perform and exchange traditional dances and celebrate pre-Hispanic ties of mutual interdependence. The day-long event was free-of-charge and was organized after PRI Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz cancelled a highly commercialized Guelaguetza where seats had cost as much as $50 a person.

ABSTRACTS

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA I: GEOPOLITICS AND MEDIA

Jason Dittmer,, Ezekiel’s Geographies: “Left Behind” and the Popular Geopolitics of the End of the World

This paper will begin by outlining the history of the American theological movement known as premillennial dispensationalism, including its basic tenets. The paper will then introduce the series of books known as the “Left Behind” series, a bestselling narrative of the Endtimes as interpreted by the authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. These books enact a particular kind of geographic imaginary, which is rooted in an emphasis on the particular over the universal. This results from several places on the Earth’s surface being elevated in geopolitical importance because of the prophetic value associated with them. Conversely, attempts to construct global identities are thwarted by associations with evil and the Antichrist. The paper concludes with a discussion of connections between the American Evangelical movement and policy makers, and thus the connections between popular geopolitics and practical geopolitics.

James Craine, See Your West: Standard Oil Markets Manifest Destiny

In the immediate post-World War II period, Standard Oil of California launched its See Your West advertising program. The advertising was in the form of a series of collectable high-quality photographic prints of “scenic views of the West prepared for your enjoyment: to recall to memory certain favorite spots you visited in the past, and to help you visualize the beauties of those regions you yet to see.” The use of famous photographers and writers increased the desirability of these prints enabling Standard Oil, in their effort to sell more products to our new and highly mobile society, to take advantage of the burgeoning westward movement of the population. By linking photographic images and ideas with specific places in the Western United States, Standard Oil could define the meanings of those identities and then reify those definitions by inscribing them onto the landscape through the use of the See Your West advertising campaign. This unique form of advertising had the power to change not only the way our landscapes are constructed, but also to alter how we relate to and consume those landscapes thus fetishizing travel to the West and fulfilling the long-standing doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Ryan McLemore, An Ocean of Ads: The Dual Geographies of Indian Outdoor Advertisements

Contemporary India provides an ideal setting to investigate the relationship between an enormous developing nation and the proliferation of mass-media. Outdoor advertising, e.g. billboards and posters, is currently experiencing growth on unprecedented levels around the world. However, geographic research has yet to examine the production, spatial distribution, and meaning creation behind these advertisements. The medium’s geographic significance emanates from the multidimensional realities it establishes at the urban scale, both in terms of physical infrastructure and “mediated” landscapes. While comprising a complex industrial framework, simultaneously producing images and the display space for those images, outdoor advertising also creates new cultural spaces in which people’s communication, travel, and living are influenced by the medium’s pervasiveness. An exploratory study was conducted in a selection of Indian cities to identify how outdoor advertising operates in such an ethnically diverse nation and what effects it is having on transforming the cultural landscape. The dominance of outdoor advertisements along urban corridors and traffic intersections creates a contradiction between the consumption based promises of ads and the surrounding realities of poverty and struggle. Empirical material derived from an extensive press review, statistics on media expansion, interviews of outdoor media professionals, and photographic material from four Indian cities (Ahmedabad, Calcutta, Darjeeling, and Mumbai). Results indicate a nascent industry working towards necessary standardization and regulation, while advertisers seek new methods of reaching an increasingly mobile and commercialized populace.

Tracy Edwards, Representation of the Irelands in American newsmagazines

The paper investigates coverage of both Northern Ireland and Ireland in Time and Newsweek from 1965 to 2000. Articles were collected and evaluated to reveal the extent conflict has dominated coverage of these states, and to examine the geography of conflict as presented within these newsmagazines. Focus is on cartographic and visual representations with commentary provided regarding the importance of mass media in communicating place images, and the potential impacts these place images may have in establishing dominant geographical imaginations of particular places.

Joseph Palis, David Kummer,

Projecting the Absence/Presence of Filipinos in Biograph Films

Our paper aims to ask what space characterizes the various constructs of orientalism and othering in the early films of Thomas Edison. Using Lefebvre?s concept that social space ?subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity? in these early shorts, we will look at three actualites found at the Library of Congress-American Memory page website to show how space is manifested and negotiated onscreen. We will examine Edison's Filipinos Retreat from Trenches, Capture of Trenches at Candaba and U.S. Troops and Red Cross in the Trenches Before Caloocan which were all released in 1899. These short films were shot during the tumultuous years of the Spanish-American War. In the Biograph shorts, the privileged positions of both Spanish and American forces as regards the annexation of a foreign land in world history books is indicative of the tendency to de-emphasize the contribution of the native population in the war. Diawara has said that space is related to power and powerlessness, insofar as those who occupy the center of the screen are usually more powerful than those in the background or completely absent from the screen. The spatial hierarchies and spatially situated images in Edison’s short films do not intend to suggest the badness and goodness of the American powers that produced such images, nor is this a celebration of the minority cultures. Rather the spatial orderings in these early films show the historically configured powers of relation and its attendant oppressive relation to its external others.

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA II: COMMODIFYING MUSIC, CITIES & PUBLIC SPACE

John Finn, Commodification and Culture in Cuban Music

After nearly three decades of cultural and economic isolation from the West, and a paralyzing economic crisis in the early 1990s, Cuba is increasingly active globally. The resulting increases in globalization affect all sectors of Cuban society. This is especially true for many of the islands musicians whose careers are deeply imbedded in the international market. In this paper I break with traditional approaches to music geography that focused on musical hearths, diffusion, delimitation, thematic analysis, and cultural mapping, instead exploring the dialectical relationship of music as an expression of cultural and a cultural asset, and at the same time a commodity for sale on the international market. I will present results from qualitative case-study research with Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the creator of the world-renowned Buena Vista Social Club. Through the lens of this well-known Cuban musician I explore the increasingly contested terrain that cultural producers throughout the global south are forced to negotiate in attempting to preserve cultural authenticity while surviving economically in the increasingly globalized realm of international capitalism.

John Lindenbaum,The industry, geography and cultural practices of Contemporary Christian Music

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) comprises popular styles of music such as alternative rock, singer-songwriter, R&B and hip-hop that feature evangelical Christian lyrics. CCM is one of the fastest growing forms of popular music in the U.S., and is quietly converging with the parallel 'mainstream' music industry. In the past decade, CCM sales increased 80%, and sales at non-Christian outlets doubled. The astonishing growth of the CCM industry has coincided with the rise of megachurches, the emergence of nondenominational evangelical Christianity as a force in U.S. electoral politics, and popular music's simultaneous concentration through media conglomeration and democratization through new technologies. I examine the record companies, radio stations, Christian bookstores, grassroots political organizations, audiences, and live venues that are crucial to the growth of this burgeoning market in the U.S. I investigate Christian niche marketing, challenging the notion of 'independent' and 'sacred' companies by explicating various organizational relationships. I explicate the geographical pattern of CCM record companies, record sales, concert venues, summer festivals and radio stations. I also analyze notions of 'Christian,' 'mainstream,' 'CCM' and other taken-for-granted distinctions that are discursively produced and reinforced through musical practices. Most of the research done on CCM has been in the popular press or from within the industry itself; its geographies, contradictions, and political subjectivities have been largely neglected until recently.

Thomas Ott, The City in Disguise: Vancouver as a Stand-in for Seattle in Hollywood Movies

Pressed by declining profits and ballooning expenses at home, Hollywood has shifted production abroad, particularly the production of low-budget movies made for television. Most are made in Canada, where a weak currency, financial incentives and proximity to the United States make production relatively inexpensive and convenient. Especially Vancouver, British Columbia, has developed into a major location for movie production; the city has become known in the industry as "Hollywood North". Major studios and independent producers alike are attracted to Vancouver by the abundance of spectacular locations, the highly experienced production teams, the pool of talented local actors and the state-of-the-art post production facilities. However, despite its role as a set for major Hollywood movies, the city is hardly ever identified as itself. It rather acts as a stand-in for American cities, especially Seattle. This process of reducing Vancouver into a mere backdrop by neglecting space and place as a source of stories and characters is fostered by American production companies and the British Columbia Film Commission alike. The scenery of the built urban fabric obstructs, however, the view on inherited, more fundamental differences in social and cultural structures and processes between Canadian and American cities.

Bill Lindeke, , Screening the City: TV, Mediation, and Public Space

New technologies are driving rapid change in the traditional broadcast media model. As proliferating cable and digital formats enable consumers to bypass advertising, advertisers and media companies are increasingly turning to cities as spaces for media. At the same time, revenue-challenged city governments are seeking to raise their profile through images of vitality and public engagement. This paper will look at ways that local news organizations are incorporating the urban into their broadcasts by examining why a Twin Cities news station has opened their newsroom onto a public mall. While the mediation of urban space has often been viewed as commodification or privatization, I will ask whether there are ways in which mediated urban space opens up a dialogue for traditionally voiceless media consumers by reviewing how avenues of criticism and control have developed within this relationship. Finally, I will examine the implications for urbanism as consumer culture becomes more reliant on the mediated public event, and look at how investment in modes of urban spectacle will be crucial for future urban development.

Kim McNamara, Celebrities and the Reconfiguration of Public Space

A divide exists between celebrities and ordinary people, not only in terms of wealth, social status, outward appearances and talent, but also in terms of public space. Celebrities often demand permission, require acceptance, or simply ignore tacit social rules when it comes to how they behave in public space. However, celebrities are also intrinsically connected to specific cities and urban spaces by way of the venues they perform in, public events they are involved with, and also the homes they own and live in. Given the increasingly intrusive presence of the paparazzi, entertainment media, and fans (from obsessed 'stalkers' to well-wishers), celebrities are also more vulnerable in public space, and have had to work hard to define and defend their privacy from the eyes of the general public. While this is usually achieved with a degree of comfort, at certain times their space is threatened. This paper considers celebrities' responses to the impact of surveillance technology - and here I mean both increasingly sophisticated camera equipment used by paparazzi, and security cameras- on the urban landscape, and looks at some adopted strategies celebrities use to defend their domestic and private lives, especially in terms of how they project themselves to their fans.

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA III: AFFECT, MOBILITY AND MEMORY IN CINEMA

Leo Zonn, The 'Alamo' on the Road: Mobility and the Cinematic Experience

Over the last decade the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, Texas, has established a unique reputation for its creative programming and for its audience friendly setting, including the serving of food and alcohol in a stadium setting. In 2002 the theater took the audience/film engagement one step further by creating the 'Rolling Roadshow Tour', whereby films were shown in settings that were associated with their cinematic subject matter. The meaning of venue and the nature of the audience participation were therefore uniquely and constantly constructed to fit the character of each film. The focus here is upon this engagement and the mobility that is so important to the program and to the audience itself. We examine this process from two views: firstly, whether it reflects an exercise of creativity that in fact is moving toward hyperreality with the 'absolute fake masquerading as the real'. Secondly, we draw upon Cresswell's theorization of mobility, which proposes that people are able to transgress norms of behavior and experience 'place' in unique and unorthodox ways. We believe that in the case of the 'Roadshow', regardless of how commercial it may have become, the audience exercise is one of ironic engagement and a need for community participation, and that the audience is well aware of the distinction between fantasy and reality which then itself becomes part of the appeal.

Tina Kennedy,Smoke Signals and Affective space

Films may have a strong emotional impact on an audience and reify or challenge stereotypes of people and place. An audience’s background, experience of non-filmic places, and the context within which a film is viewed may affect the degree or type of emotional impact a film has. Students in three courses focusing on geography and media literacy viewed Sherman Alexi’s purported comedy, “Smoke Signals”. The courses were taught simultaneously in spring, 2006, at NAU, ASU and UA. Students were asked to reflect on the film immediately after viewing it by responding to a series of open-ended questions. This paper explores the reported emotional impact of the film and specific scenes, identification with the film’s two main characters, potential relationships between experience with reservations and response to filmic images of reservations, and the context within which the student’s viewed “Smoke Signals”

Christopher M. Moreno, Stuart C. Aitken, Deleuzional Geographies of Drug Addiction in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream

This paper, explores a variety of Deleuzional geographies of drug addiction in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. Initially, I connect Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a 'drug using assemblage' to 'becoming' to express drug using bodies in terms of their enabling (good) or blocking (bad) attributes as bodies in motion and potential to become other. I then draw on Aronofsky's poly expressive montage depictions of 'drugged bodies' as a way in which to visually and affectively express these ideas. And finally, I talk about the affective qualities of this film in terms of creating what Deleuze calls ' zones of intensity' or 'media fields' where the filmic and social spaces of drug addiction come together and affect one another. (Keywords: Body, Drug Addiction, Film, Gilles Deleuze).

Ken Hillis, Dark Visions, Sunny Spaces: Enlightenment Spatial Strategies and the L.A. Film Noir

Los Angeles manifests key ideals first cultivated within the European Enlightenment public sphere, and a number of “Los Angeles” films depict the spatial practices that flow from implementing these “visionary” ideals in this desert city’s built form. Such films noir as He Walked By Night, In A Lonely Place, and Kiss Me Deadly, depict how the city’s vastness and reliance on communication technologies are unanticipated monuments to a reworking of Enlightenment theories that extend subjectivity and space yet also promote their mutual division and everyday lived isolation. Los Angeles is the formal outcome of an ideology equating space with the visible. In 1912, railroad magnate Henry Huntington proclaimed it would become the most important American, if not world, city because, like infinitely extensible Cartesian space, it could extend in any direction “as far as you like.” The consequent sprawl of bungalows and roadways and the city’s reliance on communication technologies promoted adopting surveillant communication technologies that earlier L.A. spatial practices, equating privacy with salvation, were intended to avoid. Extending Habermas’ public sphere theory, I trace L.A.’s reliance on transportation and communication technologies in its production of “a place in the sun” organized according to an idea of nature as real estate. I rely on films noir as evidence that Los Angeles, the first fully modern city, embodies empiricist concepts of space and reality as independent, divisible and ordered, and I analyze these films as ironic visual monuments to a place founded on the ideal of the conceptually disembodied masculine eye.

Kevin E. McHugh, Moral Landscapes and Memory

Humanist geographies encompass moral dimensions. As Yi-Fu Tuan and Robert Sack articulate with eloquence, place invariably casts light on the real, the good, beauty and truth. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Straight Story, David Lynch’s 1999 film portraying Alvin Straight’s journey across Iowa on a John Deere lawn mower. Undaunted by ill-health and meager resources, Alvin resolves to visit his estranged brother, Lyle, who lives in Mt. Zion, Wisconsin. Alvin’s encounters with others along the way—teen runaway, fellow World War II veteran, Catholic priest, helpful folk—illuminates the quiet wisdom of age. Reminiscing en route Alvin brings the past to bear in the present, jumbling the simple symmetry of Kierkegaard’s dictum that we live life forward but understand it backwards. Alvin Straight—comfortable in his own skin, nonjudgmental, full of grace and humility—is ‘naturalized’ man, moving at slowed pace through Iowa rural landscapes during fall harvest. Straight is seemingly inseparable from the landscape and the natural cycles and rhythms that animate place. Beyond its naturalistic outlook and beneath its romanticized veneer, The Straight Story offers a compelling message. We are nothing more and nothing less than moral agents ‘passing through’. The collective trace of our ‘passings’ constitutes the making and remaking of place.

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA IV: JOURNALISM

Amy Potter, Haiti’s Identity Crisis: Representation in U.S. Newspaper Coverage

Most newspaper articles in the United States paint a picture of Haiti as a failed state, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. These articles place the blame of the country’s problems entirely on Haiti itself, with little regard for the outside forces that brought the country to its present day state. This study is a critical geopolitical analysis of Haitian representation in U.S. newspapers. I will empirically examine a year’s worth of articles from 2004 written on Haiti in five major U.S. newspapers. From these articles I will analyze both the words used to describe Haiti and the emerging media frame. I will then compare the repetition of words and frame to scholarly sources on Haitian history. Critical media studies have shown that representation in the media can greatly impact the conventional wisdom surrounding a place and legitimize social inequalities. Through understanding the images used to describe Haiti, I hope to develop a means through which to redirect popular perceptions of it. I argue that it is only then that the problems of Haiti might be more effectively addressed and a new dialogue created, one that encompasses the entire story of this Caribbean country.

Thomas L. Bell, and Margaret M. Gripshover, Earth, Wind, and Fire: The Role of Newspaper Accounts in Public Perception of Suicide Rates After the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Chicago Fire

Print media reports hype the fear, angst, and chaos following major catastrophes. This was just as true of reportage in the Chicago Tribune following the Great Fire in Chicago in 1871, and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, as it was in New Orleans regarding the death and destruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And, based on anecdotal evidence and journalistic sensationalism, media reports seem especially drawn to the “epidemic” of suicides in the wake of such catastrophes. In contrast to media reports, public health statistics indicate that suicide rates do not necessarily increase from the norm immediately following major disasters. Public perception and anticipation of a dramatic increase in suicides as a reaction to major earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires, does, however, persist.

Mike Gasher, Journalism as a Practice of Cartography: Mapping the News Geography of Three U.S. On-line Dailies

This paper posits journalism as a practice of cartography, arguing that through their daily news coverage, journalists make maps which outline the contours of community, establish that community’s borders and membership criteria, identify centers of power, explain the extent and nature of the community’s relations to the larger world, in sum, sketch a picture of who and where “we” are. In so doing, journalists put particular events, people, institutions, concerns and solutions on the map, marginalizing, even excluding others. They define the ways in which events are newsworthy – i.e., as things that matter to “us” – and thereby create categories of inclusion and exclusion, relevant and irrelevant, we and they. Journalists, in other words, produce a news geography, a representational space in which they situate their community and its people.

Each news organization draws its own particular map, providing an editorial content package that brings together audiences and advertisers in a shared geographical space, or market. This paper reports on a 2004 news-flow study of the on-line editions of three U.S. daily newspapers -- the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times – and draws a detailed portrait of each paper’s news geography. The news world these newspapers depict is highly circumscribed, and points to the need to expand the notion of news value beyond conventional criteria and include the criteria by which journalists distinguish between “us” and “them,” as well as the commercial value of particular groups of news consumers.

Amy Siciliano, Stigma and security in the suburbs: Interrogating the 'mediated' discourse of the 'Year of the Gun' in Toronto and beyond

A year of fatal shootings and gun-related violence in Toronto led popular media to label 2005 as the 'Year of the Gun'. While 'gun violence' in Toronto in particular, and Canada in general is certainly not a 'new' phenomena – nor is it rising in relative terms – the disproportionate amount of media attention it has received suggests that it is being harnessed for broader practices of neoliberal restructuring, with the role of the state increasingly being framed through a discourse of 'security' rather than 'welfare'. This paper examines how this 'event' was discursively constructed through popular media, valourizing certain citizens and spaces while problematising others. Such discourses relied on stigmatised images of social and spatial forms of poverty in the city's inner suburbs, while promoting protective images of the gentrified inner city. Accordingly, I document the sites where 'problems' came to be defined, and the modes of description at work to perceive them; how both images and words were selectively arranged to construct and support this narrative. I also document how this heavily mediated event 'jumped scales' from a localized arena to become a national election issue, when the 'Year of the Gun' was deployed by three of the main federal political parties to help legitimate the introduction of severe 'law and order' platforms into each of their campaigns.

Scott Rodgers, ‘Reporting Live from…’: Researching Spatial Ontologies of Journalism

For at least the past 25 years, there have been intermittent calls to better study the geographies of media, of which news media have been one specific concern. Despite this, most recent human geography research and theory has only indirectly been interested in journalism. Instead, most inquiry has been into the epistemological politics of news media representations of spaces and places. Yet even a cursory survey of journalism studies across other disciplines would point to many other spatialities. For example, the extent to which reporters conduct their daily work in both fixed and mobile spaces: press bureaus, the internet, regular beats and far-flung assignments. Or the importance of newsrooms and studios in assembling and circulating the many different spaces of newsgathering. Indeed, it might be said that such studies imply a spatial ontology concerning journalism. Yet these spatialities so often found in journalism studies do not generally transcend the empirical; they are under-theorized. It is here that I suggest human geography has a contribution to make, not by creating a redundant ‘geography of journalism’, but by entering into interdisciplinary conversations on the spatialities of news media. As a starting point for such conversations, this paper identifies the current ontological concerns in human geography with social practices and materiality as particularly appropriate for studying the changing politics of journalism and news media. This is followed with an associated review of different methodological possibilities for human geographers interested in pursuing such research avenues, including a consideration of some likely problems and tensions.

GEOGRAPHY OF MEDIA V: ONLINE, GAMING AND SHOPPING

Phillipa Mitchell, A Long Way From Home? The Role Of Information And Communication Technologies In South Korean And South African Migrants’ Experiences As They Settle In Auckland, New Zealand.

Migrants face many challenges in moving to a new country, particularly one as geographically isolated as New Zealand. This paper investigates the role of information and communication technologies in the experiences two disparate migrant groups, the South Koreans and the South Africans. Interviews were conducted with individuals of different ages and who emigrated at different times, to explore what, if any, difference our increasingly coded world has meant how they settle in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. As expected there were distinctive differences in the use of technology by the two groups, however, there where also several common themes. Email, the internet and mobile phones have radically altered their ability to connect. Feelings of alienation and isolation are being mediated both by the ability to find out much more about the destination country and the ease with which they can maintain contact with their country of origin. All of the migrants described a tapering off of their need to communicate with ‘home’ over time even though it is now considerably easier and cheaper. Most have made the conscious choice to stay in New Zealand and identified that these new technologies empowered them simply by being accessible, even if their use has declined. Those that emigrated pre internet were extremely aware of how their experience would have differed, agreeing that these technologies would have lessened their sense of dislocation. Information and communications technologies are altering the way individuals interact with spaces and this has significant implications for geographical research.

Leigh Schwartz, Othering Across Time and Place in the Suikoden Video Game Series

As geographers begin investigating the imaginative geographies of media spaces, attention is drawn to the landscapes of interactive media. The virtual environments of video games continue to grow in complexity and use, and questions remain as to the experience of the users of the designed environments. Focusing specifically on messages and metaphors in written representations, this paper investigates the changing experience of gamers through time and place by examining the Suikoden fantasy series. Beginning with the adaptation of the Chinese classic Shui Hu Zhuan into Suikoden in 1996, continuing to the release of Suikoden V ten years later, the virtual environments of the Suikoden series are embedded with mythological and cultural messages about self and other. This paper utilizes visual and textual analysis to examine these changing representations over time and place in terms of the experience of these ideological messages by the players of this series.

Micheala C. Denny, Not So Sexy? ‘Big Girls’ and Shopping Space

This paper discusses the trend of spatial segregation of plus sized women’s clothing in major department stores in the United States. Drawing on the literature of the geographies of the body and exclusion as well as a sample of three different case study sites, I argue that the division of women’s shopping space into sections based on size serves as an example the physical and social isolation of the human body and that this is perpetuated by images in the media that compartmentalize certain body attributes as being desirable while and others as unattractive. Further, I argue that these spaces of isolation contribute to the social construction of what is sexy, and in this case, what is decidedly un-sexy.

Michael W. Longan, Centrality and Diversity in Online Representations of Northwest Indiana

This paper explores the dynamic tension among political, economic, and cultural forces at work in the representation of places in Northwest Indiana on the World Wide Web. Interviews with governmental, chamber of commerce, organizational, and independent web designers reveal information about intended audiences as well as motivations for constructing place-related web sites. Some designers hope to use the global reach of the web to attract new businesses and tourists to their cities while others address resident citizens in order to increase government efficiency, express pride in local culture and history, or strengthen local democracy. Site designers who understand the web primarily as a marketing tool sometimes express frustration with the mosaic nature of the web that allows for multiple representations of place. Competing representations potentially threaten carefully constructed civic branding campaigns. These designers succeed in controlling and centralizing the representation of place to the extent that few alternative representations of place exist on the web. Other site authors welcome and even seek to exploit diverse representations of place. This later group expresses an ethical commitment to creating accurate place representations through public discourse about place. Overall, the interviews reveal the ways that respondents negotiate the potential contradictions involved in producing web sites that simultaneously express local culture, support local democracy, and commodify place.

Gregory Donovan, Campaign-casting: An Evaluation of Candidates' Online Spaces In The 2005 NYC Mayoral Election

The aim of this study is to explore how New York City's mayoral candidates employed interactive aesthetics to simulate participatory and decentralized campaigns. Beginning with the first official debate of the primary season (08/16/05) and ending on Election Day (11/08/05), the mayoral candidates' websites, emails, web advertisements, text messages, blogs and physical mailings (triggered by online activity) were monitored and archived. This study applies both content and discourse analysis to the candidates' mobilization messages and the virtual places in which they were shaped. The analysis indicates that, despite noticeably absent participatory functions of the online environments, attempts were made by the mayoral campaigns to present a veneer of participation through imagery - simulating a sense of presence, population and place.