One way or another, you most likely watch television in some form. You might use a device explicitly called a ‘television’, sited in a room in which televisions tend to be, such as a lounge or family room. Or perhaps you use a remediated version of television: via a device such as a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop or even projector. And the content you’re watching may itself be only loosely television: it may be live content (e.g. news, sports, or a a live-to-air programme); or perhaps your taking in programming via an on-demand streaming platform, or even just watching video clips. Regardless of these variations and contingencies, according to some scholars, this mediated situation has important technological and cultural connections with the suburb. Not just the suburb as a location, but as: a historically specific form of urban development; as an archetype for living; and above all, as an emergent configuration of mediation in the modern urbanising world. In this episode, we explore the ways this may have transpired, and may still endure today, from television in the postwar period, to its more recent and ambient urban appearances across urban spaces.
Thinkers discussed: Roger Silverstone (Television and Everyday Life); Raymond Williams (Television: Technology and Cultural Form); Marylin Strathern (Future Kinship and the Study of Culture); Delores Hayden (Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life); James Carey (The Telegraph and Ideology); Jürgen Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere); Anna McCarthy (Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space); Marc Augé (Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity); Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life); Jo Helle-Valle and Dag Slettemeås (ICTs, Domestication and Language-Games: a Wittgensteinian Approach to Media Uses); Lynn Spigel (Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs); Roger Keil (Suburban Constellations); Francesco Cassetti (Cinema Lost and Found: Trajectories of Relocation).
Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
Media, Technology & Culture 07 (2nd Edition): Embodied Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 06 (2nd Edition): Infrastructural Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 05 (2nd Edition): Computational Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 04 (2nd Edition): Live Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 03 (2nd Edition): Domesticated Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 02 (2nd Edition): Communication Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 01 (2nd Edition): Cultural Technologies
Publicly Sited Update: New Podcast on The Mediated City; plus Media, Technology and Culture 2nd Edition
Media, Technology and Culture 09: Algorithmic Technologies
Media, Technology and Culture 08: Participatory Technologies
Media, Technology and Culture 07: Embodied Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 06: Infrastructural Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 05: Computational Technologies
Media, Technology& Culture 04: Live Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 03: Domesticated Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 02: Communication Technologies
Media, Technology & Culture 01: Cultural Technologies
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