Voices 06: Myria Georgiou on Competing Claims to Digital Urban Humanity

In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Myria Georgiou.

Myria is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been working for more than two decades on the mediation of identity and citizenship. Myria’s work has spanned interests in: the relationships of media and cities; how media are implicated in identity construction for diasporic populations and migrants; and how diversity and difference are represented in the media.

Our discussion centred on Myria’s recent book Being Human in Digital Cities. It is a book which explores the curious resurrection of a kind of ‘people centrism’ in discourses about digital cities, analysing the rise of competing claims to urban humanity by a range of different actors, from technology companies to local governments to ordinary urban citizens.

Our discussion provides a good overview of the book’s thematic attention to three varieties of digital humanism in cities: popular, demotic, and critical. We also touch on the where Myria sees her arguments in relation to broader contemporary debates about the ‘human’ or ‘posthuman’.

This interview, which was recorded on 7 May 2024, is Episode 6 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)