Media and Geography

How and why geographers engage with media is inherently tied to questions of what media are and do. The term media itself is ambiguous: http://dictionary.com defines the singular form medium as “an intervening agency, means, or instrument,” and the term was first applied to printed new s-papers more than two centuries ago. Since the early 20th century, the usage of the term as a singular collective noun began to be popularized and its application expanded. Following this general meaning and expanded usage, an intersection of media with geography can be understood as an intimate and inextricable part of the geographic discipline. From long-standing traditions of cartographic creation and analysis to humanist explorations of art and literature to critical, feminist, and poststructuralist engagements with film and multimedia, different media forms have proved both informative and revealing for geographers working through different modes of theoretical and methodological encounter.

It is generally agreed that media in their different forms—such as film, music, newspapers, comic books, video games, animation—are produced and consumed in historically specific and carefully constructed ways and that many factors combine to frame how meaning and expression are generated. Thus, media cannot be engaged in isolation but rather must be linked in multiple and complex ways to other forms of material evidence and theoretical engagement. Current streams of media geography largely take a critical approach to different media types, moving beyond understandings of media as visual or naive reflections of the “real” world or as materializations of the preestablished intentionality of their maker to understandings of media as discrete moments in the production and circulation of cultural meaning or expression. Importantly, this point is not to limit media to technologies of meaning (re)construction but also to understand media as objects of information transfer and creation wherein media themselves may be understood as differentiating forces of communication, social contestation, or affective and intellectual transformation. Media geography, then, explores broad questions of material production, cultural meaning, and bodily affects and percepts in relation to the practices and processes by which geographical information is gathered, geographical facts are ordered, and imaginative geographies are created. The differences present in how these questions are engaged with are not so much a matter of different understandings of media themselves as of what different forms and types of media do or can do.

Friedrich Kittler believes that media determine human situations, while Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase “The medium is the message” is also applicable to the study of media geography. Later critical geographers argue that media hold powerful transformative potential because people use cultural representations to create social relationships and to define space. These observations concerning media underscore differing insights into the meaning of information, the material importance of media, and how forces of technical expression may both positively and negatively [Page 1875]influence or affect our lives. What the observations share are their important implications for an understanding of media today, particularly within the context of geography.

Media geography often takes different media forms that are presented as natural, universal, or true and analyzes them to reveal how alternative geographic narratives may be visible. For instance, recent research in media geography has explored and explained the bond between media culture and nationalism or gender relations, providing insights into the motivations of media producers to prioritize time and history over space and geography by enmeshing the media consumer in systems of visibility and normalization. To critically engage media landscapes, then, it is important to understand that their places and spaces are never neutral.

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