Visualizing locality now: objects, practices and environments of social media imagery around urban change

Rodgers, Scott (2022) Visualizing locality now: objects, practices and environments of social media imagery around urban change. In: Rose, G. (ed.) Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time. Cities and Cultures. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9789463727037. (In Press)

Abstract

This chapter explores social media platforms as increasingly vast and ordinary infrastructures for how people visually experience urban locality. Drawing on a mixed-method project (including image visualization and qualitative observation) exploring the mediation of a controversial cycling scheme in East London, UK, social media imagery is conceptualized and analysed in three overlapping stages: (1) as discrete digital objects; (2) as objects mobilized through particular user practices; and (3) as objects and practices operating and appearing within platform interface environments. Drawing inspiration from phenomenological perspectives on media and technology, the chapter shows how these objects, practices and environments of social media visuality create conditions for experiencing, as well as addressing oneself towards locality, not only spatially but also temporally. Book synopsis: This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life.

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