Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2014

Vol. 28, No. 3, 281–285, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.900877

EDITORIAL
Rethinking media space
Stephen Monteiro*

Department of Global Communications, The American University of Paris, France

Thinking about space today requires thinking about media space. It is difficult to imagine –
(let alone experience) a space entirely beyond the reach of media. Media, whether as
narratives, products, technologies, or practices, do not merely penetrate or occupy space.
They produce and shape it. One could say that wherever we go, media follow, but the
inverse would be just as accurate. As Couldry and McCarthy observe, ‘It is ever more
difficult to tell a story of social space, without also telling a story of media, and vice versa’
(2004, 1). In telling those stories, they and others have noted that media space is anything
but homogenous. Rather, it is constantly differentiated by modes of distribution and
reception, legal issues, social norms, economic conditions, and geographical,
topographical, and meteorological variables (to name only a few factors), which produce
and address vastly different needs, understandings, and experiences.
The articles brought together in this special issue of Continuum indicate new, and
perhaps unexpected, paths available to researching and theorizing the relationship between
spatial conditions and mediated experience. In particular, they steadfastly explore the
interpenetration of narrative spaces and the physical locations of production and exhibition
in film, television, and music video to consider the potential impact on meaning, affect,
and behaviour. This may seem like well-trodden and fully mapped ground, which is
precisely the point. Scholarly discourse on media and space continues to grow and
diversify, particularly around new media forms and networked, digital culture. The
research presented here, in its focus on the intersection of established forms and public,
collectively experienced spaces, demonstrates the continuing need to reconsider and revise
accepted theories and histories of the relationship between the objects, products, and
processes of the media and the spaces within which they are created, circulated, and
consumed.
To varying degrees, recent studies of media’s relationship to space as a range of
heterogeneous practices occurring in a differentiated field owe a debt to the ‘spatial turn’
that marked theoretical models and research areas in the humanities and social sciences at
the end of the twentieth century (Bhabha 1994; Soja 1996; Harvey 2001). That trend
depended heavily on the writings of French critical theorists including Michel Foucault
(1977, 1986), Michel de Certeau (1984), Henri Lefebvre (1991), and Paul Virilio (1991), all
of whom explore the spatial characteristics of power relations, technological deployment,
and the generation of meaning in post-industrial Western societies. Lefebvre’s contention in
The Production of Space that all social environments are culturally determined products
remains a key tenet of this mode of thought. Written in the aftermath of the transnational

*Email: smonteiro@aup.edu

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

282 S. Monteiro

revolutionary movements of May 1968, The Production of Space discards Euclidean and
Cartesian theorizations of absolute space, elaborating instead a Marxist perspective
extending from Immanuel Kant’s conception of space as rooted in consciousness. For
Lefebvre, physical, mental, and social space overlap and underpin each other (1991, 14).
‘The space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action’, he claims, ‘that in
addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of
domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of
it’ (1991, 26).
Media, as industry and practice, have played an integral role in this process.
Considering media space in the wake of Lefebvre, therefore, means not only addressing
the terms of production and distribution, but also recognizing embodiment and diverse
social conditions as part and parcel of the function and use of any contemporary mode of
communication. This effort first developed within cultural studies, particularly in
conjunction with cultural geography, post-colonialism, and urban studies (Warf and Arias
2009). It moved beyond hermeneutics and aesthetics of the text, mechanisms of sender-
receiver transactions, and spectator or subject psychology to address the spatio-cultural
and geographical specificities where these intersect.
Fortuitously or not, this change came amid radical transformations in our
understanding and use of the media. This has meant a move in two directions when
considering space in media studies and associated fields. The first privileges the
transformative properties of decentred digital networks and mobile media, often with a
paradoxical, centralizing bias towards a few ‘world cities’ such as New York, London, and
Paris (Couldry and McCarthy 2004; McQuire, Martin, and Niederer 2009; Berry, Harbord,
and Moore 2013). This inclination, while motivated by developments in global media
since the turn of the century, may be seen as the heir to the simultaneous development in
the 1990s of spatial studies, the worldwide web, correlated ideas of ‘cyberspace’ and
‘virtual’ space as potentially liberating spheres (Rheingold 1993; Mitchell 1995;
Wertheim 1999; Dodge and Kitchin 2001), and the theorization of major cities as defining
nodes of media globalization (Sassen 1991; Graham and Marvin 1996, 2001). In the
shadow of post-2001 surveillance regimes and the 2008 global economic crisis, however,
sanguine claims for networked, participatory media have ceded ground to inquiries into
the role of convergence, crowd-sourced data labour, locative technologies, and associated
phenomena in the increasing commodification of social interaction and community
structures (Graham 2004; McCullough 2006; Varnelis and Friedberg 2008).
Diverging from this inquiry into the spatial parameters and cultural consequences of
‘new’ networked digital culture (now nearly twenty years old, after all), the second
direction represents a resurgence in research on the spatial foundations and formations of
‘old’ media beyond the edges of the digital frame (McCarthy 2001; Berry, Kim, and Spigel
2010; Acland and Wasson 2011; Hallam and Roberts 2013). The articles united here
follow in this vein, and their references acknowledge much of the new scholarship it has
produced. By exploring the impact of space on producers and consumers of media
products and delivery systems away from the familiar terrain of the global city or digital
network, they bear affinities with the idea of ‘situated knowledges’ proposed by Haraway
(1998). If, as she states, ‘Vision in the technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony;
all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just
mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put forth
the myth into ordinary practice’ (1998, 678), then these articles thicken vision and affirm
situated bodies. They demonstrate the limits of all-encompassing myths, whether in
theory, history, or contemporary media practices.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 283

The opening contribution to this special issue, ‘Media as a spatial practice: Treme and
the production of the media neighbourhood’ by Helen Morgan Parmett, examines the
complex relationship between the production of space and the space of production in
series-based television shot on location. Through the example of Treme, the HBO series
set and shot in post-Katrina New Orleans, Morgan Parmett examines the political, social,
and economic ramifications of production activity within specific spatio-cultural contexts
of the neoliberal city. She argues for a critical approach to media space that is not limited
to representations or consumption of the urban environment as narrative space, but rather
addresses ways in which productions themselves will embody, intersect, and impact
spatial practices of the city. By studying Treme’s production strategy, New Orleans’ plan
for economic development, and neighbourhood participation in the series in material and
labour terms, she contributes an exemplary analysis to the burgeoning field of production
studies. Her research demonstrates how a production ‘takes up a position in and
appropriates the daily practices, rhythms, and affects of neighbourhood space’ to create
what she calls the ‘media neighbourhood’.
In ‘Visualizing place, representing age in hip-hop: converging themes in Scarface’s
“My Block”’, Murray Forman returns to neighbourhoods in problematizing ‘representing’
in hip-hop as it involves ideas of space, time, and identity. He asserts that theorizations of
the relationship between artist, music, and the geographical specificity of the ‘hood –
(already contested territory in hip-hop studies) should also take aging into consideration as
the genre’s first and second waves of artists mature. Describing what he calls ‘age
representing’, Forman notes that ‘What we are witnessing in contemporary hip-hop is,
thus, the rise of a new cartography of age and aging, a new means of charting social
topography that facilitates the representation of hip-hop elderscapes’. Forman considers
the codes of this shift through a close reading of Houston MC Scarface’s 2002 recording
‘My Block’, and its accompanying video, within the frame of the artist’s long and varied
career. Forman underscores the sometimes tenuous relationship between the lyrics and the
video’s imagery (ostensibly shot on-location in the neighbourhood of Scarface’s youth) as
these meet in a visually seamless, mediatized representation of memory. Clearly
demonstrating that the transformative effects of experience are already embedded within
any understanding of representing, this study indicates the inherent complexity – and
sustained potential – of the term, rather than any need to supplant it. In this way it implies
intergenerational possibilities, manifested by ‘My Block’, for bridging hip-hop’s growing
age divide.
Amy Corbin’s ‘Travelling through cinema space: the film spectator as tourist’
challenges established theories of the subject by recasting film watching as ‘spectatorial
tourism’, a move that she claims ‘balances out the aspects of spectatorship that are about
identification with an explanation for the appeal of displacement and exploration’. In her
assessment, contexts of film exhibition and visual codes on screen can situate the viewer’s
subjectivity in ways that mimic the goals and mechanisms of packaged tourism, an
assertion all the more provocative in the light of Morgan Parmett and Forman’s
considerations of socio-spatial media representations. Whether the viewer is mobile or
fixed, in both film spectatorship and tourism she follows predetermined itineraries aimed
at the production of ‘views’. Like watching the world from a tour bus, the potentially
comforting, distancing effect of the cinema can transform even those places well known to
the viewer into strange, unfamiliar locations. In revisiting film theories of embodiment and
the mobilized gaze alongside key works from tourism studies and spatial theory, Corbin
draws out salient references to space and spectatorship that would support this reading.
Incorporating concepts of dwelling and mapping, while applying her theory to films as
284 S. Monteiro

disparate as Broken Arrow and When Harry Met Sally, Corbin demonstrates that the
‘virtual travel’ of film entails fundamental processes that extend well beyond codes
specific to moving image works centred on travel, such as documentaries and adventure
films, to encompass a wide range of genres and narrative strategies.
The closing article on media space, Andrea Kelley’s ‘From attraction to distraction:
the Panoram machine and emerging modes of multi-sited screen consumption’, presents a
neglected episode in the history of media distribution that highlights the recurrent
difficulty of reconciling physical and narrative space. Kelley explores the history and
ideology of the Panoram, a ‘film jukebox’ whose innovative commercial exploitation in
1940s America radically reconceived the role of audio-visual media in the social sphere.
Kelley demonstrates how the Panoram’s design and dissemination, as well as the images
comprising its musical shorts – or Soundies, represent an important antecedent not only to
broadcast television but also to contemporary mobile media and the codes of spatially
constructed interactivity. Attempting to create new links between narrative space and
viewers’ locations – (e.g. the barroom, hotel lobby, or train station) the Panoram sought to
integrate the screen into multiple consumer spaces as an interface mediating the social
relationships of the audience, much as television would in the private sphere. As Kelley
shows, however, important discrepancies emerged between the narrative potential of the
Soundie as audio-visual object on the one hand and the varying physical conditions of
exhibition on the other. This difference mirrors the ‘dual responses of intrigue and of
invisibility indicat[ing] certain ambivalences towards the Panoram’ that Kelley finds
illustrated in the reflexivity of certain Soundies. Partly due to technological constraints
(since each device held only eight Soundies), but also as a result of the device’s ambiguous
relationship to other media and the range of activities found in public spaces, the Panoram
was an economic and cultural failure. Nonetheless, it introduced a new facet to ambient
media and the commodification of space.
In many ways, our understanding of media culture’s relationship to space, and how
space may function as a medium in its own right, is still in its early stages. New
epistemologies and practices, such as media archaeology, are fundamentally changing
views on media’s spatial properties throughout the historical record (Zielinski 2006;
Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). The articles in this issue represent different subjects and
approaches. Yet each demonstrates the need to consider media space in conjunction with
other sociocultural factors, regardless of the specific medium, practice, or technology at
hand. Hopefully, they indicate new paths of study while encouraging the elaboration and
refinement of inherited theories and histories. At the very least, they should make clear not
only the possibility but also the rewards of such an endeavour.

Acknowledgements
The editor wishes to thank the editorial board of Continuum, particularly Panizza Allmark, for their
interest in, and support of, this project. He would also like to thank the peer reviewers and all those
who participated in the Rethinking Media Space panel of the 2012 Society of Cinema and Media
Studies conference in Boston, Massachusetts, for their helpful insights. He thanks Andrea Ciambra
for lending the photograph that appears on the cover. Finally, he extends his gratitude to the
contributors, who have demonstrated remarkable commitment to the project at every step.

Notes on contributor
Stephen Monteiro is an assistant professor of media and visual studies at the American University of
Paris, where he directs the Visual and Material Culture track of the Master of Arts in Global
Communications. His writings on media and culture have appeared – or are forthcoming – in
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 285

Screen, Grey Room, Photography & Culture, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Visual Resources,
and Kritische Berichte, among other journals.

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