THE DIGITAL CITY: Media and the Social Production of Place

Contemporary research in human geography can hardly be divorced from technology and the digital environments in which we now live. Today, society is rooted in the Internet of things, as an increasing amount of everyday life is connected to algorithms, applications, digital media, and the cloud. Those who are left off the grid (intentionally or not) are also objects of geographic studies— geographers analyze the implications of the digital divide or how the lack of access to technology and digital environments has an impact on communities cut off from online services, on people who are shut out from participating with the Internet, and on societies whose governments have intentionally implemented barriers to prevent citizens from accessing aspects of digital life. The Digital City finds a home within research questions regarding smart city development, media and communications technology, and cultural geographies. Halegoua, an associate professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas, is not a geographer by training, instead coming to these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Halegoua incorporates literature from communications studies, media studies, and geography to inform the arguments presented throughout The Digital City. As such, the book does not take on an explicitly spatial perspective in its analysis, but does engage with some core geographic concepts, mainly space, place, and placelessness, and engages with geography-adjacent literature in urban planning. Throughout the work, Halegoua’s main point is that previous research on digital media in urban environments have often been limited to individuals’ use of media. Studies have shown (Kitchin 2014; Shelton, Zook, and Wiig 2015) how and why media is used in urban environments as solutions to specific problems. In doing so, these studies effectively separate personal daily activities from their physical activity spaces—that is, we no longer need to go to a grocery store; instead groceries can be delivered to our homes with a few button clicks. Similarly, past studies (A. de Souza e Silva and others 2011; Ito 2013) have discussed individuals’ engagement with media and seek to understand how media users appropriate applications or physical devices to unique situations, again focusing on the use of technology to remove us from our physical environments. The Digital City pushes these studies one step farther, past understanding the ways in which people have integrated media and technology within their lives, to how this integration has subsequently reshaped their engagement