Community Is the Message
Nemanja Memarovic, Marc Langheinrich and Ava Fatah gen. Schieck: Community Is the Message – Viewing Networked Public Displays Through McLuhan’s Lens of Figure and Ground
Part of Paper Session 2: DIY and Participation
Abstract: Networked public displays are being portrayed as “a new communication medium for the 21st century”, potentially having the same impact on society as radio, TV, and the Internet. In order to understand how this new medium can impact the society this paper uses a (small) part of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, i.e., the interplay between the figure – the medium – and the ground – the context in which the medium operates – and how the figure amplifies otherwise invisible effects of the ground.
By analyzing environmental/urban research on interactions and processes in public spaces this paper infers the effects of the ground – public space – amplified through the figure – networked public displays – on its audience, showing why this new medium is fitted for affecting and enriching place-based communities. Overall, this paper contributes to the theory of networked urban/public displays and their use as a communication medium.
Nemanja Memarovic is a Postdoc at People and Computing lab at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Read more about him here
Marc Langheinrich is an Associate Professor for Computer Science at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. Read more about him here
Ava Fatah is an Architect, Educator and Researcher. She is a Lecturer in Digital Interactions on the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation proramme at the Bartlett, UCL, England. Read more about her here
Paper Session 2: DIY and Participation
This session takes place in the afternoon of November 21. It features four talks:
