Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies by Adams, Paul C; Warf, Barney;

Short description:

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of media geography, focusing on a range of different media viewed through the lenses of human geography and media theory. It addresses the spatial practices and processes associated with both old and new media.

Long description:

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of media geography, focusing on a range of different media viewed through the lenses of human geography and media theory. It addresses the spatial practices and processes associated with both old and new media, considering "media" not just as technologies and infrastructures, but also as networks, systems and assemblages of things that come together to enable communication in the real world.

With contributions from academics specializing in geography and media studies, the Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies summarizes the recent developments in the field and explores key questions and challenges affecting various groups, such as women, minorities, and persons with visual impairment. It considers geographical aspects of disruptive media uses such as hacking, fake news, and racism. Written in an approachable style, chapters consider geographies of users, norms, rules, laws, values, attitudes, routines, customs, markets, and power relations. They shed light on how mobile media make users vulnerable to tracking and surveillance but also facilitate innovative forms of mobility, space perception and placemaking. Structured in four distinct sections centered around "control and access to digital media," "mass media," "mobile media and surveillance" and "media and the politics of knowledge," the Handbook explores digital divides and other manifestations of the uneven geographies of power. It also includes an overview of the alternative social media universe created by the Chinese government.

Media geography is a burgeoning field of study that lies at the intersections of various social sciences, including human geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, communication/media studies, urban studies, and women and gender studies. Academics and students across these fields will greatly benefit from this Handbook.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction Part 1: Control and Access to Digital Media 2. Internet Censorship: Shaping the World’s Access to Cyberspace 3. Digital Divides 4. Hacking in Digital Environments 5. The Internet Media in China 6. Digital Media and Persons with Visual Impairment or Blindness Part 2: Mass Media 7. Newspapers: Geographic Research Approaches and Future Prospects 8. Fake News: Mapping the Social Relations of Journalism’s Legitimation Crisis 9. Film Geography 10. Approaches to the Geographies of Television 11. Geographical Analysis of Streaming Video’s Power to Unite and Divide Part 3: Mobile Media and Surveillance 12. Evolving Geographies of Mobile Communication 13. Moving: Mediated Mobility and Placemaking 14. Geographies of Locative Apps 15. Digital Surveillance and Place Part 4: Media and the Politics of Knowledge 16. Race, Ethnicity, and the Media: Absence, Presence, and Socio-Spatial Reverberations 17. Nationalism, Popular Culture, and the Media 18. Eurocentrism/Orientalism in News Media 19. Sex, Gender, and Media 20. Media, Biomes, and Environmental Issues