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TopSituating Large Screens In The City
If we date their emergence from the pioneering ‘Spectacolour Board’ erected in New York’s Times Square in 1976, large publicly situated video screens are now more than three and a half decades old. Yet, despite the recent rapid growth in their number and prominence, there remains relatively little empirical data concerning their impact on urban space. This is in marked contrast to the rapid development of a growing body of empirical data on the impact of ‘small screen’ devices such as mobile cell phones (Beaton & Wajcman, 2004; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Ling & Pedersen, 2005; Katz, 2006; Horst & Miller, 2006; Goggin & Hjorth, 2007).
Scholarly analysis of the impact of media on social life and urban space has historically been framed by concern with spectacle and the commodification of space on the one hand (Debord, 1970; Cooke & Wollen, 1995), and surveillance and the policing of urban space on the other (Lyon, 2007). Since the 1960s, sociologists, architects and urban planners have pointed to the decline of public space and the emergence of de-centred cities lacking a traditional sense of ‘place’ (Jacobs, 1961; Sennett, 1977; Soja, 2000). In these analyses, the impact of media, notably the role of broadcast television in effectively ‘privatizing’ public culture by relocating critical aspects of the public sphere into the suburban private home, has often been held in a negative relation to public space.
This predominantly negative association has been subject to some revaluation in recent research. For instance, research into creative industries and the role of culture in social inclusion strategies has attempted to map the links between cultural practice, urban regeneration and social cohesion (Yudicé, 2003; Paddison & Miles, 2007). There has also been an emerging body of work looking more generally at what Saskia Sassen (2006) terms the imbrication of the digital and the non-digital in contemporary cities (Mitchell, 2003; McQuire, 2008; Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2009; Gordon & Souza e Silva, 2011). And there is now an emerging body of work on the specific phenomena of large screens (McQuire, 2006; McQuire, Martin, & Niederer, 2009).