The virtual urbanization perspective
To confine the discussion of convergence to technology and industry can
overlook the ways in which very profound convergences are happening
between electronic and physical spaces. Compared to the research on
media convergence, there is much more literature dealing with the
convergence between technology and urban life.
Whereas both convergence and the CMC perspective have largely
neglected the influence of external realities, as Baym (1995) has pointed
out, there is certainly a growing body of literature which can be and
which is distinctively concerned with the urban contexts of media cul-
tures, both new and old (see, e.g., Boyer, 1996; Crang et al., 1998; Droege,
1997; Graham, 2000; Graham and Marvin, 1996; Hall and Brotchi, 1991;
Hepworth and Ducatel, 1992; Holmes, 1997; Mitchell, 1996; Ostwald,
1997; Soja, 1996; Swyngedouw, 1993; Turow and Kavanaugh, 2003). This
literature, which is oriented towards a ‘virtual urbanization’ perspective,
is beginning to explore the multiple interrelations between computer-
mediated space and contemporary urban space. As I have argued else-
where (Holmes, 1997), virtual realities are already embodied in particular
everyday technologies such as freeways, television and the shopping mall
(41–2). The most instructive feature of these technological forms is that they
can already be considered as proto-virtual realities, displaying features
that characterize virtual spaces: they tend to homogenize ‘culture’ accord-
ing to a logic which makes experience over in its own image; and they
presuppose and are major contributors to the production of cosmopolitan
world-spaces.
Implicitly, virtual urbanization is a perspective which sees life on the
screen not so much as a new or additional development but as an internal
development of the logic of modernity and of the kind of urbanization
that accompanies it.
Whereas, with conceptualizations of the first media age, broadcast
is viewed as a neutral kind of service to urbanization and city life, it can
now, with the Internet, be seen much more as a precondition of this urban-
ization. Globally, urban populations are increasing much more rapidly
than the rate of increase of overall world population. According to UN
estimates, urban dwelling worldwide was 39% in 1975, 50% in 2000, and
will be 63% in 2025.
The central features of urbanization that are relevant to the rise of the
second media age are:- the increased scales of spatial separation of workplace from
household; - the atomization of an urban population into units of consumption;
- the standardization of the built environment;
- the privatization and duplication of access to property and resources.
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