Media was always associated with the public sphere and McQuire is saying that also for the television. Until what was being shown was controlled by broadcasters.
McQuire says that screens went from private to public and asked various questions:
How should we understand the emergence of the electronic screen from the domestic interior onto the streetscape of contemporary cities? What are the implications of the merging of screens with architecture, which turns the surface of buildings into an active communication resource? How will the overlap between streetscape and datascape shape public space in the future?
The writer highlights 3 major thresholds in large screen technology:
1. The programmable electronic signage that used incandescent bulbs.
2. Screens that used a matrix of small Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) displays. (colour)
3. LED (light emitting diode) technology as a video display format in the late
1990s.
Media buildings – buildings that remain relatively transparent to occupants looking outside, but supports large-scale video images when seen from the street.
The media city = contemporary urbanism
"Nevertheless, digital media is clearly ascendant, not only because it is the fastest growing sector, but because the logic of the digital is remaking all older media industries from publishing to telecommunications."
Context of social space.
What I'm getting from this reading is that technology has infiltrated the social space and it is no longer private.
"...the social meaning of space becomes increasingly open to the force and potential of a generalised elsewhere."
Flexible cities – Flexible living spaces emerging because of new media such as computers.
Instead of there being a flow of vertical flow of information i.e. from the top down, the inhabitants are now deeply rooted in creating their environment. "The inhabitants must be given the opportunity to adapt their dwellings themselves to the needs of the moment"
"In place of cities and spaces designed ‘from above’ by experts such as urban planners, their mutual emphasis on user-configured space focuses critical thought on the city as a dynamic process – what Tschumi describes as an ‘event-city’ – involving complex and unpredictable human interactions as much as deliberately designed physical structures and built forms."
The decline of the public space due to technology
eg: from bargaining on the streets to buying online....totally crosses out the social space.
Surveillance – panoptic (showing or seeing the whole) to control space. One could now leave an electronic trail in the city e.g. cctv, credit card transactions. This type of surveillance did not come about because of the police but because of economic and administrative flexibility.
"As a result, everyday social interaction has become increasingly dependent upon the collection and checking of large volumes of information about individuals."
Also..."surveillance is no longer mainly about what happened in the past, or even what is happening now in the present, but about anticipating what might happen in the future".
Reinventing public space calls for "frameworks capable of strategically addressing the new dimension of social space created by the intersection and overlapping of media and architecture in ‘media cities’, moving beyond current paradigms based upon security and commerce to instead think about facilitating other forms of engagement in public space".
Experiments in public space
Public Space Media Art "personal participation and collective interaction, between active engagement and reflective contemplation". Strangers meet in a public space and through the technology realised that they, enacting a collective choreography, can alter its ambiance. City becomes an experimental public space.
The use of public screens in social rituals...would the countdown to the new year in NYC's Times Square be an example for this?
Are we public participants? or just passers-by?
Do these screens facilitate a transnational public sphere?
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