ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes some new insights into the co-constitutive interplay, or co-emergence, of urban environments, social, sensorial and discursive experiences of such environments, and media technologies. In particular, it is argued that media technologies and their varying uses are directly involved in co-composing people’s relations with their environments which are understood here as at once material and sociocultural. The co-emergence of media, environments and sensory experiences is examined via encounters between sensobiographic walking interviews conducted in the SENSOTRA research project in Turku, Finland, and recent theoretical reconsiderations of mediation in media studies, cultural theory and studies of urban design, on which the chapter elaborates.
Referred to with the umbrella term immediacy of mediation devised for this chapter, these re-conceptualisations of mediation posit that instead of serving as a distinct intermediary layer between subjects and world, processes of mediation related to digital technologies, for example, immediately affect and co-emerge with (human) actors and worldly situations. The meanings and effects of media devices, the experiences of bodies – minds and the qualities of the environment arise together in a way that is distinctive to their co-constitutive interplay in a particular situation, time and place. Building on this premise, the chapter analyses excerpts from the sensobiographic data by applying and expanding on two more specific concepts, the lifeness of media and radical mediation. It is hoped that the chapter will make some useful contributions to the interdisciplinary fields of sensory studies, urban media studies, mobility studies and walking methodologies.
