Digital City

Germaine R. Halegoua is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the co-editor of Locating Emerging Media.

Tracking the relationship of bodies, digital media, and the urban landscape, Germaine Halegoua raises important questions about how smart technologies mediate our assumptions about the everyday. She argues that these values, though, are not simply imposed from above, but are negotiated through the very practices of 'smart' users. A timely read that invites us to consider the city, its people, and its digital cartographies as a new ecosystem that hangs in the balances of access and technological literacy. - Heidi Rae Cooley, author of Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era It is easy to criticize technology for diluting true life experiences when one is connected to it… Halegoua argues that the relationship between people and digital technology need not be disruptive. (Choice) Showcases, with capacious research, the diversity of ways in which people create new meanings of place with technology. Halegoua writes against the trope that computer technologies will eventually dissociate physical places from social environments ... By centering digital media in urban studies—and centering the urban environment in the study of digital media—Halegoua reveals how the city becomes desirable, familiar, knowable, or unique as it is refracted through mobile phones, locative media, urban dashboards, or even broadband networks. Digital technologies are not distracting us from place; they are enabling, linking, and amplifying new meanings. (Public Books)