Abstract
Media geography is a convoluted and complex field of study – running the gamut of maps, movies, internet and social media – that tries to make sense of how we communicate our geographical imaginations. With this chapter, we tap into our own influences and discipline to map a brief trajectory of the field from the very specific focus of our interests in mediated, sensational, affective, digital and virtual geographies. Ours is just one story of the field, perhaps appropriately emanating from Southern California where we both live and where, arguably, the most powerful newspaper, television, film and internet media have held sway this last century. Our substantive interests are with film and digital media. Given this interest, we do not deal directly with newspaper, books, theatre or television, but their contexts are clearly reflected in our discussion. Nor do we follow strictly linear or historical trajectories to describe the field. Rather, we bounce between eras so as to highlight simultaneously our areas of interest and larger discursive tensions. Elsewhere, one of us argues that understanding disciplinary engagements and debates is an appropriate way of appreciating how we come to know the world because it maintains the tensions that propel creativities; although it may be pedagogically prudent to think of paradigm changes and the linear development of thought, in actuality at any one time there are a plethora of discursive tensions at play (Aitken and Valentine 2014).
“In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (Guy Debord 1994, 15).
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Other areas of interest included social and cognitive psychology, semiotics and, latterly, neuroscience.
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Aitken, S.C., Craine, J.W. (2015). A Brief History of Mediated, Sensational and Virtual Geographies. In: Mains, S., Cupples, J., Lukinbeal, C. (eds) Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_5
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