In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Myria Georgiou. Myria is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has been working for more than two decades on the mediation of identity and citizenship. Myria’s work has spanned interests in: the relationships of media and cities; how media are implicated in identity construction for diasporic populations and migrants; and how diversity and difference are represented in the media.
Our discussion centred on Myria’s recent book Being Human in Digital Cities. It is a book which explores the curious resurrection of a kind of “people centrism” in discourses about digital cities, analysing the rise of competing claims to urban humanity by a range of different actors, from technology companies to local governments to ordinary urban citizens. Our discussion provides a good overview of the book’s thematic attention to three varieties of digital humanism in cities: popular, demotic, and critical. We also touch on the where Myria sees her arguments in relation to broader contemporary debates about the “human” or “posthuman”.
A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.
Scott Rodgers is Audio Editor for Mediapolis, where he hosts the Mediapolis Now podcast. He is Reader in Media and Geography in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London, and co-director of Birkbeck’s Centre for Creative AI. His research works at the interface of media and geography, in recent years on the urban and local geographies of social media and digital platforms, and increasingly on how AI is becoming the next mediating infrastructure of everyday urban life. This concern with the ordinary character of mediation runs across his work, including Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media (Peter Lang, 2017), co-edited with Tim Markham.
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