In this episode of the Mediapolis Now Voices series, we speak with Burcu Baykurt. Burcu is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work centres the technological dimensions of statecraft, from its expressions in nationalism and borders, to the various kinds of automation being incorporated in local government infrastructures.
Our discussion centred more so on the latter, and specifically Burcu’s longstanding interests in Google as an increasingly influential agent in urban affairs. While the influence that Google and its parent company Alphabet exert on our worlds has hardly been ignored, in a strange way, less attention than we might expect has been directed to the unique place ‘Big Tech’ companies like Google have in an emerging ‘platform urbanism’, or in debates about so-called ‘smart cities’.
We spent some time discussing a special issue Burcu has co-edited with Antoine Courmont on what they call Google urbanism, before turning to her own extended research into Google in specific locales, in her case Kansas City. We end our discussion talking a bit about where Burcu’s research and writing is heading, specifically concerning the notion of a rising ‘test-bed urbanism’, and how the urban interventions of the tech sector interweave with local knowledge, practices, cultures, inequities and histories.
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.
