1.2 Cultural Concepts of Localization through Media

Analyzing the relation of space and place has become a central question in cultural studies as well and has from early on brought about locative and situational media studies. An increasingly sgnificant and differentiated attention has been given to the activities and productivity of media users and consumers (Hall 2002) since those models of the theories of reception were critically reviewed that postulated messages encoded and transmitted by a sender so that a methodological shift could take place from the analysis of texts to qualitative and media ethnographic methods (Moores, 1993). An early example is Nationwide Audience (1980) by David Morley, which he already then regarded as "ethnography of reading" (in fact of TV). It became quite obvious in these studies that the global and the local were merging, for example in the living room (Morley, 1997; Krotz, 1997). Not only Morley's "methodological situationism" but also that of many branches of cultural studies leads to an increased interest in the respective places of media reception and their constitutive function within the place of culture (Bhaba, 1994; Musner, 1999). In particular the home and the living room have become ethnographically accessible as central places for the use of media technologies and the contents transmitted by them (Silverstone/Hirsch, 1992; Morley, 1999; 2000; Berker et al., 2006; Hart-mann, 2009). The research done at first concentrated on television and addressed their questions at the place of the TV situated in the home, looking at the spatial relations, the viewing and listening relations and the rhythms of everyday practice following from it (Spigel, 1992; Hartley, 2002; Modleski, 2002; on the problems regarding ethnographic methods of this research see Radway, 1988). The "Geography of Television" (Morley 1996) thus was expanded into intercultural questions of space and place of television (Leal, 1990).

Since the early 1990s this approach was also widely read in the German discussions (Mikos, 2008; Hepp/Krotz/Thomas, 2009; Hepp, 2010), connected to questions of the place of the media and in particular of its reception. Internationally, these studies were broadened into other types of mediatized places (like malls and beaches, see Fiske, 1989, ch. 2 and 3), and partly also comprising digital media (Vitalari/Venkatesh/Gron¬haug, 1985; Morley, 2000: 171-203; Facer et al., 2003; Kraut/Bry¬nin/Kies¬ler, 2006; Röser, 2007) or cellphones (Goggin, 2006). These media then were analyzed not as places of reception but as linked places of creating identities through the always locally produced global system (Berland, 1992; Morley/Robins, 1995; Couldry/McCarthy, 2004). However, the analysis of digital, mobile and locative media using ethnographic and culturally oriented methods only has a marginal position in cultural studies compared to the well-established research done on television. Therefore, it is an objective of research that is presently being followed systematically and from ethnographic perspectives only by other disciplines like international cultural geography. In cultural studies, the present developments of media ethnography mainly followed the old tried and true triad of "production," "reception," and "distribution." After the decades of focusing on and knowledgably differentiating the reception of media, they have developed new strengths in recent years by programmatically concentrating on objectives like "Production Studies" (Mayer/Banks/Caldwell, 2009) and "Distribution Studies," explicitly building on older pioneer efforts in media-ethnological studies (Powdermaker, 1950) and journalist works (Rosten, 1941) because they had been neglected by cultural studies for decades.

By now, beginning with the analysis of spatial representations, the spatial and locative agenda in cultural studies spans from the medially varied constructions of social space and the locally different reception of media to a media scale created by the "power-geometry of time-space compression" (Massey, 1994: 149) also comprising the positioning of "media-caused entanglements of scale" (Couldry/McCarthy 2004: 8). These research efforts have produced a spatial turn in media studies (Falkheimer/Jansson, 2006; Döring/Thielmann 2008) that have resulted in a plethora of publications.

This proliferation of the spatial turn in culturally oriented media studies can be seen, among others, from the fact that

(a) mobile, localizing technologies and usages of media are widening the objects of media studies and they are concomitantly putting forward for discussion the question how new media and media platforms are changing our perception of space (Buschauer, 2010), are widening spaces (Manovich, 2005), and are contributing to a "tuning of place" (Coyne, 2010), or how multiple spaces contrariwise first of all create the necessity of multitasking in media (Mersch, 2011) and make a visual regime of navigation possible (Verhoeff, 2012).

(b) Beyond this, a specific interest in spatial and locative problems has taken hold in the different disciplines. Following a variety of artistic "spatial upheavals" (Ott, 2009) in modernism, the spatial turn in cultural studies was mainly shepherded to featuring the scholarly and artistic inquiries of the 'real' and the re-territorialized space (Maresch/Werber, 2002; Kudielka, 2005; Wagner, 2010). This can be found for example in observing the de-differentiation of modal and medial spaces of film (Agotai 2007; Frahm 2010) or the emergence of basic "hybrid forms of media and space" (Demuth 2007; Manovich 2008). Notably, the scholarly focus on media oriented artistic works transforming geospaces can be observed here (Gethmann/Hauser, 2009; Avanessian/Hofmann, 2010; Autsch/Hornäk, 2010) from different perspectives: three-dimensional (Schröter, 2009), multidimensional (Thielmann/Manovich, 2009; Jensen, 2010), or orbital (Bexte, 2008; Zinsmeister, 2008; Bergermann/Otto/Schabacher, 2010). This development surpasses art as a "historical indicator of spatial awareness" (Kemp, 1996: 13). Spatio-analytical discussions can be found in a multiplicity of subdisciplines of cultural studies, for example in discourse theory (Glasze/Mattissek, 2009), emotional studies (Lehnert, 2011), epistemology (Joisten, 2010), science studies (Suchman, 2007-10; Shapin 2010), or software studies (Mackenzie, 2010; Kitchin/Dodge, 2011). Apart from this, efforts are being made with the help of the 'guiding discipline' geography in integrating the individual and in part long-established fields of research like geography of art (DaCosta Kaufmann, 2004), geography of music (Krims, 2007; Johansson/Bell, 2009), geography of literature (Moretti, 1999; Werber, 2007; Piatti, 2008) and geography of film (Bruno, 2002; Lukinbeal/Zimmermann, 2008) across the different disciplines and media (Döring/Thielmann, 2009; Günzel, 2009).

(c) This provokes consequences for theories of media, because it reassesses their oblivion of space (Winkler, 2009) by defining their spatializing connotations more precisely (Zenck, 2010) and by differentiating their "space inversions" (Günzel 2007, 2010). Fragmenting and subdividing experiential spaces by enriching individual experiences of space through media and by being able to use mobile media as a mainly "locally controlled procedure based on contiguity," (Hagen, 2009: 362) a shift in interest is taking place with regard to spatial and locative problems. Not only has a dissolution of boundaries taken place, also an "explosion of place" has entrenched itself, (Graham, 1998) generating a need for research in concrete case studies and locative media research. This can be seen particularly in the historiography of technology that is analyzing global phenomena of media increasingly in their locally situated context (Ceruzzi, 2008; Schwoch, 2009; Aspray/Hayes, 2011).