Emergent media technologies and the production of new urban spaces

This dissertation argues that emergent media technologies and contemporary urban spaces are corresponding phenomena, connected through cultural and economic emphases on personalization, mobility, and interactivity. Interrogating developments in the built environment alongside changes in media technologies --- like linking modernist urbanity with the cinema or mid-century suburbia with broadcast television --- this dissertation engages material developments and the cultural constructions that make them possible. Conceptually, emergent media technologies and spatial practices are critiqued as interactive scripted spaces that surface ideological forces of interactivity, personalization, and mass customization in spatial and technological realms. Materially, the technological scripts of network protocols and infrastructure yield new media interfaces -- like TiVo and iPod screens -- that emphasize interactivity and personalization. Similarly, the spatial scripts of urban planning and development yield new urban spaces -- such as neotraditional communities and adaptive urban regentrification -- that emphasize flexibility and customization. In everyday environments the regular and repeated articulation of networks, interfaces, and spaces yields new practices and expectations of how the world should respond to our technologically-inflected desires. Grounded in media and urban theory as well as through egagements with real-world developments -- like Playa Vista, a new urbanist community in Los Angeles, and downtown Los Angeles itself -- this dissertation argues that Networked Media Spaces are created wherever media interfaces are engaged with media networks, and the extension of interface-associated notions of personalization and customization into these spatial environment in turn yields new modes of techno-mediated thinking that shape individual and cultural imaginaries regarding the built environment. These new spatial demands have been met with substantial changes -- the establishment of revitalized downtown centers, technoburbs, neotraditional neighborhoods, wired homes, flexible work environments, and gated communities -- that are determined in part by affinities with emergent media technologies and in part by the broader economic imperatives of neo-Fordist mass customization. Perhaps most crucially, these practices are framed by changes in a cultural vision of what it means to live in a moment of significant techno-spatial development. From master planned communities to gentrifing urban cores to ubiquitous WiFi hotspots, these scripted interrelations of capital, media, and space are ultimatley negotiated on an everyday basis through a cultural logic of networked personalized mobility.