Urban Media Studies| Understanding Encounters for Urban Media Studies: Civic Intercourse, Screen Technologies, and Cultural Difference

Abstract

This article argues for the multidimensional relevance of encounters among strangers for urban media studies. Establishing links across media and urban studies, I explore how media practices coconstitute encounters as situations that make up urbanity. The article also analyzes posts that people produced in response to xenoracist assaults in public spaces in UK cities following the 2016 Brexit referendum. My qualitative reading of select posts with an ethnographic component, demonstrates ways in which quick posting capacities of social media via portable devices resonated with the transience of street encounters and thus allowed users to reflect on aspects of street life that typically go unnoticed. At the same time, engaging with social media screens provided users with a space of distancing from the troubled scenes and transferred the contentious events to the networked, and pacifying, surveillance of the mediated city.