Negotiating the Mediated City ─ Everyday Encounters With Public Screens

This book is an interdisciplinary empirical investigation of how people interact with public screens in their daily lives. In more and more surprising locations, screens of various kinds appear within the sightlines of passers-by in contemporary cities. Outdoor advertisers target audiences which are increasingly mobile, public art uses screens to interrogate urban change, while postmodern architecture finds electronic imagery a suitable tool of expression.

Traditionally, urban sociology research has assumed that people seek to filter urban stimuli, but recent accounts of public screens suggest producers design and position display interfaces site-specifically, so as to engage with those moving past. This study offers insight both into the dynamics of actual encounters and into the long-term process of how people learn to live with repeated invitations to consume media in public spaces. The book includes four cases: street advertising, underground transport advertising, and installation art in London (UK) and media facade architecture in Zadar (Croatia). Krajina shows that maintaining familiarity with everyday surroundings in media cities that change beyond citizens' control is a temporary achievement--and a recursive struggle.

Zlatan Krajina was awarded MA and PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Previously he worked as a news and documentary producer and presenter. He has published articles on media, society and technology. He has worked as an undergraduate lecturer at Goldsmiths, and is currently based at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, where he teaches postgraduate courses on "Media and the City" and "Media Audiences."