The SLOW LAB at UO is hosting a talk on Feb. 15, 2018 with Myria Georgiou of the London School of Economics Media and Communications Department.

What kind of subjects does the digital city produce? And what difference does digital life make to the city? The unfamiliarity of these questions is striking, even paradoxical, especially at times when the language of “the digital city” has become ordinary, almost banal. In both its popular and its academic incarnations, the discourse of the digital city usually bypasses the ordinary: life in the city and the people that live and, in the process, make the city. This presentation advocates a cultural reading of the digital city, by reinstating the human at the core of the urban world. Adopting a communication approach to the life of the digital city, it offers a response to existing, disjointed conceptualisations by claiming that we need to more systematically study the ordinariness of communicative acts, relations and (dis-)connections, in order to understand how and why the digital matters to urban life.

About the speaker:

Myria Georgiou is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Deptartment of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on media and the city; urban technologies and politics of connection; and the ways in which migration and diaspora are politically, culturally and morally constituted in the context of mediation. She is the author of Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference (Polity Press).