Abstracts of Papers

Manfred Faßler:
The Mediamorphosis of the City

I.

Approaching a high level of social diffusion of digital mediasphere, we are at the point of transition from the phase of cult and culture of the mechanical abstract and territorial density (so called Modernity), to the cult and culture of the digital arteficial.

The irritations of the last two decades were numerous and coined terms like "global village" (McLuhan), "being in nothingness", "being elsewhere" (J. Meyrowitz), global electrosphere, cyberspace or "from places to network" (D. Bell). The basic question was and still is: Does the digital mediasphere inherit modern urbanism and individualisation, or do the heterogenous netbased processes construct a new "anthropological space" (P. Levy)? Obviously the growing complexity of mediamorphic processes requires the re-definition of spatial and temporal shapes and ranges, of cognitive and actional conditions of human behavior, and the re-definition of acceptance and trust as 'generalized media' (J. Habermas; N. Luhman). These needs are focused on the question if the metamorphosis reconfigures social and cultural relations as urban configurations or as a gobal 'dissociation' of individuals.

The thesis is, that the configurations of cyberspaces correspond with the dimensions of urbanity (for example anonymity, heterogeneous information-settings, individualization, abstract concepts of social control, infrastructurally based interpersonal contacts, complexity, emergence, culture of heterogeneity, multi-use of spaces [market places, public, entertainment], simultaneity of synchronous and a-synchronous processes).

II.

The media-technological composition of communication has changed. A new group of cultural, inter-cultural and transcultural references emerged. It is integrated in the multiverse of artificial environments. The City, as the most complex informational and communicative environment the modern territorial society produced, is confronted with a more complex and competitive structure: the infographical, three-dimensional spaces of virtual corporation (W. H. Davidow et al.), virtual neighborhood (H. Rheingold), virtual societies. The interpersonal social density is replaced by the trans-social teledensity.

Placed at this transition by changes beyond our control, the human communication environments have no choice between two 'gestures' (V. Flusser's "Geste"): the paradigm of face-to-face communication, including local integrated social density, anonymity and pseudonymity as specific urban qualities on the one hand, or the paradigm of interface communication, including instant local-global-relations, global digital mediasphere and placeless, so called virtual spaces. These two 'gestures' have to be coordinated as a new transsocial, cultural practice of being in a 'glocal' (R. Robertson) mediascape. These processes do not only start a mediamorphosis (R. Fidler) of the spatio-temporal interplay through which humans use to coordinate their short and long ranges of individual, cultural or social action. The mediamorphosis seems to overtake the central modern heritage: the functional differentiation of urbanity.