Beyond the ‘Dazzling Light’: From Dreams of Transcendence to the ‘Remediation’ of Urban Life

INTRODUCTION The so-called ‘information society’ is an increasingly urban society. The ‘digital age’ is an age which is dominated by cities and metropolitan regions to an extent that is unprecedented in human history. However, up until the late 1990s, the complex links between cities and electronic communications generated a curiously scarce literature. Since their inception, urban studies, policy and planning tended to neglect electronic means of communication due to their relative invisibility as compared with physical communications systems (i.e. transportation [Mandlebaum, 1986]). Meanwhile traditionally, communications studies disciplines tended to neglect the dominant role of modern cities as crucibles of innovation in electronic communication and the organization of information, knowledge and electronic flows (Jowett, 1993). Into this vacuum rushed wave after wave of commentators, business writers, futurists, novelists, media theorists, architects and social scientists to analyse the purported ‘impacts’ of new media from a technologically determinist, and substitutionist, perspective. From this perspective, more bandwidth was seen to inevitably substitute for the power of face-to-face communication in places. Alvin Toffler (1980), Bill Gates (1995) and Nicholas Negroponte (1995) were dominant figures here, with their implictly anti-urban assertions that new media would lead to a ‘death of new media & society