Abstract:

Since the rise of geomedia in recent years, the previous boundaries between production and consumption, and between technical object and symbolic representation in urban public space and everyday life space are increasingly blurred, leading to the need for theoretical innovation in terms of the "virtual/physical" dualism in geography. The development of geographies of media and communication, which is the outcome of the "spatial turn" of media research and the "communication turn" of geography, contains the potential to break through the dualism. This article reviewed the core concepts, main issues, and research framework of geographies of media and communication in order to promote the academic dialogue between Chinese scholars in geography and media and communication studies, as well as to expand the research field of Chinese human geography. First, geographies of media and communication in Western geography was founded on the dynamic relational notions of media and space that were deeply influenced by postmodernism and posthumanism thoughts, including core concepts such as texture, mobility, materiality, and embodiment. Second, existing studies mainly focus on the spatiality of digital media and posthumanism media, the hybrid space politics dominated by digital media representation and algorithmic logic, as well as the hybrid space experience brought by mobile media. Finally, this article referred to the "thirdspace" as a potential direction for geographies of media and communication to surpass the previous dualism, and materiality and embodiment serve as the ontological bridge between media and space.

Key words: geographies of media and communication, geomedia, texture, mobility, materiality, embodiment, thirdspace