Towards a New Media Literacy: Resisting the urban space as a 404 page

The intervention of media content in the public life of the city comes in many guises – the mobile screen / the corner store TV / the street projection / the media façade / the laneway love letter / the street art augmentation / the VR breakout space. Supported by commercial, cultural and civic media infrastructure the city is increasingly playing host to new forms of media content at various levels of complexity - from discrete media objects to temporary works of media art to components of a larger transmedia narrative. These projects are often built upon the convergence of personal, civic and corporate data generated from an individual’s online persona. This interplay – previously private, mostly invisible – is morphing however, from screen space to public space, from surface representation to spatial replication. This transformation is so compelling and perceptually seductive that it can become something that we simply “fall into” (Turkle 2009) unawares of the exploitation occurring beneath the “subface” (Nake 2016). Willing or not, as we move and interact in the urban publics we are participating in new forms of cultural and economic seduction. The sustainability of the industries which manufacture and embed the media that facilitate this engagement however will increasingly rely on new forms of media literacy if they are to produce genuine ongoing cultural and commercial value. Just as higher education is fragmenting into new sites of learning and new modes of interaction (Mackness, Bell et al. 2016) so too is our experience of media content in the urban space. (McQuire 2016) And yet, while the proliferation of technology has been near ubiquitous and the launch of solutions and platforms relentless, change has been slow. Both the city and the university in the 21st Century are plagued with usability issues and both have limitations in terms of our perception of their traditional function and the permanence of their physical design. As media innovates so too must its audience. We must see the value of creativity and cultural production beyond simple economics and only a media literate community can provide such an assessment and by way of participation reciprocal benefits to the media producer