Passé Media: Communication and Transportation on Commuter and Computer Buses
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: This essay proposes the concept of “passé media” as a contribution to scholarship that combines communication and geography, as well as to work that foregrounds background processes of networked, digitized social production. Passé media, communication and transportation technologies that both connect endpoints and are acclaimed only until the next technology arrives, reveal at least three attributes: (1) a novel way to conceptualize mobility, (2) the transformation of use-value to exchange-value, and (3) the continued ecological imprints of digital technologies. To illustrate, we turn to the bus, deployed both for transportation (commuter buses) and communication (computer buses). We argue that the moment of the bus highlights the ways in which spaces of connection are simultaneously privileged and ignored, highlighted and effaced.
Source: Communication Theory
DOI: 10.1111/comt.12056
Authors: Robert W. Gehl, Brian Cozen
Institution: University of Utah
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1487701140