| Emerging media are reshaping geographic connections and formations in everyday life, from Europeanization to the Arab Spring. This dissertation in cultural anthropology investigates how communication technologies such as social and mobile media were remaking the experience of space, place, and scale in post-socialist, integrated Europe. Based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and other European sites, this research considers how online and offline activities produced and shaped geographic scales as a means of ordering social space, drawing attention to the uneven ways emerging media circulated. For small clusters of friends connected by shared tastes in electronic music or regional German origins, social, mobile, and other media were transforming the lived experience of Berlin neighborhoods, regional German affiliations, translocal music scenes, online publics, and national belonging. The meaning and experience of the local, regional, national, or European were changing as ways of understanding space and place. New communication platforms often facilitated and privileged the sociality and mobility of dominant subjects in transnational circuits, such as popular social networking sites or mobile phones. Online activities were also linked to normative forms of selfhood at the national level, linking the nation to affective ways of being and feeling. Diverse language practices generated audiences and publics at multiple scales, especially online, illustrating how the global scale itself was comprised of multiple place-making projects. Finally, the communication system territorialized digital information in ways specific to Berlin's history and to national and supranational levels of regulation, shaping how users could access and interact with media technologies. These accounts highlight the contingency of the local, regional, national, or global as spatial scales that must be made and made commensurable. In recent years, the future of European supranationalism has been called into question, but it remains to be seen what worlds these scalemaking projects will bring into being. In Berlin, a shared sense of Europeanness informed everyday life, yet often depended on the exclusion of particular others, such as Muslims. In rethinking how emerging media circulate, this research addresses how everyday practices were remaking lived experience in new Europe. |
