Tilo Felgenhauer

Regional identity as celebration and routine: 'Mitteldeutschland's' glorification and its taken-for-granted meaning in media content

Contemporary approaches to regional identity generally consider regions to be social or cultural constructions rather than natural entities. Therefore ‘Mitteldeutschland’ (Middle-Germany or Central Germany) can be understood as a product of symbolic regionalization in terms of its media status. The regional broadcasting station Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) presents its history as the history of a German heartland with great cultural and national benefits. For example, Luther and Bach are placed in a natural and historic landscape that is regarded as the origin of major historic developments. This article emphasizes aspects of linguistic reference and coherence and inference embedded in a web of (successful) reasoning, which shows how the term ‘Mitteldeutschland’ fades from being the main subject of discourse to its unreflected background. The relations between explicit naming and defining, on the one hand, and implicit and tacit knowledge, on the other, is presented by the use of argumentation analysis.

Die Räume des Codes und die Räume des Alltags – Zur Aneignung urbaner digitaler Infrastrukturen

(Digitale) Infrastrukturen zeichnen sich in modernen stadtischen Kontexten durch ein hohes Mas an Komplexitat, ihre Konstitution auf der Basis von Expertenwissen und durch eine deutlich ausgepragte Intransparenz fur den Laiennutzer aus. Gleichzeitig sind sie in ihrer Funktion in vielfaltigste Routinen eingelassen und an der aktuellen Transformation des Urbanen insgesamt beteiligt. Der Beitrag diskutiert humangeografische Ansatze zum Thema digitale Infrastrukturen und Stadt, arbeitet deren Raumverstandnis, ihr analytisches und kritisches Potenzial heraus. Auf dieser Grundlage soll eine praxiszentrierte Sichtweise auf die alltagsweltliche Aneignung komplexer Infrastrukturen entwickelt werden.

The re-imagining of the geographical tradition in the digital age

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of modernity entering its digital stage, theoretical conceptions of the relation between technology and space regard the two as becoming increasingly interlinked. In human geography, such conceptual advances are mainly reflected either in models of globalization as being driven by technological change or in more specific investigations into technologies that have an inherent relation to space and place, such as locative media. The article opens up a geographical perspective on the relation of technology and space by focussing on the micro-level of the everyday use of technology. A framework is proposed that understands the symbolic geographies involved in the everyday interaction with technology as a combination of numeric components (places and networks coded by numbers), deictic expressions and graphics (as in egocentric interfaces sensitive to the user’s location) and common toponyms (established place names). Not only is this model applicable to the example of locative media, it also promises to be transferable to various kinds of complex infrastructure systems (including those for communication and transport) and media technology. The last part of the paper reflects on the apparent renaissance of traditional geographic concepts (such as place, landscape, region or nation state) in the context of digitalized lifeworlds. This can be explained by innovations in interface design enabling both providers and users of technological systems to integrate familiar geographic concepts into interaction language.