This article draws on five participatory action research studies to address how geomedia theory can induce multiple imaginations of the future. Critical future research advocates that societies need to collectively create visions of multiple futures, transcending the single rational (neoliberal) future path. The studies were conducted in collaboration with rural communities and local tourism entrepreneurs who were exploring geomedia technologies to develop destinations. The tourism sector uses geomedia technologies but often depends on commercial platforms that seek upscaling and generalisation, becoming detached from local practices and place-specific settings. By applying critical geomedia studies, we problematised the relationship between people, place, and technology in the present, the past, and the future. Geomedia studies provided a critical lens that provoked future visions beyond preformatted technological infrastructures and media practices. The participants were asked to engage with complex issues such as access, restrictions, equality, authority, and legitimacy in relation to the specific place, bringing forth a multitude of local assets and narratives envisioning alternative geomedia technologies. As a result of this process, participants paid greater attention to local assets, gained a more critical approach towards technology, and dared to use digital solutions in a more visionary manner. We, therefore, argue that researchers need to engage with society to bypass hegemonic geomedia representations. By illustrating how geomedia theory can be utilised within community development, we provide a framework for how collaborative research can more explicitly engage with local actors’ thoughts and imaginings of possible futures.

This special issue of Culture Unbound directs attention beyond cities, to small towns and rural communities, and the practices taking place there. Referring to a previous special issue on ‘Rural Media Spaces’ from 2010, this special issue revisits the notion of ‘the rural’ versus ‘the urban’ through the concept of placemaking and geomedia. In a mediatized society, placemaking practices cannot be understood without simultaneously understanding different media practices and how they affect place. A geomedia perspective on placemaking beyond cities, therefore, brings new perspectives on media representations of small towns and rural communities, related to the materialization of space and how we engage with and perceive the world. Geomedia also includes a focus on layers of digitalization and new media in the relations between place and practice.

The issue brings together researchers from a wide range of subjects, and the articles in this volume address empirical examples from different rural places and small towns in Sweden and internationally. Taken together, a manifold of issues relating to media and placemaking beyond cities are covered, for example, inclusion/exclusion, representation, resistance, community building, belonging, and identification.

Covid-19 och de restriktioner som följde i pandemins spår förändrade musikbranschens förutsättningar över en natt. Scener och klubbar tvingades stänga när det infördes förbud mot allmänna sammankomster och alla uppmanades att hålla avstånd. Festivaler, turnéer och konserter ställdes in. Men hur påverkades och förhöll sig den svenska musikbranschen till restriktionerna under pandemin? Detta kapitel ger en bild av tiden under pandemin utifrån små och medelstora svenska musikaktörer. Aktörer som står utanför de stora major-bolagen och som är aktiva utanför Sveriges storstadsregioner. Utgångspunkten är enstudie som initierades när Sverige införde begränsningar av allmännasammankomster 2020 och som pågick fram till sommaren 2022. Kapitlet redogör för musikaktörers reaktioner, ageranden och de olika faser branschens aktörer genomgick under denna märkliga tid – från desperation till innovativt samarbete.

Purpose– This article examines the ways in which the popular music industry markets artists through integrated transmedia marketing campaigns. These campaigns unfold across multiple media and create multiple pathways for audience engagement, particularly fan engagement, across social media platforms. The purpose is to further theorise the relationship between artists, the music industry and audiences.

Design/methodology/approach– The study used digital ethnography to scrutinise the activities within a contemporary music transmedia marketing campaign, focusing on the release of Taylor Swift’s album Reputation as an illustrative case.

Findings– The study demonstrates how strategically curated activities encompass platforms’ affordances and industry events by making use of fan engagement across social media platforms and streaming services. Fans shift through platforms, as well as across digital and physical spaces, through defined marketing activities at specific times. This article proposes the concept of choreographed engagement to specifically address the ways in which the temporal and spatial aspects of social media marketing are used at the intersection of platform logic, algorithm economy and fan engagement to reach wider audiences.

Originality/value– By proposing the concept of choreographed engagement, the authors bridge the gap between fan practices and marketing practices, providing insight into how commodification of fan engagement is utilised spatially and temporally within the contemporary platform economy. Choreographed engagement constitutes a significant aspect of strategic communication and marketing. The term expands the vocabulary used in the debate on the commodification of artistic work, and audience engagement in the platform era

With the rapidly emerging development of technology-mediated tourism experiences and place-based digital services for visitors, there is a lack of awareness regarding the spatial implications of technological implementations. Based on a participatory action research method applied in this study on five research-based destination development projects in Sweden, we propose a spatially sensible approach when developing enhanced experiences for visitors through digital technology. This paper is motivated by the emerging criticism of how media technology is shaping and reshaping spaces. Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of the growing field of geomedia studies, we propose “geomedia sensibility” as a way to offer a sensible approach in the co-creation of digital experiences at destinations.

This study investigates how the popular culture scene in rural areas and small towns can be interpreted as constructive resistance (Jul Sørensen, 2016) to the urban norm. The city has long been associated with modernity and positive connotations, such as opportunity, social mobility, future, and wealth (Dibazar et al. 2013). This is in contrast to the countryside, which is thought to lack the amenities associated with the urban city. The contemporary debate in Sweden reveals a split between urban and rural communities. The city is associated with positive values like economic growth and cultural development, whereas the countryside is associated with social problems, a declining population, and a lack of opportunities (Stenbacka and Heldt Cassel, 2020). Drawing on interviews with local artists, musicians, and event organizers living in the Swedish countryside (Värmland), I found that they express their choice of living and engagement in local communities in opposition to the urban norm. Both in their choice to not establish themselves in a major city and in how their artistic work contributes to and is dependent on the production of locality (Massey, 1993; Appadurai, 2003). Applying the theoretical framework of constructive resistance identifies how rural artists’ everyday practices become a way to stage a desired community independent of the dominant structures already in place. I thereby bring attention to how the production of locality disrupts the urban norm through the struggles of the rural popular culture scene.

Virtual reality (VR) immerses users in others’ lives, creating empathy and understanding long after the VR scenario has finished. As VR technology has matured, VR scenarios have begun to be used in complex real-world areas such as education, health and organisational change. These scenarios can be of variable technical quality, with limited interactive capacity, unrealistic environments and clunky or absent avatars. In this study, three scenarios related to gender inequality training were constructed with glitches in the core immersive qualities of presence, interactivity and plausibility in order to understand their effect on the immersive experience. Using a multi-step in-depth series of qualitative interviews to examine the whole immersive process, the results show that immersion is not compromised but changed by glitches. Limited interactivity led to uncomfortable interactions that allowed participants to process difficult emotions; implausible situations surfaced buried norms and prejudices; and avatar variation gave rise to a sense presence that also included distance, which gave the user opportunities for critical reflection. These results point towards immersion as a robust and richly textured concept, while interactivity, plausibility and presence can best be understood as dimensions rather than goals. Totally seamless and immersive experiences may not only be utopian but also unnecessary. The glitches in low-end productions can produce powerful communication without expensive technology.

This article presents an action-research study investigating a spatially sensitive innovation process of place-based experiences in a rural area of Sweden. Lately, there have been a growing number of initiatives focused on developing location-aware mobile media – geomedia technologies – to offer place-based digital experiences within tourism. Drawing on contemporary critical studies on geomedia technologies, we stress the importance of reflecting upon the implications of place-based technologies to minimise both the negative impacts on a place and the neglect of local perspectives. We conducted action-research interventions to unpack the complexity of developing place-based mediated experiences. The study makes an illustrative case of how interventions lead to more nuanced development processes of geomedia technologies while simultaneously fostering creativity. We argue that as action research allows researchers to intervene in media innovations, it identifies models for more nuanced place-based development processes, including local spatial and sociocultural perspectives.

Our changing climate foretells a future with continued large forest fires and extreme weather events, such as devastating storms, heavy rainfall, flooding, heat and drought. This project focuses on preparedness for this kind of events taking place while large, spread-out, and often uncertain, numbers of visitors are roaming the Swedish countryside – not seldom voluntarily or involuntarily of the grid. The conditions for crisis communication is changing with social media, apps and digitalization of information. Obstacles and possibilities for digitalization in the tourism sector in relation to the specific conditions of nature-based tourism needs more attention.

Tourists are a vulnerable group in crisis situations, since they are not acquainted with neither the place nor how to find information about the crisis and how to keep themselves safe. In parallel, the Swedish tourism sector is constantly growing, with new trends as ”vacation at home” and increasing numbers of international tourists visiting Swedish nature, and nature-based tourism is believed to see a significant increase in post-pandemic travel, as more visitors seek uncrowded destinations. A crisis can be devastating in nature tourist areas. Despite this, the tourism sector is often viewed as peripheral and is in some cases not even included in crisis preparedness planning.  

The aim of this study is to generate new knowledge and methods for incorporating the Swedish countryside tourism sector in crisis management and communication. Crisis management and risk preparedness and awareness, and collaborations and relations between the tourism sector and other crisis management actors (municipalities and public authorities) are in focus, as well as the nature tourists themselves.

Over the last decade, the music industry has adapted its promotional strategy to take advantage of the fluid, contemporary, platform-based transmedia landscape. For researchers of contemporary culture, the multiplicity of promotional activities creates substantial methodological challenges. In this article, we present and discuss such methodological approaches using two studies of contemporary promotional music campaigns as illustrative cases. Inspired by digital and innovative methods and guided by the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR’s) ethical guidelines, we developed two data collection strategies—reversed engineering and live capturing—and applied two analytical approaches—visual mapping and time-based layering. The first case study traced already staged music marketing campaigns across multiple online media platforms, and the second followed an online promotional campaign in real time for six months. Based on these case studies, we first argue for the importance of grounded manual capturing and coding in data collection, especially when working around data access limitations imposed by platforms. Second, we propose reversed engineering and live capturing as methods of capturing fragmented data, in contemporary promotional campaigns. Third, we suggest the visual mapping and time-based layering of data, enabling researchers to oscillate between qualitative and quantitative data. Finally, we argue that researchers must pool their experiences and resources regarding how to transcend platform limitations and question a lack of transparency while respecting ethical norms and guidelines. With these arguments, we assert the researcher’s necessary role in understanding and explaining the complex and hybrid contemporary promotional landscape and provide tools and strategies for further research.