Geomedia, representing an epochal shift in spatial mediations and spatialized media, changes daily life. This future-directed thematic issue advocates for contextualized understandings of geomedia that transcend contemporary hegemonic representations of technology. It recognizes the transformative powers of geomediatization processes and asks what “geomedia futures” such processes might bring about. Bridging critical geomedia studies and critical future studies, it challenges dominant narratives about tomorrow’s technological society and promotes the exploration of diverse, equitable, and sustainable futures with and under geomedia. Through numerous methodological approaches, the collected articles examine the role of geomedia in contexts such as urban planning, tourism, surveillance, governance, and policy. The thematic issue emphasizes the importance of envisioning alternative futures that resist technological rationalization and unethical exploitation of geospatial data, supporting more inclusive and human-centered mediatized places. This work contributes to ongoing debates in geomedia studies, highlighting the need for critical and interdisciplinary approaches to understand and shape our technological future.

Current research suggests that coworking spaces (CWS) both respond to and legitimize work precarization. This is an important critique. Less acknowledged, however, is the fact that CWS also (re)produce eliteness. Thus, to the aim of offering perspectives that remain underrepresented in CWS research, I here scrutinize CWS as promotors of class privilege. I build my case on the premise that class privilege has to do with more than merely economic superiority and seek to dismantle, in particular, the role of geomedia technologies in the (re)production of CWS eliteness. With clues derived from a literature review as well as analyses of real-life cases, I here recognize CWS as places of elite (non-)consumption, as hubs of elite mobility, as nodes in elite networks, and, ultimately, as elite territories in the (super-)gentrified geomedia city. I end my article by reflecting on the dialectics of CWS eliteness, thereby suggesting how precariousness and eliteness are interlinked.

Coworking spaces are contradictory places. Typically, they are constructed as connected, domestic-like places for hard work and as recreational, aestheticized destinations for individuals in search of work-life balance and opportunities for partial disconnection. This article contributes an immanent critique of coworking spaces through the overarching notion of “coworking space territoriality”. Our point of departure is the concept of post-digital territoriality, which captures how individuals and organizations in various ways try to counter the downsides of escalating digitalization and reclaim a sense of bounded place. To further elaborate the subversive potentials of coworking spaces, however, the “post-digital” is brought into dialogue with “post-work” and “post-tourist”; two other “post-” concepts that contain ideas and practices that characterize the contradictory nature of coworking spaces. At the intersection of all three facets of territoriality, we argue, the coworking space emerges as a spatially and socially bounded comfort zone. The suggested approach informs the ongoing conversation about the ambiguous role of coworking spaces in broader transformations of society, especially in terms of social inclusion and exclusion. The theoretical arguments are anchored in a substantial literature review as well as in first-hand empirical data from a “hot-desking ethnography” covering ten different coworking spaces in Oslo, Denver, and Palma de Mallorca. 

Politicians are decision-makers responsible for policy and opinion leaders with unique powers to construct challenges and problems as political. An emerging problematic issue pertains to users’ experiences of digital overload and invasive media (Syvertsen 2020; Lomborg and Ytre-Arne, 2021). Existing studies report that users struggle to self-regulate their digital media use – or ‘disconnect’. This relates to how connectivity platforms develop increasingly advanced techniques to keep them from logging off (Karppi 2018; Zuboff, 2019; Ytre-Arne et al., 2020).

This article aims to unpack how politicians understand problems about digital overload and invasive media and to what degree they regard digital disconnection as a potential political issue. We have selected Norway as our case country because of the population’s level of digital connectivity and the tradition of media regulation in the Nordic region (Syvertsen et al., 2014). Based on 16 research interviews with politicians and think-thank experts and a document analysis of official party-political platforms, we ask to what degree the politicians experience digital overload and invasive media as problematic, and if so, whom they believe is responsible for causing and solving the problems, and what specific solutions they suggest to the issues. In addition to digital disconnection literature, we draw on theoretical perspectives from media policy, political theory, and responsibilization.

Key findings indicate that politicians regard digital overload and invasive media as highly problematic. However, they are reluctant to suggest political interventions as solutions to these problems but rather place responsibility on the users and the platform industries. The politicians struggle to imagine political interventions that could help users disconnect while respecting personal authority and are doubtful about their power vis-à-vis the global tech companies. The article concludes with a critical discussion about the politicians’ acceptance of the neoliberal idea of responsibilization. This ultimately produces a reluctance to discuss disconnection as a political issue, not just an individual challenge.

This paper draws on empirical insights from two ongoing research projects, both of which are concerned with how we live and work with – or without – digital media: Hot desks in cool places: Coworking spaces as post-digital industry and movement (Karlstad University, PI André Jansson) and Intrusive media, ambivalent users, and digital detox (Digitox) (University of Oslo, PI Trine Syvertsen). With cues taken mainly from multi-sited ethnography in coworking spaces and qualitative interviews with (dis-)connected knowledge workers, I inquire about top-down and bottom-up forms of boundary work that are undertaken to produce particular workstyles and workspaces. I pay particular attention to expressions of what I shall call ’the post-digitalization of work’; that is, to the socio-spatial shaping of contemporary (knowledge) work by disconnectivity ideals and feelings of digital unease. 

This chapter assesses the social consequences of transmedia as a regime of cultural circulation through two thematic lenses: work and tourism. Based on our previous fieldwork, as well as the work of others, we hold that transmedia feeds into and provides new facets to geo-social de-differentiation as diagnosed by postmodern (or, “late-modern”) sociologists in the 1980s and 1990s. This means, above all, that social realms that used to be delimited in time and space are increasingly open-ended, which, in turn, has a profound impact on how relations between self and society are negotiated. Focusing on work and tourism, we try to show how people’s engagement with transmedia fuses realms that were once taken as the moral and social opposites. On the one hand, “transmedia work” denotes a social condition marked by the growing prominence of strategic recognition work and liquid boundaries between leisure and labour. On the other hand, “transmedia tourism” captures not just the growing presence of touristic expressivity in everyday life, but also the growing day-to-day significance of logistical practices - which ultimately constitute another kind of work - in the creation of tourism phantasmagoria. The chapter begins with a positioning of our analysis in relation to the theoretical discourses of transmedia and postmodern de-differentiation. The following two parts use empirical examples to tease out the characteristics of “transmedia work” and “transmedia tourism”, respectively, as increasingly liquid and contradictory social terrains. In the final section we bring together the discussions into an argument concerning (1) the prospects of revisiting postmodern theory as a way of conceptualizing social consequences of transmedia and (2) the relevance of strategic recognition work and logistical work as complementary perspectives for grasping the role of transmedia in the formation of contemporary selves.