Infrastructures of Obscenity: Interactive media technologies and the urban morphologies of class mixing

Keywords: Infrastructure, Media, Obscenity, Times Square, Class
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 08:00 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 09:15 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 32

Abstract

This paper examines the development of interactive media technologies, urban environments, and habits of class-mixing through the history of peepshows and urban politics of the "obscene." Using Times Square, NY around the turn of the millennium as a starting point, it looks at the formation of interactive television and social media through theories of obscenity. It first engages theories of the elements of obscenity (though not explicitly sexual)—esp, transgression, prurience, intensity, and authenticity—that contemporary interactive media share with early film, peepshows, and the mediated adult entertainment of the mid- to late-20th century. Next, it explores the historical transition of Times Square from shabby red-light district to opulently staged mixing of “media” and “ordinary” worlds through what I call infrastructures of obscenity, built by transnational media capital. Then the paper extends these insights to contemporary communication technologies and forms of staged class mixing. Ultimately, it explores how the tensions and ambivalences implicit in capitalist mass culture contain the seeds (however small or nascent) of rebellion against class society itself.