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One map to rule them all? Google Maps as digital technical object 'I guess, naively perhaps, we hoped we could have one global map of the world that everyone used, but politics is complicated' (Ed Parsons, geospatial engineer at Google, in Usborne 2016) Maps are distinctive artefacts that humans have produced for millennia. They are sites at which the relation between knowledge, technics and space becomes an explicit matter of concern. If the dream of the perfect map conjures a certain limit of modern representation-memorably dramatized by Borges and dramatically theorized by Baudrillard-contemporary scholarship has tended toward an understanding that a map is less the representation of a pre-existent world, but constitutive of world-view. Every map, then, proposes a distinctive mode of being in the world; a particular distribution of territory, space, borders and others. While maps have a long history, the last two decades have seen the dawn of what is widely acknowledged as a new era in mapping. Building on earlier developments in GIS and computing, the rise of web-based mapping has meant that all kinds of attributes-from the data maps display to where they are accessed, how mapping works as an industry to its role in everyday life-have been subject to rapid transformation. Crampton (2008: 206) expresses one key dimension of change when he observes that "for most of its history, mapping has been the practice of powerful elite". In contrast, contemporary mapping is marked by the upsurge of what he calls 'populist cartography', as a wider range of actors have gained access to the means of producing and distributing maps. At the same time, geospatial data has emerged as one of the keystones of the contemporary digital milieu in which the capacity to 2 calculate positionality becomes an operational logic joining commercial profitseeking agendas to state-based strategies of governmentality and security. The challenge is to understand the broader logic of this transformation without losing site of its different trajectories and specific instantiations. As Nigel Thrift (2009: 125) has remarked in another context, 'Detail counts'. In this essay, I argue that the reinvention of mapping has distinctive lessons for how we might understand the implication of media technology in the remaking of contemporary social life. The process by which maps become digital platforms locates mapping as a core-and indeed constitutive-element of the historical trajectory I have elsewhere described as the shift from media to 'geomedia'; a condition characterized by media becoming increasingly ubiquitous, place-aware and supportive of realtime feedback (McQuire 2016). This essay focuses on Google Maps, which is a clear market leader in online digital mapping for the consumer market. As Gannes (2015) has noted: "'You may quibble with how Google delineates some geopolitically contentious area, or dislike one of its interface redesigns-but modern maps are the way they are because of the scale of Google's investment and ambition." In what follow...

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The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a farreaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces and diverse public cultures.

What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves back into the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer defined simply by material structures such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic media. Rather the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. These hybrid spaces may be called ‘media cities’. In this essay, I argue that different instances of the public space in modernity have emerged in the shifting nexus between urban structures and specific media forms. Drawing on the pioneering work of sociologist Richard Sennnett, I offer a critical analysis of the forms of access and modes of interaction, which might support a democratic public culture in cities connected by digital networks and illuminated by large urban screens.