For those of us who live in cities, those of us who move through them primarily by foot and public transportation, it comes as no surprise that we are surrounded by media from the moment we step outside. We see the newspaper dispensers, the homemade posters pointing us to the next yard sale, and the storefronts designed to beckon us in. We might not realize it, but we are also seeing media in the graffiti, stickers, murals, street signs, and the flyers we instinctively decline when someone tries to put one in our hands. What do we actually notice, what do we remember, and where do these recognitions and memories reside in our consciousness? I am a recent arrival to the Central Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a longtime urbanite, it has been my casual but ongoing project to identify the multiplicities of media and ponder their messages. I now propose to take that tendency and turn it into a thesis. I want to know who produces the media I see every day on the street and what their motivations are. I want to learn more about the nature of the contests, collaborations, and coincidences occurring over the turfs, public and private, that are open to the public gaze.

If we first imagine the street media of a city as a layer superimposed on the city's geographical location and physical structure we can then ask questions about its contours. What are the varied spaces and temporalities in which the media appear and disappear? Which spaces are public and which are private? What rules govern the exhibition of media in these spaces? Are these spaces accessible to all? Are they enforced? By whom? As these questions are answered by my research, I will continue to look at the nature and content of this media meta-city. Already, I've noticed that some signs and micro-narrative threads are more dominant than others.

I have also noticed a surprising void: the lack of Cambridge-specific newspapers besides the weekly Cambridge Chronicle and the Cambridge TAB. One question I might pursue further is what such a weak journalistic presence means for a city of over 100,000, and how that might relate to the proliferation of other, less-authorized forms of media evident throughout Central Square. Gerard Genette's "paratext" concept might prove useful here, as well.¹

To go from reading the ambient media of a few city blocks to grander theories of urbanity, geography, and history is not as great a leap as one might imagine. Seeing firsthand the vast amounts of street media breathes life into Friedrich Kittler's vision of the city as a medium, an amalgam of networks of organized and disorganized information, standardized addresses, data processing, and storage.²

A Faded Sign

Seeing the present multiplicity juxtaposed (not deliberately) with evidence of past media - sticker remnants, faded street signs and discarded newspapers - brings to mind David Harvey:

The image of a collage-spectacle epitomizes the proliferations and disjunctures brought on by postmodernism. The volume of external stimuli on these 21st-century streets renders 19th-century anxieties about the information-loaded modernist city - such as those articulated by Georg Simmel in his essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life"⁴ - either quaint or prescient, depending on your point of view. David M. Henkin notes the obscuring of the forest by its many leaves:

Exacerbating this state of confusion is the augmented reality brought about by the presence and use of electronic technologies, especially the Internet. "Electronic space interacts with urban space to create heterarchic spaces, which disrupt conventional boundaries," as Mike Crang aptly puts it.⁶ From store windows to stickers on street poles, the mediascape that originates in the brick-and-mortar-lined streets extends beyond. Even when we aren't directly accessing the Internet, we are reminded that it is there, not only by web addresses on store windows, but by the growing number of wireless access points dotting the area, fed upon by denizens with laptops lining café windows. The image is suggestive of the rhizome figure developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, which I will explore further for its suitability to describing the non-hierarchical information networks I have already begun to uncover in Central Square.

Memory Effect, the Sticker

Memory Effect, the Band

The computer is not the only augmentative intermediary between ourselves and our daily realities, as Paul C. Adams notes:

Walk/Don't Walk signs and advertisements on buses, taxis, and trucks suggest other ways in which we find ourselves enveloped by media we might not even notice. When talking about mediation, it might be helpful to understand what reality is grounding our perceptions. Or perhaps there is no reality, only different forms of mediation? It is a question worth exploring, but not getting lost in, for in the end, the current set of mediations is my current reality.

Jam'n Truck

Roger Silverstone provides useful insight into how I might reconcile mediation with my lived experience and work both into an intellectual inquiry:

Even as I scan the clouds of theory and philosophy, my feet will remain on the ground, my eyes trained on the earthly landscapes in front of me. The urban corner where I live has its everyday routines, and I have mine. When my trajectory intersects the others, what am I seeing but not noticing? What might I notice if I pay closer attention? What are the daily practices that place and remove all of the media that surrounds me?

David M. Henkin looks at Manhattan during a 40-year span between 1825 and 1865 and treats it as one long, closed historical moment. As I study the present (which sticklers might prefer to call the immediate past), I will take a different approach, one that traces change over small units of time - days and weeks - rather than years. That is partly because I plan to examine the time in which I live, performing a sort of 'urban archaeology of the present,' as William Uricchio puts it, and partly because I want to acknowledge and explore the importance of the multiple temporal planes on which everyday media operate. A storefront display may change frequently or never; the contents of the Boston Globe and Metro news racks are changed daily.

Here Today	Here Tonight

Stickers and graffiti have a higher turnover than I had imagined, and not just because the city offers a hotline to combat it.¹⁰ MIT professor and longtime Cambridge resident Ed Barrett tells of a number of nonaligned characters in Central Square who take it upon themselves to remove the posters and stickers. From what I've already seen, it is a daunting task, as every sticker removed seems to be followed by the deposit of many more.

Meet Me At Modica Way

What do the temporal traces of one item do to the next? We know a sticker's future when we see another's past. We know the newspaper in our hands is meant to be discarded after it is read. We sense some faded official signs are of forgotten, unenforced rules, but can we be sure? The city's physical structure becomes a palimpsest, and signifiers that endure change meaning over time:

Knowing this, I cannot approach my reading of the area as I would the reading of an ink-and-paper book. Meaning may never be fixed, as the postmodernists and poststructuralists say; often, in the case of a street's media, neither is the text. I would like to spend some time with works by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others in their schools, to see what of their theories seems incarnated in the street media I see. Perhaps fluidity of meaning has something to do with the open-endedness of a city's overall structure, as Kevin Lynch writes:

I have held these awarenesses (albeit without the theoretical citations) in the back of my mind during all of my years as an urban dweller and explorer, and that is why I find this thesis topic so appealing. I have lived in New York, Washington, Boston, and Providence; I have spent significant time in many other cities: Bangalore, San Francisco, Paris, and Bologna among them. I can relate

Do I Fit In?

to Yi-Fu Tuan's geography students, who, he writes, "had been in the field all their life without knowing it, except periodically, when they were actively engaged in a project."¹³ I don't just see the sights; I feel the city. New York exhausted me, and it wasn't until I moved to Washington that I had greater insight into why. New York's cacophony of appealing storefronts and hip billboards kept me in a constant state of unfulfilled desire. Passersby sported fashions upheld by the edgy language of the alternative press, both pointing to lifestyles that I longed to emulate without understanding how. Everything I saw I wanted; most of what I saw I couldn't afford. Washington's storefronts were mostly of chain stores and had nothing I wanted. That city was a relief from desire, but it was oppressive in other ways. I sensed disapproval and surveillance everywhere - signs told me what not to do before the possibility had occurred to me; the Washington Post included sections where residents griped about people who walked too fast on the Metro escalators or who parked their cars too close together. Advertisements on bus stops said nothing to me. I was not Washington's target demographic, and I felt it keenly every day, resulting in a sense of alienation from the city that I never quite got over.

These are just examples of the myriad ways I find myself sensitive to the everyday media in the urban spaces I inhabit, more so than many people I know.

Life is a field trip for me, a major reason why I eventually made my way into journalism. Professionally, I worked with sound, but photography has always been another passion of mine, and its power has never been as clear as when I prepared for this paper by photographing Central Square. Any doubts I had as to the potential of my thesis idea evaporated as I framed and captured the street media bit by bit.

In the spirit of using my graduate school time as a means to develop heretofore neglected intellectual interests, I have spent the past semester reading as much as I can of the copious literature on the imageability and phenomenology of the urban space. Much of what I've read has inspired me by the affirmation of my vernacular instincts. And yet, there is a limit to how much we can generalize the experience of living in a city. Jonathan Raban says it best:

I think of the hundreds of journal pages I've filled mapping cities with my own emotions - a crying session on the steps of an old home in Venice, a sense of well-being in a sunny cemetery in Prague, fear for my safety on a bus in Bhopal, the list goes on and on. The terms humanist geography and psychogeography loom large in my textual explorations; they are new terms to me, but old concepts. Psychogeographically inclined friends of mine have been busy building maps such as http://www.oneblockradius.org¹⁶ and http://www.pdpal.com¹⁷. Such maps are based on human experience, historical presences, or other criteria that remind us that standard road maps and tourist maps are narrow samples of the many possible representations of a space. I began exploring new mapping concepts last semester for Flâneurs Savants, a walking tour of Paris designed by Andrea McCarty and myself, and for an accompanying study project that also gave me the opportunity to encounter the likes of Walter Benjamin and Lewis Mumford for the first time.