This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities.
AminAThriftN (2016) Seeing like a City.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
2.
AshJ (2015) Sensation, network, and the GIF: Toward an allotropic account of affect. In: HillisKPaasonenSPetitM (eds) Networked Affect.
London:
MIT Press, pp.119–133.
3.
BiggamC (2007) The ambiguity of brightness (with special reference to Old English) and a new model for color description in semantics. In: DedrickDParameiGVMacLauryRE (eds) Anthropology of Color: Interdisciplinary Multilevel Modeling.
Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing, pp.171–188.
4.
BissellDFullerG (2017)
Material politics of images: Visualising future transport infrastructures. Environment and Planning A49(11): 2477–2496.
5.
BoyJDUitermarkJ (2017) Reassembling the city through Instagram. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42(4): 612–624.
6.
BrookerPBarnettJCribbinT (2016)
Doing social media analytics. Big Data & Society3(2): 1–12.
7.
BrunsAHanuschF (2017)
Conflict imagery in a connective environment: Audiovisual content on Twitter following the 2015/2016 terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. Media, Culture & Society39(8): 1122–1141.
ColemanR (2013)
Sociology and the virtual: Interactive mirrors, representational thinking and intensive power. The Sociological Review61(1): 1–20.
10.
CowartHSSaundersLMBlackstoneGE (2016)
Picture a protest: Analyzing media iImages tweeted rrom Ferguson. Social Media + Society2(4): 1–9.
11.
CrutcherMZookM (2009)
Placemarks and waterlines: Racialized cyberscapes in post-Katrina Google Earth. Geoforum 40(4): 523–534.
12.
DeanJ (2010) Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive.
Cambridge:
Polity.
13.
DeanJ (2015) Affect and drive. In: HillisKPaasonenSPetitM (eds) Networked Affect.
London:
MIT Press, pp.89–100.
14.
DijckJV (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
15.
DorrianM (2015) Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation.
London:
IB Tauris.
16.
DouglasN (2014)
It’s supposed to look like shit: The Internet ugly aesthetic. Journal of Visual Culture13(3): 314–339.
17.
FaveroPSH (2017)
Tainted frictions: A visual essay. American Anthropologist119(2): 361–364.
18.
FosterH (1988) Preface. In: FosterH (ed.) Vision and Visuality.
Seattle, WA:
Bay Press, pp.ix–xiv.
19.
Gabrys J (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
20.
GeuensJ-P (2013) Angels of light. In: VernallisCHerzogARichardsonJ (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp.45–60.
21.
GrahamMZookMBoultonA (2013)
Augmented reality in urban places: Contested content and the duplicity of code. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers38(3): 464–479.
22.
HalavaisA, (2014) Structure of Twitter: Social and technical. In: WellerKBrunsABurgessJet al. (eds) Twitter and Society.
New York:
Peter Lang, pp.29–42.
23.
HalpernO (2015) Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945.
Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
24.
HaylesK (2012) How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
25.
HillisKPaasonenSPetitM (eds) (2015) Networked Affect.
London:
MIT Press.
HoelzlIMarieR (2015) Softimage: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image.
Bristol:
Intellect Books.
28.
HollandsRG (2008)
Will the real smart city please stand up?.City12(3): 303–320.
29.
JenkinsHFordSGreenJ (2013) Spreadable Media.
New York:
New York University Press.
30.
KaneCL (2014) Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Colour, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Algorithms.
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
31.
KharroubTBasO (2015)
Social media and protests: An examination of Twitter images of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. New Media & Society18(9): 1973–1992.
32.
LewisSCZamithRHermidaA (2013)
Content analysis in an era of big data: A hybrid approach to computational and manual methods. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media57(1): 34–52.
33.
MaffeiNPFisherT (2013)
Historicizing shininess in design: Finding meaning in an unstable phenomenon. Journal of Design History26(3): 231–240.
34.
ManovichLDouglassJ (2011) Visualizing change: Computer graphics as a research method. In: GrauOVeiglT (eds) Imagery in the 21st Century.
London:
MIT Press, pp.315–338.
35.
MarresN (2017) Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
36.
MatternS (2017) Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media.
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
37.
McFarlaneC (2011)
The city as a machine for learning. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers36(3): 360–376.
38.
McQuireS (2016) Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
39.
MelhuishCDegenMRoseG (2016)
“The real modernity that Is here”: Understanding the role of digital visualisations in the production of a new urban imaginary at Msheireb Downtown, Doha. City and Society28(2): 222–245.
40.
MunsterA (2013) An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology.
London:
MIT Press.
41.
NitinsTBurgessJ (2013) Twitter, brands, and social engagement. In: WellerKBrunsABurgessJet al. (eds) Twitter and Society.
New York:
Peter Lang, pp.293–303.
42.
PaasonenS (2015)
As networks fail: Affect, technology, and the notion of the user. Television & New Media16(8): 701–716.
PaasonenSHillisKPetitM (2015) Introduction: Networks of transmission: Intensity, sensation, value. In: HillisKPaasonenSPetitM (eds) Networked Affect.
London:
MIT Press, pp.1–24.
45.
PapacharissiZ (2015) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford Studies in Digital Politics.
New York:
Oxford University Press.
46.
RangaswamyNAroraP (2016)
The mobile internet in the wild and every day: Digital leisure in the slums of urban India. International Journal of Cultural Studies19(6): 611–626.
47.
RogersR (2013) Digital Methods.
London:
MIT Press.
48.
RogersR (2014) Foreword: Debanalising Twitter: The formation of an object of study. In: WellerKBrunsABurgessJet al. (eds) Twitter and Society.
New York:
Peter Lang, pp.ix–xxvi.
49.
RoseG (2016)
Rethinking the geographies of cultural ‘objects’ through digital technologies: Interface, network and friction. Progress in Human Geography40(3): 334–351.
50.
RoseG (2017)
Posthuman agency in the digitally mediated city: Exteriorization, individuation, reinvention. Annals of the American Association of Geographers107(4): 779–793.
51.
RoseG (2018) Look Inside™: Visualising the smart city. In: FastKJanssonALindellJet al. (eds) An Introduction to Geomedia: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds.
London:
Routledge, pp.97–113.
52.
RubinsteinDSluisK (2008)
A life more photographic: Mapping the networked image. Photographies1(1): 9–28.
53.
RubinsteinDSluisK (2013)
Concerning the undecidability of the digital image. Photographies6(1): 151–158.
54.
RuppertELawJSavageM (2013)
Reassembling social science methods: The challenge of digital devices. Theory, Culture & Society30(4): 22–46.
55.
RyanP (2016)
#Follow: exploring the role of social media in the online construction of male sex worker lives in Dublin, Ireland. Gender, Place & Culture23(12): 1713–1724.
56.
SeoH (2014)
Visual propaganda in the age of social media: An empirical analysis of Twitter images during the 2012 Israeli–Hamas conflict. Visual Communication Quarterly21(3): 150–161.
57.
ShedroffNNoesselC (2012) Make It so: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction.
New York:
Rosenfeld Media.
58.
SöderströmOPaascheTKlauserF (2014)
Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City18(3): 307–320.
59.
SrnicekN (2016) Platform Capitalism. Theory Redux.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
60.
StewartK (2015) New England red. In: VanniniP (ed.) Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research.
Abingdon:
Routledge, pp.19–33.
61.
SteyerlH (2012) The Wretched of the Screen.
Berlin:
Sternberg Press.
62.
SundaramR (2015)
Publicity, transparency, and the circulation engine. Current Anthropology56(12): 297–305.
63.
TerranovaT (2004)
Communication beyond meaning. Social Text22(3): 51–73.
64.
ThelwallMGoriunovaOVisFet al. (2016)
Chatting through pictures? A classification of images tweeted in one week in the UK and USA. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology67(11): 2575–2586.
65.
ThriftN (2012)
The insubstantial pageant: Producing an untoward land. Cultural Geographies19(2): 141–168.
66.
ThriftN (2014)
The ‘sentient’ city and what it may portend. Big Data & Society1(1): 1–21.
67.
TufekciZ (2014) Big questions for social media big data: Representativeness, validity and other methodological pitfalls. In: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp.505–514. Palo Alto: AAAI Press.
68.
VanoloA (2016)
Is there anyone out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities. Futures82(September): 26–36.
69.
VerhoeffN (2012) Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation.
Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
70.
VernallisCHerzogA (2013) Introduction. In: VernallisCHerzogARichardsonJ (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 1–10.
71.
VisFFaulknerSParryKet al. (2013) Twit-picing the riots: Analysing images shared on Twitter during the 2011 U.K. riots. In: WellerKBrunsABurgessJet al. (eds) Twitter and Society.
New York:
Peter Lang, pp.385–398.
72.
WellerKBrunsABurgessJet al. (eds) (2013) Twitter and Society. Digital Formations.
New York:
Peter Lang.
73.
WiigA (2016)
The empty rhetoric of the smart city: From digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia. Urban Geography37(4): 535–553.
