Twenty-third International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The emerging field of “urban communication research” comprises an invitation to look at the variety of intended and inadvertent expressions of the built environment and material culture, as well as how people interact with it and with each other. This study was undertaken to fill the void in the study of media, culture, and communication by emphasizing culture and communication as they are enacted on a daily basis and at the “street level.” Fierce advocates of the idea of the city as a proper “medium of communication,” Gendelman, Dobrowolski, and Aiello (2010) propose looking at the city as “a laboratory to research diverse and often unconventional forms of urban expression,” as “a diverse spectacle composed of interwoven signs, competing stories, diverse actors, and social boundaries in constant flux,” and as “a hodgepodge of communicative genres” (p. 181). It examined sources, tools, and methods to capture, analyze, and communicate the visual dimension of communicative urban environments, using existing visual sources as well as visual media as tools to both produce data (of material culture, media usage in an urban context, and human behavior) and communicate insights and views on the contemporary urban condition and experience. Mimetic Theory in Art was used to frame the study’s’ analysis in a phenomenological approach. Mixed qualitative tools were triangulated to categorize themes abstracted from transcripts of 25 interviews and subjected to In Vivo for inter-coding reliability.