Text-Space Dynamics: the Digital Media in Defining New Urban Languages

The paper outlines, from the point of view of cultural and media studies, how digital media can be taken as a key to approach the understanding of new urban languages, as they introduce new dynamics in the text/space relationship: as a matter of fact, in digital media "texts become spaces", as they become viable (eg in hypertexts and video games); and - on the other side - "spaces become texts", as they become readable and writable (eg in procedures for geotagging and in many other cases). The paper focuses on the text/space dynamics, taking into account some theoretical points regarded as paradigms of how the perception and representation of social space are changing in the digital media landscape: interactivity; the mobile/locative paradigm; gamification and pervasive gaming; visual culture and data storytelling; social tagging and partecipation.