La mediatizzazione della città. Tra controllo e consumo

According with the literature about the experience of the modernity (from Baudelaire and Poe to Simmel and Benjamin, to the historiographic reconstructions of Schivelbusch and Kern), sensory and communicative hyperstimulation is a typical and constant feature of the modern city. Overturning the classic McLuhan’s metaphor about the media as a “global village”, we could say that the city is today a “glocal medium”: an environment that brings together a wide and displaced complex of subjects (individuals, communities and institutions) due to technological infrastructures, professional cultures and the plurality of languages that break down into a network of communicative flows. In this web of discourses, a particular communicative act joins in, namely, outdoor advertising: a set of instruments and communicative promotional practices that try to intercept consumers when they are outside their own domestic environment, from the more traditional billboard to ads in public transports, from sponsored urban tools (bus shelters, underground stops), to the most recent electronic devices (digital screens, video wall, display), to what has been defined as “ambient advertising”. The transformation of outdoor advertising and the tools of control linked to its marketing are an interesting indicator of the transformation of the city as a medium