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Der Beitrag fokussiert den Blick zurück auf den Blauen Paneten als »Urszene« des planetarischen Bewusstseins, wie er sich in Alfonso Cuaróns GRAVITY (USA/UK 2013) reinszeniert findet. In einer Verschränkung von visueller Geschichte und Mediengeschichte wird gezeigt, wie das Bild der Erde in immer neue Sinn- und Handlungshorizonte gesetzt wurde. Während das berühmte Foto der Blue Marble (Apollo 17) etwa zur Ikone einer systemischen Globalität in der Ökologiebewegung avancierte, steht Buckminster Fullers Geoscope von 1963 paradigmatisch für den Übergang zu einem »globalen Interface«. Die sphärische Visualisierung globaler Ströme präfiguriert, was ein halbes Jahrhundert später mit Softwareanwendungen wie Google Earth zum neuen medialen Habitat der Blue Marble wird. Deutlich tritt hier die visuelle Repräsentation der Erde hinter einer »Oligoptik« zurück, in der sich Bedeutungen, Handlungspotenziale und Machthierarchien situiert herausbilden.

This volume addresses the matter of participatory media practices as playful appropriations of media technology within current digital media cultures. It introduces case studies, concepts, and methodologies at a time when participation seems to be the general condition of media culture—a condition, one might be tempted to label post-participatory. Commonly understood as becoming involved in doing “something” or as taking part in “something”, in the context of media use, participation is commonly associated with a changing attitude of consumers towards the contents of media products.

Digital Games are a genuine part of convergence culture because their structure can become the subject of participatory practices. This generates special needs on the side of the computer game industry to manage and steer the relationship to its customers. The article focuses on this relationship between the game industry and its customers and outlines it as a form of cooperation. A short archeology of so-called editor games serves as a starting point. Editor games refers to a specific software genre, in which the users are offered design possibilities within a relatively confined framework. The article continues by elaborating the limits and possibilities of co-creative practices afforded by these software programs in order to trace the changing material conditions of a participatory computer game culture as a whole. It shows that editor games act as mediators within a precarious relationship between the media industry and the consumers. The aim of this approach is to explore the role of editor games in initiating and maintaining cooperative relationships between the computer game industry and its customers.

This paper considers some significant questions in geography and cognate fields about the roles of maps in the information age. Most maps are now digital products, offering immersive environments for user involvement. The increasingly networked digital distribution of geographic information in consumer-orientated cartographic representations leads to substantial changes how people individually and collaboratively experience and produce space and place. This article focuses on the ongoing metamorphosis arising through geobrowsing, the media-based flexible production of geographic knowledge through interactive maps. Drawing on work in media studies influenced by the so-called spatial turn—the rediscovering of geography-related questions in the social sciences and humanities, after modernism’s claimed prioritization of time and history (Soja in Postmodern Geographies. The reassertion of space in critical social theory, London, 1989; Jameson in Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, 1991)—this paper develops a theoretical framework built on the dynamic networked geomedial action spaces concept to understand the changing roles of information age maps as imagined materialist spaces for the experience and production of space—ultimately a medial turn. Following this concept, maps change from offering static and non-interactive frames of geographic reference for the production of space and place and as geomedia support a veritable infinity of interactive and map-based activities. Geobrowsing facilitates some new modes of geographic interactions that move from logocentric engagements with static maps to egocentric dynamic interactions with code-based elements of geomedial action spaces. Google Earth and similar geomedia facilitate maps that become intrinsic to a growing number of social action spaces and alter the experience and production of space and place.

Der Beitrag hat eine praxeologische und medienethnografische Erforschung der sozio-technischen und sozio-okonomischen Bedingungen der digitalen Medienpraxis des Computerspiel-Moddings zum Ziel. Modding bezeichnet Praktiken der Veranderung oder Erweiterung von Inhalten und Strukturen eines Computerspiels durch Spielerinnen und Spieler.

Media rich geographical environments and mobile Geomedia are suspected to change the way we encounter cartographic material. Thereby, commercial geomedia such as Google Earth promise to work as devices that not only facilitate the access to geographical material, but provide interactive platforms that makes it easier to handle and comprehend spatial relationships, and, at the same time, reconfigure our understanding of space and location. The paper argues that these developments demand an overall shift from the fixed functional approach of map use studies to a more dynamic view on geomedia usage that becomes inevitable through new practices such as geobrowsing. This claim is reviewed, drawing on Science and Technology Studies, and, in particular their research branch Actor-Network-Theory, to give further insights in the handling of geomedia, against the backdrop of the sociotechnical context in which the objects influence our everyday encounters with the outside world.