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Besides traditional mass media, "new" media, too, give rise to specific visibility regimes, which are different from the diagram of the broadcast analysed in Chapter 3. Of course the category of "new media" is always historically relative, given that every medium functions through re-mediation of former media, so that what seems to be most immediate is in fact hypermediated (Bolter and Grusin 1999). For us, writing at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the new media in question are digital, networked, portable, personal and locative media. In this chapter, the analysis of mediated visibilities undertaken in Chapter 3 is extended to the new media based on a set of distinctive digital information and communication technologies. By-now extensively investigated phenomena like "ubiquitous computing" (shortened, "ubicomp") and "mixed" or "augmented reality" show how visibility is located at the centre of a series of socio-technical and bio-political nodes of contemporary society. To my mind, a double exploration is required: first, of how visibility circulates in networks, or, how it becomes networked; second, how networks themselves become means to produce, enhance and manage visibilities, or, how they configure themselves as visibility networks.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230282056_4

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