The cybercity as a medium Public living and agency in the digitally shaped urban space

Abstract

The digitalized urban environment is explored in the paper as a medium with several overlapping and interweaving spatial layers. The author suggests that it has grown increasingly complex in the multi-spaced and multiply scaled cybercities for people to share in public space. Moreover, the challenges of public living in contemporary urban settings emerge most intensely at the points of intersection of the invisible technostructure and the (mass) media saturated phenomenality of the city. At these intersections, one ethically and politically burning issue is how people through their ICT-related activities contribute to the ?automatic production of space‘. More specifically, critical attention should be paid to people‘s active, but not necessarily selfreflexive, participation in the consolidation of the ?technological unconscious‘ that conditions their own public agency.