Ports: On the material and symbolic mediation of global capitalism

Abstract

Introducing and contextualising the contributions to the thematic section on ports, we discuss the conceptual and empirical productivity of the port for media research. As material infrastructures, ports mediate between land and sea, nature and culture, centres of power and colonised/extracted peripheries. As logistic nodes, ports connect transport and communication, technological innovation and revolutionary agency. Their ambivalent and managed visibility makes ports an intriguing motif of media representations that is harnessed for dramatic narratives, cognitive mapping of capitalism, or for city branding. As such ports help to rethink ideas about the relationship between material and symbolic aspects of mediation, between technological innovation and cultural heritage, between metaphorical and literal media ecologies.