Boston Mass-Mediated
Urban Space and Culture in the Digital Age
In the mid-nineteenth century, Boston fashioned itself as a global hub. By the early 1970s, it was barely a dot on the national picture. It had gained a reputation as a decaying city rife with crime and dysfunctional politics, as well as decidedly retrograde race relations, prominently exemplified by white resistance to school integration. Despite this historical ebb in its national and international presence, it still possessed the infrastructure—superb educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT, world-class sports teams like the Celtics and Red Sox, powerful media outlets like The Boston Globe, and extensive shipping capacity—required to eventually thrive in an age of global trade and mass communication.
In Boston Mass-Mediated, Stanley Corkin explores the power of mass media to define a place. He examines the tensions between the emergent and prosperous city of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its representation in a range of media genres such as news journalism, professional sports broadcasting, and popular films like Mystic River and The Departed. This mass media, with its ever-increasing digital reach, has emphasized a city restricted by tropes suggestive of an earlier Boston—racism, white ethnic crime, Catholicism, and a pre-modern insularity—even as it becomes increasingly international and multicultural. These tropes mediate our understanding and experience of the city. Using Boston as a case study, Corkin contends that our contemporary sense of place occurs through a media saturated world, a world created by the explosion of digital technology that is steeped in preconceptions.
‘Corkin does a marvelous job weaving together literatures, ideas, and concepts from sociology, history, geography, urban studies, and literary studies to show how the image of Boston is tied up in the mediated stories people tell about it.’—Michael Ian Borer, author of Urban People and Places: The Sociology of Cities, Suburbs, and Towns and Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark
‘Corkin is one of the leading proponents of urban-oriented cinema and media studies, and Boston Mass-Mediated will be the first authoritative book-length study of Boston in mass media. Given its historical importance as a city and in media, this is essential reading.’—Mark Shiel, author of Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles
Stanley Corkin is Charles Phelps Taft Professor and Niehoff Professor of Film and Media, Emeritus, at University of Cincinnati. His numerous books include Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore; Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s; and Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and US History. His peer-reviewed articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in several journals, including Jump Cut, the Journal of Urban History, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Prospects: An American Studies Annual, Journal of American History, Cinema Journal, College English, College Literature, and Cineaste.
