The impetus for Making Publics, Making Places was a desire to map the connections and disjunctions between scholarly approaches to understanding the making of publics and places. Primarily, the approaches in this collection represent the broad field of media scholarship complemented by perspectives from adjacent disciplines. The collection is exploratory, a boldly heterogeneous reaffirmation that places and publics continue to be the focus of investigations into cultural practices in a hypermediated era.

In accounts of mediation and societal change, digital technologies are often framed as taking on an agency of their own. Nigel Thrift's (2014) editorial commentary for an issue of Environment and Planning A on data, space and place notes an important limitation in taking up either side of the Manichean divide on technological and human determinism. He argues that not only is technology ‘more mundane than it is generally portrayed, it is part of people's practices and adapts to them’. Its impact is therefore more likely to result in a ‘slow upheaval’ of change made by mostly invisible technology infrastructure, rather than ‘some kind of ecstatic change’ (p. 1264). Taking on Thrift's argument about the symbiotic nature of advances in technology and people's practices of use, our aim in the call for chapters was to invite contributors to help shape a collection illustrating the breadth and variety of approaches to understanding new media's generative power in everyday life.

The volume thus attends to two specific areas of disruption and generative change which are often taken up separately, despite their intrinsically linked nature: understandings of publics, and understandings of place. Following Couldry's advice on the opening up of cultural theory, we aimed to include perspectives beyond those in our disciplinary location as new media researchers — perspectives with the potential to ‘open up possible empirical work on culture’ (2000, p. 14). Couldry notes the benefits of stepping out of theoretical straightjackets, and refers to Stuart Hall's advice that ‘the only theory worth having is the theory you have to fight off, not the one you speak with profound fluency’ (1992 in Couldry 2000, p. 280).