Mobile City Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin
Mobile City Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin by Jordan H. Kraemer, published by Cornell University Press on January 15, 2025, offers an in-depth examination of the intersection between social media and urban life in early-2000s Berlin. This 228-page book investigates how a burgeoning “knowledge” class, including young Germans and EU foreigners, engaged with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter amid the city’s vibrant post-unification counterculture. Kraemer analyzes the implications of these digital interactions within the context of urban development and class dynamics, highlighting the transformation of Berlin into a neoliberal “creative city.”
Readers will find a detailed exploration of how social media practices influenced urban sociality and mobility, reshaping everyday experiences in Berlin. The book delves into the complexities of class mobility and identity as urban planners and developers redefined the cityscape. Kraemer discusses the broader implications of these changes, including the potential for both global interconnection and the risks of European disintegration and illiberalism. Mobile City presents a nuanced perspective on the relationship between digital media and urban environments, making it a significant contribution to the fields of communication, sociology, and urban studies.
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In Mobile City, Jordan H. Kraemer charts the rise of social media and an emerging “knowledge” class in early-2000s Berlin. Many young Germans and EU-Ausländer (foreigners from other EU countries), attracted to Berlin’s vibrant post-unification counterculture, moved to the city just as they began using social media like Facebook and Twitter. Social media and Berlin alike became hip sites for urban, middle-class aspirations, but, as Kraemer accounts, social media users became embroiled in contestations over class mobility and identity, as urban planners and developers remade Berlin into a neoliberal “creative city.”
The rise of this creative city involved scale-making projects that fused imaginaries of digital technologies with the expansive impulses of late capital: a vision of world peace and economic cooperation through global interconnection. But in Berlin, scalar transformations were lived out through ordinary practices that reconfigured daily sociality, mobility, and urban space. Mobile City explores how digital media practices forged emergent scales like the global and supranational yet were equally complicit in potential European disintegration and illiberalism.
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