Navigieren

Abstract

Navigation is no longer unique to the context of professional seafaring, but has become an integral part of networked digital everyday life enabled through smartphones and web browsers. Indeed, finding one’s way through online and offline spaces increasingly presupposes and produces specific forms of media competence one could call »navigational«. In this, a ›media cultural studies‹ perspective on the situated and ›technologized‹ media practices of navigation becomes imperative to understanding the contemporary media landscape. Issue 1/22 of Navigationen answers this call by presenting polyperspectival approaches to »navigating«. The contributions discuss the bodily, cultural, and media-technical facets of navigation, as well as its historical forms, the work on and in the data produced by and with navigational media, and the theorization of post-digital ›sensor media cultures‹. In doing so, the issue acknowledges that not only do data, things, and bodies need to be ›navigated‹ in the context of logistics, but that the increasingly autonomous wayfinding processes of non-human actors change the notion of navigation itself. As (German language) media cultural studies has so far lacked a convincing compilation of heterogeneous approaches to studying navigation, this issue provides an overview of the field, its researchers and questions. Despite the spatial turn in the humanities and a recent surge in geomedia studies, an approach towards the media and practices of navigation that combines historical, ethnographic, technical and theoretical perspectives, has remained a desideratum until now. The issue fills this gap.