CONVERGING MEDIA SPACES: INTRODUCING AN EMERGENT FIELD OF STUDIES

Along with the development of and widespread access to mobile technologies - smartphones, tablets, notebooks, GPS, Wi-Fi, RFID technologies as well as the growing number and diversity of media located in the city, such as urban screens and facades, interactive billboards and installations, media users' relationships with urban spaces has become morę sophisticated. Converging media spaces emerge from the complex relations between devices, content, as well as business and users' daily activities in urban spaces. These spaces conceptualized as processes or rather events based on users' experiences allow us to indicate the emerging multipliedplaces. Con-verging media spaces emerge in multilaterally mediatized cities and mobile media urbanization - of which interactive maps are the best example. Ali of these processes take place in the context of blurring boundaries and the merging of daily activities. The analysis presented below was based on materials gathered in New York City in November 2010 by the researcher as a foreign observer and were supplemented by materials from dif-ferent internet sources collected after the visit (articles, films, photos). The analysis includes the characteristics of physical (materiał) and virtual (digital) spaces. Furthermore, it pays attention to the meaning of emerging in-betweens. The cultural implications of widgets, switching and overlaying are also introduced.