This chapter demonstrates how the introduction of large screens to contemporary public spaces function to assimilate diverse arts, commercial, and public forms into a conservative regime. On the one hand, the new opportunities that accompany the large public screens are subverted by the logic of capitalist accumulation, which informs a public address designed to achieve high volumes of individual engagement, rather than high quality public engagement. On the other hand, new opportunities to enhance public engagement are subjected to bureaucratic modes of governance, which pre-emptively censor content such that it extends and satisfies conservative regimes of early broadcast regulation. The authors argue that the confluence of capitalist and bureaucratic regimes governing big screens effectively balkanise audiences, valorise nondemocratic forms of participation, and privatise public spaces.
Broadcast Regulation and the Irrelevant Logic of Strict Scrutiny
