GENERATING COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE CITY IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL CULTURE: A VISUAL ASPECT

The article focuses on the analysis of generating processes of collective representations about the city in the age of digital culture, which are directly related to the urban imaginary structuring. The academic relevance of research on collective representations about the city is supported both by increased scientific interest in phenomena which symbolically and mentally determine the urban reality and by the consequences of digitalization influence on these processes. At the applied level, this problem is revealed in the context of the existing necessity to study the predicting and projecting of the urban environment development processes, the prospects of constructing urban spaces and the urban imagery taking into account the digital transformation of reality. In this research, the main focus is on the visual aspect of generating collective representations about the city and, accordingly, on practices that produce visual urban imagery in the age of digital culture. A digital city representation opens up new ways of structuring collective city views. Imagining a particular city, a person mentally recreates images that allow him to perceive it as a visible location. Nowadays, the process takes place by means of AR or VR digital technologies through the digital media content via electronic gadgets. In the digital culture age, collective city representations are concentrated in a mosaic of reviews, publications, videos, posts in digital communications, where personal information is transformed into collective through digital media. The city is imagined via a digital code as a symbolic system of storage, representation and translation of meanings in digital environment. This situation causes a fundamentally new logic of generating collective urban representsations, where actors of visual content production and city virtualization in digital communications, which create a unique “digital footprint” of each particular city, play a significant role. The city perception onthology is changing, as well as the processes of its comprehension by citizens, guests, tourists: the hyperreal and virtual reality takes up more and more space. Now, collective representations largely depend on the tendencies and trends that the actors of the urban imaginary follow, in particular, on how popular certain images of the city and its objects (nature, gastronomy, architecture, public spaces, etc.) are with opinion leaders in the digital environment.

city, collective representations, urban imaginary, digital culture