Abstract

With the notion of public screens serving as analogies of lubrication, aiding the flow of corporate capital exchange, Times Square is said to be serving serving as a symbolic nucleus for today’s globalized financial economy. Surprisingly, however, it was not very long ago when corporate bodies set out to make Times Square – the very center of the global digital financial system – void of digital screens. The following thesis will illustrate how a particular group of public screens, perhaps the most widely known, were at one point threatened to be removed from Times Square, only to be, less than a decade later, permanently cemented in the city’s legal policies and planning regulations. Through a series of negotiations with political as well as corporate bodies, culturally oriented organizations helped reshape the way Times Square’s screens were re-conceptualized as objects worthy of conservation, and as tools that can aid formulate and facilitate a particular type of self-governing citizens. Although public screens may seem to belong to an emerging cultural landscape, it would be a mistake to understand them solely as such. The aim of this thesis is to offer a history that sees public screens as products of residual, emergent, as well as dominant social and cultural formations, and to help clarify how ideas about screens as symbols of the digital economy first began formulating.