ИСТИНА

Space is an essential concept for all of us. We shape our environment, e.g., when we decide which media devices to integrate in our personal or business life. In turn, our environment shapes us, e.g., our satisfaction at the workplace (Sailer et al., 2021). This interplay is increasingly determined by digital technologies: Online meetings in Zoom, remote collaboration in Microsoft Teams, virtual collaborations from the home office across local, temporal, and cultural boundaries–the last COVID-19 years have demonstrated how essential digital spaces have become for media organizations. Current research shows that such digital spaces exist as a first type in a materially manifested form, for example when workplaces are built. As a second type, digital spaces can be viewed on an abstract level, for example through the connections created by digital technologies among the members of working groups. In both cases, those digital spaces are shaped differently than without digital technologies, often even vastly and decisively different (Mütterlein & Fuchs, 2019). The scientific discussion on digital spaces is just emerging, but its relevance for media research already becomes apparent. The media industry was one of the first industries to be affected by digital technologies and has been restructured on an industry, organization, and consumer level extensively since then. But, and perhaps even more important, a media perspective can also add value to the general discussion on digital spaces. With Foucault’s concept of the dispositive (Foucault, 1978), media research has applied an idea similar to digital spaces successfully for decades to analyze media environments and consumer behavior, particularly in the area of film and cinematography. Here, with a very narrow understanding of the term “dispositive” and related to the first type of digital spaces, dispositive means the apparatus used for media creation, delivery, and consumption and the overall setting in which these processes happen. In the last years, research in the field of organization science has rediscovered Foucault’s work and started to explore its applications in business contexts (Raffnsøe et al., 2016). Being the first industry to become spatially restructured due to digitalization and also the first research field to apply the concept of the dispositive for analyzing the influence of technology in environments, media is perfectly suited to advance our understanding of digital spaces and the influence technologies have on them. One of the first steps to take in this direction is to show how current digital technologies are exactly shaping digital spaces in media. In our study, we select video conferencing and blockchain–the latter being the backbone of web3–to outline the spatial influence of digital technologies on the front end (i.e. content layer) and back end (i.e. network layer) of digital spaces in media. With these two examples, we show that digital technologies lead to information-rich, connected, and continuously evolving media spaces that are also becoming increasingly decentralized. This suggests that we need to adapt how we create, change, and analyze media environments. Word Count: 487 Keywords: Space, Dispositive, Video Conferencing, Blockchain, Web3 Literature Foucault, M. (1978). Dispositive der Macht. Über Sexualitat, Wissen und Wahrheit. Merve: Berlin. Mütterlein, J., & Fuchs, C. (2019). Digital technologies and their influence on spaces. Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS), Xi'an, China. Raffnsøe, S., Thaning, M., & Gudmand-Høyer, M. (2016). What is a dispositive? Foucault's historical mappings of the networks of social reality. Organization, 23(2), 272-298. Sailer, K., Koutsolampros, P., Pachilova, R. (2021). Differential perceptions of teamwork, focused work and perceived productivity as an effect of desk characteristics within a workplace layout. PLoS ONE, 16(4), e0250058.