I’ve been meaning to get this photo off of my camera and post it for a while. At least a year ago, I took a photo of this same Blockbuster outlet (in Crouch End, North London) and the sign read ‘OC BUSTER’. It may or may not be surprising that they’ve simply let their presence wither away like this. But in this more recent state of erosion, of course, there are further layers of meaning (‘ouster’ refers to “ejecting, forcing out, or supplanting” according to one online dictionary).

Or maybe it’s just that the various ways in which ‘media’ crops up in urban environments has been even more in my head than usual these days, as I’m teaching The Mediated City (PDF file of syllabus) this term. In taking this photo, I had in mind a comment one of my students made to me during a media tour of West End London, which I use to get the students thinking about the many, often unconventional ways media appear to us in the city. As he remarked, one thing he’d noticed as a trace of media in the city was declining formats and technologies, seen in the state in shops like Blockbuster, HMV or Jessops. Not something I’d considered myself, but then I saw this a week later.