Mobile media (Communication)

In this inaugural issue of the timely Mobile Media & Communication journal, questions have been posed about the state of play for mobile communication now and in the future. Given the growing convergence between mobile, social and locative media, this requires a reassessment of mobile media and its relationship with place and intimacy. How are these convergent media platforms, contexts and practices shaping, and being shaped by, intimate cartographies of place? Drawing on a case study of location-based services, games and camera phone practices in South Korea, this paper explores the role of gendered visual cultures in the relationship between place and intimacy.

8th International Conference on Networks, Mobile Communication (NMCO 2022) is a forum for presenting new advances and research results in the fields of Network, Mobile communications, and Telematics. The aim of the conference is to provide a platform to the researchers and practitioners from both academia as well as industry to meet and share cuttingedge development in the field.

Mobile dating apps with geolocation function have gained popularity for fostering social, romantic, and sexual connections between nearby strangers. Through in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with 74 users of gay mobile dating apps (Grindr and Jack'd) in Hong Kong, this study illustrates how the sociological concept of time can shed light on users' experience of relationship formation through these apps. Specifically, the accelerated tempo of interactions facilitated by perpetual connectivity, mutual proximity awareness, and instant messaging was seen to entail instantaneous and ephemeral relationships. The interface design, which foregrounds profile photos and backgrounds textual self-descriptions, was perceived to structure the sequence of browsing and screening in favor of physical appearance and users seeking casual hookups. The findings suggest that the temporality of browsing and exchange on apps is incongruous with the temporal norms prescribing formation of friendship and longterm romance. Such incongruity affects the perceived quality and satisfaction of app use, frustrating users who seek more durable relationships.

Communication about crime and the places it occurs has been an important area of study for criminology, sociology, public policy, and media scholars. Where incidents used to be communicated through word of mouth, physical evidence, and news outlets, recent advances in crime tracking, mapping, and mobile media have dramatically changed how individuals are informed about crime. Many organizations have adopted mobile text alerts, and recent advances in augmented reality (AR) technologies have made it possible to overlay visuals about crime on top of users’ physical surroundings. How people make sense of this visual, individualized, and location-specific crime information, however, is largely unknown and complicated by the fact that mobile technologies are challenging to study in situ, as people move through and experience urban place. Within the AR literature, while existing research has started to look at the ways that AR can affect people’s experience of place, the precise ways that ...

In this article, we examine how second-generation locative media and emerging contemporary camera phone practices are becoming entangled to create new visualities and socialities of place and place making. With location-based services (LBS) smartphone apps like Instagram geotagging is increasingly the default, rather than choice. This has transformed both how we experience and conceptualize co-present relationships across micro and macro realms and how we chart these relationships and environments as we move through the everyday world. Through a preliminary study of 10 users of smartphones in urban Australia we explore their daily routines and how camera phone and LBS practices become part of those everyday repetitions. In 2013, Australia mobile Internet subscriptions have now reached 22.1 million: basically one subscription for every person in the country. To understand these new everyday visualities we develop the notion of the "digital wayfarer" as a way to think about the perpetually moving mobile media user. Expanding upon Tim Ingold's notion of the wayfaring type of mobility that is both routine and repetitive (i.e., "transport") in the realm of the digital interwoven within the everyday, we reflect upon the digital wayfarer as they move through taking and sharing pictures and their tagged geographic and temporal contexts as part of broader emplaced and interwoven visualities and socialities.

(for an open Access journal article to this presentation see: http://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/JKM/periodical/titleinfo/3683427; "A Question of Commitment, Attention and Trust The Role of Smartphone Practices for Parent-Child Relationships in Adolescence" )

As a result of technological change, we are confronted with a growing number of digital media which increasingly permeate all parts of our lives. This mediatization of everyday life (Hepp & Krotz 2014) entered into a new stage when mobile devices made access to digital services nearly ubiquitous. Especially smartphones as multifunctional devices, which we can easily carry around with us, have changed the way we deal with digital media. The whole Internet became available in our pockets and we can now chat, read, watch or post when and wherever we want (Vorderer et al. 2016). As a consequence, we find ourselves in a state of permanent connectivity (Steinmaurer 2014).
As adolescents and their parents make manifold use of mobile devices this also has an impact on family life. Smartphones are not only widespread in European households (newzoo 2017), they are also strongly integrated into everyday family practices. Family members rely on mobile phones when communicating among each other (Feierabend et al. 2016). Yet, they also use mobile phones for temporary stepping out of family life by entering other spaces online. According to Knopf et al. (2015) this can have both positive and negative effects on family relationships.
Against this background, the paper addresses the role of smartphones in family life focusing on relationships between family members. It reconstructs, how different ways of dealing with smartphones influence the way family members relate to each other. To get deeper insights, we decided for an explorative qualitative study. Building on Paus-Hasebrink’s (2017) integrative-praxeological family research we conducted five case studies of families with adolescent children (12-15 years). We concentrated on families with intensive smartphones usage and made sure to consider different family sizes, educational backgrounds and degrees of urbanization. The fieldwork was carried out in Austria in spring 2018. It consisted of problem-centered interviews complemented by a short standardized questionnaire with both an adolescent and one of his parents. To sensibilize them for the role of smartphones in their family life we asked all family members to do not use their mobiles for family communication or in family situations for one day. Afterwards they reflected on their experiences by answering open questions in written form.
First results show that parents use smartphones to keep in touch with their children throughout the day. By doing so, both parents and children gain a feeling of safety and closeness which intensives their relationship. Surprisingly, none of the adolescents felt controlled by this. However, control is an issue when it comes to parents interventions in their children’s smartphone usage. When they look through their kids’ mobiles or strongly restrict their smartphone activities teenagers interpret this as a strong lack of trust. Conflicts also arise when adolescence use their smartphones while others are present. Parents often perceive this as disrespectful and negative for family communication. However, they themselves very much relay on their mobiles. All five families had troubles to find one single day when they felt they could handle family life without their smartphones.

Pokémon Go is a hugely popular hybrid reality game (HRG) that enables players to occupy a space that is simultaneously physical and digital. The general aim of Pokémon Go is to discover and then capture Pokémon. This article reports on an original research project designed to explore the impact of Pokémon Go on spatiality and sociability. The project was conducted between May 2017 and July 2017, using an online survey which received 375 responses from users of Pokémon Go geographically spread across the globe. Drawing on the concept of the “playeur” as an established approach to understanding the effects of locative play on spatiality and sociability, this research follows three lines of enquiry. First, the research examines whether the intermingling of play and ordinary life might encourage players to spend more time outside in public spaces, and how this mode of play is experienced. Second, the research explores whether the game mechanics of Pokémon Go might lead players to traver...

This study examines preservation of voicemail artifacts. Applying an exploratory approach through grounded theory, participants (N = 52) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provided common reasons for retaining voicemail artifacts. Results highlighted why participants retained or deleted general and specific voicemails. Five categories, past-focused, important, future-focused, sentimental, and neglectful, represented retaining reasons. The oldest and most important artifacts represented sentimental messages. Three categories, past-focused, technological affordance, and unremarkable or undesirable calls, represented reasons for deletion. Voicemails are paralleled to mass and interpersonal communication and implications make connections between information retention, temporality, and interpersonal memorialization. Findings indicate that asynchronous communication exchanges and relics, such as voicemails, offer linkages to and reverberations of old and emerging technologies.

Domestication is an approach which considers media appropriation processes in detail, looking at media technologies as doubly articulated and integrated into moral economies. Originally developed for the study of household contexts, the domestication framework has increasingly been used to study the appropriation of mobile media in diverse contexts. The article summarizes this development briefly to then suggest that another concept – of mediated mobilism – might be a useful extension to study mobile media and mobility in future.

This study presents a secondary analysis of real-time data of mobile phone usage in Israel during two recent wars – with the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 and with the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza in 2008/9. The data, provided by Cellcom Israel, the country’s largest mobile operator, enabled an analysis of real behavior patterns rather than relying on memories of people who may have been under stress or traumatized during the hostilities, hence unable to accurately recollect this information later on. During both wars, significant changes were noted in the way people used their mobile phones: There was a substantial decrease of calls originating from within a 10-kilometer region along the Israel-Lebanon border and mobile users also made significantly longer calls. However, the decrease in calls during the Lebanon War was more than double that of the decrease in the comparable region along the Gaza border. There was no significant change in the calling patterns of Israelis living outside t...

Compact Cinematics challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact, short, miniature, pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form, and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated, taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia environment...

In the introductory essay to Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of BitSized Media, editors Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki set the stage for their volume on compact cinematics, a term which encompasses a wide array of moving image works and their role in society—a role that is often minimised due to their length and “small screen” methods of display. Rather than agree with dominant understandings that compact cinematics are new, and exist on the border of film and television, the authors argue that such visual displays, now in digital form through platforms, such as Vine and YouTube, predate feature-length films, and can open new avenues of understanding in the realm of spectacle and leisure studies more broadly.

The mHealth field understandably arose from a base of practice, developed a nascent, yet ever-expanding, body of inter-disciplinary scholarship, and currently hopes for recognition by, and establishment on, national and trans-national policy bodies and agendas respectively. However, to justify public investment, policymakers require a body of theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous, and generalizable, evidence on how mobile technologies can effectively improve basic healthcare service delivery for hard-to-reach, resource-poor populations in developing countries.

This paper addresses two types of technological media convergence: media convergence based on mobile technology, and also convergence based on the unification between IT and media industry. These forms are influenced by the multimedia aspects of the content. The research interest in this study is related to media landscape in Romania and its state. Even if many academics and practitioners
consider media convergence only at the content level from journalistic perspective, this
topic has many more detail aspects and trends. Thus, media convergence in terms of content can
be now interpreted together with the user’s content and takes into consideration the unification
between paid, owned, shared and earned content. This paper proposes a theoretical and practical
perspective for the relationship between convergence and multimedia for online media products.
This perspective belongs both to media producers and to online consumers of information. The
paper is interesting in that it reveals the challenges facing the media industries, and shows approaches
of convergence that are related to multimedia for media products. The methodological
framework uses the content analysis and the hierarchical cluster analysis to discover different
forms of convergence in online media. The main conclusion of this study shows that due to various
technologies and their partnerships, convergence can be directed both from the users to the
media industry, and conversely.

This conversation considers some of the disciplinary divides and anxieties surrounding contemporary research on media and mobility through a discussion of linkages between these two research fields and the role of non-media centric focuses on media across the disciplines. The conversation was sparked by the three-day workshop, Anthropologies of Media and Mobility: Theorizing Movement and Circulations across Entangled Fields, held in September, 2017 at The University of Cologne.1 One of the coconvenors Roger Norum sat down with a trio of leading scholars working on media and mobility, Heather Horst, David Morley, and Noel B. Salazar. They address a number of critical topics such as the nature of binary and category disruption, contextually dependent forms of media, the value of collaborative scholarship, the roles of methodologies in academic practice and the critical role played by early-career researchers in pushing various boundaries across our fields.

In this study, we proposed a new paging method, angular paging, that reduces the paging cost in distance-based location registration (DBR). DBR causes a mobile station (MS) to register its location when the distance between the current base station and the base station in which it last registered exceeds a distance threshold d. When MS travels longer distance and registers a new location area, it tends to move along with dominant angle. In order to apply this dominant angular movement, we suggested new paging method and showed that the proposed angular paging always outperforms the conventional whole paging.

En virtud de su capacidad creciente de conectividad, procesamiento y transmisión de datos, el dispositivo
móvil se encuentra inmerso en un proceso de convergencia
con el ecosistema mediático, que involucra, por un lado, a paradigmas
propios de los medios convencionales (contenidos
estandarizados, coste por acceso, consumo individualizado
pasivo) y por otro, al paradigma característico de la Web Social
(contenidos personalizados y/o generados por el usuario,
entornos abiertos a terceras partes, trabajo colaborativo, predominio
de la cultura de la compartición, etc.). El presente artículo
propone un marco general de los factores relevantes por
los que el paradigma de la Web Social se perfila actualmente
como un modelo prevalente en el desarrollo del mercado y
el consumo de datos en dispositivos móviles, aportando una
estructura conceptual de utilidad para el posterior estudio
evolutivo de los modelos de producción, negocio y consumo
de los contenidos móviles.

Using mobile media can be both detrimental and beneficial for well-being. Thus, explaining how and when they elicit such effects is of crucial importance. To explicate boundary conditions and processes for digital well-being, this article introduces the Integrative Model of Mobile Media Use and Need Experiences (IM³UNE). Instead of assuming mobile media to be pathogenic, the IM³UNE offers a salutogenic perspective—it focuses on how we can stay healthy when using mobile media ubiquitously in daily life. More specifically, the model assumes that both the satisfaction and the frustration of basic psychological needs are key underlying mechanisms linking demanding mobile media use to well-being. However, the impact of these mechanisms is contingent on how users perceive, appraise, act on, and make sense of mobile media demands according to their global orientation to life (i.e., their sense of coherence, SOC). Integrating prior work, we theoretically link mindfulness, self-control, and ...

In this contribution to the inaugural issue of Mobile Media & Communication, I draw upon recent work on mobiles in the global south to illustrate how the 'third wave' of mobile communication research requires a renewed focus upon the political and economic dimensions of infrastructures and the subversion of the system by individuals, communities and organizations. Inspired by Susan Leigh Star's seminal work on the importance of studying infrastructures, I suggest that mobile media scholarship should look to the changes in the technical, social, political, regulatory and other forms of infrastructures that the first two waves' focus upon novel uses and consumers often rendered invisible.

Resumen: En virtud de su capacidad creciente de conectividad, procesamiento y transmisión de datos, el dispositivo móvil se encuentra inmerso en un proceso de convergencia con el ecosistema mediático, que involucra, por un lado, a paradigmas propios de los medios convencionales (contenidos estandarizados, coste por acceso, consumo individualizado pasivo) y por otro, al paradigma característico de la Web Social (contenidos personalizados y/o generados por el usuario, entornos abiertos a terceras partes, trabajo colaborativo, predominio de la cultura de la compartición, etc.). El presente artículo propone un marco general de los factores relevantes por los que el paradigma de la Web Social se perfila actualmente como un modelo prevalente en el desarrollo del mercado y el consumo de datos en dispositivos móviles, aportando una estructura conceptual de utilidad para el posterior estudio evolutivo de los modelos de producción, negocio y consumo de los contenidos móviles.

A key guarantor of social trust and a necessary feature of democratic societies is a stable sense of social distance. Social distance is the cultural imaginary within which an individual's coordinates of social status and contingent social location allow or inhibit contact with similarly and dissimilarly located others. The rearrangement of customary social distances by new communication technologies is a source of considerable social anxiety. In mobile communication, this context collapse is instigated by a distinctive combination of affordances: deep connectivity, the accelerated speed and volume of communicative exchange, enhanced social legibility and asymmetric communicative transparency. Robust and effective levels of social trust depend on a political will to build strong democratic accountability and civil rights guarantees into emerging mobile architectures. Identifying specific recalibrations of familiar social distances by regimes of mobile communication and assessing the effects of these recalibrations in democratic terms is a central task of mobile research.

The current research used uncertainty management theory (UMT) as a framework to examine individuals’ experience of uncertainty within the context of Grindr, an all-male, location-based mobile dating application. In two studies, we first investigated the particular concerns associated with Grindr use. Results indicated that the unique affordances of Grindr generated six categories of user concerns associated with use of the mobile application. The second study confirmed that a specific set of user goals and concerns predicted daters’ desire for uncertainty, which in turn predicted information-seeking behavior. Findings clearly indicate that Grindr users’ responses to uncertainty were not limited to simple reduction strategies, but were dependent upon their desire for and tolerance of uncertainty in relation to their goals and concerns of application use. The current results also help to establish UMT’s predictive power and explanatory utility within the realm of interpersonal communi...

With the popularization of smartphones, location-based services are increasingly part of everyday life. People use their cell phones to find nearby restaurants and friends in the vicinity, and track their children. Although location-based services have received sparse attention from mobile communication scholars to date, the ability to locate people and things with one's cell phone is not new.

This study presents a secondary analysis of real-time data of mobile phone usage in Israel during two recent wars – with the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 and with the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza in 2008/9. The data, provided by Cellcom Israel, the country’s largest mobile operator, enabled an analysis of real behavior patterns rather than relying on memories of people who may have been under stress or traumatized during the hostilities, hence unable to accurately recollect this information later on. During both wars, significant changes were noted in the way people used their mobile phones: There was a substantial decrease of calls originating from within a 10-kilometer region along the Israel-Lebanon border and mobile users also made significantly longer calls. However, the decrease in calls during the Lebanon War was more than double that of the decrease in the comparable region along the Gaza border. There was no significant change in the calling patterns of Israelis living outside t...

Transnational mothers working in foreign countries face the challenges of providing “intensive” mothering to their children from a distance, and risk being subject to the “deviancy” discourse of mothering. This paper investigates the role of mobile phone usage, via voice, text messages, and social networking sites, in dealing with the tensions and ambivalence arising from transnational mothering as a dialectical process. We surveyed 42 Filipina and Indonesian foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Singapore using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. FDWs addressed tensions arising out of societal expectations of motherhood and their own anxieties about children’s well-being. The reluctant obsessive struggled to maintain a balance between an intensive nurturing style and a deviant mode of mothering that respected the growing independence of the children. The diverted professional had to balance the financial empowerment of being the primary breadwinner with the risk of surrogate motherhood for the employer’s children subsuming the care provided to her own. The remote-control parent shared mothering responsibilities with caregivers, usually relatives, who acted as a contradictory proxy presence for intensive mothering. The incomplete union of stressed marital parenting put further pressure on the romantic and sexual identities of migrant women. Transnational mothers utilized mobile phones actively as a tool to negotiate and redefine identities and relationships that created fissures in their sense of self. These included the management of third-party relationships, withholding of emotions or information, and engaging in counterintuitive phenomenon such as restricting, or actively dis-engaging from, mobile phone usage as a communication strategy. The paper calls for future research into the multiple, and interacting, social identities assumed and managed by transnational mothers, and the complex role played by mobile phones in the constant process of negotiation by agentic, self-relective and multifaceted women.

Today’s mobile technology and mobile professions mean that people are nearly always either in, or connected to someone who is in motion. And yet, communities persist in the face of this constant motion. This is a qualitative study of a mobile labor group—taxi drivers in Chicago. Similar to Wallis’s (2011) conclusions, I found that access to and use of a mobile phone does not automatically imbue taxi drivers with power and autonomy from forces that seem to be working against them. However, access to mobile phones does help to shake up the hierarchy of control in the taxi industry. This study has also identified another type of community where the theory of polymedia (Madianou & Miller, 2012) applies, that is, labor communities, and has shown that while choice of technology may offer some sense of power, access to mobile communication technology does not necessarily result in significant changes in power structures within and surrounding a community.