Mobile media (Communication)

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.

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 ...

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 special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware technologies in constructions of privacy (Coldewey, 2016; Cunningham, 2016), risk and surveillance (Machkovech, 2016; Mishra, 2016) to the role of mobile media in commodifying (Evangelho, 2016) and expanding the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of play (Isbister, 2016; Mäyrä, 2012). As the mobile media and game theorists in this commentary highlight, the game sits at the nexus of several technological and cultural trajectories: the playful turn; the ubiquity of location-based and haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the effects of digital mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and art; our individual and c...

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.

Conversational studies have shown that location cannot be considered as an external framework that shapes interaction; rather it is to be analyzed as a resource and an achievement in interaction (Schegloff, 1972). Building on a corpus of 93 recorded mobile phone conversations from the United States and Denmark, this article adds to current interaction research by investigating how location is produced, understood and socially accomplished via mobile phones. More specifically, we investigate how location talk operates in the opening sequences of the call. We find that location is an opening-relevant topic: speakers introduce it as the reason for the call and topicalize it following initial engagement. When referring to location, speakers predominately use two variations: inquiries (where are you), and reports of their whereabouts (I just got home). Further, speakers formulate their locations in two ways: location specific (I'm sitting on a train) or status of transit (we are on our way). In addition to open format where-are-you elicitations, location talk can take the form of a candidate (are you at Union street); candidate formulations show how speakers orient to the collaborative work of meeting up with one another and display knowledge about each other's activities. Finally, we treat the case of reciprocal location inquiries and reports, where both caller and callee state their whereabouts, showing how location talk is sequence organized.

In this article we depart from studies on empowerment and its intersections with the informal economy and market women in the Global South and promises of the mobile phone in so-called developing regions. Conducting an explorative study among market women in Kampala, the aim is to examine what roles (if any) the mobile phone plays for them in terms of empowerment. Our findings resonate with studies from other parts of the world, suggesting that while pivotal for their business endeavors, mobile phone practices are also embedded in patriarchal structures. By discussing how these market women navigate the tensions between using the phone for their business and in relations to their partners, the article contributes a more nuanced and context-specific understanding of mobile phone practices and the empowerment of market women. We conclude the article by suggesting a situated approach to the study of empowerment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the widespread use of mobile phones in the developing world, interactive voice response (IVR) systems are increasingly accessible to people with low literacy and/or limited financial resources. Interest in using IVR systems as a means to increase citizen participation in society has increased. Yet, research exploring the potential of IVRs—with particular affordances, constraints, and norms—to facilitate citizen participation in society remains limited. Drawing on field data gathered as part of a study of CGNet Swara, an IVR-based citizen journalism platform in rural India, we introduce the concept of a “participatory IVR” and undertake a phenomenological inquiry to account for user interactions with the system.

Concepts from Gregory Bateson are used to explore the ways that mobile media shape communication process in public and private spaces. His focus on patterns of relationship is used to offer insight into ways of understanding differences in behavior with mobile media as frame dilemmas.

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.

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.

A key theme in mobile communications research is the idea that people are suffering from communications overload. This essay remarks on what that term might mean and how it ought to be addressed when viewed from the perspective of mobile phone research. It will argue that its use in everyday life is rich and complex, and that this use ought to be a research topic in its own right. Some of the difficulties that will need to be addressed when this occurs are noted.

147 effectively straddles the fields of evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and political economy to reveal how specific notions of sharing have crystallized as common knowledge. However, his selective use of examples from "tribal societies" to argue for a more generative critique of the sharing economy makes me uncomfortable. Arguing that exchanges from so-called "primitive" societies allow us to use sharing broadly as against its modern Global North critics reinforces a certain geographical and temporal politics of sociality and innovation where the contemporary non-West does not appear at all. While the empirical contributions across the chapters resonate with what readers might already know from the works of Yochai Benkler, Jenny Kennedy, Lawrence Lessig, and more recently Botsman and Rogers as well as Sundarrajan on "sharing economy" services, it is the book's exhaustive conceptual exploration of "sharing" as a word that makes it such a compelling read.