Welcome to Mobile Media & Communication

Mobile and Digital Communication: Approaches to Public and Private, 2015

The types of communicating vessel systems that form public and private "spheres" constitute a multifaceted, complex system that is connected to an almost intractable range of issues. The fact is that the facets of mobile technology – ubiquity, multimediality, multidirectionality – form a new context in which trends to renegotiate, defend, adapt or challenge notions of public and private are developed by individuals in their everyday lives and by social institutions through their rules and goals. This book, which brings together presentations from the conference "Public and Private in Mobile Communications", held in March 2015 at Beira Interior University, Portugal, particularly favors discussions on the uses that individuals make of mobile devices in their everyday practices. However, as a background issue, it also includes the sometimes implicit approach about the transformations that connect new technologies to certain cultural practices, forms of interaction and political uses. In fact, as happened in the past with other technological innovations, it is practically impossible to discuss the penetration of mobile devices and their social appropriations without the perspective of a historical side, even if it is "only" an epistemological background. - See more at: http://www.livroslabcom.ubi.pt/book/141#sthash.VfN7TSa0.dpuf

This dissertation examines the integration of the mobile phone into every day life as a communication device and as media. It focuses on the uses of the mobile phone as a pervasive multimedia tool and its relationship to other media in the changing media landscape. The main argument of the dissertation is that the mobile phone is a medium in itself and it should also be regarded as a medium among others. In media studies the mobile phone has often been perceived as a sub-media to traditional media. As a medium it has its own specific characteristics and social functions, allthough its uses may vary in different contexts and cultures. However, this argument does not mean that the mobile phone is a medium without user involvements. The role of user innovations has been important in constructing the mobile phone's role in the media field: for instance, text messaging has brought a new kind of social interaction and media form with it. Indeed, the mobile phone has influenced the ways in which we can interact with other media. The mobile phone is located between personal, social and mass media, and can serve personal, peer-to-peer and mass communication purposes in different communications situations. The mobile phone, along with the popularity of personal computers, has contributed to the increased consciousness and idea of personal media, and the emergence of new kinds of media behaviour. The mobile phone is not only a developing tool for citizenship journalism and participatory media making, but also a channel between traditional and new media, as it, in some cases enables the interactivity of television. Text messaging has been incorporated into television and, in some cases, also into newspapers. It seems that the mobile phone as a personal and ubiquitous technology may lower the threshold for participating in media making. The role of the mobile phone as a tool in digital storytelling has become more important as the number of reader's own photographs as news material in newspapers has increased. The newspaper offices and other media have to find a solution for how to act with the increasing content produced by their audience; for instance, how to find the important news 8 Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Pirkanmaa Regional Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation. I also want to thank my friends and family. My mother, Hilkka, has provided invaluable help with childcare and her excellent cooking has kept me well nourished during many writing periods. My husband Vesa and our son Matias have successfully reminded me everyday that there is also a life beyond the dissertation. Thank you!

2004

Fibreculture, 2005

Portable media devices and 'wearable' communications technologies are becoming both increasingly ubiquitous and personalised, penetrating and transforming everyday cultural practices and spaces, and further disrupting distinctions between private and public, ready-to-hand and telepresent interaction, actual and virtual environments. Such devices range from the standard mobile phone-which itself is exceeding its role as a communication device-to highly sophisticated multimedia hybrids, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players, personal media centres and handheld networkable game consoles. This article presents some initial thoughts preempting a bigger research project on mobile connectivity and media, and their emergence as portable microworlds or pocket technospaces. The project en large aims to investigate the emerging socio-cultural and techno-corporeal effects of mobile interactive media, and how they are changing the ways people interact with both their digital interfaces and each other, altering the shape and meaning of community and spatial location, and our embodied and agentic placement within metropolitan, pedestrian (i.e. literally 'walkable') and urban environments. Much of the research and analysis in this project will focus on the mobile phone itself and its ostensible mutability into digital video camera, email and web interface, MP3 player, personal organiser, wireless broadband laptop-link, data storage and game device. In her study on mobile phone use in the global context, Sadie Plant observes that the mobile phone is often used as the primary means of Internet access (Plant, 2003).[1] The multi-functionality of the mobile phone, together with high-speed wireless third generation (3G) and Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) networks, and the adoption of Internet protocol technology, means that both mobile phone carriers and makers of handheld phones are poised to move beyond the voice market and into that of mobile media and data communication (strategy+business magazine, May 10, 2004). Moreover, today's advanced handsets 'are disrupting many industries simultaneously, including photography, music and games' (The Australian, September 7, 2004). Yet while the mobile phone is perhaps the most significant technology in the context of this project, and will be the focus of much of this article, it is part of a more general telematic trend towards wearable, handheld and pocket communications and entertainment media. Aside from the multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player and PDA, there exist a number of handheld interactive media devices including Nintendo's GameBoy and DS (dual screen), Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP), phonegame hybrids such as Nokia's N-Gage QD and Samsung's recent rival (the SCH-V450), and the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) handset which can receive TV broadcasts over the cellular network. The PSP, for example, has been launched as an all-in-one multimedia entertainment platform targeted for the adult market, with a USB 2.0 port for further expandability and connectivity to other devices, and the capability for wireless multiplayer interaction, network applications and data transfer. Thus, such handheld games and portable multimedia devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and should be examined both in terms of their potential merger with mobile phone functionality, and in their own right as nascent new media forms. Significantly, over the past two decades many of the distinctions between mass media and communications technologies have converged to become-as suggested at a recent symposium-"network media"

Open and Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology Culture and Education, 2010

Around the year 2000, a new research topic emerged in the social sciences and the humanities: mobile telephony. Drawing on earlier scholarship on the classic phone, the internet, and the information society, and applying the conceptual tools of communication theory, sociology, psychology, political science, etc., mobile telephone research began as, and continues to be, an interdisciplinary enterprise. Nonetheless, over the years an impressive array of paradigmatic research results has crystallized into what can be termed as the new discipline of Mobile Studies. Summarizing these results, the volume also opens up new perspectives on mobile telephony in the age of telecommunications convergence.

Mobile communication is a relatively new form of interaction. It has only been commonly available in developed countries for the past two decades and in developing countries for less than that. Perhaps because the rise of mobile communication is so recent, the juxtaposition of its use against traditional social practice illuminates issues in a new way. To be sure, mobile communication's explosive growth as an everyday life resource has given us a lens through which we can study both sociological and psychological developments. Despite being a relatively new addition to the media landscape, the assuredness with which we appropriate our mobile devices speaks to well routinized use. When we reach for our phone to fill in what Fortunati (2002, p. 518) calls the "smallest folds" of life, we manipulate them with ease. In addition, at the social level, we increasingly understand that it is expected of us to have a mobile phone. Our friends and family expect us to be available to them, to be socially "on call." Through mobile communication, we become more attached to one another, not to mention to the technology itself. Without the device, it is not uncommon for a user to feel utterly disconnected and psychologically distressed .

In discussing the effect of the use of mobile phones, this chapter is not about the device itself but rather all that it engenders. The mobile phone is a means of achieving continuous connectivity provoking feelings of intimacy and of being permanently tethered to loved ones as well as of being on call to less welcome people. It is the ways that people have adapted existing social practices to manage this that lies at the heart of the explanation of whether or not people are affected by their mobile phones. Three case studies from research are used to provide an empirical context for examining the topic. This research was conducted during two years of studies1 completed in 2004 that investigated the social shaping of the new third generation mobile phone technology. Theoretical aspects are addressed by exploring some of the ways in which others have examined the sentient aspects of our lives to reveal the complex mesh of elements that affect everyday life. It continues by highlighting analogies between these writings and the social practices of mobile phone users identified in the research

Emerging Perspectives on the Mobile Content Evolution, 2016

This chapter discusses the new social configurations society is undergoing on the basis of media emergence. Media are embedded in the arousal of communication and information transmission becoming the form, the infrastructure and the institution for the social and culture. This chapter focuses on mobile communication, having as central goal to debate on the processes of mediatization and mediation of society, as well as on the processes of belonging and social cohesion. Data from mobile internet adoption and use will be discussed in the light of the above mentioned theoretical approaches. An empirical case study will also be approached and results will provide contributions for the understanding of this type of technology adoption processes and the increasing importance of mobility in cultural and social practices, promoting an exciting discussion on the centrality of media nowadays and the current transformation processes society is undergoing.

… T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and …, 2007

Parents usually don't know how important a tool the mobile has become in young people's lives. They only think about the communicative function, not the social meaning. 1 (sixteen-year-old girl) brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by IssueLab 144 Youth, Identity, and Digital Media facilitates this mobility of identity, as it is ubiquitous in youth cultural contexts as a medium for constant updating, coordination, information access, and documentation. At the same time, the mobile is an important medium for social networking, the enhancing of groups and group identity, and for the exchange between friends which is needed in the reflexive process of identity construction. The mobile has become the ideal tool to deal with the pace of information exchange, the management of countless loose, close or intimate relations, the coordination of ever-changing daily activities, 4 and the insecurity of everyday life. Hence the mobile becomes a learning tool for dealing with living conditions in modern society for young people, while at the same time it adds to the conditions they are trying to deal with. This chapter addresses four broad themes. The first theme is availability-the fact that the mobile is always on, which makes the users always available with no or few communicationand information-free moments. The second theme is the experience of presence during mobile communication, that is, the experience of social presence in public space being invaded by ongoing mobile communication. The third theme is the importance of the mobile as a personal log for activities, networks, and the documentation of experiences, a role that has implications both for relations between the individual and the group and for emotional experience. These discussions lead to analysis of the mobile as a tool for learning social norms. Before I proceed with the discussion of these themes, however, I offer a short discussion of the concept of mobile media and a broader account of the role of the mobile phone in the context of contemporary youth culture. The main empirical basis for my analysis is quantitative and qualitative findings from a series of studies of fifteen-to twenty-four-year-old Danes and their mobile phone use. 5 These studies, which were conducted in 2004 and 2006, included questionnaire surveys, individual interviews, observations, and (in one case) high school essays on "My Mobile and Me." As even younger groups of children have their own mobiles, the fifteen-to twenty-four-yearolds cannot necessarily be seen as representative of young Danish mobile phone users in general. However, other studies and surveys 6 indicate that the general findings from these studies also reflect some of the main uses and meanings of younger children's mobile phone use, as well as experiences in other national and cultural settings. The Mobile Phone and Mobility The most obvious characteristic of the mobile phone is precisely that it is mobile, that it can be transported. Compared to the first transportable phones, which were huge machines, then very heavy telephones, both built into cars, and then heavy but portable telephones, 7 mobile phones today are so small, flat and light that they can fit into a pocket and effectively disappear in the hand and at the ear. Especially when connected with a light headset, the mobile seems to be part of the user's body-which may remind the reader of McLuhan's discussions of media as the "extensions of man," but which also points to the fact that it is so easy to take the mobile everywhere and to have it near and ready to hand that the user hardly notices it, until it isn't there, when it doesn't alert the user with a new message or call. But what are the specific potentials of mobiles? How are they different from landline phones? And how does the use of mobiles differ from PCs and traditional Internet? The German sociologist Hans Geser states that "Seen in this very broad evolutionary perspective, the significance of the mobile phone lies in empowering people to engage in communication, which is at the same time free from the constraints of physical proximity and spatial immobility." 8 This general and yet simple notion is expanded by Rich Ling, who describes