Week 9: Mobile Media and Public Space

Mobile Media

Traditionally ‘mobile’ media have been thought of in a specific way as devices which offer mobility outside of the home, rather than forming part of a domestic media set-up. Indeed in this sense, ‘mobile’ media can be said to be about taking a sense of the home(ly) out into the cultural world.

Raymond Williams (1997) coined the phrase ‘mobile privatization’ to describe a ‘shell you take with you’ (mobile device) which is centered on the home but not necessarily in the home, it takes the familiar or seemingly protective layer out into the unfamiliar public space.

It’s reverse is the ‘private mobilization’ where public spaces are brought into the home wirelessly. Matt Hills (2009)

Instant Communities of Practice

An important communicative practice observed by Castells et al. (2007) is the emergence of unplanned, largely spontaneous communities of practice in instant time. By transforming an initiative to do something together into a message that is responded to from multiple sources and by convergent wills in order to share practice and have a collective voice. An example of this is Flash Mobs and Smart Mobs.

Users as Producers

We invent new uses, and even a new language, circumvent regulations, quickly find better cheaper available pricing schemes and build networks of communication for purposes and uses that were never in the cards of technologists and business strategists. This fully replicates the experience of the internet. 

Mobile Communication and The Network Society

The mobile communication society deepens and diffuses the network society, which came into existence in the past two decades, first on the basis of networks of electronic exchange, next with the development of networks of computers, then with the Internet, powered and extended by the World Wide Web. 

Wireless communication technologies diffuse the networking logic of social organisation and social practice everywhere, to all contexts, - on the condition of being on the mobile Net. 

More notes on Week 9's topic of Mobile Media and Public Space can be found in the presentation in Blackboard.