Mobile and Wireless Technologies

The next session I’m attending at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is on digital imaginaries, and starts with a paper by Peter Gentzel. His approach centres on mapping: digital maps are a form of media that envision futures, showing aspects of our social and cultural life that are not quite visual, and seek to empower us to do and see things that are mostly hidden, and thereby provide for a better future.

Such maps include services like Google Maps, which focusses on providing consumption options, curated online maps of cultural options (like street art across a given city) …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kyle Moore, whose focus is on food delivery apps. These serve as an example of the gig economy, which enables irregular work structures and task-based activities by workers who usually provide all of their own equipment for their tasks. The workers themselves are also one category of app users, in fact, and exist in a liminal legal state between employees and freelancers.

Workers are required to be online and available around peak usage times, then, and this leads to a kind of power chronography that relates to the temporal rhythms …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2022 session are Lisa Waldenburger and Jeffrey Wimmer. They begin by noting the rise in digital stress – at work, at home, and in public spaces –, and their project is designed to explore the experience of and coping mechanisms for such digital stress by users. Such stress is often caused by a self-diagnosed lack of media literacy, especially as self-service technologies come to substitute for previously non-digital and interpersonal interactions; these technologies contribute to economic rationalisation and social exclusion especially for non-tech-savvy and older people.

These moves, and their accompanying stresses, were exacerbated …

It’s a very foggy Friday morning at ECREA 2022, and I’m chairing a morning session on protests, politics, and the digital that begins with a paper by Roman Horbyk, on mobile communication on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. This is a project that was launched well before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia, also covering the ongoing hostilities predating it.

Roman begins by noting the deep mediatisation of contemporary society; our urban environments are now dense with digital communication technologies, but is this also the case for the frontlines of recent wars? There are some studies already of …

Coming up next at ANZCA 2017 is Lyell Durkin, who shifts our interest to the media representations of skateboarding (now also an official sport of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games). There are many different views of skateboarding, but skateboarders themselves are regarding their practices as an art and a lifestyle; this view is also represented in the skate media emerging from the community itself.

Skateboarding media centrally include videos and photos that represent and memorialise tricks and moves; this is because many such moves are a great deal more difficult to describe than they are to capture in visual form …

The final speaker in this final AoIR 2015 session is Lee Humphreys. Her interest is in the intersections between mobility and memory, and this needs to be understood in terms of degrees of mobility; some devices are more mobile than others.

There is also a very long history of mobile media, all the way back at least to the immensely popular pocket diaries of previous centuries. These devices enabled their users to create media messages – to note things ad hoc as users were going about their day. By contrast, (paper) photo albums could be seen as mobile media memory …

We move on in this session at AoIR 2015 to Nicole Ellison, who highlights the different frames through which we might understand mobile uses; one is the affordances frame which might highlight the differences between content persistence and ephemerality, for instance. She points to Snapchat in this context, as a particularly interesting object of research.

Snapchat uses were studied here by exploring the interaction experiences of a cohort of undergraduates across different media and using Snapchat as the baseline. They were surveyed for instance on the pleasantness of their interactions (where face-to-face ranked high, email and texting low); on supportiveness …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Veronika Karnowski, whose focus is on the ubiquitous nature of Internet access in contemporary society. Prior to this, households may have had different mediators as determined by the location of connection plugs; later, patchy wireless availability made Internet use nomadic as we moved between islands of connectivity. Today, use is truly ubiquitous.

This creates substantial variations in place – the surroundings of where we use the Internet are no longer predetermined by connectivity limitations. But scholarship has so far largely failed to take such situational contexts into account. Context-related variables show up in …

The final (!) session of AoIR 2015 is on the mobile Internet, and starts with Katy Pearce. Her interest is in the experiences of mobile-only Internet users: a phenomenon which is especially prevalent in developing countries. Here, resource constraints make it more likely that users will buy multi-purpose devices such as feature phones or smartphones with direct network access rather than desktop, laptop, or tablet devices that require a wifi connection. >

The devices people use impact on their usage patterns, of course. But other factors, such as age, educational and sociodemographic status, also impact on such patterns. In Armenia …

The final speaker on this first day of "Compromised Data" is Sidneyeve Matrix, who shifts our focus towards geosocial information as generated by smartphones and other mobile devices. Only 12% of US users as surveyed by the Pew Centre posted Foursquare check-ins in 2013, for example, down from 18% in 2011 - but this may mask a greater take-up of other location-based services, not least the Frequent Locations functionality in iOS7.

There is a continuing trend towards the consumerisation of geodata. Geosocial cultural arrangements are explored through the use of mobile communication patterns, but such analysis is notoriously …