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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Mobile media such as smartphones, apps, and social media are an integral part of everyday life, used by billions of people around the world. For students and researchers, mobile media also offer a treasure trove of new concepts, methods, and techniques to do research – representing a new phase in digital methods. Across disciplines, researchers rely upon mobile media for quantitative and qualitative projects, to gather data and document sound and images, engage with participants, and disseminate findings.
This is the first textbook devoted to explaining these innovative and groundbreaking mobile media methods. Exploring the opportunities and limitations mobile media offer for methods, the book covers a range of topics from mobilities and placemaking to virtual reality and AI, as well as new kinds of mobility such as e-scooters and connected cars. Student-friendly features such as practical guidance on how to gather and analyse data alongside exercises are also included. Underscoring the book throughout is the definition of methods as not just a series of tools and techniques, but as an invitation to rethink how to conceptualize, practice, study and theorize the relationship between research, data and the field.
Drawing from the best of mobile and digital communication research, Mobile Media Methods offers a clear, accessible, and practical guide to mobile media methods. It is essential reading and a useful resource for students and scholars of digital technology and research methods.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Acronyms
1 Introduction
Mapping Mobile Media Methods
Exploring Mobile Media
Book Overview: Chapter Summaries
Summary of Main Points
Exercise: Walkthrough app exercise
Keywords
2 Methods
What Is a Method?
What Are Qualitative and Quantitative Methods?
Creative Practice Research Methods
Mobile Media Methods: Past, Present and Evolving
Conclusion
Summary of Main Points
Exercise 1: Mapping your relevant mobile media methods
Exercise 2: Experimenting with mobile media methods
Keywords
3 Placemaking
Mobile Maps, Geomedia and Digital Wayfaring
The Art of Placemaking: Creative Mobile Methods
Digital Wayfaring: Digital, Creative Place and Sensemaking
Conclusion
Summary of Main Points
Exercise 1: Reimagining the pandemic
Exercise 2: Compare maps of places
Keywords
4 Mobilities
Moving Media
Media Memories, Histories and Archaeologies
Mobile Media Mobilities
Sensory Mobilities
Mobilities and Transnational Homes
Conclusion
Summary of Main Points
Exercise 1: Mapping mobility and immobility
Exercise 2: Emergent mobile devices as method
Keywords
5 Practices
What Is Social Practice?
Haptic Ethnography
Conclusion
Summary of Main Points
Exercise 1: Mobile media in everyday life: front- and back-stage
Exercise 2: Haptic methods
Keywords
6 Play
What Is Play?
Cities as Urban Play
Play-Maker
Playful Methods: Pet Playing for Placemaking
Conclusions: Playing with Research
Summary of Main Points
Exercise: Design a mobile game prototype
Keywords
7 Data
Rise of Mobile Media Data
Leveraging Mobile Media Data
‘Good’ Mobile Data
Sensing Data
Visualizing (Multisensorial) Data
Applified and Datafied: Quantified Self and Digital Health
Feeling Data: Embodied, Affective and Haptic Interventions
Conclusion
Summary of Main Points
Exercise 1: Understanding data visualization
Exercise 2: Mobile data collection
Keywords
8 Futures
Afterlives and New Beginnings
Twelve Theses for Mobile Media Futures
Three Touchstone Futures
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Mobile media play a key role in mediating and mediatizing our lives.
Figure 1.2
TIMeR Audiowalk (Davies, Guntarik, Innocent, Briggs).
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Mobile media apps such as Instagram actively curate and mediatize public spaces.
Figure 2.2
Holly Durant using mobile media for critical and creative reflection within her …
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
How Are You Feeting? responses on Instagram (feetings_as_actions).
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
64 Ways of Being featuring Troy Innocent’s mixed-reality art.
Figure 6.2
Players experiencing 64 Ways of Being in Melbourne’s laneways.
Figure 6.3
Pet Playing for Place-Making project in action.
Figure 6.4
PP4P mobile game designed during the pandemic to activate spaces and sociality f…
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Rohit Khot’s Sweat Atoms (2016) work as part of the Design and Play exhibition.
Figure 7.2
Strava drawing as a way to feel data differently.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
The robot Spot at ACMI (Melbourne): DERC summer school (2023).
Figure 8.2
Public encounter with Spot (2023).
Figure 8.3
Sam Lavigne discussing scrapism (2023).
Figure 8.4
#DearFutureCitizen postcards 2019.
Figure 8.5
#DearFutureCitizen installation 2019.
Figure 8.6
Postcard responses on @data_of_the_dead.
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Mobile Media Methods
Larissa Hjorth and Gerard Goggin
polity
Copyright © Larissa Hjorth and Gerard Goggin 2024
The right of Larissa Hjorth and Gerard Goggin to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5881-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948750
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Larissa and Gerard firstly wish to thank all the experts who responded to our call for their insights on mobile media methods. The Mobile Communication community of practice is a rich, diverse and engaging group whose work inspired this book. We would like to thank Mary Savigar for her support and excellent editorial guidance in the making of this book. Also Stephanie Homer for her excellent support and help throughout. Our thanks to the reviewers of the manuscript and proposal for their invaluable feedback. We would also like to thank Dr Caitlin McGrane for research assistance and Sue Jarvis for copy-editing.
Larissa would like to thank Gerard for being an excellent collaborator, colleague and friend. She also wants to thank Jesper, David and Pokémon Obama the turtle for all their support. She acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship scheme (The Mourning After, FT220100552).
Gerard wishes to thank Larissa for inviting him to join this project, and for a wonderful thinking, writing and conversational experience – a new stage in their long-standing collaboration and friendship. He thanks Jacqueline for her support. He gratefully acknowledges the support of funding and other support from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University of Sydney.
Larissa (Boon Wurrung country) and Gerard (Gadigal country) wrote this book on unceded First Nations Land. We respectfully acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging.
Abbreviations and Acronyms
AI
artificial intelligence
API
Application Programming Interface
AR
augmented reality
CoSEM
contextual and semantic embedding (for app usage prediction)
CPR
creative practice research
DIY
do-it-yourself
DRM
daily reconstruction method
ESM
experience sampling method
GIS
Geographic Information Systems
GPS
Global Positioning System
HCI
human–computer interaction
ICT
information and communication technologies
IGTS
Information Gain-Based Temporal Segmentation
IoP
Internet of Places
IoT
Internet of Things
KoM
King of Mountain
LBMG
location-based mobile games
MMS
multimedia messaging
NFC
Near-Field Communication
PP4P
Pet Playing for Placemaking
QR
quick response
QS
quantified self
REM
rapid eye movements
RFID
Radio Frequency Identification
SCOT
social construction of technology
SLG
serious location-based game
SMS
short message service
STS
science and technology studies
UX
user experience
VOIP
Voice over Internet Protocol
VR
virtual reality
WFH
working from home
WSIS
World Summit on the Information Society
XR
extended reality
1Introduction
In Montreal, a 60-year old woman takes pictures of her beloved, a Golden Labrador, and shares them on Facebook for her family and friends – all via the mobile phone.
In Naarm/Melbourne, a Boon Wurrung woman in her thirties takes a selfie of herself with her mob and posts to Instagram with the hashtag Day of Mourning on the contested (colonial) Australia Day.
In Sydney, a climate emergency activist uses a combination of social mobile media – WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram – to get the story of her local town out to different audiences and to connect with others.
In Tokyo, a passionate quantified selfer (QS), who uses data tracking to reflect and change behaviours, puts a sensing tracker on their greyhound to track their dog’s movements, heart rate and moods while away at work.
These are just a few ways in which mobile media inhabit our lives. They shape, and are shaped by, our everyday rhythms, rituals and routines. They are also intimately entangled in our social, material and environmental worlds. With the rise of sensing data, automation, robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT), we witness the potential for mobile media to provide expanding possibilities for researching our society. Indeed, mobile media can be understood in a variety of ways – as a set of sociocultural technologies, media practices, platforms, algorithms, context and a lens for being in the world.
So what are mobile media? Mobile media encompass various dimensions:
Media — such as photos, videos, text and music
Device or technology, such as smartphone, smartwatch, laptop, mobile phone, sensing device
Network, such as 3G, 4G, 5G or 6G, Internet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or sensor network
Software, computational and cloud-based technology system, infrastructure or platform, such as a messaging or social media service or app (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook).
Mobile media were firmly associated with the emergence of mobile phones, based on cellular mobile telecommunications networks (Goggin, 2006). As devices have proliferated, networks have evolved, interconnected, and to some extent become interoperable; convergence has occurred across media, communication and information; and digital technologies have grown to underpin many domains of economy, society, culture and nature. Mobile media entail a variety of media, contexts, devices and platforms. Once, the term ‘mobile media’ was defined as distinct from mobile communication as mobile technology devices started to diverge and become more multimedia.
However, now mobile media encapsulate both communication and technology (Goggin & Hjorth, 2009). As mundane tools that are an integral part of our lives, they provide intimate, expressive, creative and practical ways to research on the move in and through place. Far from being ‘placeless’, they illustrate how they are embedded in place (Itō, Matsuda & Okabe, 2006). They are about emplacement – that is, interwoven into our stories of place and placemaking. For example, think about how taking and sharing pictures on Instagram operates to visualize a moment in a place while on the move (Hjorth & Pink, 2014). In sum, to locate place.
For users, mobile media include mobile phones, tablet computers, apps, wearable devices such as smartwatches, trackers and connected clothes, RFID chips and sensors. While these are distributed, owned and used unevenly, they have become an integral part of everyday life globally. For researchers, mobile media have also created a wide range of new capabilities for investigation, fieldwork, experimentation, documentation, data-gathering, alternative academic and extramural communication, and new links with publics and audiences.
The field of mobile media is contested and dynamic, having multiple histories across disciplines and ways of being – in place, by the body, in movement. In ways visible and invisible, mobile media have become a ubiquitous part of how we move through place, space and time, and mediate most aspects of our lives. Mobile media are extensions of our body and senses, devices for capturing a complexity of data (Harari et al., 2020; Nelson et al., 2019; Lee, 2019; Gabrys, 2019a). They are vehicles for making artificial intelligence (AI) mundane and taken-for-granted (Ling, 2012). Mobile media are a big part of the environmental e-waste problem (Maxwell & Miller, 2019), not just in the inherent materiality of the devices but in their support for and normalization of collecting and sharing enormous amounts of data. Mobile media are a significant part of the wider energy consumption, environmental impact (Allard et al., 2022) and sustainability challenge posed by the internet and information and communication technologies (ICT) (Brevini, 2022; Jones, 2018).
Yet, conversely, mobile media are tools for addressing a range of challenges. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, smartphones can help to coordinate public health messaging and control through techniques such as quick response (QR) code tracing and tracking (Andrejevic et al., 2021; Davies et al., 2022). Mobile media can also be used as forms of creative practice through location-based games that enhance cooperation and place-based play (something that occurred at scale with the phenomenal rise of Pokémon GO in 2015–16). Tapping into such a variety of trivial, significant and essential things, mobile media play an integrative and integral role in how many of us visualize, experience and represent the world.
Thus, across most societies, people’s lives are deeply mediated by digital technologies – especially mobile devices, apps and data (Figure 1.1). We experience place, movement and sociality in and through mobile media. The rise of mobile media has significant implications for research and practice. Across disciplines and settings, researchers are seeking to make sense of the place of mobile media in social life. Increasingly, they also rely upon mobile media for their research. Mobile media are a researcher’s device for collecting, documenting and dynamically capturing their fields of investigation. They also shape digital methodologies across technologies, their social formations, affordances and environments of uses as these move across digital, social and material worlds. Consider, for instance, how apps and platforms play a powerful role in how we not only see, but feel the world (Goggin, 2020; Lupton, 2017a). As devices that are often attached to the body all the time, such mobile media provide ways of ‘reading’ or interpreting our lives. From qualitative methods such as the ‘walkthrough approach’ to study apps (Light et al., 2018) – whereby researchers ask participants to talk through the app as they scroll – to quantitative and quantified approaches – such as the use of mobile media and app data collection and analysis (Harari et al., 2020) – mobile media provide an invitation and encounter for us to situate our research in different ways. Among other things, mobile media challenge us to take seriously, in our quotidian and mundane contexts:
Intimacy and embodiment – the body as part of thinking and being
in situ
;
proprioception – the knowledge of the body in and through movement;
emplacement – stories of mobility, place and placemaking;
datafication – the rendering of information into data in a digital form.
Figure 1.1. Mobile media play a key role in mediating and mediatizing our lives.
Photo credit: Larissa Hjorth.
In short, for researchers, mobile media offer a paradigm shift in methods – a rich and powerful, yet complex, set of developments. In this book, we explore the opportunities and limitations mobile media offer for methods. Core to our approach is expanding the definition of methods as not just a series of tools and techniques but as a conceptual lens for understanding the world. We do this by engaging with the key literature in the interdisciplinary field combined with interviews with key experts.
Mapping Mobile Media Methods
As anthropologist Daniel Miller (2021) highlights, mobile media offer ways to take seriously empirical – in the resonant sense of experience-based – methods as part of knowing, conceptualizing, theorizing and inhabiting the world. Miller argues that methods are not separate from theory or conceptualization; rather, they are an integral part of the research endeavour. This is especially the case given the different traditions of studying mobile media – from anthropology (where Miller is located), through cultural studies, sociology, media and communication, internet studies and science and technology studies to a wide range of other disciplines, such as human–computer interaction (HCI), economics, law and design, to mention just a few.
Jeffrey Boase and Lee Humphreys evocatively propose that mobile methods offer ‘the means by which mobile communication technology is used to study the social world’ (2018, p. 153). In the plethora of data collection that mobile media have evolved to undertake, we are yet to fully understand all the implications for mobile media methods. Boase and Humphreys identify three themes in mobile methods, each raising distinctive challenges: field-based on-hand/at-hand research (i.e. the ‘field’ of research is often not only a significant digital environment, it is a mobile media one); controlled complexity data collection (i.e. with a lot of data associated with mobile media, researchers must decide the limits); and use of mobile media to create particular ethical considerations (especially as smartphones and other devices have become so mundane that participants can forget they are being interviewed). There are other pressing and novel issues too – for instance, the challenges arising from the growing amount of ‘data of the dead’, as the data legacies and custodianship of people’s posthumous digital lives steadily expands (Cumiskey & Hjorth, 2017). There are the complexities of copyright, intellectual and data property, governance and sovereignty issues – only deepening with the dominance of digital platforms and emerging data, computation and AI infrastructures.
To flesh out these vignettes and introduce the book, we will start by outlining what mobile media are. We then give an overview of their affordances, uses and implications for researchers across a wide range of disciplines. This chapter outlines the journey of this book to reflect upon the shifting nature of mobile media and, in turn, methods. The book unfolds at an important time in the evolution of mobile media, as its social and technical dimensions have expanded well beyond the feature phone or smartphone device into terrains such as IoT, AI and sensing devices, and into a thorough embedding into social lives and their environments (Cumiskey & Humphreys, 2023).
In this book, we distinguish between digital methods – as an area that has received attention because of the rise of the internet, data and digital technologies, and the emergence of areas such as digital humanities, digital sociology and digital research generally – and mobile methods. While both the digital and mobile seem to be everywhere and together, there is a useful distinction to be drawn between digital media methods and mobile media methods. While many devices and media are both digital and mobile, the mobile dimension does entail a situated context – often place based and ‘embodied’ (or of the body).
Thus, for internet scholar Annette Markham (2023), mobile media methods ‘are tools plus a mindset accompanying the use of a mobile device as a core sensemaking tool for people being situated’. Key to the nature of mobile media methods and distinguishing these from other digital methods, as Markham also notes, is the mobility dimension. This mobility, identified and charted by Monika Büscher (Büscher et al., 2020) and various other mobilities scholars, prompts us to strive for a more complex understanding of the empirical as in motion – in the sense of a constitutive relationship to movement.
Mobile media methods have close links with digital methods but, as we will discuss, they also open up a range of new and different directions for researchers, particularly across the humanities, creative arts and design, social sciences and technology disciplines, and interdisciplinary areas such as human-computer interaction (HCI). As we argue, the rich potential and contribution of mobile media methods have especially emerged through a few key phenomena: the rise of mundane automation (Burgess et al., 2022) and AI; the COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant growing inequalities and data justice (Dencik, Jansen & Metcalfe, 2018); the Anthropocene crisis and the politics of technology use (carbon footprint) and waste (Maxwell & Miller, 2019); and the need to address First Nations knowledges as we move towards increasingly uncertain futures. In this book, we seek to capture and integrate these lessons for future research approaches.
Exploring Mobile Media
As we noted in our early work in the field of mobile media around 2008, the then operative definition sought to capture the uses, platforms and practices that diverged from the initial mobile technology communication modes, such as SMS and voice calls (Goggin & Hjorth, 2009). The rise of camera phones and platforms such as Flickr and then Instagram witnessed a burgeoning of mobile media practices, platforms and performativities.
Japan provided an early lead in mobile media innovation. Mobile media invention and adoption were especially spurred on via the pioneering mobile internet service NTT DoCoMo around 2000. Its iMode phone was arguably the first smartphone, especially due to its own anticipatory versions of apps. The Japanese-American digital cultural anthropologist Mimi Itō captured this zeitgeist in her co-edited collection Personal, Portable, Pedestrian (Itō, Matsuda & Okabe, 2006). The various essays in the book documented the unique characteristics of Japanese mobile media, centring on the keitai (the Japanese word for mobile phone, meaning ‘something you carry with you’): namely, intimate, co-present, mobile, familiar, ubiquitous and ambient.
As researchers of emergent Japanese mobile media showed, far from eroding our sense of place, mobile media play a key role in how we understand, traverse and ritualize places. Think, for example, about how we use Instagram to capture moments while on the move and travelling – both mundane and profound. Or how a hashtag then provides an ad hoc organization and curation device for such images (Bruns & Burgess, 2011). In the sharing by users of these moments, we see something termed ‘co-present sociality’ – creating sociability and social life via communication technology, not at a distance (in the etymological sense of ‘telecommunications’) but in the present, and in the process reimagining what kinds of practices, meanings and things that present involves. This example underscores how mobile media have become key to how we make sense of the world, both in it and through it with others.
For Jason Farman (2018), contemporary mobile media can be understood in a long historical duration mapped back 60,000 years to the Australian Aboriginal boomerang, drawing on a media archaeology approach that sees contemporary media as extensions and remediations of older media (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011). As Farman (2018) notes, rather than focusing on immediacy, delay has always played a crucial part in communication rituals. For arts-based collective Miyarrka Media, mobile media offer interesting ways for contemporary Australian First Nations communities to adapt powerful songlines (storytelling as a way of being in and through the land) for intergenerational renewal and kinship. In its project Phone & Spear, Miyarrka Media (2019) uses the word Yuta, meaning ‘new’, to connect to different intergenerational storytelling techniques that embody Indigenous ways of being (2019).
Figure 1.2.TIMeR Audiowalk (Davies, Guntarik, Innocent, Briggs).
Photo credit: Hugh Davies, 2019.
These First Nations examples highlight that when we think about mobile media, we are not only thinking about a cultural artefact and storytelling device that reflects different framings of technology and society. Mobile media also involve digital and material devices that shape and are shaped by rituals and practices. Mobile media are not just a tool that researchers can use to collect fieldwork; the technology offers performative, place-based and co-creation dimensions that enable a new and better understanding of the field of research. Here we are reminded of cultural geographer Doreen Massey’s (2005) notion of place as ‘stories so far’. This underscores the ways in which mobile media have become one of the key vehicles, tools and frames for place and storytelling.
Thus, for Boon Wurrung Elder N’Arweet Carolyn Briggs in her collaborative location-based augmented reality (AR) game TimeR (with Troy Innocent, Olivia Guntarik and Hugh Davies), the mobile device offers a playful method to disrupt colonial maps and mapping with First Nations storytelling of being in place (see Figure 1.2). As people walk around with the game, her voice tells the important stories of the Kulin people and how different animals, plants and spirits guided First Nations people to honour the understandings of Place and Country. This production shows mobile media as not just a tool for recording place and location-based movement, but also an embodied, co-creative and performative sense of acknowledgement to the Country inhabited by First Nations people.
Mobile media heighten what Farman (2011) identifies as ‘social proprioception’ – the knowledge of the body as one moves through social, digital and material worlds. As highlighted in research on ‘more-than-human’ (i.e. animal) and multispecies beings, mobile media and data tracking can allow for inventive ways to understand the world beyond human-centric lenses (Hjorth, 2022; Leong, Hjorth & Choi, 2020; Gabrys, 2019b; Bencke & Bruhn, 2022). For Sarah Whatmore, more-than-human refers to the contexts in which multiple species and processes coalesce (2006). According to Anna Tsing, humans are part of an ‘interspecies’ relationship (2012).
An example of this more-than-human exploration can be found in the work of locative landscape architect Hajime Ishikawa. Ishikawa has tracked his everyday movements since 2000, which has provided great insights. Then, he started to track his cat’s movements, only to be completely surprised by the data (see Leong, Hjorth & Choi, 2020). As Monika Büscher and John Urry (2009) note, the emergence of the mobilities paradigm, epitomized in and through the mobile device, has witnessed a recalibration of theory, critical inquiry, explanation and engagement with the empirical. For John Law and John Urry (2004), traditional methods have failed to deal with the complexity of movement and fluidity.
The significance of mobile media in connecting memory to place can be witnessed in the Ukraine refugees fleeing the Russian attacks in early 2022 – for many, their phones became photo albums for them to carry their home with them while on the run. This contradictory process of domestication-while-on-the-move was highlighted by British cultural studies scholar David Morley (2017). As science and technology studies (STS) phenomenologist Michael Arnold (2003) notes, mobile media both set us free and bring with them other obligations (such as always being available – anytime, anyplace).
Another example is provided by the case of the Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani. Boochani sought refuge in Australia, but was illegally detained offshore in the notorious government-run detention facility in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea (Wells, 2022) from 2013 until his acceptance as an immigrant by New Zealand in 2019. Boochani poetically captured his experiences through sending WhatsApp messages to outside supporters (Tofighian, 2018), who translated the texts. The mobile media messages were eventually published as the prize-winning book No Friend but the Mountains (Boochani, 2018; for wider context, see Grasso, 2023).
The mobile device thus enables mobilities (and immobilities) to be captured through various forms of attunement that emerge in and through the interrelationships among the social, material and digital. In doing so, the field of mobile media and its research can be deployed to draw attention to and intervene in major concerns, such as inequalities. Take, for example, research around the AR game Pokémon GO, which highlighted how the game, on the one hand, allows for people to discover playfully their environment, exercise and socialize, but, also, on the other hand, reinforces exclusionary infrastructure biases with a majority of the PokéStops in middle-class locations (so-called ‘redlining’) (Salen Tekinbas, 2017).
As our expert comments (from interviews conducted 2022–3) have highlighted, mobile media provide a unique context to explore and experiment with creative, playful methods that not only are attuned to the complexity of the world now and into the future, but also activate social and political inquiry and social change. It is this dimension of mobile media as a paradoxical tool for agency, expression and social justice that allows us to rethink methods and their intimate place in researching the field. They play a crucial role, for instance, in how data justice is now playing out in an automated world where offline inequalities and non-normalized bodies are amplified in the digital world (Dencik et al., 2022; Goggin & Ellis, 2020).
Moreover, with mobile media’s decades of involvement in citizen empowerment and exploitation they are key examples of Cizek and Uricchio’s (2019) co-creation manifesto. It is this co-creation framework that allows us to rethink the role between researcher, participants and the field. From the climate emergency to the ethics of AI (artificial intelligence), mobile media are providing an innovative and creative space to explore new ways of being in the world (Gabrys, 2019a). As key media communication scholar Rich Ling observes: ‘We are still waiting on embedded communication, the internet of things, the application of AI … These will further change the dynamics of society and will also call for new ways of thinking about methods’ (2023).
With such exemplars in mind, in this book we view mobile media methods as an invitation to rethink how we conceptualize, practise, study and theorize the relationship between the research, data and the field. We hope our discussion will provide a foundation and invitation to think through the specific characteristics of mobile media as intimate, mundane, embodied (on and with the body), locative, place-based, creative, playful and networked. As the vehicle for our ‘stories so far’, mobile media have become one of the key vehicles, tools and frames for place and storytelling, as we will discuss in this book.
Book Overview: Chapter Summaries
As you dip into this book and read on, we hope it will provide you with the creative, critical and cultural contexts to think about mobile media methods and provide you with examples to inspire your studies and future research.
The book includes features aimed at undergraduate student readers and teachers – in particular, each chapter concludes with summaries of the main points as well as exercises for interested readers to explore and gain confidence in using mobile media methods. These features may be less relevant for more advanced readers – such as postgraduate researchers and scholars seeking an accessible introduction and overview to mobile media methods.
In Chapter 2, ‘Methods’, we provide an overview of mobile media’s affordances, uses and implications for researchers across a wide range of disciplines. In Chapter 3, ‘Placemaking’, we explore and map the terrain that is mobile media. What constitutes mobile media and its distinctive and special relationships with place and location (Wilken & Goggin, 2015)? What are the affordances of mobile media? What are the cultural dynamics of mobile media now? In this chapter, we reflect on different approaches to understanding placemaking – from ethnographic interviews and participant observation through urban studies action research to data visualizations of movement – to see how the different methods provide alternative insights into place. We introduce the role of ‘research creation’ – that is, using creative methods such as theatre, writing and photography – as a way to engage participants/communities/stakeholders and connect research with policy-making (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2015). In this chapter we also consider how students might reflect on First Nations peoples’ ways of knowing place by exploring examples of mobile place-making projects uncovering different ways of seeing and being in the world. (In each country, First Nations knowledges will have different ethical considerations. For example, in Australia, which has problematically been slow to recognize the agency and self-determination of First Nations people, non-Indigenous researchers need to read and understand these ethical guidelines [AIATSIS, 2020]).
Chapter 4, ‘Mobilities’, highlights questions of movement and mobilities, and how to grasp these via methods. As a sociological research area, mobilities have been important in conceptualizing how mobile media shape and are shaped by the various mobilities – geographic, physical, economic and cultural. In this chapter, we look at methods for investigating mobilities associated with mobile media. Building on the important work on methods in mobilities research (Büscher, Urry & Witchger, 2011; Büscher et al., 2020, Hill, Hartmann & Andersson, 2021), we meld this with creative interventions around the changing notion of mobility during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. What does it mean to rethink mobility studies in a time of working from home (WFH), and the new conditions of domestic life, domestication and media that have emerged (Adey et al., 2021; Hartmann, 2013)? To answer this question, we suggest it is critical to use concepts and methods for studying the emergent kinds of ‘mobility justice’ (Sheller, 2018) and data justice (Milan & Treré, 2019; Dencik, Fieke & Metcalfe, 2018) that have appeared.
In Chapter 5, ‘Practices’, we take up the long-standing area of research into social and cultural practices and discuss what mobile media methods can contribute to this. Drawing on the traditions of practice theory and research across the humanities and social sciences, we begin with a discussion of key work showing how mobile media provide a unique opportunity to explore everyday practice. This is especially the case given that mobile media are a vehicle for many processes that merge work, play, school, public and private lives. Indeed, to ask someone to talk about their mobile media practices is to uncover many complex perceptions of and experiences around contemporary life. This chapter is guided by the question of how mobile media allow for unique understandings of the rhythms of practice and ritual that pattern culture and society.
Chapter 6 focuses on ‘Play’, something that characterizes a central logic in mobile media – where we have seen apps such as Strava gamify exercise, while TikTok ludifies (makes playful) genres such as dance. Play is not only integral to digital media but also to software logic, as Sicart (2017) notes. In this chapter, we explore the ‘playful turn’ in digital media, and the outsized role played in this by mobile media (Frissen et al., 2015; Raessens, 2006; Sicart, 2014; Walz & Deterding, 2014). We explore play as a series of creative practice methods and look at how this can help us to reimagine the intersection between mobile media, creativity and data literacy. In this chapter, we present and highlight ways in which play – as a mode of critical inquiry, creativity, innovation and iteration – can make sense of mobile media and be a lens for making sense of the world.
In Chapter 7, ‘Data’, we look at one of the most conspicuous and profound dynamics of digital technologies in contemporary social life, in which mobile media have become particularly important. We discuss how researchers have taken advantage of and shaped innovative new concepts, approaches and methods that rely upon the vast troves of data generated by people, animals, things and environments across many kinds of digital technologies. In this chapter, we focus on two things that have become closely related: the nature and rise of mobile media data; and mobiles as computational media, software (especially apps) and platforms.
In the second part of the chapter, we explore the role of mobile media in our ways of making sense of the world. With the smartphone, connected environments in home, work, cities, entertainment and leisure, emergent technologies and networks such as the much-anticipated IoT, everyday life is populated by sensors and sensing technologies and media. Alongside these sensors, how can we leverage other senses and capabilities of sensing? As we discuss, mobile media are keyed into how we curate and affect our sensorial experience – whether that be affecting experiences of intimacy, touch, co-presence, absence or loss. What does it mean to take seriously sensing as a method for understanding the world? How might a sensory ethnography (Pink, 2015) capture the data and what kind of things would it say? And what other concepts and methods can we use to interpret and use sensor data?
The book concludes with Chapter 8, ‘Futures’, considering how the future of mobile media looks, smells and feels, and what implications and opportunities this offers research and methods. We reflect upon the role of mobile media in shaping how we memorialize the past and present, then consider how this, in turn, shapes our orientations to social, cultural, environmental and other futures. For instance, how do mobile media help us to critically engage with emergent and future imaginaries of technology and society?
In this chapter, we reflect on the methodologies emerging around the intersection between automation (Burgess et al., 2022; Pink et al., 2021) and mobile media. We examine some of the research creation methods for engaging audiences to think about the implications of their data for the future. Returning to our starting point, we suggest that we need to think about methods that are grounded in present time and places, but also methods that imaginatively open up futures – for instance, the scope of mobile media methods in co-creation that can allow for more hopeful futures that embrace important and multifaceted approaches.
Summary of Main Points
Mobile media refers to a range of media – potentially stretching back many centuries – that have some kind of mobility or movement. In the present day, mobile media emerged from mobile phones from the late 1970s onwards, based on cellular mobile telecommunications networks.
Mobile media encompass pagers, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets. Mobile media often integrate other kinds of technology such as location technology (GPS), sensors, touch-based haptic technology, radio, audio, television and streaming, internet and social media, game devices VR/AR/mixed-realities technology, smartwatches and wearables. Mobile media have expanded to feature in or be considered to extend to connected cars, drones, micro-mobility devices, miniaturized hearing devices (such as airpods), and health and wellbeing – as majority devices.
Mobile media are often intrinsically entangled with perceptions and practices of bodies in place. They often involve extension of or incorporation into our bodies, and mobility of the vast amounts of data they often gather.
Mobile media offer new ways to study the world – what can be called mobile media methods. These are also novel methods for studying mobile media themselves – and the wider settings, ecosystems and systems of information, communication, media and technology in which they are embedded. Mobile media are not just a series of techniques, approaches and tools for studying the empirical but also involve a conceptual lens for being, seeing and feeling in the world.
Exercise: Walkthrough app exercise
Warm-up ‘walkthrough’ app exercise: What does your smartphone say about you?
In pairs, do a ‘walkthrough’ of your apps and usage. For example, how often do you take camera phone pictures and what ones do you share and not? And why? Do you use exercise apps like Strava to motivate you? What does it mean to gamify your exercise? Look at your data usage – what does this say about your everyday practices? Talk through some of the meanings and rituals that inform your mobile data usage. What are the similarities and differences? And what are the best ways to document and analyse these practices?
Keywords
Affordances: thinking about the contexts – often an overlay between the environment, contexts, uses.
Attunement: the subtle relationships among people, other species, things and their environment.
Datafication: the transformation and apprehension of the world through increasingly pervasive and intensive data.
Locative media: location-based media; media oriented around location position and data, and taking advantage of place.
More-than-human: going beyond a human-centred perspective; acknowledging that human beings exist in a wider world of animals, species, things and environments.
2Methods
Researcher Marco uses his GoPro while on his Strava bike ride to explore some of the different ways movement across places can be reflected. He wonders what the different data say about the experience, and what it is unable to capture and why.
Student Uma has been keeping a diary of her mobile media activities while also lodging her feelings when she does them. She then brings that together with the data produced on the phone (use time, amount of usage, apps used). She is always fascinated by how her perceptions of use are different from the things collected by the sensing data.
The rise of mobile media has significant implications for research and practice – especially in terms of methods. Across disciplines and settings, researchers are seeking to make sense of the place of mobile media in social life, and they are increasingly relying upon mobile media for their research. Mobile media are not only a researcher’s devices for collecting, documenting and dynamically capturing the field; they are also a context for shaping particular modes of digital media methodology across the various affordances (environments, contexts, uses) of platforms and apps as it moves across digital, social and material worlds. For Andrew Schrock, mobile media affordances and their social contexts are uniquely ‘communicative’ (Schrock, 2015, p. 1239). Mobile media methods have become an integral part of contemporary research practice and media production, distribution and consumption (Vannini & Trandberg Jensen, 2020, p. 219), which in turn raise ethical issues about consent and privacy (Humphreys, 2023, p. 23). Creative practitioners have turned to mobile media as a context for mundane creativity, playful intervention and reinvention (Hjorth et al., 2020). As mobile media morph from smartphone into the ubiquity of IoT, AI and automation, the methods increasingly require interdisciplinary and inventive techniques.
As highlighted in Chapter 1
