Storied spaces: Cultural accounts of mobility, technology, and environmental knowing (original) (raw)

Mobiles and the appropriation of place

2003

Mizuko Ito, who spent her childhood split between Japan and the US, is a cultural anthropologist interested in how digital media are changing relationships, identities, and communities. She worked on that at the Universities of Tokyo and Stanford and is presently researching at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication. In her contribution she analyses how wireless tools are changing the experience of copresence for Japanese youth.

Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing

2007

The rise of wireless networks and portable computing devices has been accompanied by an increasing interest in technology and mobility, and in the urban environment as a site of interaction. However, most investigations have taken a relatively narrow view of urban mobility. In consequence, design practice runs the risk of privileging particular viewpoints, forms of mobility, and social groups. We are interested in a view of mobility that reaches beyond traditional assumptions about the who, when, why, and what of mobility. Based on analytic perspectives from the social sciences and on empirical fieldwork in a range of settings, we outline an alternative view of technology and mobility with both analytic and design implications.

Mobility in the Digital Context

The purpose of this essay is to explore how a mobilities paradigm, in relation to new digital practices, can redefine the understanding of space. Mobility is a contemporary paradigm that explores societies through the understanding of the movement of people, things, ideas and information. In this sense, mobilities is a paradigm that renders the world as a network of connections, which nowadays seems to permeate every single aspect of daily life. Furthermore, digital practices continue to evolve in a dynamic flow of change ever more complex and entangled with human activity.

Mobility, Space and Power: On the Multiplicities of Seeing Mobility

Mobilities, 2011

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Mobile Media as New Forms of Spatialization

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2015

The physical space has historically served as an important support for human expression. However, the production of location-based information has been consciously used as means of social control by the hegemonic power, which decides what can be publicly displayed, and what should be hidden. With the development of mobile media, space has gained new dimensions, resulting in a sort of hybrid space where digital information overlays the physical space revealing what was previous unknown about a place. As mobile devices become increasingly present in our society, they should be understood as a social interface to our experience of space, serving not only as means to consume information, but also tools for communication. This paper discuss the current mobile media practices, such as mapping, urban electronic annotations, location-based mobile games, and smart mobs, which creates opportunities for new forms of human expression, reappropriations of space, and contestation of hegemonic power.

“’All Transportation is Local’: Mobile-Digital-Networked-Technologies and Networked Orientations”

Transfers – Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 3(1): 119-139, 2013

In an increasingly mediated situation, mobile, digital, and networked technologies (MDNTs) prompt individuals to orient themselves in new ways to the spaces they traverse. How users and communities experience these technologies in relation to the environments around them subsequently affects mentalities, including perceptions of space and mobility. The mediating presence of digital technology interconnects internal and external factors through diverse social and technological networks. This paper uses interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives to argue that ubiquitous MDNTs alter the ways that individuals orient themselves in relation to the spaces, both on- and offline, that they traverse. By mediating various visual, audible, and informational aspects of daily life while remaining implicated within external networks of related experiences, individuals move through on- and offline spaces in ways that allow the subject to negotiate her local environment(s). Experiences of mobility and space become more fluid as spatial subjectivities and mobility become integrated.

Interplaced Mobility in the Age of “Digital Gestell”

Transfers, 2017

The following article explores meanings and implications of mobile technologies and embodiment in a globally networked context. Drawing on ethnographic research on global travelers moving through Nepal and India, we focus on the role mobile technologies play in mediating perceptions and performances of place. Facilitated by contemporary media and mobility infrastructures, we suggest that mobile subjects are relationally “interplaced.” By introducing this notion, we aim to illustrate how forms of virtual mobility overlap with and impact actual, corporeal experience. Following Heidegger, we also develop a concept we call “digital Gestell” (enframement). Applying Heidegger’s reflection that technologies of a given historical epoch frame the way subjects approach the world, we can say that many people today are “digitally enframed.” Facing this increasingly technologized Being-in-the-world, we suggest an “ethos of Gelassenheit” for a more responsive and responsible awareness of the powe...

Imagining a Mobile Sense of Place: Towards an Ecopoetics of Mobility

2017

This essay starts out from the observation that in American literature there is a growing body of environmentally significant poems that are invested both in place and geographical movement. Because their green resonances are not so much compromised as they are productively complicated and intensified by this double-orientation, such poems challenge all-too stable notions of place and place-connectedness as ecological ideals, from the perspectives of a genre that is uniquely suited to transcend place and time without necessarily relinquishing literature’s referential dimension. Combining some of the questions asked in recent ecocriticism with the concerns of mobility studies, this essay explores how American poetry engages with the shifting place of human and nonhuman creatures in an increasingly mobile world. Using Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and a spectrum of contemporary poets as examples, the essay argues that such poems, in spite of their notable differences, all engage simi...

On the Move: Technology, Mobility, and the Mediation of Social Time and Space

The Information Society, 2002

The current explosion in mobile computing and telecommunications technologies holds the potential to transform "everyday" time and space, as well as changes to the rhythms of social institutions. Sociologists are only just beginning to explore what the notion of "mobility" might mean when mediated through computing and communications technologies, and so far, the sociological treatment has been largely theoretical. This article seeks instead to explore how a number of dimensions of time and space are being newly reconstructed through the use of mobile communications technologies in everyday life. The article draws on long-term ethnographic research entitled "The Socio-Technical Shaping of Mobile Multimedia Personal Communications," conducted at the University of Surrey. This research has involved ethnographic eldwork conducted in a variety of locales and with a number of groups. This research is used here as a resource to explore how mobile communications technologies mediate time in relation to mobile spaces. First the paper offers a review and critique of some of the major sociological approaches to understanding time and space. This review entails a discussion of how social practices and institutions are maintained and/or transformed via mobile technologies. Ethnographic data is used to explore emerging mobile temporalities. Three interconnected domains in mobile time are proposed: rhythms of mobile use, rhythms of mobile use in everyday life, and rhythms of mobility and institutional change. The article argues that while these mobile temporalities are emerging, and offer new ways of acting in and perceiving time and space, the practical construction of mobile time in everyday life remains rmly connected to well-established time-based social practices, whether these be ; web site: http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk institutional (such as clock time, "work time") or subjective (such as "family time").