Publications

Editors: Adriana de Souza e Silva & Mimi Sheller
ISBN: 978-1138778139
Published: July 21, 2014
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Mobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to bring together mobilities with mobile communication and locative media. Mobile communication scholars have focused on cell phones, often ignoring broader connections to urban spaces, geography, and locational media. As a result, they emphasized virtual mobility and personalized communication as a way of disconnecting from place, location and publics.

The growing pervasiveness of location-aware technology urges us to rethink the intersection among location, mobile technologies and mobility. Few studies have addressed the many transformations taking place in mobile sociality and in urban spatial processes through the appropriation of these technologies. This edited collection will address this gap by exploring the intersection of mobility, mobile communication, and locative media, as well as the implications of this for adjacent fields such as mobile art, mobile gaming, architecture, design, and urban planning.”

Review:
Buccitelli, A. B. (2016). [Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile communication in hybrid spaces, by A. de Souza e Silva and M. Sheller], New Media & Society, 18 (4), 669-672.

Authors: Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith
ISBN: 978-0415506007
Published: March 10, 2012
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Mobile phones are no longer what they used to be. Not only can users connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, they can also use their devices to map their precise geographic coordinates – and access location-specific information like restaurant reviews, historical information, and locations of other people nearby. The proliferation of location-aware mobile technologies calls for a new understanding of how we define public spaces, how we deal with locational privacy, and how networks of power are developed today.

In Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Adriana de Souza E. Silva and Jordan Frith examine these social and spatial changes by framing the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, and the mobile phone. These technologies work as interfaces to public spaces – that is, as symbolic systems that not only filter information but also reshape communication relationships and the environment in which social interaction takes place. Yet rather than detaching people from their surroundings, the authors suggest that location-aware technologies may ultimately strengthen our connections to locations.

 

Review:
Schrock, A. R. (2012). Mobile interface theory: Location-aware mobile devices in urban environments, International Journal of Communication, 6, 2082-10.