Glover-Rijkse, R., & de Souza e Silva, A. Evolving Geographies of Mobile Communication. In P. Adams & B. Warf (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies (pp. 161-171). New York: Routledge.
This chapter considers the evolving ways in which mobile communication technologies produce and shape experiences of spaces, focusing on three key moments: (i) the late 1990s and early 2000s, when mobile phones were widely diffused and adopted into new spaces, (ii) the emergence of smartphones in the late 2000s, along with the normalization of locations embedded with digital information, and (iii) the spread of mobile infrastructures in the second decade of the 21st century, demonstrating how these infrastructures impact communication and mobility. During this timeframe, mobile communication technologies have shaped how we experience spaces by contributing to the merging of the physical and the digital. Additionally, they have enabled users to learn about and interact with their surroundings, therefore increasing people’s connections to spaces. Increasingly, though, these technologies have also become integrated within networks of mobile infrastructures that proliferate in our everyday spaces. These infrastructures offer new resources within spaces, but they also subject the interactions and mobilities within these spaces to various forms of tracking and control. As such, we address how the how power becomes inscribed in the relations between mobile technologies, users, and spaces.