Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile communication in hybrid spaces

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.