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.

Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138778139_oachapter12.pdf

Adriana de Souza e Silva is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University (NCSU), affiliated faculty at the Digital Games Research Center, and a faculty member of the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) program at NCSU.

Mimi Sheller is Professor of Sociology and directs the Center for Mobilities Research & Policy at Drexel University. Her research combines Caribbean studies, mobilities theory, and mobile locative media. Author of four monographs on the Caribbean, she is co-editor of Tourism Mobilities (2004), Mobile technologies of the city (2006), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014), and L.A. Re.Play issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (2014).