Mobility and Materiality in Digital Literacies

Mobility and Materiality

  • Digital technology advances:-

    • Internet access via portable devices.

    • Increasing integration into the physical world.

  • Digitally mediated communication:- More mobile and ubiquitous.

    • Physical spaces and objects: important resources.

  • Digital literacies: understanding meanings across time, space, and matter.

    • Focus: changed relationship with time, space, material world.

Impact on Time and Space

  • Inhabiting multiple spaces.

  • Engaging in interactions across spaces/timescales.

  • Exploiting location/movement.

  • Mobile digital technologies:- ‘Always on'.

    • Always connected to digital networks.

Embodied Communication

  • Embodied communication from a distance: gestures, expressions, touch via video chat.

    • Devices like Apple Watch.

  • Physical reality becoming digital: augmented by device information.

    • Physical objects connected to digital networks (IoT).

Mobility and Hybrid Spaces

  • Early internet & cyberspace:- Alternate reality.

    • Science fiction.

    • Cyberspace: ‘Lines of light…’ (Gibson, 1984: 51).

  • Digital technologies: alter experience of space/time.

    • Layering time/space.

  • Reconfiguration with communication technologies: writing, electronic media.

  • Television: breaking down barriers between spaces (Meyrowitz, 1985).

    • Breaks ‘public’/‘private’ boundaries.

  • Mobile technologies: controlling spaces.

    • Paperback book: managing public situations (Schivelbusch, 1986).

    • Goffman (1963: 38): involvement shields.

  • Devices altering urban space (De Souza e Silva & Firth, 2008): blocking sounds, augmenting experience.

    • Media filtering and managing data/interactions.

  • Reconfigurations of time/space: physical spaces still relevant.

    • Classroom/living room affects experience.

    • De Souza e Silva and Firth (2008: 39): reader in train.

  • Layering space challenges communication: readjusting frames.

    • Shared context at nexus of spaces/timeframes (Lyons & Tagg, 2019).

  • Jones (2005) on chatrooms/IM: experiencing multiple spaces.

  • Mobile digital technology: increases complexity.

  • Hybrid spaces (de Souza e Silva, 2006): mobile spaces via devices.

    • 'Always on': transforms experience.

    • Enfolding remote contexts (262).

  • Altered 'relational space': 'ambient co-presence' (Ito & Okabe 2005).

    • Ongoing awareness: ‘keeping channels open’ (264).

Online and Offline Intertwining

  • Devices don't remove us from physical spaces.

  • Online/offline: activities intertwine.

  • Simultaneous involvements.

  • Merging spaces: using mobile phones to locate.

Locative Media

  • Mobile technologies: filter information by location, communicate/locate.

  • Location services in smartphones (GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi): used in apps.

  • Users interact/alter meaning: attaching pictures/reviews.

  • Personalized experience.

  • Apps locate things/users.

  • Snapchat’s ‘Snap Maps’ (2017): users on map.

    • ActionMojis change.

    • Opting out via ‘ghostmode’.

  • Location as communicative resource: altering interaction, managing relationships, maximizing opportunities, exacerbating loneliness.

  • Location-based dating apps (Tinder, Grindr): finding companions.

    • Relieving awkwardness.

  • Mobile phones: altering configurations in physical spaces, intersecting with prejudices.

    • Strategic radius based on ideas.

  • Key affordances of location-based apps: managing identities, inferring identities, communicating qualities, reinforcing prejudices.

  • Potential to alter power: tracking, surveillance, data sharing.

Activity: Locative Technologies

  • Survey apps collecting location data.

  • Check iPhone/Android Location Services.

  • Determine why apps collect data, consider functionality, alter permissions.

Placemaking with Digital Images

  • 'Location': relation to people/things, geographical coordinates.

  • Location-based apps: go beyond coordinates, make locations meaningful.

    • Association with place.

  • Apps like Google Maps: accessing pictures, reviews.

    • Rating/commenting.

  • Mobile digital technologies: turn spaces into places.

  • Philosophers/geographers on ‘space’ vs. ‘place’ (Harvey, 1996): Places = spaces with meaning.

  • Michel de Certeau (1988): spaces become places through practices.

  • Doreen Massey: places ‘thrown together’ by interaction.

  • Henri Lefebvre (1991): space made meaningful through actions, experiences, information.

  • Places constantly made/remade.

  • Placemaking by bodies, relationships, communication.

  • Places are embodied, relational, meaningful.

  • Different media offer affordances for placemaking.

  • Mobile digital technologies for placemaking: apps using location-based services and digital cameras.

    • Exchanging images.

  • Camera-based apps make places: 'throwing together' aspects.

  • Snapchat example (Albarwardi, 2017): communicating experience, feelings, dynamics.

  • Digital camera, Snapchat: enable communicating about place/experience.

  • Snapchat images: depicting experience, transforming bodies.

  • Wargo (2015): embodied composing.

  • Communicating embodied experience (Radley, 1996): transforming features.