Abstract
Mobile Technology and Place investigates the important redefinitions and reconstructions of place and space afforded by the almost ubiquitous mobile media technologies surrounding us. The book, organized into four parts, seeks to develop a “fuller, critical understanding of the intersections and interconnections between mobile media use and notions of place to understand what significance both elements have for understanding and living in the digital age” (p. 18).
Part I offers an introduction to the entanglement of networked mobile technologies and place, where the editors outline the scope of the problem for mobile media studies scholars. They note that the concept of place has been debated in the field of human geography, showing that it entails nature and culture alike, and further an ensemble of materiality, meaning, and practice. In addition to these complex and heterogeneous parts, place is seen as fluid, dynamic, and temporary. The editors argue for a relational understanding of place opposed to the rather static euclidean concept of space, acknowledging that the two cannot be separated since technologies such as GPS frame place within their static axiomatic space regime. In his chapter, Jeff Malpas offers a thoughtful reflection on “the place of mobility” about an often overlooked effect, namely how processes of individualization and subjectivation constitute place, subject, and positioning. As Richard Ek points out in his contribution, topological understandings of spatial systems are always political, and place-making processes are ontological renegotiations set in motion by mobility and mobile technologies. Overall, Part I of the book has outstanding contributions which offer the theoretical nucleus to understand the construction of place.
Part II “Media, Publics and Place Making” goes into medias res, featuring an ethnographic case study of wireless gaming in Japan and Paris, and discussing the “urban dynamics of net localities.” Part III “Urbanity, Rurality, and the Scenes of Mobiles” opens with a case study of north Australian connectivity problems and their effects on the construction of localities, followed by a rare case study of mobile social networking of “have less” Chinese students migrating to Shanghai and how they produce and renegotiate their family ties with mobile technologies. Part IV focuses on “Bodies, Screens, and Relation of Place,” incorporating integral concepts such as body and the problem of the mobile screen into the discussion.
As the book draws to an end, the reader is offered a discussion of other critical metaelements including Gerard Goggin’s discussion of political encodings of place and Francesco Lapentas’s important study of the normative regime imposed by algorithmicity onto everyday mobile culture.
This edited collection bravely opens the Pandora’s box of theoretical and conceptual problems to engage with in the coming years of mobile media studies. At the same time, it shows that so far no canonical concepts have evolved in this field and that many theorists borrow from established disciplines, most prominently, human geography. While most contributions are outstanding, the general composition of the book remains a bit opaque and it is not entirely clear if the four-part structure is helpful to the reader. Furthermore, the book lacks a deeper discussion of infrastructures, which in their static set up are the counterpart to mobility and fundamentally enable the processes discussed in the book.
In sum, this book is a prime resource and excellent initial investigation of one of the most basic concepts for mobile media studies. Its main merit may well be a recapitulation of the broader theoretical discussion of concepts of place, with a long-term significance that will not be outdated too soon.