COVID-19 now and then: Reflections on mobile communication and the pandemic

Although our history with pandemics is long, our collective memory of pandemics is short. The 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, infected almost a third of the world's population and claimed more than 100 million lives, and yet it has been scarcely mentioned afterwards (Crosby, 2003). This tendency to forget lessons learned from pandemics is problematic because it leads to the lack of proper public funds allocation for scientific research, public health, and pandemic preparedness. In addition, with the urge to go back to “normal,” we might forget important lessons that a large-scale public health crisis might have taught us about the way we communicate and experience spaces and time. Understanding these lessons is especially important to mobile communication scholars since mobile communication can distribute and diffract our ability to move and to do things in the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many of our relationships to resources and to spaces, which is the connective theme across many of the articles in this special issue. Jensen (2013) explains that mobile media can be studied as a resource of social action across social spaces. From this perspective, mobile communication enables communication and action at a distance, which allows for a network of resources to expand or contract, emerge or dissolve, because mobile communication works in concert with existing (mobile and immobile) infrastructures. As Jensen puts it,

In a historical perspective, mobile media occupy a position in between, on the one hand, the mostly fixed terminals of broadcasting and personal computers and, on the other hand, … [they] are variously integrated into natural objects, artifacts, and social contexts. (p. 30)

Our experience of spaces, mediated by mobile communication devices, has drastically changed with the pandemic, and this is because the pandemic has highlighted the importance of networks and the infrastructures that support them. While the global kinetic elites (Castells, 2000) were privileged enough to become “immobile” and work remotely, many marginalized populations with limited access to technology or the infrastructures that support mobile communication were forced to keep moving or to find creative ways of accessing networked infrastructures. Horst (2013) has argued that infrastructures are a dynamic process that is simultaneously made and unmade because of larger economic and political structures. We might think that the choice to either use or not use mobile media is a personal or a social decision. But Horst reminds us that if we were to look back on the “second generation of mobile communication research,” also known as the studies that examined the patterns of adoption and appropriation of mobile phones, we will see that the choice to use or not use mobile media is conditioned by economic and political forces. In the case of the pandemic, we see infrastructural politics taking place through government interventions. Regulations, such as requiring the use of contact-tracing apps, or business practices such as where to provide broadband access or cellular networks, also determine who has access and what kind of participation can take place. This means that sometimes the choice to use or not use mobile media is not fully ours to make because there may not be the necessary infrastructure to support the desired behavior. Mobile communication, then, becomes a priority resource. During the pandemic, COVID-19 regulations and policies changed mobile media infrastructures and cultural practices in ways that (re)directed and (re)shaped the way we engaged with mobile communication.

Mobile communication exists due to both our mobile devices that move along with us and the infrastructures that enable them to work. Ling (2015) describes mobile communication as the use of various technological systems in order to communicate while not in a fixed location. By this measure, mobile communication is not limited to devices like mobile phones because it involves networks and infrastructures (Frith & Özkul, 2019). In fact, mobile communication is not even limited to portable media. As Campbell (2013) explains, “portable media are carried from place to place, whereas mobile communication is possible during transition, freeing the user to connect with others while moving about within and across space” (p. 10). It is communication that is not tethered to space. This line of thinking has opened the doors for mobile communication scholars to study mobile applications that require the use of mobile devices. Using mobile apps is in itself a kind of mobile communication that depends on various technological systems to enable communication that is not tethered to locations.

As research in mobile communication continues to grow, several scholars have pointed out that the mobile media landscape is changing. To date, Mobile Media & Communication has published around 186 articles that center on mobile apps, so we are not surprised to find that a good number of the articles included in this special issue also center on how the use of mobile apps is tied to issues of mobility and immobility, along with their networks and infrastructures. By this point, it is clear that mobile communication scholarship extends past mobile phones and specific apps to include media that is spread throughout our environments, like wearables, RFID, or Bluetooth beacons. All these end devices depend on infrastructures to work, which allow for portable, untethered, and invisible forms of communication.

During pandemic lockdowns, most of the world depended heavily on mobile media to socialize and communicate. However, there are different media ecologies that configure our complex mobile communication practices, depending on where people are, what people do and the kind of relationships they maintain (Boase, 2023). For example, in the United States, people use a range of different apps such as iMessage, SMS, and Telegram, while in other countries, some apps function as an all-encompassing mobile communication facilitators. This is the case of WeChat in China and WhatsApp in most of the developing world. The use of different mobile communication channels influenced how people interacted and shared experiences during the pandemic, since each platform has their own affordances (Norman, 2013).

Sometimes, the affordances of an infrastructure can be used in creative ways. Noticeably, displaced and emplaced persons, as well as marginalized communities in rural or “less developed” areas in the Global North and South, came up with creative forms of mobile communication to deal with the required mobilities and immobilities imposed by the pandemic (de Souza e Silva & Xiong-Gum, 2021). For example, for many people with no computer or internet connection at home, their mobile phone became the most important communication channel: reaching out to clients, taking orders, and paying bills. Mobile devices became systematically used as interfaces for tele-medicine, locating testing sites, and contact tracing. For those who sheltered in place, mobile applications that support delivery services for food or grocery items played a critical role in the continued circulation of goods in the growing of a mobile-guided gig economy. In locations without access to cellular networks such as signal “dead zones,” people had to travel to engage in mobile communication. Siegler (2020) reports that up to a third of people living in rural areas of the United States are located in dead zones—areas where people cannot access internet or cellular service. Often such dead zones are within driving distance to “fully connected areas.” For instance, Lockhart, Texas is a dead zone located about a 30-minute drive from the city of Austin. As the demands to use Zoom and other mediated forms of communication rose, there was an unveiling of the differences in the equity of mobile communication infrastructure. Yet, as a response, in these areas of connective precarity some schools boosted their WiFi signals so more families could connect (Siegler, 2020) or school buses equipped with mobile WiFi traveled into neighborhoods so families could connect to the internet for the purposes of online classes (Blad, 2020; Chambers, 2020). As a result, not only did we see an appropriation of mobile media, but we also saw people actively configuring and reconfiguring a network of mobilities and mobile communication to redistribute community resources.

Beyond this, the pandemic fueled the development of new mobile technologies, such as heat sensors, contact-tracing apps, and mobile maps (de Souza e Silva, 2022). It also prompted us to use our mobile technologies in different ways that challenged previously established social, temporal, and spatial boundaries. For example, for most of us, our social lives were already heavily mediated by mobile technologies, but smartphones were primarily used as an extension and complement to face-to-face interaction. During lockdowns, our screens (mobile or not) became the only vehicle through which communication with the outside world occurred. Smartphones became a necessary mediation for life—not only in our personal relationships, but also interfaces for shopping, taking care of one's mental and physical health, and leisure activities, such as playing games. As a result, previous discussions about screen time changed. Suddenly screens became positively viewed as the main way to interact with the world (Hjorth & de Souza e Silva, 2023).

One of the heavily studied aspects of mobile communication has centered on how it helps us micro-coordinate the ebbs and flows of ordinary life (Ito et al., 2005; Ling et al., 1999). We use our phones in between other activities while on the go to schedule and reschedule work meetings, social activities, and shopping. With lockdowns and the need to stay bounded at home, the way we organized our personal lives changed, and the need to do things “in-between” too. As Campbell and Komen (2023) show, an important (and understudied) aspect of mobile communication is about micromobility around the house—that is, the way we use our mobile and locative technologies within bounded spaces. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted mobile communication's presence in our everyday lives, from macro and micro-coordination in public open spaces to the micromobilities of moving within our homes.

The COVID-19 pandemic may soon be coming to its end, but COVID-19 still kills thousands of people every single day. In the United States, COVID-19 became the third leading cause of death (CDC, 2022). And even if COVID-19 now represents less of a health risk and less disruption to our personal lives, we know this won’t be the last pandemic. Preparing for the next pandemic includes understanding the past and planning for the future. It includes rethinking “normal” ways of interacting with others, our technologies, and the spaces in which we live. In addition, we need to reconsider how mobile communication is a resource that can be fostered, regulated, distributed, and coveted by way of networks, infrastructures, and cultural norms. What have we learned during this time of forced mobilities and immobilities that might challenge the traditional roles of mobile communication in our everyday lives? Will the way we experience public, domestic, and distant spaces via mobile technologies change? What are some of the more sustainable futures of urban networked mobility? How can we rethink the meanings of social interaction while immobile and at distance? And will some of these shifts permanently stay with us and change how we communicate, play, work, and socialize? These are just some questions that emerge when we consider the future of mobile communication and networked urban mobility after COVID-19.

The articles in this special issue reflect on how the pandemic has shaped and rearranged our mobile communication, sociability, and networked urban mobility practices around the world. Although each article engages with the challenges of the pandemic in its unique and original way, there are many overlapping topics and methodologies that run across multiple articles. We are sure readers will find their own connections and relationships across these studies, but here we suggest a framing of how they connect to each other by identifying a few overarching themes:

Historical perspectives on the pandemic

Historical perspectives on the pandemic: Learning from the past

Have we learned anything with past pandemics? Have we learned anything with the COVID-19 pandemic that can help us plan for future pandemics? In “Looking back to look forward: 5G/COVID-19 conspiracies and the long history of infrastructural fears,” Frith et al. (2022) focus on the conspiracy theories connecting the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic to the deployment of 5G cellular networks. These conspiracy theories led to the delay in implementing 5G infrastructures in many countries and, in some cases, to the overt destruction and vandalization of antennas. They argue that conspiracy theories normally emerge from a lack of public understanding about how these infrastructures work, which is fueled by their invisibility. What we can learn from their study is that there's nothing new about linking the emergence of pandemics to (unknown) dangers posed by wireless (invisible) infrastructures because there has always been some kind of cultural fear growing alongside of new technologies. Being aware of this connection might help us be proactive in addressing similar unfounded connections in future pandemics.

Coleman and Mari (2023) also look to the past, but to a specific moment in time. In “Networks in motion: The alliances of information communication technologies and mobility technologies during the 1918 influenza pandemic,” the authors explore the role of urban mobility and mobile technologies during the 1918 pandemic. They draw on newspaper articles, technical publications, and historical texts to argue that many of our current behaviors in relation to public transportation and mobile communication during the COVID-19 pandemic are not new. During the influenza pandemic, commuting via streetcars and other forms of public transportation was considered risky, while using an automobile for urban mobility was the safe option. Leisure (im)mobile activities that prevented close physical contact, such as drive-ins, cruising, and shopping over the telephone were encouraged. On the other hand, there are some substantial differences between the two pandemics. To start with, the ratio of telephones and automobiles per person was significantly lower than it is today, meaning that these technologies were not as ingrained in people's daily lives and still corresponded to a certain affluent way of living. While in 2020, mobile phones were viewed as one of the main ways people could socialize with each other, in 1918 people were discouraged from using telephones over a long period of time. Telephones were operator-based and due to a shortage of operators (who were mostly sick with the flu), customers were asked to free up the few existing lines for emergency calls—using them only to obtain help or report sickness. In addition, while now smartphones are personal items and are used to keep in touch with others, telephones were viewed as transmitters of disease: the phone mouthpiece—especially on public phones—was considered unclean and a conduit for spreading germs from one person to another. Thus, telephones were both viewed as a means of mitigating direct contact, but also instantiating direct contact with disease. As Coleman and Mari argue, understanding people's relationships with telephones, automobiles, radios, and streetcars during a previous pandemic is critical for how we understand mobility, mobile communication, and mobile media use during this and future pandemics.

Urban and transnational networked mobilities

Like Coleman and Mari, another set of articles in this special issue investigates how the pandemic impacted personal mobility and how people interacted with mobile technologies in urban spaces. In “Google Maps’ COVID-19 layer as an interface for pandemic life,” Gekker (2022) explores the Google Maps’ COVID-19 layer as an interface for the user in motion during the pandemic. The COVID-19 layer was a special Google Maps feature launched in September 2020 and shut down two years later. Gekker explains how Google tried unsuccessfully to repurpose a commercial platform into a health safety tool. The COVID-19 layer retrieved data from the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard and displayed it as a heat map over the traditional Google Maps interface, showing the concentration of cases in different areas with different color shades. Gekker points out that maps are never neutral and unbiased: they are political and represent the view of the dominant elites. While maps display information, they also cover up facts. As Gekker explains, from an interface design perspective, the Google COVID-19 layer was not well integrated with the rest of the Google Maps interface: when turning on the layer, it blocked underlying information such as traffic patterns and street names. In addition, infection rates were reported according to predefined administrative boundaries, regardless of the changes on the ground or user needs. Additionally, the layer was not integrated with navigation and directions and, therefore, useless for people who wanted to plan their mobility to avoid high-risk COVID-19 zones. As such, the app did not provide much as a mobility and mobile communication resource. Gekker ends with design recommendations for mapping future pandemics. He suggests mapping practices should focus on bottom-up community contributions and higher degree of personalization. For example, if users were able to delimit customized areas of interest or movement; to set up alerts for communicating changes in that area, be it in infection rates or vaccine availability; or, more generally, to use the map according to the needs of their own communities and localities, it could actually be a helpful feature in improving mobile communication and informing mobility in future pandemics.

Similarly exploring the intersection of mobile communication and urban mobility, Andrade and Nery Filho (2022) delve into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on location-based gaming design in the Northeast Brazil. In “Playing remotely: The COVID-19 pandemic and mobile locative gaming in Northeast Brazil,” they investigate the creative mechanisms Pokémon Go players developed to continue playing the game in a situation where urban mobility and personal contact became a health risk. Location-based games encourage players to move physically closer to other players (friends and strangers), to be more mobile in urban spaces, and to visit more places. But this is exactly what everyone tries to avoid during a respiratory viral pandemic. As a response, several locative games adapted their design to allow players to play and communicate remotely and be socially distanced. Games like Pokémon Go implemented several game mechanics modifications such as allowing players to spin Pokéstops from a greater distance and purchase remote raid passes. Andrade and Nery Filho point out that there were two main ways players could level up in the game during the pandemic: engaging with Niantic's new game revenue model that required players to pay for resources, such as remote raid passes and incenses, or to invest more time to acquire these resources for free.

The pandemic did not only impact mobile communication at a local level. In “(Im)mobility and performance of emotions: Chinese international students’ difficult journeys to home during the COVID-19 pandemic,” He and Zhang (2022) explore the transnational (im)mobility of Chinese students who were initially stuck abroad and then managed to return to China. The authors analyze these students’ mobile communication practices through the Douyin app, a Chinese version of TikTok. Students used the app to broadcast their journey home, sharing short videos about their emotional struggles, communicating with their local friends and distant family, and coping with challenges imposed by the pandemic.

The use of mobile apps and interfaces for community and self-care

He and Zhang (2022) report that international Chinese students felt anxiety, fear, shame (in feeling as though they were a burden to their home country), but also national pride, security, relief, excitement, gratitude to medical workers, and solidarity for their communities. They situate emotion as an integral aspect of transnational mobility and mobile communication, emphasizing the relevance of using a mobile app as an emotional resource, long-distance care, and personal networking.

Douyin mediated these students’ mobilities, creating opportunities to bridge the emotional distance between the stigmatized community and the broader audience. He and Zhang argue that mobile media creates a sense of togetherness in times of isolation and ambivalence. They point out that mobile media has the potential to create a space that enables witnessing and eliciting empathy for the hardship experienced by marginalized groups during the pandemic. By enabling such, mobile media amplifies the feelings of belonging in times of isolation and ambiguity and offers a safe space for people spread across geographical and socio-emotional distances.

This is comparable to what happened with Pokémon Go players in the Northeast of Brazil. Andrade and Nery Filho (2022) found out that mobile communication played a significant role in keeping players in touch during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Pokémon Go does not have an in-game chat channel, many players use other mobile media channels, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook, to create raid groups and stay in touch, often providing emotional support for each other. In addition, due to the availability of remote raid passes, players expanded their communication networks to also include other cities and countries. In the lack of player connection at a local level, these apps enhanced players’ communication networks across cities and countries, enabling them to micro-coordinate their mobilities within the bounded space that was created as the result of stay-at-home orders.

Other authors in this special issue explore how people used mobile apps and interfaces to cope with the lack of personal touch and physical proximity and to receive emotional support. In “The relational ontology of mobile touchscreens and the body: Ambient proprioception and risk during COVID-19,” Richardson and Wilken (2023) explore the tension between the significance of touch as a vital sensory modality of human experience and how proximity and tactile intimacy with other bodies in urban and domestic spaces became fraught with the risk of viral contagion. They start by stating how traditional phenomenology considers physical touch as an essential part of intimacy and well-being. They also claim that although the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an avoidance of touch, a culture of “no-touching” in fact precedes the pandemic. Richardson and Wilken, however, go on to argue that the pandemic required that we reconsider how touch is enacted and embodied. They claim that our bodily boundaries are not defined by our skin—they depend on our interaction with mobile, wearable, and portable devices. Our bodily boundaries can be defined through perception. As such, our smartphones and haptic interfaces do provide some sense of touch proximity, or touch potentiality, as they put it. In this manner, mobile media provided a sense of mediated touch, a way of feeling together and being in affective proximity with each other during a global pandemic. Our mobile devices became conduits of connecting and checking in, and effective pathways of “care-at-a-distance,” as people found alternative modes of experiencing emotional proximity in the lack of mobility. This is exactly what happened with a cricket WhatsApp group in India.

In “Repurposing a WhatsApp group: How a fantasy cricket group transformed into a site of care and support during India's second wave of COVID-19,” Deshbandhu and Sahni (2022) describe the process of how an e-sports group morphed into a COVID-19 support and care site during the course of the pandemic. They show how the WhatsApp group turned into a site where real-time, immediate, and live information about the pandemic was being shared by the participants. Participants used the group to share COVID-19 resources such as locations where to get oxygen, medications such as remdesivir, tests, and vaccines. The authors argue that while WhatsApp has been often studied as a tool for spreading misinformation, in this context it was used for emotional support and for fact-checking pandemic information participants received elsewhere. In line with Richardson and Wilken's argument, Desbhandhu and Sahni point out that the group's social contact in WhatsApp helped make up for the lack of physical contact and immobility during the pandemic's darkest moments. Desbandhu and Sahni emphasize the locational and situational aspects of the group: with members spread out through India and the United States, the participants in the United States were seeking specific contextual local information from the group, which wasn’t available in mainstream media coverage or on larger social networks but appeared in abundance on smaller mobile groups in WhatsApp.

In China, WeChat performed many of the same functions WhatsApp took on in India and other western countries. In “Mobilizing care? WeChat for older adults’ digital kinship and informal care in Wuhan households,” Yu et al. (2023) explore how WeChat was used as a mobile interface to help people in Wuhan during the 2020 lockdown. As a multipurpose app, WeChat was used for many different goals such as chatting with family and friends, ordering groceries, and paying for services. Residents, community volunteers, and shop owners created WeChat groups to connect people living in the same neighborhoods. However, the older generation did not have the necessary digital literacy to fully function in WeChat as the younger generations, exemplifying how mobile communication can be an asymmetric resource, as some people have more or less media literacies.

In their analysis, Yu et al. (2023) tell us how the Chinese elderly overcame challenges to adopt mobile media. While a few older adults were already familiar with WeChat and could figure out on their own how to make payments, buy groceries via the app, and create and manage groups, others required more hands-on help from the younger generation—either their sons and daughters, or neighbors and community volunteers. As they point out, the digital literacy divide was relational to socio-economics: high-rise affluent zones had a relatively easy time organizing themselves via WeChat as a response to pandemic restrictions, while in low-rise poorer areas, the connection and organization was way more challenging and time-consuming. Yu et al. (2023) demonstrate how the lockdowns have leapfrogged many Chinese elderly into the mobile era. In addition, they show how kinship care was reconfigured during the pandemic, arguing that we can learn from the Wuhan case about the role of mobile media as vehicles for digital kinship and intergenerational care. They argue that a crucial learning from this time is the need to address the inequalities around mobile media access and literacy among the elderly population in practical and effective ways, taking into consideration geographical, socioeconomic, and age disparities.

As all these articles show, “care-at-a-distance” during the pandemic should be framed beyond just health—it is also about social inclusion and the distribution of (emotional) resources. Their articles demonstrate the important role mobile media played in helping people cope with isolation and providing emotional support to others. Specifically, they all explore how specific mobile apps can be used as interfaces and sites of connection, support, and care.

Pandemic context in the Global South

One of our goals with this special issue was to decenter the analysis of the pandemic from Global North and developed nations to analyze the impacts of the pandemic in the practices of marginalized populations, especially in the Global South. In “Contact tracing apps, nationalism, and users with disability in the Global South: The faith in state and collective objective,” Rohman and Pitaloka (2023) point out that most early studies about contact-tracing apps originate in the Global North. Global South countries, however, were the most affected by the pandemic. To fill this gap, the authors explore the use of contact-tracing apps among people with disabilities in Indonesia and Vietnam. They explain how government-created COVID-19 contact-tracing apps in both countries were deployed amidst a campaign of nationalism, which included messages about “protecting the country” and “community togetherness.” They show how government agencies wield the power to mandate the use of mobile communication through rhetorical campaigns.

While these types of apps were met with skepticism in many countries, including fears of invasion of personal privacy, the perceived successful story of contact-tracing apps in Indonesia and Vietnam stems from citizens’ trust in the government. The study found that people using the app trusted that the government would protect their privacy and not share their personal information with other parties or use it for obscure purposes and that the government had their best interest in mind. In addition, participants expressed a sense of community and collectivity to justify using the app to protect other people. The authors, however, additionally ponder that narratives countering the state's messaging are rare. As a result, rather than being seen as toxic, nationalism was framed as an impetus to collectively fight against the pandemic.

This is similar to what happened with Chinese international students. As He and Zhang (2022) demonstrate, a sense of nationalism was also embedded in Chinese international students’ feelings about homecoming. These students felt solidarity and compassion for their communities and followed the strict public health measures to avoid getting infected, which included traveling with full body suits and personal protective equipment, such as mask and goggles, because they didn’t want to become a “burden” to their homeland.

The articles in this special issue show that although the pandemic was a global phenomenon, the way people reacted to it—including the uses of mobile media and communication—was very local. For example, Andrade and Nery Filho (2022) argue that Pokémon Go players in the Northeast Brazil adapted their playing habits based not only on Niantic's game design choices, but also their socio-economic reality of income inequality, insecurity, and risk. Pokémon Go is played worldwide, and gameplay tactics and strategies differ significantly across the globe. In the context of Northeast Brazil, a region filled with stark socio-economic inequalities and everyday urban mobility risks such as violence and robbery, the pandemic actually helped gameplay. Although some might think that a pandemic would serve as a death statement to location-based games because players were not supposed to go out and socialize (Laato et al., 2020), Andrade and Neri Filho concluded that in Brazil the pandemic paradoxically allowed players to experience the game with more freedom and play more because they were safe at home and had more time to play. Playing Pokémon Go at home is a prime example of micromobility within bounded spaces (Campbell & Komen, 2023).

Recognizing that “Global South” is far from being a homogeneous context, we frame these explorations as first steps to gain a more nuanced and holistic understanding about the role of mobile communication in different contexts. From Chinese international students to the Indian cricket WhatsApp group, Brazilian Pokémon Go players, and elderly people in China, these articles show a wide range of responses and contexts heavily impacted by COVID-19. While they all had in common people's struggles with the lack of personal mobility, fear of the virus, and lack of emotional support, each of these populations used mobile media in unique ways to deal with their own local challenges.

Networks and infrastructures

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, we grasp that networks and infrastructures are also cultural; they exist in relation to their affordances and our priorities. Together, infrastructures enable and shape how we connect, or how networks are formed. Although networks and infrastructures should not be conflated, it is difficult to discuss one without the other. As Frith et al. (2022) explain, infrastructures are the underlying structures that support higher-level practices such as cellular networks that enable texting or calling. Meanwhile, they also explain that networks are what allow us to connect. It is not the end devices alone that allow us to connect, but rather the relationships between people and technologies that enable connectivity. As such, networks and infrastructures condition our agency to do things, as they reflect our cultural practices.

Frith et al. (2022) explain that infrastructures cannot be separated from the practices they support. For this reason, the infrastructures that support mobile communication are also the same infrastructures that support the concentration of conspiracy theories. The authors find that conspiracy theories have been seeded into the history of mobile communication and that these fears have co-evolved with mobile technologies over time. For instance, before the emergence of 2G, some people had already linked wireless communication to disease. Similarly, Coleman and Mari (2023) explain that during the 1918 pandemic, there were fears that the disease would travel through the telephone lines, from the receiver to the operators.

In addition to networks and infrastructures being relational to culture, Coleman and Mari (2023) explain that mobile media enhance relationality as they extend our intimate relationships—not just connectivity. This can be seen both in He and Zhang's (2022) account of Chinese international students who use Douyin to support one another during their journey back to their homelands, as well as in Deshbandhu and Sahni's (2022) analysis of cricket players using WhatsApp as a site for care and information about India's dire second wave of COVID-19. In fact, Yu et al.’s (2023) account of older adults in Wuhan during the pandemic reflects the need for care that is mobile and networked, especially when face-to-face care was not possible. They explain that the one-child policy, which can result in one adult-child being responsible for potentially a set of aging parents and grandparents, and the increasing mobility of younger generations who often live away from their parents have contributed to a need to understand older adults' relationship with mobile media and digital inclusion. Although at face value this latter example might not seem to be an issue of infrastructure, it actually is an issue of infrastructural politics when it is the government which is ushering its people to use mobile applications. In the case of Vietnam and Indonesia, Rohman and Pitaloka (2023), reported that few people actually used the government-sponsored contact-tracing apps until it became the site for officially declaring vaccination statuses. Although those who did engage in this practice trusted the government's handling of their personal data, this is another example of the pervasiveness of mobile infrastructures.

Thus, these articles demonstrate that networks and infrastructures are deeply value-laden and are a source of power, so we need to continue to explore which values and practices are being supported through them. We are able to see that networks and infrastructures support an array of cultural practices that reflect the values circulating during the pandemic, from fears about the unknown to the invisibleness of the virus.

Mobile methods

We also would like to point out that the studies in this special issue are truly methodologically diverse. Mobile methods do not only include collecting data with mobile devices (Boase & Humphreys, 2018) or being mobile with a research participant (Büscher et al., 2010); they also include developing mechanisms to understand the various ways mobile communication happens in the world and how we interact with our mobile devices and the infrastructures that support them. As Hjorth and Goggin (Forthcoming) argue, mobile media is “shaping particular modes of digital media methodologies across the various affordances (environments, contexts, uses) of platforms and apps as it moves across digital, social, and material worlds (n.d.).” Because of the difficulty in collecting data in person during the pandemic, most data collection for this special issue's articles has been conducted via mobile apps. There are many different approaches to mobile data collection. Rohman and Pitaloka (2023), for example, conducted in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews via diverse mobile and online platforms, such as WhatsApp, Google Meets, and Skype. However, they point out that in order to reach rural populations where internet connection is precarious, they used traditional phone calls. Deshbandhu and Sahni (2022) also conducted interviews with the participants in the WhatsApp group, but in addition included an autoethnographic description of the group's formation before the pandemic, and textual analysis of the group's chat content to chart the challenges faced by study participants. Similarly, He and Zhang (2023) conducted a visual data analysis of the short videos posted by Chinese international students on the mobile platform Douyin about their transnational journeys returning to China. Andrade and Nery Filho (2022) did not conduct interviews, but instead sent out an online survey. Finally, both Gekker (2022) and Frith et al. (2022) conducted analysis of popular press sources and written documents about past pandemics. These diverse data collection and analysis methods show us that mobile communication data can be obtained in many different ways, depending on contextual circumstances and specific research questions. Following Hjorth and Goggin, we understand mobile methods not just as a series of tools and techniques, but as conceptual lens for understanding the world.

Conclusion

We are no longer in lockdown mode. For most people, life has gone back to “normal.” However, a question remains: How do we redefine what normal means in a post-pandemic world? And—most importantly for this issue—how have our mobile communication practices changed (or not) with the pandemic? People desperately want to return to their pre-pandemic practices, but some things might have permanently changed. Many activities that were thought to be necessarily in-person are now being mediated by mobile devices. Take the case of health checkups and doctor's visits. During the pandemic, tele-health systems were put in place all over the world for non-urgent matters. In many Global South countries such as Brazil, non-governmental organizations developed tele-health systems for low-income populations who live in favelas via WhatsApp (de Souza e Silva, 2022). WhatsApp became a mobile platform for mediating social gatherings and work meetings, along with FaceTime and Google Meets. Although people are no longer tethered to their homes, many of us will keep primarily using our mobile phones and platforms for connecting with doctors, mental health specialists, conducting work meetings, and maintaining relationships. These activities can be also performed with desktop computers, but considering that the majority of the world population does not have access to personal computers, it is clear that the role of our mobile technologies in mediating everyday life and connecting with resources just increased.

In addition, tracking and surveillance apps, like contact tracing and biometric sensors, have become increasingly normalized in the name of addressing the pandemic. However, as the pandemic is nearing its end, what will become the purpose of these pandemic-specific mobile technologies? Due to masking, innovations in mobile sensoring technologies have focused on developing tools that can help identify individuals without the need for facial recognition. Gait recognition, which has been around, paired with cameras can allow a person to be identified based on their walking patterns, since personal mobility is as unique as a person's voice (Wang et al., 2003). Thermal facial recognition is another method of identifying individuals who might be masked. A company in Singapore, Ramco, has promoted an integrated thermal imaging and facial recognition device to take the temperature of and track attendees (Van Natta et al., 2020). This system also sends contact tracing notifications if they have encountered employees or attendees with elevated temperatures. Apart from this, the company Dragonfly was developing a so-called pandemic drone that uses thermal recognition to scan and monitor coronavirus-prone areas with the ability to check heart rates (Van Natta et al., 2020). Altogether, these are just a few examples of the kind of technology designs that emerged to respond to the pandemic. These designs demonstrate the evolving landscape of mobile technologies in public spaces. Now, what will become of them, especially since they pose serious privacy and surveillance concerns?

While we still need to have conversations about the legal, social, and ethical aspects of these changes, we must recognize them and try to understand how our social lives mediated by mobile communication technologies will be different from now on. As demonstrated throughout the pandemic and within the analysis of these articles, mobile communication is a resource that can be regulated, shared, and withheld. Most importantly, we hope this collection of articles will help mobile communication scholars to take the lessons learned during this pandemic and consider how these lessons can help us to better face future pandemics.