Mobile intensities

Fibreculture Issue 6 - Mobility, new social intensities and the coordinates of digital networks

Papers of note:

From Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci: Networked Mobility and the Transformation of Place
by Rowan Wilken

"This paper explores the notion of place in relation to networked mobility and mobile phone use. Two key arguments are developed. The first is that the experience of place persists and remains an important consideration in relation to mobile phone use. The ‘domestication’ approach to understanding the development and uses of new technologies is considered useful in explaining this persistence. The second is that networked mobility actually forces a renegotiation of place, and leads to significantly altered understandings of place and place-making. This is theorised as a shift from a traditional understanding of place as stable and fixed (stabilitas loci), to a reconceptualisation of place as experienced in and understood through mobility (mobilitas loci). The paper concludes by sketching some of the potential, and possible implications, that this renewed understanding of place might have for future studies of networked mobility."



Mobile Technosoma: some phenomenological reflections on itinerant media devices
by Ingrid Richardson

"Today’s handheld devices are becoming increasingly multifunctional, portable and interactive technospaces which enfold (and unfold) an assortment of media forms. This transformation requires a critical approach that considers mobile media as more than telecommunications tools, but also as hybrid new media interfaces. This article presents some initial thoughts pre-empting a larger research project on the phenomenology of mobile media. From a phenomenological perspective, each body-tool relation induces its own technosoma, or specific ways of ‘being-with-equipment’ in a Heideggerian sense; in this conceptual framework, I explore some of the medium specific and intercorporeal effects of the mobile phone."



Gestures Towards the Digital Maypole
by Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea

"To paraphrase Blanchot: We are not learned; we are not ignorant. We have known joys. That is saying too little: We are alive, and this life gives us the greatest pleasure. The intensities afforded by mobile communication can be thought of as an extension of the styles and gestures already materialised by multiple maypole cultures, pre-digital community forms and the very clustered natures of speech and being. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that the information selection process at the heart of communication is one of the fundamental activities of any aesthetically produced knowledge form. From this radial point, 'Gestures Towards The Digital Maypole' begins the process of reorganising conceptions of modalities of communication around the absent centre and the affective realms that form through the movement of information-energy, like sugar in a hurricane."



Flash! Mobs in the Age of Mobile Connectivity
by Judith A. Nicholson

"Flash mobbing shone briefly and brilliantly in cities around the world in summer 2003. Each flash mobbing was comprised of a public gathering of strangers and acquaintances organised via email and texting. Once gathered, flash mobbers performed a quirky stunt and then quickly dispersed. Why did a trend often described as ‘silly fun’ become hotly contested? This paper argues that the conjuncture in flash mobbing of mobile texting, targetted mobbing and public performing—and the popularization of the trend in urban public spaces at this juncture in history—made it a significant moment in the history of mobile communication."


Via Space & Culture