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

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.

Angel Lin - Gendered, Bilingual Communication Practices: Mobile text-messaging among Hong Kong College Students

Mobile text messaging—variously known as SMS (short message service), text messaging, or texting—has become a common means of keeping in constant touch, especially among young people, in many parts of the world today. The research literature abounds with studies on the social, cultural, and communicative aspects of mobile text messaging in different sociocultural contexts in the world. In this paper, current theoretical positions in the research literature on mobile communication will be summarized and then findings of a pilot study on the mobile text-messaging practices of university students in Hong Kong will be reported. Implications for emerging bilingual and bicultural identities and gendered sociality practices among Hong Kong young people will be discussed.

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

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.

Scott Sharpe, Maria Hynes and Robert Fagan - Beat me, Whip me, Spank me, Just Make it Right Again: beyond the didactic masochism of global resistance

Critics of globalisation maintain a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the net. Any use of the internet for the purposes of criticising global processes and the institutions of global governance necessarily acknowledges its participation in these very processes. But what is the nature of such participation? To the extent that critics of globalisation espy in the internet a means of making a difference, precisely what kind of difference is this? Seen primarily as a representational and a didactic tool, the internet may be put to the service of an idealist politics, enabling truths, otherwise obscured, to see the light of day. Yet such a strategy, it is argued, is bound to a certain repetition that may deny resistance its fully positive power. The paper contrasts two distinct strategic uses of the net in order to open up to a different understanding of the political potential of the internet. For the superunion, the International Union of Food, Agriculture, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), the internet represents a means of reaching the broadest possible public audience, so as to lessen the hold of the ideology of global capital. The use of the internet by the loose alliance of culture jammers known as the Yes Men calls for an alternative understanding of what it means to make a difference to the contemporary scene. We argue that their use of the net for the purposes of resistance calls into question the representational model and its associated politics.

Felicity Colman and Christian McRea - Gestures Towards the Digital Maypole

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.

Larissa Hjorth - Locating Mobility: Practices of co-presence and the persistence of the postal metaphor in SMS/ MMS mobile phone customization in Melbourne

One of the marked features of ICT’s (Information and Communication Technologies) mobility (literal and electronic) is the role of customization in location (Castells, 2001; Manovich, 2001). When we think of "customizing" mobile phones we often summon up an image of techno-savvy places such as Tokyo where the outside of the mobile phone (keitai) is adorned with a plethora of cute (kawaii) characters in, for example, the style of Hello Kitty. Indeed, much of the Asia-Pacific region seems characterized by seemingly every form of mobile phone adornment. One could be mistaken, then, for thinking that Melbourne is out of place in the mobile flows of the region. However, Melbourne demonstrates that customization can also occur inside the mobile phone. Customization is not just a matter of wallpapers and ringtones. It is also the case that customizing of applications such as SMS (Short Message Service) speaks of specific processes of subjectivity, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984[1979]; McVeigh, 2003) and locality (Massey, 1993). Such internal customization operates as an important mode for users to become active producers in the extension of conventions of the emerging genre.

Once just an application used for its simplicity and affordability, SMS has grown to be an enduring mode of mobile phone communication (Goggin, 2004). The resilience and evolution of SMS practices has resulted in it surpassing the role of a "making-do" application; SMS has grown to accommodate particular modes of etiquette and to signify gestures of intimacy. I argue that SMS customization is central to a personalizing and localizing of remediated technologies (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) that is best understood as a persistence of the postal metaphor. As a remediated genre reminiscent of such genres as the 18th century visiting card (Milne, 2004), SMS and its practices of co-presence need to be understood in terms of earlier genres of telepresence and intimacy . In order to discuss some of the contemporary practices of co-presence in the light of the postal, I turn to a sample study of Melbournian mobile phone users.

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

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.

Lin Prøitz - Cute Boys or Game Boys? The Embodiment of Femininity and Masculinity in Young Norwegians’ Text Message Love-Projects

By looking at young Norwegians’ text messages in sexual romantic negotiations, this article examines whether text messages may provide a site for performing femininity and masculinity in ways that subvert traditional conceptions of these constructs. Although various studies on gender, sexuality and media [1] have consistently indicated gender specific usage/performances which in this article is indicated and supported by the study’s young informants’ own formulations, the discourse analysis approach employed a more complex image. Here, I focus on how the young people indicate and translate their modes and body-language into texts, paying particular attention to how signs of femininity and masculinity emerge in text message love-projects, I argue that especially for young males, text messages in love-projects offer a site where in particular young males may perform masculinity in counter-traditional ways. The article is a part of a long study of young Norwegian’s usages, self-understanding and gender performances through text message communication.

[[1] Döring, Hellwig and Klimsa, 2004, Hareide 2002, Johnsen 2000, Lee and Sohn, 2004, Ling 1998, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, Skog 2000, 2002]

Dong-Hoo Lee - Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture

A major aspect of the relationship between women and the media is the extent to which the new media environment is shaping how women live and perceive the world. It is necessary to understand, in a concrete way, how the new media environment is articulated to our gendered culture, how the symbolic or physical forms of the new media condition women’s experiences, and the degree to which a ‘post-gendered re-codification’ can be realized within a new media environment. This paper intends to provide an ethnographic case study of women’s experiences with camera phones, examining the extent to which these experiences recreate or reconstruct women’s subjectivity or identity. By taking a close look at the ways in which women utilize and appropriate the camera phone in their daily lives, it focuses not only on women’s cultural practices in making meanings but also on their possible effect in the deconstruction of gendered techno-culture.