Studying Mobile Media

Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone

Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, Ingrid Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136464324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The iPhone represents an important moment in both the short history of mobile media and the long history of cultural technologies. Like the Walkman of the 1980s, it marks a juncture in which notions about identity, individualism, lifestyle and sociality require rearticulation. this book explores not only the iPhone's particular characteristics, uses and "affects, " but also how the "iPhone moment" functions as a barometer for broader patterns of change. In the iPhone moment, this study considers the convergent trajectories in the evolution of digital and mobile culture, and their implications for future scholarship. Through the lens of the iPhone—as a symbol, culture and a set of material practices around contemporary convergent mobile media—the essays collected here explore the most productive theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping media practice, consumer culture and networked communication in the twenty-first century.

1 Studying the Mobile

Locating the Field

Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess,
and Ingrid Richardson

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade we have witnessed many transformations in the field of mobile communication as it moves unevenly into the smartphone era. This relatively short period has seen the emergence of a large body of literature that has addressed the multi-modal nature of, and need for interdisciplinary approaches to, mobile communication.¹ While much of this earlier work aimed to provide critical analyses of communicative practices surrounding mobile phone use, more recent texts have turned their attention to the mobile as an online, networked media device for games, video, music, and various other forms of everyday creativity. The smartphone's convergence of social, geolocative, and mobile media presents new challenges for how we study the increasingly mobile and interconnected fields of media production, distribution, and consumption. As an object of study, mobile media has expanded to encompass much more than just mobile communication—in turn attracting interest from internet studies, games studies, new media studies, and art, each discipline approaching mobile media devices from particular conceptual and methodological perspectives. So although mobile media scholarship has begun to grow,² it is by no means a coherent field of scholarship, and there are still many areas in need of elaboration and differentiation. What constitutes studying mobile media? For example, at what point is the study of mobile media the preoccupation of internet or game researchers? In its migration across a variety of areas, does the mobile media field have distinct characteristics? As the epitome of ubiquity, mobile media in an age of smart-phones requires that we not only attempt to articulate the field but also to more systematically understand its various dimensions—the technical, cultural, social, political, and economic.

The iPhone represents a distinctive moment, both in the very short history of mobile media and in the much longer history of cultural technologies. Like the Walkman three decades earlier,³ it marks a historical conjuncture in which notions about identity, individualism, lifestyle, and sociality—and their relationship to technology and media practice—require rearticulation. Studying Mobile Media explores not only the iPhone's particular characteristics, uses, and “affects,” but also how the iPhone “moment” functions as a barometer for broader patterns of change, as well as the debates and controversies associated with them. By considering the iPhone “moment,” Studying Mobile Media considers the number of convergent trajectories in the evolution of digital and mobile culture, and their implications for future scholarship. Through the lens of the iPhone—as a symbol, culture, and set of material practices around contemporary convergent mobile media, as well as a particular form of proprietary platform—the chapters included in this book explore some of the most productive available theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping media practice, consumer culture, and networked communication in the twenty-first century.

As a project, Studying Mobile Media took as a starting point Paul du Gay et al.’s “circuits of culture” approach, introduced in Doing Cultural Studies, which invited researchers to map the dynamics of culture—described by the core categories of consumption, production, regulation, representation and identity—as they co-influenced one another to produce the meanings of a particular cultural object (in that case, the Sony Walkman).⁴ While the Sony Walkman case study itself is now decades old, the ongoing significance of this approach was captured by Gerard Goggin's more recent reinterpretation of it in Cell Phone Culture.⁵ Doing Cultural Studies used an analysis of a significant technology of the time (the Sony Walkman) for dual purposes: to analyze new forms of media practice (consumption and production), and at the same time to consolidate and communicate the theoretical and methodological approaches of what was still an emerging discipline (Cultural Studies) for the benefit of students and researchers.

The ongoing relevance of Doing Cultural Studies beyond the “moment” of the Sony Walkman was that it captured the zeitgeist of cultural analysis in the 1990s and provided a benchmark for Cultural Studies research beyond that moment. Studying Mobile Media has similar aims: to use a single but highly complex cultural object (the iPhone) as a starting point, and to make available to readers a range of approaches and methods that may be useful in making sense of the contemporary proliferation of mobile media, social media, and user-created content; as well as contemporary trends in technological, cultural, and industrial convergence; and their implications for media, culture, and society. Through locating social mobile media within a diversity of cultural and industry contexts, Studying Mobile Media examines the ways in which technologies are both taken up and rejected by users. Indeed, Studying Mobile Media is as much interested in “discontinuous innovation” (products and applications that fail) as exploring the long-term effects of usage once the “honeymoon” period of new acquisition is over and the technology becomes integrated into users’ everyday lives.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THIS BOOK

Studying Mobile Media is not a simple celebration of the iPhone; rather, throughout the book the iPhone is deployed as a means of critically analyzing contemporary situated media practice—from social media and networked mobile media to creative industries such as the games industry. While the chapters do address the particularities of the iPhone—especially in terms of its photographic, game and geolocative media applications or “apps”—we also uncover some salient issues about the role of media in shaping, and being shaped by, locality, sociality and intimacy more broadly. Building upon the work conducted in mobile communication studies, Studying Mobile Media considers new forms of expression emerging from photographic applications, location-based services (LBSs), along with the associated phenomena of user-created content and social media, and the dynamics of convergence. The first section of the book provides both macro and micro perspectives on the iPhone as a cultural, technological and historical moment. Goggin's chapter provides an insightful analysis of the Apple Inc. machine in relation to the field of communication studies; Jean Burgess reimagines the open/closed platform debate in terms of the iPhone's position within the broader history of cultural technologies; the following two chapters offer cultural case studies of the iPhone as a moment in user practice: in China (Hjorth, Wilken, and Gu) and in Korea (Lee).

In Goggin's chapter, the iPhone is contextualized within broader mobile communication debates. Here, Goggin succinctly identifies not only how studying the iPhone can inform wider debates around mobile communication but also how the iPhone needs to be situated within such media ecologies. By addressing four key scholars in the area—James Katz, Christian Licoppe, Manuel Castells and Leopoldina Fortunati—Goggin provides a media compass with which to locate the iPhone. Contextualizing and situating the iPhone is also the agenda in Burgess's chapter; however, for Burgess, the iPhone needs to be understood as a moment in the longer and highly contested history of computer culture, and in particular, the way that user agency has been framed in the design and representation of personal computer technology. Burgess traces the shifts in Apple's corporate ethos, design and marketing practices from the late 1970s onward, arguing that earlier tensions between a “hacker” ethos and a market-driven populist one have resolved into a situation where highly usable but “closed” or “tethered” technologies—especially the iPhone—paradoxically provide the capacity for, rather than limiting, “cultural generativity.”

Having situated the iPhone within two of its most important historical contexts, the book's next chapters mark the shift toward understanding the iPhone as a site of socio-cultural practice. Larissa Hjorth, Rowan Wilken, and Kay Gu consider the iPhone as a portal to geolocative media (geomedia) for young people in Shanghai, representing a particular “moment” within Chinese technoculture. Beyond the stories of Apple shanzhai (copy culture) stores, the iPhone presents a particular inroad into LBSs such as Jie Pang; this media practice is the preoccupation of a particular generation—in China they are called the ba ling hou (born between 1980 and 1989). As Hjorth et al. suggest, the deployment of Jie Pang through the iPhone reinforces culturally specific notions of social capital in the form of guanxi. From the Chinese context we migrate to Korea; in Dong-Hoo Lee's chapter, South Korean technoculture is identified as a dominant player in new media technologies through companies such as Samsung and LG. But as Lee notes, the introduction of the iPhone within the Korean context was quickly dubbed the “iPhone shock.” In order to gain insight beyond the effects of this “shock,” Lee firstly outlines the rise of mobile media communications in light of the smartphone spectacle and then moves onto a case study of Korean twenty-something iPhone users to gain a sense of the lived experience of mobile media practices in South Korea.

As a platform and phenomenon, we see how iPhone media practice— symbolized by its apps—provides numerous media cultures that both rehearse and extend practices across visual cultures, gaming and augmented reality. In “Part II: iPhone as a Platform and Phenomenon,” we move through five very different and yet complementary case studies across photography, geomedia and games. In Palmer's, Chesher's and Verhoeff's discussions of iPhone photography, we see how apps both reinforce and depart from previous image practices. Camera phone practices amplify the local, highlighting the divergent ways in which public, private and the personal—especially converging around intimacy and intimate publics—are being reconfigured.⁶ As Amparo Lasén and Edgar Gømez have observed in the case of the networked capacities of camera phones through online communities like Flickr, divides between public and private are undergoing significant change.⁷ For Scott McQuire, the reconfiguration of public and private is part of the “new ways of conceptualizing the space and time of social experience and agency in a context in which the older boundaries of both territory and media are in a flux.”⁸

These transformations are reflected in Palmer's discussion of the iPhone as part of the creative lifestyle and the questions this brings to bear on professional photography. In the first generation of camera phone studies, debates revolved around the erosion between amateur and professional users, especially concerning photo-journalism⁹ and the way in which it interwove intimacy and co-presence¹⁰ with banality.¹¹ The issue of a (networked) context, as it informed (vernacular) content, was key to these studies.¹² In light of the increased sophistication of the lens and editing suites, along with networked contexts such as Flickr,¹³ Palmer considers whether one can talk about iPhone photography as a visual arts practice.

In Chesher's chapter, the context of iPhone photography is situated within a philosophical, rather than visual art, context. Moving beyond the first generation of camera phone studies that, according to Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe,¹⁴ was symbolized by the logic of ambient co-present intimacy in the form of three “s”: sharing, storing and saving, Chesher argues that iPhone apps “transform, translate and transmit” images. Picking up on earlier discussions about the haunting of the analogue within digital photography (i.e., in programs such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop), Chesher argues that iPhone apps further augment and simulate the nostalgic image. Drawing from Félix Guattari's essay “Machinic hetero-genesis,” Chesher philosophically probes the limits and possibilities—in the form of specific Universes of reference—of iPhone photography especially in terms of geomedia (location-based services). Nanna Verhoeff takes this philosophical analysis further by considering case studies of geomedia and its impact upon situated and augmented reality. Unlike Chesher's chapter that focuses squarely on the iPhone, Verhoeff's discussion oscillates between the generalities of smartphone capabilities and the specificity of the iPhone, demonstrating the liminalities of the iPhone as a theoretical object. Drawing on structuralism, Verhoeff investigates the way in which iPhone navigation can be viewed as “a performative practice in mobile and interactive augmented reality tours.”

Verhoeff's robust discussion of augmented reality within current mobile media practices provides a segue into the next chapter on mobile gaming and the iPhone. While the burgeoning of mobile games is not exclusive to the iPhone, the device does lend itself to particular kinds of game play and game cultures that are different from other handheld or haptic game consoles.¹⁵ In “Touching the Screen,” Ingrid Richardson begins with a discussion of the micro- and macro-corporeal effects of touchscreen smart phones and the various embodiment relations specific to mobile gaming on such devices. She then turns to the particular affordances or “socio-somatics” of the iPhone as a game interface and offers a comparative analysis of location-based and casual iPhone games with respect to their distinct modalities of place, presence and being-in-the-world.

In the final section of the book, the discussion moves away from representation, consumption and practice toward the iPhone's conditions of production and its attendant forms of labor. Continuing the theme of iPhone games, John Banks turns our attention toward the specific model the iPhone's platform provides for industry development. By focusing upon iPhone games developer, HalfBrick, Banks considers the limits of innovation in relation to the iPhone as a development platform, and how this is both enabling and shaping practices within the games, software and content industries. In his vivid portrayal of the inhumane conditions surrounding iPh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Studying the Mobile Locating the Field
• Part I iPhone as a Cultural Moment
• Part II iPhone as a Platform and Phenomenon
• Part III iPhone and Labor
• Contributors
• Index