Mobile Technology and Place

Rowan Wilken, Gerard Goggin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136463341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An international roster of contributors come together in this comprehensive volume to examine the complex interactions between mobile media technologies and issues of place. Balancing philosophical reflection with empirical analysis, this book examines the specific contexts in which place and mobile technologies come into focus, intersect, and interact. Given the far-reaching impact of contemporary mobile technology use – and given the lasting importance of the concept and experiences of place – this book will appeal to a wide range of scholars in media and cultural studies, sociology, and philosophy of technology.

Part I

Theorizing Place and Mobiles

1 Mobilizing Place

Conceptual Currents and Controversies

Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin

“We are always in place, and place is always with us.”¹

“‘Place’ […] in the radically imploded space of the global civilisation of the early twenty-first century remains [one] of the most problematical but compelling human concerns within the continuing experience of modernity.”²

“Traditionally, place is an interweaving of communication and action.”³

INTRODUCTION

Sometime in late 2010, the number of mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide exceeded the five billion mark, more than doubling since 2005. As the International Telecommunications Union has noted, mobile services are now available to over 90 percent of the world’s population, including some 80 percent of the population living in rural areas.⁴ Of course, such aggregate figures belie important aspects of actual access, consumption, and use of these technologies—especially of the myriad applications, functions, and meanings that comprise them. Nonetheless, there is abundant evidence of the global growth and ubiquity of mobile technologies.

From 2005 to the present day, we have also witnessed a fundamental change in the nature of mobile technologies themselves, made possible by the deployment of third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) networks, and the intelligence at the edges of such networks in the multimedia capabilities of the mobile technologies themselves. Since the arrival of the iPhone in mid-2007, and then the iPad in early 2010, the smartphone and tablet computer, respectively, have attracted the keen interest of users, industry insiders, and content developers alike. Such developments in the technical nature of mobiles have been intertwined with the shift from the mobile phone’s innovations in voice and text communications to the central role mobiles now play in contemporary media—illustrated by the rise of many distinctive mobile-remediated forms: the resilient medium of text messaging, especially important in low-bandwidth countries in the global south; mobile news and citizen journalism; video and television; music and games; maps, location, navigation, and wayfindings; mobile Internet, in many different forms; apps for the care of the self, whether to do with lifestyle, identity, fitness, health and illness; and e-reading on mobile devices. In these developments in mobile technologies, place has played a prominent role. Because these are technologies in which mobility is key, there has been an everyday concern with their relationship to particular places (e.g., the space occupied by an individual while they use a device) and place in general. As mobile technologies have developed, their links with, focus on, and reliance on place have only deepened. This is most obvious in the wave of location, mapping, and sensor technologies that underpin applications such as maps for mobiles and Internet-based geoweb applications migrating to mobile platforms (most prominently, Google Maps).

There is intense popular, commercial, government, and civil society interest in mobile technologies. In research, mobile technologies have been examined extensively from a variety of perspectives across many disciplines. In particular, much has been revealed about the implications for mobile technologies on space and time.⁵ Surprisingly, there has been a great deal less research and thinking on these technologies and the important role of place. Thus, the interactions between mobile technologies and place are little understood, despite the recent renewal of interest in related questions of location and geography in fields such as media and communications, cultural studies, and sociology.⁶

In this light, the book gives detailed, critical attention to the concept of place, exploring what significance this concept has in an era that sees continued and rapid growth in networked mobile technologies, and how these technologies have contributed to reconfigured understandings of and engagements with place. To explain the key theories and conceptual issues in mobile technologies and place, this chapter takes three progressive steps. First, the chapter begins by examining this most elusive of concepts—place—and how it has been conceived and debated over time by a wide range of theorists and critics from the fields of humanist geography (Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, Nigel Thrift, Doreen Massey, Tim Cresswell), architecture and phenomenology (David Seamon), philosophy (Edward Casey, Jeff Malpas), sociology (Manuel Castells), anthropology (Marc Augé), critical theory (Michel de Certeau), and media and communications (Joshua Meyrowitz). Second, we consider the particular challenges that are posed to established understandings of place by various forms of (macro and micro scale) mobilities and global networked information and communications technologies—in other words, the dual shaping influence of what Thomas Misa evocatively terms “the compelling tangle of modernity and technology.”⁷ Third, we narrow the focus slightly to consider the impacts of mobile technologies on place. The chapter concludes by returning to questions of definition, and, in overall terms, what is at stake in this concept of place in the present era of global mobile technologies. Let us begin, then, by developing an account of place: how it has been defined and understood, and how it forms a rich yet elusive concept.

UNDERSTANDING PLACE

The concept of place is notoriously complex and fraught. According to Jody Berland, it “has become one of the most anxiety-ridden concepts today.”⁸ Dealing with the idea of place is especially difficult due to its lack of definitional clarity and precision. As Nigel Thrift notes, “defining exactly what place is turns out to be very difficult.”⁹ Even in as compendious and impressive a study as Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place, place is everywhere present but nowhere defined.¹⁰ Basic dictionary definitions do little to resolve general understanding of the term. For instance, The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary offers thirteen variations, which range from broad references to space and its occupation to the differentiation of types or subcategories of geographical space and the occupation of these spaces (including, in order of increasing expansion: a residence or dwelling; a group of houses in a town; a town square; a village, a town, a city; an area or region).¹¹ This particular example adds support to Tim Cresswell’s observation that “the commonsense uses of the word place belie its conceptual complexity.”¹²

As Cresswell explains, in practical terms, place can be usefully understood as “a meaningful site that combines location, locale, and sense of place.”¹³ These last three elements correspond in turn with the following: “the ‘where’ of place”; the “material setting for social relations”; and, “the more nebulous meanings associated with a place: the feelings and emotions a place evokes.”¹⁴ Thus, as Edward Relph puts it, places “are constituted in our memories and affections through repeated encounters and complex associations.”¹⁵

One of the issues with definitions of place, and with attempts at definition in general, as the preceding explanation highlights, is that place “is not just the ‘where’ of something; it is the location plus everything that occupies that location seen as an integrated and meaningful phenomenon.”¹⁶ Lukermann describes this as a process involving complex integrations of nature and culture that have developed and continue to develop in particular locations, and which connect flows of people and goods to other places.¹⁷

In other words, “in any given place we encounter a combination [and interlinking] of materiality, meaning and practice.”¹⁸ Each of these three terms warrants further explanation. The first, materiality, is intended to suggest that places have both “a material structure,” as well as being constituted via “all the material things that pass through” them, such as “commodities [including mobile media technologies], vehicles, waste, and people.”¹⁹ The second, meaning, connects back to one of the most entrenched understandings of place from within human geography—the idea that “location became place when it became meaningful.”²⁰ The third and final element, practice, and more specifically mundane practice, is especially significant for understanding the interactions of mobile technology and place.²¹ As Cresswell writes:

Places are continuously enacted as people go about their everyday lives—going to work, doing the shopping, spending leisure time, and hanging out on street corners. The sense we get of a place is heavily dependent on practice and, particularly, the reiteration of practice on a regular basis.²²

It is this aspect of place that forms a vital ingredient in the examination of mobile technology and place in this book.

An even more expansive perspective on place is to suggest that difficulties of definition and experiential expression are in fact due to the notion of place being all-pervasive, structuring and shaping every facet of our lives, as well as of our negotiation and experience of the lived world.²³ In this respect, difficulties in grasping the notion of place are very much like the difficulties attending the category of the quotidian or everyday.²⁴ As Maurice Blanchot says of the everyday, “whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes.”²⁵ Its pervasiveness renders it as platitude.²⁶ But, as Blanchot adds, “this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived.”²⁷ And so it is with place. The pervasiveness of place and its plurality of forms means that it allows no hold; its ubiquity and diffuseness is what makes place most important as it informs and shapes lived existence.²⁸ Thus, place can be understood as all-pervasive in the way that it informs and shapes everyday lived experience—including how it is filtered and experienced via the use of mobile media technologies. As Casey puts it, “place serves as the condition for all existing things.”²⁹

Further valuable conceptualizations of place include: the idea of place as being a structure of feeling or generated by “fields of care;”³⁰ place as open and relational rather than bounded;³¹ place as “more and more demonstrably the outcome of embodied social practice,” where “people determine its shape and meanings;”³² and, inverting the previous understanding, as that which “is integral to the very structure and p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• PART I. Theorizing Place and Mobiles
• PART II. Media, Publics, and Place-Making
• PART III. Urbanity, Rurality, and the Scene of Mobiles
• PART IV. Bodies, Screens, and Relations of Place
• List of Contributors
• Index