Mobile media: from legato to staccato, isochronal consumptionscapes

Abstract

Mobile devices in the form of smartphones are transforming the temporality of consumption experiences, from languid and legato forms to isochronal and staccato forms. New communication technologies accelerate as well as alter mobile consumptionscapes. Rather than attempting to capture the elusive here-and-now essence of such fast-changing scenes, this essay invokes three historical episodes of technology and mobility – the transistor radio, the Walkman-style cassette device, and the MP3 player – to uncover the patterns that enhanced levels of mobility bring to the media consumption experience. In particular, by illuminating matters of time, some temporal framings are offered as correctives to spatially biased theories of mobile media. Drawing lessons from these historical episodes and blending in contemporary social theories about mobile technologies, we arrive at a temporally oriented view of the emergent consumptionscapes that can contribute to understanding the present era and the proximal future in terms of connecting both places and paces.

Keywords:

• mobile
• media
• consumptionscape
• smartphone
• radio
• walkman
• MP3

Notes

1. There are other, mostly parallel histories of mobile audio for other purposes, such as mobile technologies used by the military, by the transportation industry, by live audio engineers, and by the telecommunications industry. Of these, it is the last, telecommunications, which intersects most with the trajectory of mobile consumer audio entertainment. A fuller consideration of the cases considered in this paper should include also an account of mobile telecommunications related to smartphones – but this has not been undertaken to keep the paper reasonable in length.

2. The major commercial success in terms of selling (and getting users to pay for) content, in the growing era of staccato temporality, has been Apple's iTunes service. By fractionating content into songs and tracks priced at 99-cents each, iTunes has re-motivated millions of users to subscribe to a centralized retail service – to purchase content legally rather than obtain it via piracy.