Mistrust of the City at Night: Networked Connectivity and Embodied Perceptions of Risk and Safety

ABSTRACT

This article explores the embodied experience of smartphone users in urban darkness, and considers how the geo-locative and network functionality of mobile media impacts upon the perception of safety and risk at night. City spaces at nighttime are often perceived as less safe, and the habitual trust we place in familiar strangers during the day can becomes imbued with caution, suspicion and fear. Women in particular are typically advised to reduce nighttime risk by remaining in well-lit, more populated areas, not travelling alone, and keeping mobile phones handy. Indeed, in contemporary popular culture, media coverage increasingly links heightened physical safety with the use of geolocative mobile media – this is evident in the reporting of the sexual assaults and murders of Jill Meagher, Eurydice Dixon, and Aiia Maasarwe in Australia, and Mollie Tibbetts in the United States. This article draws on original ethnographic data collected in Perth and Melbourne (Australia) from 2016 to 2020 to examine how mobile devices as both communicative and location-aware interfaces are used to provide women with a perceived or ‘felt’ sense of bodily safety and security, and the potential implications this has on users’ pedestrian traversal of the urban dark.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile media
• darkness
• urban space
• safety
• embodiment
• phenomenology
• ethnography

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Murdoch University Ethics Approval: Project No. 2015/225 and 2020/077.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jess Hardley

Jess Hardley is a PhD candidate in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is also an Associate Lecturer in Communication & Cultural Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. Her research interests include phenomenology, feminist theory, ethnography, embodiment, mobile media and the urban night. She is co-author of Mobile Media and the Urban Night (Palgrave, forthcoming), has published in Convergence and M/C Journal, and has presented research at several international conferences. She is also on the editorial board of the journal Digital Geography and Society.

Ingrid Richardson

Ingrid Richardson is Professor of Digital Media in the School of Media & Communication, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. She has a broad interest in the human-technology relation and has published widely on the phenomenology of games and mobile media, digital ethnography and innovative research methods, the cultural effects of urban screens, wearable technologies, virtual and augmented reality, remix culture and web-based content creation and distribution. Recent co-authored books include Ambient Play (MIT Press, 2020), Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity (Palgrave, 2020) and Understanding Games and Game Cultures (Sage, 2021).