Mobile Media as New Forms of Spatialization

Abstract

The physical space has historically served as an important support for human expression. However, the production of location-based information has been consciously used as means of social control by the hegemonic power, which decides what can be publicly displayed, and what should be hidden. With the development of mobile media, space has gained new dimensions, resulting in a sort of hybrid space where digital information overlays the physical space revealing what was previous unknown about a place. As mobile devices become increasingly present in our society, they should be understood as a social interface to our experience of space, serving not only as means to consume information, but also tools for communication. This paper discuss the current mobile media practices, such as mapping, urban electronic annotations, location-based mobile games, and smart mobs, which creates opportunities for new forms of human expression, reappropriations of space, and contestation of hegemonic power.

Keywords:

• mobile media
• media studies
• spatial theory
• cyberculture
• social media

Introduction

Though mobile media are not a novelty, technological improvements in the last decades introduced a variety of new mobile devices that provide the opportunity for the computing, production, and distribution of information in movement; thus, establishing a new method of interaction with the surrounding environment. The physical space has historically served as an important support for human expression and the communication of information, both critical and banal: inscriptions on stones, statues, billboards, posters, are only a few examples. However, as Lefebvre (1992) argues, space is a social product, and has been consciously used as means of social control by the hegemonic power, which have restricted and controlled location-based information, choosing what can be publicly displayed, and what should be hidden, in order to keep the status quo unchanged.

Developments in digital mobile media, have given spaces the potential for new communicative dimensions — a digital layer that criss-crosses and overlaps the physical space, introducing new sources of information and forms of interaction with urban space (Silva and Frith 2012). Such overlays produce hybrid spaces and make possible the revealing of previous hidden, locked or simply unknown aspects of physical spaces, as well as the creation of new opportunities for expression within, interpretation of, and interactions with our spaces. In fact, we have barely scratched the surface of how human expression can be represented in hybrid spaces. Thus, as mobile devices become increasingly present in our society, they should be understood as a social and cultural interface that mediates our experience of space (Farman 2011), serving not only as means to consume information, but also tools for communication with greater potential to decentralize mediation and civic participation (Donath et al. 2011).

In order to explore the potentials of mobile media in interfacing our interactions with space, this paper attempts first to define what comprises mobile media, establishing the distinction between portable and mobile technologies, and how they have been used to interface public spaces: if in the past books and personal music players allowed some interference on the immediate user’s surrounding space, today smartphones expand these interactions and enable active participation in the mediation of space.

The second section examines the relationships between digital mobile media and the urban space, exploring how mobile devices interface and embody digital actions at specific locations. I use Lemos’ (2008) classification of locative media projects to describe the current methods people have employed mobile media to interact with space: (1) mapping and geo-localization, (2) urban electronic annotations, (3) location-based mobile games, and (4) smart mobs. As a result of these activities, new layers of meaning are added to space, re-signifying places, ultimately changing cultural practices and shifting the balance in social power relations.

What are mobile media?

The idea of moving around with a piece of technology that mediates and facilitates communication is cultural rather than universal. We have been using cell phones and playing portable video games since the 1990s; we used to listen music on a Walkman in the 1980s; take pictures with portable cameras since the nineteenth century; and navigate using a portable compass since the fourteenth century. In the early years of the twenty-first century these gadgets became digital and embedded in one simple device: a smartphone.

Nevertheless, it is rare to find any mentions of mobile, portable, or wearable devices in the study of media’s history; even Marshall McLuhan, with his prophetic discourse about the future of media, had little to say about mobile media (Huhtamo 2011). Huhtamo (2011) identifies three types of mobile media: portable, wearable, and vehicle-mounted. While the latter is built into vehicles, only used when it transports someone, the former implies instruments light enough to carry around, such as typewriters and laptops, often needing to be set up on a surface to be used. Smartphones, on the other hand, are considered wearable, since they can be attached to the user’s body and used in movement.

To understand digital mobile media we have to find the roots of their current use and identify possible predecessors of mobile devices. While mobile media did not play a widespread role in media history, its concept surely appeared before its materiality, even existing ‘as a shadow cast by other applications — traveling with the users in guises, fulfilling functions, but rarely perceived for what they were’ (Huhtamo 2011, 24). Understanding the social–cultural conditions, therefore, can give us clues about the current condition of mobile media, including its obsessions, excesses, and its reappropriations by each new generation. Thus, in order to describe the desires, uses, and consequences of previous mobile technology in relation to their experience of the space, I briefly examine two different types of mobile devices: reading devices (e.g. book and newspaper), and personal music devices (e.g. Walkman and iPod).

Reading devices

The intense industrialization of Western Europe included the spread of railways to facilitate transportation of goods and people, quickly supplanting the horse-drawn coach as the dominant form of transportation on land (Silva and Frith 2012). On the train, people were expected to sit for long periods of time and share the same space with the company of strangers. In these circumstances, individuals usually look for tactics to avoid social contact or to have some control of their private experience in a shared space (Simmel 1903). They soon discovered that the book narrative could assist them in producing their own space, where they can feel more comfortable, developing what Simmel (1903) called the blasé attitude. However, even though immersion can be achieved in these circumstances, the experience of the narrative is shaped by the place where the person is, at the same time that the experience of the place is shaped by the narrative (Silva and Frith 2012). Ergo, the book is a mobile medium that helps us to filter our surroundings and produce our own individualized space, though we still perceive the physical space with other senses, like haptic, olfactory, and auditory (Lynch 1964).

Personal music device

In 1979, Sony released the Walkman, equipment that produces a similar effect to the book. When people put on their headphones and walk on the streets they create a ‘sound bubble’, enabling them to control the levels of social interactions as they move through the public space — almost like creating a soundtrack of their lives. The Walkman, and more recently, the iPod, adds a new auditory layer to the space; yet, the space produced is highly individualized and not experienced by all users in the same way. In fact, Silva and Frith (2012) claim that the Walkman acted as an ‘aestheticizing force’: rather than simply ignoring what is around, users changed the way they perceived the space. That is, the Walkman does not remove people from space; instead it reshapes the experience, customizing, and filtering the sound nature of the environment. This is achieved by reappropriation of space as part of, or constitutive of, users’ desire: either overlaying a personalized soundtrack, or just cancelling the outside noise, make the act of walking on the streets with a Walkman a powerful strategy to control the levels of social interactions and interfere in the production of public spaces.

Digital mobile device

Digital mobile devices, particularly smartphones, embed different tools, such as tracking and capture systems, and the capability to connect to other devices, building up a convergence across media. These devices not only enable people to consume and produce information in any place, erasing part of the social mediation imposed by mass media agents (Lemos 2010), but also give us the ability to experience the space in new ways. Thus, the way we conceive of space and our interaction with it has everything to do with the ways media are employed.

Mobile media change our perception of connectivity, allowing us to make new types of connections with other people as well as with the space around: ‘creative uses of the technology emerge, leading to a shift not only in our social relationships, but also in our perception of space’ (Silva 2004/2010, 72). The emergence of mobile media as a nomadic technology transforms the cityscape into a responsive surface, where each location can be re-signified through digital interaction. Moreover, as Farman (2011) argues, mobile devices have been used not only for two-way communication or for media consumption, but also to ‘document the world [and] interact with the surrounding environments in ways that far exceed the initial design and purposes’ (p. 8).

Spatial embodiment

While technologies from the 1990s were criticized for creating sociability in virtual space, therefore producing an escape from reality (Farman 2011), mobile media technology not only make us more aware of the physical space in which we live, but also expand the ways people perceive real places. Or, as Silva (2004/2010) puts it, ‘mobile technologies bring these multi-user and playful experiences to physical spaces, encouraging users to go out on the streets, and bringing new meaning to familiar spaces’ (p. 78). As Farman (2011) also notes, ‘locating one’s self simultaneously in physical space and digital space has become an everyday action for many people’ (p. 17). Mobile media are, therefore, the lens for our interactions in the hybrid digital–physical space: mapping our location on a mobile app, interacting with other people via social media, participating in a large community through locative games, and interacting with temporal and spatial narratives.

Indeed, mobile media bind virtual and real objects and offer very real experiences, which in turn challenge our perception of what is the real space. For Farman (2011), virtuality does not erase reality; instead it is an experience of multiplicity and a ‘constant interplay that bonds the virtual and the actual together’ (p. 38). This notion of multiplicity becomes more perceptible in the shift from physically fixed desktop computers to personal mobile computing: using information visualization superimposed on physical space, for instance, we can take advantage of our abilities for pattern recognition, eventually leading to a transformation of spaces into meaningful places. That is, connecting meaningful information to the space situates ourselves in particular places, which according to Farman (2011), ‘gives us a sense of embodied integrity in a particular locale and also answers the question, “which way am I going”, and “what am I doing here?”’ (p. 42).

It is important to note that when we use technology to give meaning to a place, the specificity of the media and the materiality of the technology are crucial. The medium, the location, and the context together determine how people will interpret the information and the space. Farman (2011) observes ‘our experience of place through mobile technologies is at once a phenomenological engagement with a particular medium and a mode of reading the significance of that mode of engagement’ (p. 45). That is, we experience the world not only through our sensory apparatus (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch), but also by means of social-cultural products (language, art, power, knowledge). Thus, some content, especially embodied content, is not transferable to other media or situations. For instance, retrieving information from Wikipedia using a desktop computer is very different from accessing the same information using a mobile device from a specific place, where the location can be used as a parameter to deliver specific detail about the surrounding space. Since users are situated in space, they can bind together spatial information from their sensorial apparatus and contextual data from mobile media to make sense of the surrounding space.

We could affirm that the physical landscape becomes, therefore, an interface to access information. Yet, locale, which is the practiced and contextualized location (Lippard 1998), has always served as communication interface. For instance, we can perceive meaning through graffiti, billboard, posters, or statues in the urban space. The novelty is that whereas locale information is very tight and restricted to the materiality of the place, which is at the same time limited and valuable, mobile media are able to overlay physical space with digital information, which Lemos (2010) calls an information territory, showing not only what was hidden, locked, or unknown about the place, but also opening opportunities for new interpretation and practices of the space.

According to Lemos (2008), everyday practice of mobile mediation in hybrid space falls under four categories:

1.	Mapping and Geo-Localization — tracking and customization of spaces through functions that permit multimedia content sharing in order to build bottom-up maps, reinforce communities, and produce new meaningful experiences.
2.	Urban Electronic Annotations — attaching and sharing multimedia content (e.g., photos, text, video, sound, and other discrete data) to specific locations in order to rewrite and reappropriate the urban space.
3.	Location-Based Mobile Games — combining physical and digital elements to repurpose the urban space using game’s ludic affordances.
4.	Smart Mobs — mobilizations coordinated through mobile devices to perform political and aesthetic actions, resulting in temporary reappropriation of places and territories.

Mapping and geo-localization

Notwithstanding the fact that digital maps are a very recently developed technology, only made available to the public in the 1990s (e.g. vehicle GPS), they have become very popular (also very intrusive) mobile media experiences. We began to heavily (and blindly) depend on them all the time, transferring to the machine the effort required to locate ourselves in and navigate through space. Not surprisingly, Google Maps is the most frequently used mobile app — fifty-four per cent of global smartphone users in the world (GlobalWebIndex 2013).

When moving through an unfamiliar city, for instance, users have begun to rely on digital mapping, such as Google Maps,¹ to find out where they are, where to go, and the best route to get to a specific place. Google uses our personal preferences and search history to create recommendation lists of places and routes. It is likely that users follow the path suggested by Google and, consequently, become unaware of other alternative routes. As Silva and Frith (2012) observe, ‘with location-aware technologies, users are able to selectively visualize people, things, and information from their surroundings. Therefore, those who carry these technologies will have a radically different experience of public spaces from those who carry some other technology, like a printed map, a guidebook, or an audio tour. As a result, places become manipulable and filterable in ways that they could not before’ (p. 155).

Space only becomes meaningful with human movement through the mapped space (De Certeau 2002; Farman 2011) and not by means of disembodied technologies. Thus, the act of walking in urban space using a mobile device implies a sensorial engagement with the space. For example, Nike+² enables runners to track their routes by drawing a map based on GPS coordinates collected in short intervals from the user’s mobile device. The project Nike+ City Runs (2012),³ developed by YesYesNo, revealed that the combination of many users using Nike+ produces crowd-sourced digital maps showing how they repurpose the city grid into running paths.

Yet, digital maps (e.g. Google Maps, Apple Maps,⁴ and OpenStreetMap⁵) depend on culturally situated maps, ranging from a subject point of view (street view) to disembodied voyeur (aerial view), implying a very distinct perception of space and different ideological status of the observer. Maps are so commonsensical that they are almost transparent to critiques — no one expects that a photographic map could be wrong. While ‘photographs have undergone scrutiny in the digital age, and their reliability as indices of reality is continually questioned (since photographs can so easily manipulated with digital technologies)’ (Farman 2011, 48), satellite maps and aerial photography have been poorly questioned, and still are considered a static representation of reality.

Nonetheless, Farman (2011) notes that ‘digital maps have also incorporated user data, imagery, and information to create a new notion of spatial mapping’ (p. 46), which could lead to a contestation of hegemonic power. Silva and Frith (2012) point out in the same direction:

Urban spaces can be represented and narrated in many different ways, producing multiple maps, each of which contains different elements and perspectives of the urban environment... [mobile media enable] us to connect fragmented locations in the urban landscape, and by doing that, they create new forms of mobility and mapping within the city. (p. 175)

Maps signify a specific look, an ideology produced to fit in the current hegemonic culture (Harpold 1999). Digital mapping practice might be, therefore, a form of contestation of the structured power and a challenge to hegemonic representations.

Lynch (1964) has already identified that different results could emerge if people designed their own maps using contextual information, rather than using institutional political conventions. The power to track our movements on the streets is to take control of the space: our position in space is used to retrieve locational information from the internet, augmenting our levels of understating. Therefore, digital mapping becomes not only a form of counter-mapping (Harpold 1999; De Certeau 2002), but also a new way of practicing place. In Lemos’ (2010) words, digital maps can ‘represent people, community and a more legitimate space and place that show how people see and [feel] their environment’ (p. 416).

Urban digital annotation

Half a century ago, Lynch (1964) demonstrated that a region in space is not singularly defined by the constituent power, but culturally produced by its dwellers: each individual pictures the city in a unique way. Nonetheless, he found that there is still a public image of any given city, a general sense, which ‘is the overlap of many individual images’ (Lynch 1964, 46). That is, we are somehow stuck between our own experience and the general perception of the space.

Since mobile devices empower people with means of communication able to both broadcast and aggregate information to and from different sources (particularly user-generated content), multiple images of the city can be produced and retrieved. This is the new way to write in the urban space in which we can easily produce and acquire different perspectives of the same space. Thus, instead of using institutional political conventions, we are capable of creating new territories using contextual information and attaching multimedia information (photos, text, video, sound, or any discrete data) to hybrid spaces.

For instance, Streetmuseum,⁶ created by the Museum of London, can help us to better understand our history at the same time that it brings a vivid experience of the past. The application takes advantage of the camera and the GPS, and hundreds of the museum’s images collection, to create augmented realities, combining the present and the past in one single image, and produce a unique perspective of the old and the new London (Museum of London 2010). Similarly, Anne’s Amsterdam,⁷ a mobile app developed by Anne Frank House, allows people to explore the city of Amsterdam during World War II through photos, videos, and personal stories. The initiative is based on Anne Frank’s diary and aims to ‘connect the past to the present [showing] how the occupation during World War II left its mark on the city and its people’ (Anne Frank House 2012).

According to Farman (2001), the ‘act of storytelling is indeed an act of inscription. It is a writing of place, of identities, and of relationships’ (p. 118). Although, the questions of how to attach stories to specific sites, and who has the authority to do so, have concerned storytellers throughout history. Due to our traditional site-specific media (i.e. inscription on infrastructure such as buildings, statues, etc.), which only accommodates a singular story, the spatial narrative favours the hegemonic power. There are, however, counter-hegemonic initiatives that strive to inscribe their own stories through everyday urban mark-up, such as graffiti, signs, and banners. The contrast is in the cultural value attributed to the source and durability of a message, a distinction, for instance, between a statue and a spray-painted wall: whereas both are forms of art, the former represents wealth and authority, and the latter vandalism. Mobile media break with this logic and make possible new practices of storytelling that expand public participation in urban inscription. New methods of community formation and experience of space are produced by the numerous distributed geotagging platforms like Flickr,⁸ Foursquare,⁹ Wikipedia,¹⁰ and Google Maps. As a result, we are able to produce and share our own perceptions of urban space, and collaborate on large crowd-sourced narratives.

Foursquare is an example of collaborative crowd-sourced urban annotation: based on user’s location, it shows a list of places nearby — restaurants, airports, schools, public buildings, parks, and so on, where users can either check-in at a place or create a new one. The list of places is crowd-sourced, so people are free to add places that are meaningful to them, share pictures, and post reviews and comments. With more than fifty million users and over six billion check-ins (Foursquare 2014), Foursquare not only helps people to explore the city, but also creates new communities around places of interest. Thus, we use geolocation functions to revalue everyday practices and make meaningful connections: with community participation, maps and urban annotation can portray a variety of experiences, looks, and ideologies, enabling other ways to represent space.

Locational mobile games

While portable consoles, like Nintendo DS and PSP, allow people to play video games anywhere, they do not incorporate the physical environment into the game. Locative games, on the other hand, enable the link between contextual physical environments and the digital space through electronic sensors, wireless networks, mobile communication, and information devices: they use the city as the game space, transforming movements of everyday life into actions in the game world. Thus, the embodied space becomes hybrid, integrating physical objects, location, and people as assets of the digital interaction.

According to Lemos (2011), there are currently three categories of locative games: (1) Location-Based Mobile Games (LBMGs), (2) Mixed Reality Games (MRG), and (3) Augmented Reality Games (ARGs). Location-Based Mobile Games integrate geolocation as a key element of the game. In fact, this is the lower level of integration introduced by the first generation of locative games, where a player’s position is used to deliver locational information. These games are usually technically limited, with minimal geolocation functions, and restricted to one or a few players at a time; yet, they are able to deliver the experience and constraints of playing using spatial contextual information.

In Mixed Reality Games players are located at physical space and in cyberspace at the same time. While it can be demanding to take action on the real world (e.g., only being able to act when you are at a specific place, or collecting tokens at certain locations), MRGs creates opportunities for players to forge new connections and reinforce relationships with places and other people. More recently, game developers have been taking advantage of social network capabilities to expand the game environment, producing Massive Multiplayer Online Mixed Reality Games (MMOMRGs) — binding real life connections to game actions can increase the challenge and improve levels of engagement. Most of the locative games today fall under this category. To cite one among many, Ingress,¹¹ developed by Google, consists of establishing ‘portals’ at public places to create virtual triangular fields over geographic areas. The game has a complex science fiction back story with the players split in two factions — Enlightened and Resistance — fighting against each other to control these hybrid physical/virtual areas in a continuous open narrative (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1. Snapshot of Ingress: the gameplay consists of establishing ‘portals’ at public places to create virtual triangular fields over geographic areas. Image © Luciano Frizzera.

Finally, Augmented Reality Games use the camera and the display of mobile device to overlay information on top of a first person view of the real space. Although today’s smartphones have some capability to produce augmented reality experiences, the technology is still in its infancy, and a few developers have been employing this affordance to create games (e.g. Zombies Everywhere!,¹² and AR Invaders¹³).

The game experience in locative games exists in the tension between physical and electronic spaces. In fact, the digital environment created by the game is always tied to the physical space and its features, such as the network’s coverage, the access to this network, and the proper rules of the place. Since the game space is, at the same time, play and everyday life, every action in the game produces new meaning in the physical space where the game is being played. For De Certeau (2002) this is a spatial tactic in which people transform the everyday space, even when they are just walking or wandering in the city. Indeed, if the space, especially the urban space, is strategically purposeful (Lefebvre 1992), any change in its original plan can be considered a provocation, a misuse, or a reappropriation.

Smart mobs

A smart mob is a tactic for mobilization coordinated through decentralized network channels to perform political or aesthetic actions. Salmond (2010) identifies the rave culture as one of the earliest examples of smart mobs: they often take the form of an ‘elaborate chain of events such as distribution of flyers at a particular place and time with a phone number to call on a designated date, which would have a recorded message with details of the location’ (p. 95). Today, smart mobs use mobile and social media to communicate and mobilize actions in order to temporally repurpose public and private spaces (occasionally even redefining the space permanently). The logic of smart mobs is the same as social networks, with rapid information replication through individual connections: while ravers from the 1980s utilized underground networks, the political actions of the 2010s take advantage of technology ‘in order to connect like-minded individuals and evade the controlling mechanisms of authority’ (Salmond 2010, 95).

Smart mob is a form of contestation, an urban phenomenon that transforms the space and produce new territories. Further, against a constant privatization of the public space (Sassen 2006), politically oriented smart mobs put in evidence the right to be at a public place in attempt to rescue the space of socialization where democracy can be freely practiced. The urban space is indeed the site where the formation of new claims by informal political actors materializes and assumes concrete forms (Sassen 2006). Much has been said about how Arab Spring (Allagui and Kuebler 2011; Panisson 2011) and the Occupy (Costanza-Chock 2012; Jurgenson 2012) movements made use of mobile and social media to quickly organize and disseminate information among individual participants. Vemprarua, also known Manifestações dos 20 centavos [20 cent rally], is an example of a decentralized political movement that made intense use of mobile and social media to not only coordinate and mobilize participants, but also disseminate and broadcast the event.

The movement was initially organized against a (20 cent) increase in public transportation fare in São Paulo, Brazil in early June 2013. Between 17 and 20 June, a massive rally spread out across the whole country, where one million people in one hundred cities took to the streets to raise their voices against corruption, and claiming for better public policies (Prada and Marcello 2013). Again, mobile and social media had an important role as tools for organizing, mobilizing, communicating, and broadcasting information.¹⁴ Furthermore, since mass media channels (TV and radio) were poorly covering the protests, some participants began to live broadcast the event using mobile media devices — a practice named mídia ninja¹⁵ — producing an independent and direct communication channel with people outside the event (Figure 2). Nevertheless, despite the peaceful characteristics of the movements, it was brutally reprehended by the state: the police were instructed to remove participants from public spaces, where they have the constitutional right to be,¹⁶ resulting in many injured people and a few deaths.

FIGURE 2. Mídia Ninja: Brazilian protesters began to live broadcast the event to show what mass media hide. Image Copyleft: Mídia Ninja.

Mobile media became, therefore, important tactical tools of resistance in postmodern urban public spaces. Through a decentralized network, smart mobs could not just organize in one location, but instead be global in scope and form a bigger community across multiple geographical spaces. Participants of these ‘instant communities’ may not know each other until the action takes place: they are a group of strangers; they are a multitude. In fact, this multidimensionality of the network connection between different people, places, and political realities, resembles a rhizomatic structure (Deleuze and Guattari 1987): the information flow does not have a predefined pattern behaviour, showing itself in many different ways and forms — no start, no end, no centre, and organized dynamically. Smart mobs are global, dispersed but interconnected, and follow the same structural logic of the economic flow in global cities described by Sassen (2006). Not surprisingly, they are more intense in urban spaces, since the city ‘constitute the terrain where people from all over the world intersect in ways they do not anywhere else’ (p. 29). It is the city, therefore, that concentrates not only the source of contemporary economic power, but also where people cluster, organize, and act to establish new forms of sociability, identity, and values (Harvey 2012).

Conclusion

The idea that mobile technology serves as interface between people and their environments is not new. Books, wristwatches, newspapers, Walkmans, and cellphones have long been part of our society as cultural products used to assist people in interacting with their space. Over the last few years, mobile devices evolved, embedding different tools, particularly tracking and capture systems, and the capability to connect to other devices, resulting in a convergence across media. New mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have been shifting cultural practices?and have already changed how we experience the city and shape our urban culture (Farman 2011; Lemos 2010; Silva and Frith 2012).

Consequently, if at the end of the twentieth century every aspect of our culture was controlled through the broadcasting technology of mass media agents (Baudrillard 1983), today digital technology disrupt this logic, bringing decentralization to social mediation (Lemos 2010). Accordingly, digital mobile devices are tools for communication with great potential to decentralize mediation and facilitate civic participation (Donath et al. 2011), which not only enable people to consume and produce information in any place, erasing part of the social mediation imposed by mass media agents, but also give us the ability to experience the space in new ways.

Mobile media add digital information on top of physical locations, creating hybrid spaces that affect how people experience and represent the space, as well as the social relations among other people. As a result, location and context together determine how people will grasp the information and the space. To use Farman’s (2011) term, mobile media make us sensory-inscribed in space; that is, we experience the space through our body and our sensorial apparatus, as well as through social and cultural practices. Thus, mobile media become the interface for the everyday practice in hybrid spaces identified by Lemos (2008): mapping and geo-localization, urban electronic annotations, location-based mobile games, and smart mobs. Digital mapping and urban annotation are now a creative intervention in urban space, shaping both the physical location and the experience of urban life, revaluing everyday practices in the process, such as walking and occupying public spaces. While location-based mobile games use ludic affordances to repurpose physical places into game play environments, political smart mobs occupy and reappropriate urban spaces to question the legitimacy of private spaces and put in evidence the right to be at a public place.

For De Certeau (2002), the practice of everyday life creates small transformations of and within the dominant culture in order to make the space suitable to a user’s own interest. These transformations, though fragmented and isolated, reflect a set of principles connected to a consumer’s activity, culture, tradition, agency, and anxiety. Urban space becomes politicized in the process of rebuilding itself, putting in question the legitimacy of the space produced by the hegemonic power. Conversely, mobile media still speaks to, and is the speech of, a privileged audience that has access to devices, wireless connection, and applications. The high cost attached to them prevent many people to experience and take part in these new forms of spatialization, resulting in the reinforcement of the hegemonic ideology and culture.

As technology evolves, its production’s costs drop, and the adoption of mobile media increases, we need not only to consider the opportunities, but also think through the consequences of these new forms of interaction with other people and with space. Since mobile media is also a mediation system based on algorithms, I feel that we should start to ask the same sort of questions raised by Nichols (1988/2003) in 1988 about cybernetics: Who designs and controls these systems? For what purpose? If the requirement to use a technological interface that mediates us through this new mode of participation is in itself a form of exclusion, whoever owns and controls these communication systems also has some control over our sensorial engagement with the world.

Notes on contributor

Luciano Frizzera is a PhD student in Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University, (Canada). His doctoral project explores the affordances of mobile and social media for civic engagement, especially in the context of smart cities. Luciano received his Master of Art in Humanities Computing from the University of Alberta, (Canada), and his Bachelor in Social Communication from the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, (Brazil). Luciano’s background spans a diverse range of disciplines: media studies, graphic design (print and digital), interface design, project management, urban studies, digital humanities, information visualization, sociology, and political science.

Acknowledgements

This work is part of the required thesis for my MA in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. The thesis was supervised by Geoffrey Rockwell, and defended in August 2014.

Notes

1 Google Maps: https://maps.google.com.

2 Nike+ is a smartphone application developed by Nike: http://nikeplus.nike.com/plus/.

3 Nike+ City Runs: http://www.yesyesno.com/nike-collab-city-runs.

4 Apple Maps: http://www.apple.com/ca/ios/maps/.

5 OpenStreetMap: http://www.openstreetmap.org.

6 Streetmuseum: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/museum-london-streetmuseum/id369684330? mt=8.

7 Anne’s Amsterdam: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/annes-amsterdam/id520476666?mt=8.

8 Flickr: https://www.flickr.com.

9 Foursquare: https://foursquare.com.

10 Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org.

11 Ingress: https://www.ingress.com.

12 Zombies Everywhere!: http://uselessiphonestuff.com/?app=zombies-everywhere-augmented- reality-apocalypse.

13 AR Invaders: http://invaders.soulbit7.com.

14 See an analysis of social media usage at protests in Brazil: Malini, Fabio. 2013. ‘The Battle of Vinegar: Why #protestoSP Had Not One, but Many Hashtags’.

15 Mídia Ninja: http://midianinja.tumblr.com.

16 In Brazil, individual and collective rights are guaranteed by the Art 5° of Federative Republic of Brazil’s Constitution, particularly in the items IV, IX, XV, and XI, regarding to freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of assembly, respectively (Brasil 1988, Art 5°).