Communications and Mobility is a unique, interdisciplinary look at mobility, territory, communication, and transport in the 21st century with extended case studies of three icons of this era: the mobile phone, the migrant, and the container box. Urges scholars in media and communication to return to broader conceptions of the field that include mobility of all kinds—information, people, and commodities Embraces perspectives from media studies, science and technology studies, sociology, media anthropology, and cultural geography Discusses ideas of virtual and embodied mobility, network geographies, de-territorialization, sedentarism, nomadology, connectivity, containment, and exclusion Integrates the often-neglected transport studies into contemporary communication studies and theories of globalization

Communications and Mobility is a unique, interdisciplinary look at mobility, territory, communication, and transport in the 21st century with extended case studies of three icons of this era: the mobile phone, the migrant, and the container box. Urges scholars in media and communication to return to broader conceptions of the field that include mobility of all kinds—information, people, and commodities Embraces perspectives from media studies, science and technology studies, sociology, media anthropology, and cultural geography Discusses ideas of virtual and embodied mobility, network geographies, de-territorialization, sedentarism, nomadology, connectivity, containment, and exclusion Integrates the often-neglected transport studies into contemporary communication studies and theories of globalization

How wireless technology is redefining the relationship of communication, technology, and society around the world—in everyday work and life, in youth culture, in politics, and in the developing world. Wireless networks are the fastest growing communications technology in history. Are mobile phones expressions of identity, fashionable gadgets, tools for life—or all of the above? Mobile Communication and Society looks at how the possibility of multimodal communication from anywhere to anywhere at any time affects everyday life at home, at work, and at school, and raises broader concerns about politics and culture both global and local. Drawing on data gathered from around the world, the authors explore who has access to wireless technology, and why, and analyze the patterns of social differentiation seen in unequal access.They explore the social effects of wireless communication—what it means for family life, for example, when everyone is constantly in touch, or for the idea of an office when workers can work anywhere. Is the technological ability to multitask further compressing time in our already hurried existence? The authors consider the rise of a mobile youth culture based on peer-to-peer networks, with its own language of texting, and its own values. They examine the phenomenon of flash mobs, and the possible political implications. And they look at the relationship between communication and development and the possibility that developing countries could "leapfrog" directly to wireless and satellite technology. This sweeping book—moving easily in its analysis from the United States to China, from Europe to Latin America and Africa—answers the key questions about our transformation into a mobile network society.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real. Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences. This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric. The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Especially as mobile media become seamlessly integrated into transportation networks, navigating urban spaces, and connecting with social networks while on the move, researchers need new approaches and methods to bring together mobilities with mobile communication and locative media. Mobile communication scholars have focused on cell phones, often ignoring broader connections to urban spaces, geography, and locational media. As a result, they emphasized virtual mobility and personalized communication as a way of disconnecting from place, location and publics. The growing pervasiveness of location-aware technology urges us to rethink the intersection among location, mobile technologies and mobility. Few studies have addressed the many transformations taking place in mobile sociality and in urban spatial processes through the appropriation of these technologies. Chapter 12 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

Winner of the 2018 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication Responding to the effects of human mobility and crises such as depleting oil supplies, Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder turns specifically to automobility, a term used to describe the kinds of mobility afforded by autonomous, automobile-based movement technologies and their ramifications. Thus far, few studies in technical communication have explored the development of mobility technologies, the immense power that highly structured, environmentally significant systems have in the world, or the human-machine interactions that take place in such activities. Applying kinaesthetic rhetoric, a rhetoric that is sensitive to and developed from the mobile, material context of these technologies, Pflugfelder looks at transportation projects such as electric taxi cabs from the turn of the century to modern day, open-source vehicle projects, and a large case study of an autonomous, electric pod car network that ultimately failed. Kinaesthetic rhetoric illuminates how mobility technologies have always been persuasive wherever and whenever linguistic symbol systems and material interactions enroll us, often unconsciously, into regimes of movement and ways of experiencing the world. As Pflugfelder shows, mobility technologies involve networks of sustained arguments that are as durable as the bonds between the actors in their networks.

This book is about the relationship between media, communication and globalization, explored through the unique empirical study of electronic music practitioners’ use of the global social media: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. To understand the significance of the emerging nexus between social media and music in a global context, the book explores various aspects of production, distribution and consumption among electronic music practitioners as they engage with global social media, as well as a historical, political and economic exposition of the rise of this global social media environment. Drawing on interview-based research with electronic music artists, DJs, producers and managers, together with the historical portrayal of the emergence of global social media this pioneering study aims to capture a development taking place in music culture within the wider transformations of the media and communications landscape; from analogue to digital, from national to global, and from a largely passive to more active media use. In doing so, it explores the emergence of a media and communications ecology with increased mobility, velocity and uncertainty. The numerous competing, and rapidly growing and fading social media exemplify the vitality and volatility of the transforming global media, communication and cultural landscape. This study suggests that the music practitioner’s relationship with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and the key characteristics of these global social media, alter aspects of our practical and theoretical understandings of the process of media globalization. The book deploys an interdisciplinary approach to media globalization that takes into account and articulates this relationship, and reflects the enduring power equations and wider continuities and changes within the global media and communications sphere.