Special Issue "Social Transformations from the Mobile Internet"

Guest Editor
Dr. Jason Farman
University of Maryland, College Park, Department of American Studies and the Program in Digital Cultures and Creativity, 1102 Holzapfel Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Website: http://www.jasonfarman.com
E-Mail:
Interests: embodied space in digital environments; mobile technologies; pervasive computing; mapping and representations of space; performance studies; game studies; social media

Dear Colleagues,

In the first lines of Howard Rheingold’s seminal book on pervasive computing, Smart Mobs, he notes an observation he had in Japan that changed the way he thought about mobile technologies: “The first signs of the next shift began to reveal themselves to me on a spring afternoon. That was when I began to notice people on the streets of Tokyo staring at their mobile phones instead of talking to them” (2002, p. xi). This shift from using a mobile device as a voice communication medium toward usages that focus on data (specifically the “mobile Internet”) heralds the era of physical and pervasive computing culture. This culture is characterized by the ubiquity of the Internet, as it is woven into the fabric of daily life, typically so commonplace that we are often rarely aware of the extent of this integration. The effects of moving from a fixed-location Internet to a mobile Internet are far reaching. This special issue of Future Internet seeks to elaborate on the various cultural transformations brought about by the mobile Internet.

Possible topics of interest include:

• the transformation of online spatiality
• uses of the mobile Internet in the arts
• confronting the digital divide with the mobile internet
• site-specificity of information (and information visualization)
• location-based social media
• mobile mapping and representations of space
• modes of embodiment across the mobile Internet
• consequences of the move from voice to data on mobile phones
• social research of the “Always-on/Always-on-you” internet
• effects of the mobile internet on temporal experiences (work, leisure, the “in-between”)
• the commodification of site-specificity with the mobile internet
• the evolution of content in the age of mobile media

Kind regards,
Dr. Jason Farman
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 300 CHF (Swiss Francs). English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Mobile Phones Bridging the Digital Divide for Teens in the US
Authors: Katie Brown ¹, Scott W. Campbell ¹ and Rich Ling ^1,2
Affilations: ¹ University of Michigan, USA
² IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract: Even with access to smart phones, teens tend to use their mobile devices primarily for texting and voice calls. Among teens with multi-purpose phones, just 27 percent accessed the Internet through their handsets in 2009.  However, teens from lower income families were significantly more likely to use their phones to go online. Mobile device Internet access was also higher among minority teens, with 44 percent of African American teens and 35 percent of Hispanic teens using this feature. Taken together, these surprising trends suggest a means of narrowing the digital divide. Using survey and focus group data from a national study of “Teens and Mobile Phone Use” (released by Pew and the University of Michigan in 2010), this article helps identify and explain this and other emergent trends for teen use (as well as non-use) of the Internet through mobile devices.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social
Author: Gerard Goggin
Affiliation: Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract: Until recent times, it has been relatively uncommon to see the Internet, or its future, bound up with cars, technologies, and computing. Now, however, we are witnessing the advent of overlapping Internet and related technologies that are associated with, and playing about, through cars: satellite navigation technologies; advanced computing, sensing, and networked technologies in automobiles, and other vehicles; the use of digital music, email, social media, and smart phone apps. This is a kind of mobile Internet that is involved in intriguing and significant ways in a reconfiguration of the social. Accordingly in this paper, I consider the new phase of the tandem technologies of cars and mobile — represented by the mobile Internet. My argument is two-fold: firstly, the advent of mobile Internet in cars bring together new, widely divergent trajectories of Internet, that require urgent critical research and reflection — because they are still rarely considered in mainstream discussions of the Internet and its future; secondly, such developments indicate a new assembling of the social underway in mobile Internet, that can be discerned in the distinctive forms it takes in cars.

Type of Paper: Article
Title: The Player As Author: Exploring the Effects of Mobile Gaming and the Location-Aware Interface on Storytelling
Authors: Ben S. Bunting, Jr., Jacob Hughes, and Tim Hetland¹
Affiliation: ¹Washington State University, Department of English
Abstract: The mobile internet expands the immersive potential of storytelling by introducing electronic games powered by portable, location-aware interfaces. Mobile gaming has become the latest iteration in a decades-long evolution of electronic games that seek to empower the player not just as an avatar in a gameworld but also as a co-author of that gameworld, alongside the game's original designers. Location-aware interfaces allow players to implicate places in the physical world as part of their gameworld (and vice versa) for the first time. In addition to empowering the player as a co-author in the process of constructing a compelling gameworld, then, mobile games eschew linear narrative structures in favor of a cooperative storytelling process that is reliant in part on the player's experience of place. While such an author-player "worldmaking" approach to storytelling is not new, mobile games evolve the process beyond what has yet been possible within the technical and physical constraints of the traditional video gaming format. Location-aware interfaces allow mobile games to extend the worldmaking process beyond the screen and into the physical world, co-opting the player's sensory experiences of real-world places as potential storytelling tools. In our essay, we theorize the unique storytelling potential of mobile games while describing our experience attempting to harness that potential through the design and implementation of our hybrid-reality game "University of Death".

Type of Paper: Article
Title: When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution
Author: Nathan Jurgenson
Affiliation: University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract: The rise of mobile phones and social media may come to be historically coupled with a growing atmosphere of dissent that is enveloping much of the globe. The Arab Spring, UK Riots, Occupy and many other protests and so-called “flash-mobs” are all massive gatherings of digitally-connected individuals in physical space; and they have recently become the new normal. The role of technology in producing this atmosphere has, in part, been to effectively link the on and the offline. The trend to view these as separate spaces, what I call “digital dualism,” is faulty. Instead, I argue that the digital and physical enmesh to form an “augmented reality.” Linking the power of the digital–creating and disseminating networked information–with the power of the physical–occupying geographic space with flesh-and-blood bodies–is an important part of why we have this current flammable atmosphere of augmented revolution.