As an example of convergence, the mobile phone—especially in the form of smartphone—is now ushering in new promises of seamlessness between engagement with technology and everyday common experiences. This seamlessness is not only about how one transitions between the worlds of the device and the physical environment but it also captures the transition and convergences between devices as well (i.e. laptop to smartphone, smartphone to tablet). This volume argues, however, that these transitions are far from seamless. We see divisions between online and offline, virtual and actual, here and there, taking on different cartographies, emergent forms of seams. It is these seams that this volume acknowledges, challenges and explores—socially, culturally, technologically and historically—as we move to a deeper understanding of the role and impact of mobile communication’s saturation throughout the world.

This book presents state of the art theoretical and empirical research on the ubiquitous internet: its everyday users and its economic stakeholders. The book offers a 360-degree media analysis of the contemporary terrain of the internet by examining both user and industry perspectives and their relation to one another. Contributors consider user practices in terms of internet at your fingertips—the abundance, free flow, and interconnectivity of data. They then consider industry’s use of user data and standards in commodification and value-creation.

The last decade has witnessed the rise of the cell phone from a mode of communication to an indispensable multimedia device, and this phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of mobile communication studies in media, cultural studies, and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media seeks to be the definitive publication for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of mobile media. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize the increasingly convergent areas surrounding social, geosocial, and mobile media discourses. Features include: comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing mobile media; wide-ranging case studies that draw from this truly global field, including China, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as Europe, the UK, and the US; a consideration of mobile media as part of broader media ecologies and histories; chapters setting out the economic and policy underpinnings of mobile media; explorations of the artistic and creative dimensions of mobile media; studies of emerging issues such as ecological sustainability; up-to-date overviews on social and locative media by pioneers in the field. Drawn from a range of theoretical, artistic, and cultural approaches, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media will serve as a crucial reference text to inform and orient those interested in this quickly expanding and far-reaching field.

Liking, sharing, friending, going viral: what would it mean to recognize these current modes of media interaction as promiscuous? In a contemporary network culture characterized by a proliferation of new forms of intimate mediated sociality, this book argues that promiscuity is a new standard of user engagement. Intimate relations among media users and between users and their media are increasingly structured by an entrepreneurial logic and put to work for the economic interests of media corporations. But these multiple intimacies can also be understood as technologies of promiscuous desire serving both to liberalize mediated social connection and to contain it within normative frames of value. Payne brings crucial questions of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and attention back into conversation with recent thinking on network culture and social media, identifying the queer undercurrents of these current media dynamics.

Social media have dramatically popularized practices of evaluation, especially of cultural products and artistic expressions. The practices of "liking" and rating any shared contents such as music to blogs, film, videos, photographs to artwork and performances are ubiquitous in today’s digital environments. As a result, creative producers are increasingly developing reputations and careers through a complex blend of online social reputation management and distribution platforms, and more longstanding forms of marketing channels and professional evaluation. In this context, Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts seeks to examine the newly emerging forms of evaluation, such as contests, competitions, ranking, commenting, liking, and rating, which are taking place in digital environments. In doing so, this book investigates the criteria and assessment practices tied to the evaluation of creativity and artistic works and further questions what is at stake when digital environments heighten the role of amateur and peer criticism to the level of expert critiques. While exploring potential informal learning opportunities and offering incisive critiques on the emerging norms and standards of evaluation, the essays in this book cover a wide range of artistic and creative practices.

Digital gaming’s cultural significance is often minimized much in the same way that the Middle Ages are discounted as the backward and childish precursor to the modern period. Digital Gaming Reimagines the Middle Ages challenges both perceptions by examining how the Middle Ages have persisted into the contemporary world via digital games as well as analyzing how digital gaming translates, adapts, and remediates medieval stories, themes, characters, and tropes in interactive electronic environments. At the same time, the Middle Ages are reinterpreted according to contemporary concerns and conflicts, in all their complexity. Rather than a distinct time in the past, the Middle Ages form a space in which theory and narrative, gaming and textuality, identity and society are remediated and reimagined. Together, the essays demonstrate that while having its roots firmly in narrative traditions, neomedieval gaming—where neomedievalism no longer negotiates with any reality beyond itself and other medievalisms—creates cultural palimpsests, multiply-layered trans-temporal artifacts. Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages demonstrates that the medieval is more than just a stockpile of historically static facts but is a living, subversive presence in contemporary culture.

The study of online gaming is changing. It is no longer enough to analyse one type of online community in order to understand the plethora of players who take part in online worlds and the behaviours they exhibit. MacCallum-Stewart studies the different ways in which online games create social environments and how players choose to interpret these. These games vary from the immensely popular social networking games on Facebook such as Farmville to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games to "Free to Play" online gaming and console communities such as players of Xbox Live and PS3 games. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of social gaming online, breaking down when games are social and what narrative devices make them so. This cross-disciplinary study will appeal to those interested in cyberculture, the evolution of gaming technology, and sociologies of media.

Cyberactivism already has a rich history, but over the past decade the participatory web—with its de-centralized information/media sharing, portability, storage capacity, and user-generated content—has reshaped political and social change. Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web examines the impact of these new technologies on political organizing and protest across the political spectrum, from the Arab Spring to artists to far-right groups. Linking new information and communication technologies to possibilities for solidarity and action—as well as surveillance and control—in a context of global capital flow, war, and environmental crisis, the contributors to this volume provide nuanced analyses of the dramatic transformations in media, citizenship, and social movements taking place today.

Haunting Hands looks closely at the consequences of digital media's ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss. From Facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of the deceased, the digital is both extending earlier memorial practices and creating new ways in which death and loss manifest themselves. The ubiquity of digital specters is particularly evident in mobile media spanning smartphones, iPads, iPhones, or tablets. Mobile media entangle various forms of social, online and digital media in specific ways that are both intimate and public, and yet the use of mobile media in contexts of loss has been relatively overlooked. Haunting Hands seeks to address this growing and important area by helping us to understand the relationship between life, death, and our digital after-lives.

This book explores the socially and individually determined nature of media literacy, addressing the central question of how individuals’ media activity can be explained and evaluated. It examines people's media activity through the relationship between their competence to act and actual actions. Further, the book discusses the social factors that foster self-determined media activity, including people's abilities and skills and the associated knowledge that facilitates such skills, from the perspectives of various social science disciplines. Lastly, it applies these theoretical reflections to two empirical studies. Overall, this book provides a fundamental introduction to theories of media socialization, media literacy and media competence, and to the relation between media and socialization. It analyses international discourses on children, media, media literacy, and digital literacy. This book is of interest to scholars and researchers in the field of media studies, including media sociology and media education, communication, and cultural studies.