Smartphone Cultures explores emerging questions about the ways in which this mobile technology and its apps have been produced, represented, regulated and incorporated into everyday social practices. The various authors in this volume each locate their contributions within the circuit of culture model. More specifically, this book engages with issues of production and regulation in the case of the electrical infrastructure supporting smartphones and the development of mobile social gambling apps. It examines issues of consumption through looking at parental practices relating to children’s smartphone use, children’s experience of the regulation of this technology, both in the home and in school, how they cope with the mass of communications via the smartphone and the nature of their attachment to the device. Other chapters cover the engagement of older people with smartphones, as well as how different cultural norms of sociability have a bearing on how the technology is consumed. The smartphone’s implications for other theoretical frameworks is illustrated through examining ramifications for domestication, and the sometimes-limited place of smartphones in certain aspects of life is examined through its role in the practices of reading and writing. Smartphone Cultures presents the latest international research from scholars located in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia and will appeal to scholars and students of media and cultural studies, communication studies and sociologists with interests in technology and social practices.

Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like “Hello Kitty” from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another. Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website’s reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia’s government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws. Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

What do we really know about mobile phone culture? This provocative and comprehensive collection explores the cultural and media dimensions of mobile phones around the world. An international team of contributors look at how mobiles have been imagined through advertising and social representations - tracing the scripting and shaping of the technology through gender, sexuality, religion, communication style - and explore the locations of mobile phone culture in modernity, urban settings and even transnational families. This book also provides a guide to convergent mobile phone culture, with fresh, innovative accounts of text messaging, Blackberry, camera phones, moblogging and mobile adventures in television. Mobile Phone Culture opens up important new perspectives on how we understand this intimate yet public cultural technology. Previously published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Comprehensive introduction to cell phone culture and theory.

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

Gerard Goggin has produced an incisive and penetrating overview of the world according to mobiles. Covering sight, sound and status, plus a host of other issues, he provides a provocative analysis of how mobile communication gadgets come to play such a prominent role in our lives. Any scholar of New Media will want to read this book – James Katz, Department of Communication, Rutgers University, USA With billions of users worldwide, the cell phone is not only a successful communications technology; it is also key to the future of media. Global Mobile Media offers an overview of the complex topic of mobile media, looking at the emerging industry structures, new media economies, mobile media cultures and network politics of cell phones as they move centre-stage in media industries. The development, adoption and significance of cell phones for society and culture have been registered in a growing body of work. Where existing books have focused on communication, and on the social and cultural aspects of mobile media, Global Mobile Media looks at the media dimensions. Goggin provides a pioneering yet measured evaluation of how cell phone corporations, media interests, users and policy makers are together shaping a new media dispensation. Global Mobile Media successfully places new mobile media historically, socially and culturally in a wider field of portable media technologies through extensive case studies, including: the rise of smartphones, with a detailed discussion of the Apple iPhone and how it has catalysed a new phase in convergent media, audiences and innovation the new agenda in cultural politics and media policy, featuring topics such as iPhone apps and control, mobile commons, and open mobile networks a succinct map of the political economy of mobile media, identifying key players, patterns of ownership and control, institutions, and issues a critical account of cell phones’ involvement in and contribution to much-discussed new forms of production and consumption, such as user-generated content, p2p networks, open and free source software networks an anatomy of how cell phones relate to other online media, particularly the Internet and wireless technologies. Global Mobile Media is an engaging, accessible text which will be of immense interest to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in Communication Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, as well as those taking New Media courses.

An engaging and comprehensive look at the Korean smartphone industry and culture

Smartphone adoption has surpassed 50% of the population in more than 15 countries, and there are now more than one million mobile applications people can download to their phones. Many of these applications take advantage of smartphones as locative media, which is what allows smartphones to be located in physical space. Applications that take advantage of people’s location are called location-based services, and they are the focus of this book. Smartphones as locative media raise important questions about how we understand the complicated relationship between the Internet and physical space. This book addresses these questions through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and a detailed analysis of how various popular mobile applications including Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare use people’s location to provide information about their surrounding space. The topics explored in this book are essential reading for anyone interested in how smartphones and location-based services have begun to impact the ways we navigate and engage with the physical world.

This collection explores the politics of game play and its cultural context by focusing on the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies to macro political economy analysis of techno-nationalisms and transcultural flows of cultural capital, it provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming.