Infrastructures of Mobile Social Media

Abstract

In the age of mobile media, social interactions prioritize proximity and depend on our material engagement with the world. As such, the study of social media in the mobile era must look beyond the interface. Studies in this field must go beyond what takes place on the screens of devices to contextualize those interactions with what is happening around those devices. Moving beyond the interface, the study of social mobile media must then take into account the various infrastructures that make these practices possible (including fiber optic cables that run along the paths laid by railroad tracks, the mobile switching centers run by mobile providers that route data, the Internet data centers and peering points, and the servers that connect people and data). As social media scholarship turns toward the various levels of invisibility and visibility of the infrastructures required for mobile social media to work, it becomes clear that practices of social media are one node among a massive network of materiality.