Merging mobile communication studies and urban research: Mobile locative media, “onscreen encounters” and the reshaping of the interaction order in public places

Abstract

This communication discusses how the use of locative media in urban public settings allows users to recognize one another’s proximity on screen. Such “on screen encounters” make simultaneously relevant the categories of passer-by and mobile user, thus creating a tension between an orientation towards civil inattention or engaging in focused, face-to-face interactions. Such a tension is characteristic of the interaction order of urban settings experienced as location- or proximity-aware “hybrid ecologies”.