What’s mobile in mobile communication?

Abstract

Interrogating the terminology of “mobile” communication, this article notes that media and communicative practices have been mobile for millennia. What’s mobile about cell phones and other current mobile media is a new range of contexts in which personally meaningful and socially consequential interactions become possible. Mobile media should be studied, above all, as resources of social action across physical space. Mobile media, further, provide the wider field of research with an opportunity to revisit the great divide between technologically mediated and embodied communication. Technologically mediated communication remains grounded in human bodies residing in local places. Humans can be understood as a first degree of media whose communicative and performative reach has been extended in time and space by historically shifting technologies.