Theories of the Mobile Internet: Mobilities, Assemblages, Materialities and Imaginaries
As the Internet enters its third decade as a popular medium, one of the most important aspects of its evolution has been the transformation of the digital way of life from a state of being “wired” to that of being “wireless” and “mobile.”1 While the wireless Internet refers to the increasing diffusion of “Wi-Fi” connectivity (and its more powerful successors), the mobile Internet entails wireless connectivity and more. The technological advancements in platforms for the latter are driving the expansion of the provision of the former.
The mobile Internet is manifested in the proliferation of practices mediated through “3G” (third generation) and IMT-Advanced (commonly called “4G” or fourth generation) data transfer networks that are accessed through mobile communication devices ranging from smartphones (such as the iPhone or the many Android OS–based devices) to a wide array of tablet devices (such as the iPad) through which Internet experiences truly become portable across a multiplicity of spaces and places of everyday life.2 Until the development of these devices, mobile communication was more or less comprised of untethered telephony with the added (and originally unintended) benefit of SMS texting (Goggin 2006). As we know, 3G and 4G devices embody the convergence of new multimedia forms, applications and platforms that extend the possibilities of mobile communication far beyond talking and texting. Indeed mobile Internet users—particularly those who accessing video and gaming content—are increasingly consuming the vast majority of wireless bandwidth.
While there has been a tremendous flowering of scholarly work on mobile telephony and communication over the past five years, Internet scholars have been slower to consider the growing mobility of the Internet.3 This aporia in critical Internet studies is problematic for, as Mimi Ito has argued, the development of the mobile Internet “demands a set of engagements at various methodological and theoretical points that differ substantially from Internet study” (2005, 5). Indeed, from our perspective, making sense of the mobile Internet necessitates the development of a unique analytic that closes the gap between Internet scholarship on the one hand and scholarship on mobile communication on the other.
This book takes up the theoretical and conceptual challenge that Ito posited—but did not elaborate—by proposing an approach that focuses on how the mobile Internet shapes and is shaped by the emergence of what Mimi Sheller and John Urry term the “new mobilities paradigm” (2007, emphasis added). This paradigm emphasizes multiple and linked registers of mobility which include (but are not limited to) the physical movement of travel and migration, the symbolic movement of mediated communication and the circulation of cultures, and the virtual movement in and through digitized spaces (Urry 2007; Elliott and Urry 2010, Cresswell 2010). All three registers, Sheller and Urry argue, converge in the practices of mobile telephony which enable the capacity of “interacting and communicating on the move, of being in a sense present while apparently absent” within the same spatio-temporal coordinates (2007, 207). Accordingly, this volume seeks to address two apposite issues: First, how do mobile communications and the mobile Internet create zones of connectivity that are fluid, transportable, and meaningful? Second, what are the structures of immobility (i.e., server farms, wireless towers, Wi-Fi hotspots, fiber optics of Internet backbones, and so on) that also serve to constitute the mobile Internet?
To address these questions, authors in this book construct the subject of the mobile Internet as an assemblage of multidimensional socio-technical practices in which the materialities and imaginaries of manifold technologies of mobile communications converge. At its most abstract level in terms of social theory, “assemblage thinking allows us to foreground ongoing processes of composition across and through different human and non-human actants,” a perspective that is absolutely crucial to understanding the mobile Internet as a contingent totality (Anderson et al. 2012, 172). Digital gaming scholar T. L. Taylor describes the concept of the assemblage—derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987)—as an “alternative heuristic” for understanding complex socio-technical systems: “the notion of assemblage is one way to help us understand the range of actors (system, technologies, player, body, community, company, legal structures, etc.), concepts, practices, and relations” (Taylor 2009, 332). Taylor is noting here the heterogeneity of the assemblage as a network of imaginary and material elements, elements that are not randomly connected but are structured with a particular vector of force and effectivity in time and space. Jennifer Slack and the author of a final chapter in this volume, Macgregor Wise (2005), render this heuristic more nuanced by distinguishing between “articulation” and “assemblage.” A socio-technological articulation refers to how an elemental ensemble of objects, social practices, symbolic representations, experiences and affects are drawn together in a specific and contingent unity. An assemblage is a socio-technical articulation that is, to use a Deleuzian metaphor, “constellated” into a “particular dynamic form” that envelops and gives form to spatio-temporal territorities (Slack and Wise 2005, 128).
From our perspective, the concept of assemblages is as important methodologically as it is ontologically. John Law, in After Method, emphasizes the ad hoc and active meaning of the concept. An assemblage is not a fixed arrangement or state of affairs, but rather an open-ended, “uncertain and hesitant process” (2004, 41). Assemblages are both objects and activities. The mobile Internet is neither one nor the other, but rather “the event … of their reciprocal configuration” (Taylor 2009, 332). The notion of the assemblage makes understanding the mobile Internet in situ—whether that situation be physical, symbolic or virtual—possible. The materialities and imaginaries of the mobile Internet are fluid and dynamic, and thus their apprehension and analysis must be likewise methodologically open-ended and plural.
The assemblages of the mobile Internet are comprised of articulations of materialities and imaginaries. The term “materialities” invokes two traditions of materialist analysis, both of which have long, storied and influential purchase in communication/cultural/media studies. The first derives from the neo- and autonomist Marxist materialism of the political economy of communication (Mosco 1996; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). From this perspective, the centrality of the mobile Internet in constructing a distinctive form of digital and/or informational capitalism is paramount. If, as Benedict Anderson (2006) famously argued, the apparatus of print technologies ushered in the era of “print capitalism,” is it possible or fruitful to speak of the emergence of “smartphone” or “notepad” capitalism? What are the arrays of social relations of power and exploitation—embodied in markets and their constituent social practices—that characterize this new form of capitalism as a distinctive social formation? What are the “circuits of interactivity”—between smartphone and user, between telecoms and regulatory agencies, between applications and software designers, between Google or Apple and regimes of intellectual property and so on—that comprise the “empire” of network informational capitalism (Kline, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2003)?
The second tradition derives from the materialism rooted in the well-known “medium theory” of Innis and McLuhan (Meyrowitz 1994; Deibert 1997), which is in turn a major inspiration for the contemporary “media materialism” of Friedrich Kittler (1999; Gane 2005; Parikka 2012; Pels et al. 2002). This evolving and disparate body of work takes seriously the idea that the material forms of mobile communication—from the digital architecture of 3G networks to the design of the devices themselves—are just as important as the meaning of the messages they convey and carry. How do the materialities of the mobile Internet manifest themselves in the everyday encounters of users and their devices? To what extent does the design of haptic interfaces of mobile device construct or determine the mobile experience? Concern with such materialities may also entail a concern with their corporealities. Pushed to the limit, the materialities of the mobile Internet encompass the connectivities that the ITU has called the emergent “Internet of Things” (2005), where H2H (human-to-human) communication is increasingly supplemented by H2T (human-to-things) and T2T (things-to-things) (Varnelis and Friedberg 2007, 37). The important of the emergence of the Internet of Things to issues of mobility is underscored by the fact that wireless bandwidth usage will be increasingly dominated by T2T communication (Lawson 2014).
All technologies—in their development, dissemination and usage—are embedded within and animated by “social imaginaries.” According to Charles Taylor (2004), a social imaginary is an epistemological and ontological framework of cultural value and identity that is at once more supple and yet firmly embedded in quotidian perceptions and practices than ideologies per se. As Andrew Herman (2010 has argued, “Social imaginaries then are not simply a set of ideas about the social world: they are pragmatic templates for social practice. In this way, social imaginaries operate as forms of power-knowledge, enabling some social actions and constraining others as they provide a map of the social as moral space that is delineated along existential, normative and utopian dimensions” (190).
Patrice Flichy (2007) observed in The Internet Imaginaire that there are few technological developments in modernity that have not been animated by such an imaginary. Among the key questions the chapters in this collection consider are how the mobile Internet is constructed through such imaginaries and how these imaginaries privilege particular definitions of personal being and valorize specific desires of social becoming. As Jan Hadlaw (2011) more recently reminds us, new communications technologies have historically acted as the sites on which negotiations over—often competing—social values and utopian desires have been played out. The utopian promise of technological progress associated with the mobile Internet continues this tradition. What do desires to project ourselves into the future tell us about our social and technological present? What do such social and technological imaginaries tells us about past imaginaries where other wireless utopias were projected onto the future, and how can bringing an historical perspective to understanding the imaginaries of the mobile Internet provide us with insight into contemporary imaginaries (Gitelman 2006)?
Following Slack and Wise’s analytic of articulations and assemblage, the book will explore three distinct topoi of the mobile Internet and its spatio-temporal territorialization(s): the politics of mobility and its other; past and future conceptions of Internet mobilities; and mobilities of the Internet in everyday life.
As we noted earlier, mobile communications and the mobile Internet create zones of connectivity that are fluid, transportable and meaningful, but the structures and politics of immobility also serve to constitute the mobile Internet. Involuntary immobility enforced on those who occupy the lower registers of various socio-economic hierarchies is, of course, inegalitarian and unjust. But what about immobilities enforced by those who occupy these lower registers upon those who would prefer that they, and things, just keep moving? This section begins with Darin Barney’s “We Shall Not Be Moved,” in which he interrogates the moral economy of mobility in which freedom is assumed to be contingent upon open access to mobile communication. Barney argues that, to the contrary, mobility is not ipso facto a ground of freedom and empowerment; indeed a politics of immobility in relation to work and labor may be the progressive line of flight. Alison Powell’s “Openness and Enclosure in Mobile Internet Architecture” takes issue with the always-already necessary convergence of “open” architecture and “open” digital public sphere that has dominated liberatory rhetoric in digital culture since the 1970s. She examines how the materialities and imaginaries of wired and wireless Internet embodies this conflation of openness with freedom, with special eye toward the development of the hardware of mobile Internet devices. In “The Materiality of Locative Media,” Jason Farman offers a thoughtful mediation on the relationship between space as location, place as identity, and how both are performed through the unseen layers of the material infrastructures of mobile networks. Farman’s ethnographic account of a visit to one the “doors to the Internet” in the United States—the Equinix Data Center outside of Washington, DC—becomes the foundation for the development of what he terms an “object-oriented phenomenology” that will, hopefully, render the “vibrant matter” of the material infrastructures of the mobile Internet visible. Part I concludes with Enda Brophy and Greig de Peuter’s chapter on “Labors of Mobility.” They map the value chain of “communicative capitalism” by tracing the flows of labor that produce the “smartphone” at multiple registers of materiality. In so doing, they address what they term the “labor blindspot” of contemporary critical analysis of the mobile communication and the mobile Internet.
As a heterogeneous assemblage of materialities and imaginaries, the mobile Internet embodies and instantiates multiple temporalities. Some of these temporalities cohere synchronically and are structurally present in what Siegfried Zielinski (2008) terms the “deep time” of contemporary forms and practices of the Internet gone mobile, such as the smartphone or protocols of wireless Internet connectivity. Still other temporalities manifest themselves in diachronic genealogies of the past and present, as well as histories of the future. This section considers both kinds of temporal modalities, beginning with a look at the futures of wirelessness and mobility as imagined in the past and ending with imagining the future viewed through the optic of stone-age megaliths. In “Wireless Pasts and Wired Futures” Ghislain Thibault examines the technological imaginary of progress and the “dematerialization” of communication infrastructure, an entirely contingent articulation that produced the ideological coupling of wirelessness with mobility, and mobility with freedom, in the late nineteenth century. Andrew Herman and Vincent Manzerolle examine the rise and fall of perhaps the first iconic device of the mobile Internet era—the BlackBerry smartphone—in order to develop a more coherent and durable conceptualization of digital and informational capitalism that has theoretical implications far beyond the life of the device or the company that made it. They argue that the imaginary of a wireless future of mobility and freedom becomes tightly intertwined with the materialities of ubiquitous connectivity that come to dominate the quotidian world of digital labor in the new era of “informational capital/-ism.” Gerard Goggin’s chapter on “Mobile Web 2.0” closely interrogates two of the conceptualizations of the “imaginary” most influential in the intellectual shaping this project, that of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2004) and Patrice Flichy (2007). Leveraging Taylor’s and Flichy’s complementary understandings of social imaginaries, Goggin examines multiple histories of mobile Internet assemblages: early wireless Internet protocols; the articulation of the development of mobile handsets with ideologies of ICT4D in the Global South, and the rise of locative media. The combined and uneven development of these imaginaries, argues Goggin, provides a fruitful framework for interrogating the emergent materialities of the mobile Internet as a global phenomenon. Part II concludes with Laura Watts innovative auto-ethnography “Future Archaeology: Re-animating Innovation in the Mobile Telecoms Industry.” Reflecting upon her experience in the mobile telecom industry in the early part of the century, Watts shifts the analytical terrain of the territorializations of the mobile Internet away from the historical and genealogical toward the archaeological and the futurological, examining the industry fixation on the archaic figure of the stone-age “pebble,” in spite of all revolutionary rhetoric of technological progress to the contrary.
The final part of the book considers a range of assemblages of the mobile Internet as they territorialize different quotidian spatialities and temporalities. Rich Ling offers a critical phenomenology of the quotidian experience of the mobile Internet as taken-for-granted lifeworld by examining the complex interplay of practices of social exclusion, social inefficiency and social interaction that is territorialized through the social mediation of the smart-phone. In their chapter “New and Old, Young and Old: Aging the Mobile Imaginary,” Barbara Crow and Kim Sawchuk consider the articulation of aging, mobility-as-movement and mobile telephony as imagined by the wireless telecom industry as well as social scientific studies of mobile communication. They offer a critical assessment of the tendential force of a mobile assemblage that privileges youth. Thom Swiss troubles the ideological articulation of mobility and freedom through a multi-modal ethnography of homelessness and mobile communication in “I’m Melvin, a 4G Hot Spot.” Swiss reflects upon the “conceit” of “assemblage” as an “alternative heuristic that mirrors the fragmented lives of the homeless.” As Swiss suggests, the wireless connectivity of one body can be literally dependent upon the displacement and dislocation of another body in complex relations of power and inequity that only a poetic method of methodological connectivity can illuminate. Macgregor Wise’s chapter asks us to consider the phenomenological moment of quotidian connectivity that we experience as we gaze at and engage with the mobile devices in our hands. According to Wise, this moment is dis/embodied in the “hole in the hand”—or the screen of our mobile devices—that is a portal and nexus of the “clickable world” of the mobile Internet. Wise reflects upon what he terms the “ethics of attention” in this assemblage that suggests that we inhabit vectors of distraction of view, always-already leading elsewhere but arriving nowhere. Jodi Dean concludes the section—and the book—with a critical account of the rise and hegemony of apps in the constitution of the mobile Internet experience. For Dean, apps are fasteners of attachment and enthrallment. Although one can differ with Dean’s argument that apps are the functional raison d’etre for smartphones, this does not detract from the fact that apps are “affective machines” that bind us to the supply chains of “drive” that are the sinews of “communicative capitalism.”
1. According to the OECD, Wireless broadband penetration has grown to 68.4% in the OECD area, according to June 2013 data, meaning there are now more than two wireless subscriptions for every three inhabitants. (“OECD broadband statistics update” January 9, 2014)
2. “3G” refers to a set of technical standards for the mobile communication devices developed by the International Telecommunications Union. According to the ITU, “Third generation (3G) systems promise faster communications services, including voice, fax and Internet, anytime and anywhere with seamless global roaming. ITU’s IMT-2000 global standard for 3G has opened the way to enabling innovative applications and services (e.g. multimedia entertainment, infotainment and location-based services, among others).” (www.itu.int/osg/spu/ni/3G/technology/index.html). Interestingly, prior to January 2012, there is no so such thing as “4G” apart from industry hype as the technical standards for IMT-Advanced (aka 4G) had not been agreed upon. Such standards were announced by the ITU on January 18, 2012 (www.itu.int/ITU-D/tech/MobileCommunications/IMT_INTRODUCING/IMT_2G3G4G.html) The technical distinctions between the systems are very important for product differentiation, market strategies and governmental regulation (or lack thereof), especially in the EU and Asia
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