Studying Mobile Media - Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Hardcover, New)

This international, interdisciplinary collection explores a range of possible theoretical and empirical approaches to cultural technologies and mobile communication by treating the iPhone as a case study. As the mobile phone graduates into a fully web-capable and multi-media device, the contributors to this volume critically examine the nature and implications of this shift, considering the iPhone as a significant moment in media history.

With the emergence of networked, convergent mobile media devices like the iPhone, new media and communication practices are emerging. Increasingly, the mobile phone is becoming a platform for gaming, online social networking and emergent lifestyle applications. The iPhone is symbolic of this phenomenon, but it also has its own distinctive features (in terms of branding and use), and so provides media and communication theorists with a unique opportunity to explore these practices. Indeed, the iPhone--as part of broader shifts toward ubiquitous, convergent mobile devices and "smartphones"--can be usefully deployed as a case study enabling new insights into mobile media culture.