Mobile Media: A Review of Opportunities to Learn and Emerging Participation Gaps

• In Event: Mobile (Media) Constructions of Place

Abstract

Current social practices with mobile media are accelerating beyond the opportunities for learning that exist in formal education. In fact, education research is behind in synthesizing the increasingly well-documented social practices with mobile media that are essential for developing meaningful digital literacy for the mobile media age. Although digital literacy researchers argue for education with mobile media that connects schools with the social, professional, and civic practices of local communities (Squire, 2013), most educational practice with mobile media is focused on the mobile devices themselves, or on using these technologies to reproduce traditional pedagogies with analog content, such as using iPad apps for grammar instruction (e.g., Beach & O’Brien, 2015). Mobile media are therefore not conceptualized in relation not to a specific medium—a mobile device such as an iPad or smartphone—but in relation to how such mobile devices enable a convergence of digital media—such as apps, videos, augmented reality narratives—and the construction of social practices (Farman, 2015).

This review therefore synthesizes research documenting mobile media as social practice, focusing on opportunities to learn and on defining the practices that may generate participation gaps with mobile media, akin to those with digital media and Web2.0 (Gee, 2014). The following questions focus the review: 1. How are new activities and social practices developing with mobile media? 2. What do these new activities and social practices imply for re-imagining digital literacy education in the mobile media age?

The theoretic development from this review that mobile media practices are improvisatory, emplaced, and distributed. For example, emerging social practices of micro-coordination, hyper-coordination, and controlling social interaction on the move are defined in relation to such mobile media activities as on-the-spot public journalism and disaster communication (Engeström, 2009), location-based mobile gaming and urban play (de Souza e Silva, 2017; Sutko & de Souza e Silva, 2011), digital urban markup and geocomposition (Rivers, 2016). These social practices are improvisatory, emplaced, and distributed because they allow for micro-coordinating peoples’ convergence on specific locations via messaging in order to respond to ongoing emergencies, or gaming experiences. In experiences such as these “everything is virtual until the parties, the places and the moments come together to make it real. In this context the person without a phone becomes a liability.” (Rainie & Wellman, 2012, pg. 61).

Additional place-based activities and social practices with mobile media reviewed through this theoretic perspective include, but are not limited to: location-based virtual storytelling (Farman, 2015), digital museum curation (Gammon & Burch, 2008), and cultural mapping (Hemmersam, Aspen, Morrison, Sem, & Havnør, 2015). Digital literacy education must evolve to address such emerging mobile media practices both to realize new opportunities for learning, and to mitigate emerging participation gaps due not to simply to being “without a phone” but to being un-enculturated into the mobile media age. This evolution may therefore lead toward better educational designs for using mobile media in strategic, place-based social and civic educational initiatives, rather than for simply mobilizing computer screens.

Authors

• Christian Ehret, McGill University

• Ty Hollett, The Pennsylvania State University

• Luka Ciklovan, McGill University