“Passing-by” at the Intersection of Mobility and Sociality

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session I
  In Interactive Paper Session: Mobile Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This paper propose that both social sciences and mobility studies should take mobile public space as a space of social interaction. Through the notion of digitally mediated transient sociality, I argue mobile devices as integral to experience and sociality in the public transportation systems. This allows us for the opening into the structural politics of time and space that any media technology alters, through examining the mundane and unremarkable everyday experiences and the assemblages that constitute them. This paper contribute to such an understanding by examining the moment of “passing-by” experienced through a mobile device between people on a public transportation. By doing, it explicate the co-constitutive nature of human and nonhuman entities in the experience of sociality, and attend to the centrality of mobility in the sociality of urban commuter trains by bringing together the hitherto separated categories of virtual and actual mobilities.

Author

• Keiko Nishimura, University of North Carolina