The Socialities of Place-Based Mobile

• In Event: Mobile Socialities

Abstract

This paper critically explores how a normative sociality underlies growing developments in place-based mobile communication, by considering empirical research from two distinct examples: First, Couchsurfing, a global social networking community that connects travellers with home-stays through free guest-and-hosts matching as well as connecting travellers and locals through community gatherings and dinners; Second, the particularities of Wi-Fi in Cuba, which the state has rolled out around the country over the past two years through a series of fixed access points along streets and in public parks.

These cases point to differing responses to Wellman’s (2001) claim that a “networked individualism” arises “because the connection is to the person and not to the place, it shifts the dynamics of connectivity from places—typically households or worksites—to individuals” (p. 30). Fifteen years later, a range of interventions work to create social connection between people and place, albeit on a framework where those ‘households or worksites’ have become mobile themselves.

The Couchsurfing network allows mobile socialities, i.e. mobile people connect to others in a network of geographic locations, yielding social benefits allowing travellers, often considered to be isolated and without connections, to feel as though they have “a social support network and friends in otherwise unknown locations” (Rosen et al, 2011:984). The service is online, networked, and place-based. On the other hand, mobile internet in Cuba exists only in fixed locations. In Havana, the recoding of certain public spaces as portals to the internet (as well as localized forms of networked communication using Bluetooth) is particularly noteworthy. The prioritization of public access points over smartphone data plans or home contracts, while partially reflecting the economics of distribution and efforts to limit counter-revolutionary uses, is part of an intentional State strategy to build the internet as a tool for social connectivity: to foster networked socialism over networked individualism.

This paper explores differences in the types of connectivity, control, design, and mobility at work in these two examples, but points to underlying similarities to suggest how we might conceive of new forms of mobile socialities in the context of how mobile communications are increasingly directed at connecting people to place.

Author

• Erika Polson, University of Denver