Media on the move: personalized media and the transformation of publicness

Abstract

This article focuses on mobile phone uses and is premised on two seminal trends in recent media culture, namely media convergence and media mobility. As for convergence, the technological digitization of all media and telecommunication technologies imply increased possibilities of interplay between media forms of communication that turn people into media users and possible producers. As for media mobility, the development of ever-smaller media gadgets serves to integrate media and ICT uses as inconspicuous elements of people's everyday actions and interactions in public as well as private spaces. The combined development of mobile and ubiquitous media technologies signals a reorientation of peoples' appropriation of mediated time and space as they develop more personalized and interactive forms of communication, such as sms, mms, chat and gameworld interventions — not to mention the combination of communication and computing capabilities in the latest generation of mobile devices.