The fourth screen: Mediatization and the smartphone

Abstract

Smartphones have enjoyed nearly unprecedented rates of adoption, and within a short time they have quickly become a uniquely important mobile communication device, especially among young people. While such observations are compelling, they lack a conceptual context. This paper theorizes the smartphone in the general terms of mediatization. Emphasis is on existing and emerging technologies of the mediatization process and the consequent “intercorporeal” relationships users construct with the smartphone. Empirical findings about the often intensely personal usage of the smartphone document this phenomenology. The paper concludes by introducing three provocative implications of new media like the smartphone, which are both indicators and motors of mediatization, as focuses for future study: technogenesis, or the coevolution of people and their information machines; embodied and extended cognition, the intensifying interweaving of mind and thinking machines; and the subjectifying process of individualization, ever more dependent on digital self-creation and self-maintenance.