Andrew Herman - Theories of the Mobile Internet: Materialities and Imaginaries

This book takes up the theoretical and conceptual challenge that Ito positedbut did not elaborateby proposing an approach that focuses on how the mobile Internet shapes and is shaped by the emergence of what Mimi Sheller and John Urry term the new mobilities paradigm (2007, emphasis added). This paradigm emphasizes multiple and linked registers of mobility which include (but are not limited to) the physical movement of travel and migration, the symbolic movement of mediated communication and the circulation of cultures, and the virtual movement in and through digitized spaces (Urry 2007; Elliott and Urry 2010, Cresswell 2010). All three registers, Sheller and Urry argue, converge in the practices of mobile telephony which enable the capacity of interacting and communicating on the move, of being in a sense present while apparently absent within the same spatio-temporal coordinates (2007, 207). Accordingly, this volume seeks to address two apposite issues: First, how do mobile communications and the mobile Internet create zones of connectivity that are fluid, transportable, and meaningful? Second, what are the structures of immobility (i.e., server farms, wireless towers, Wi-Fi hotspots, fiber optics of Internet backbones, and so on) that also serve to constitute the mobile Internet?

To address these questions, authors in this book construct the subject of the mobile Internet as an assemblage of multidimensional socio-technical practices in which the materialities and imaginaries of manifold technologies of mobile communications converge. At its most abstract level in terms of social theory, assemblage thinking allows us to foreground ongoing processes of composition across and through different human and non-human actants, a perspective that is absolutely crucial to understanding the mobile Internet as a contingent totality (Anderson et al. 2012, 172). Digital gaming scholar T. L. Taylor describes the concept of the assemblagederived from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari (1987)as an alternative heuristic for understanding complex socio-technical systems: the notion of assemblage is one way to help us understand the range of actors (system, technologies, player, body, community, company, legal structures, etc.), concepts, practices, and relations (Taylor 2009, 332). Taylor is noting here the heterogeneity of the assemblage as a network of imaginary and material elements, elements that are not randomly connected but are structured with a particular vector of force and effectivity in time and space. Jennifer Slack and the author of a final chapter in this volume, Macgregor Wise (2005), render this heuristic more nuanced by distinguishing between articulation and assemblage. A socio-technological articulation refers to how an elemental ensemble of objects, social practices, symbolic representations, experiences and affects are drawn together in a specific and contingent unity. An assemblage is a socio-technical articulation that is, to use a Deleuzian metaphor, constellated into a particular dynamic form that envelops and gives form to spatio-temporal territorities (Slack and Wise 2005, 128).

From our perspective, the concept of assemblages is as important methodologically as it is ontologically. John Law, in After Method , emphasizes the ad hoc and active meaning of the concept. An assemblage is not a fixed arrangement or state of affairs, but rather an open-ended, uncertain and hesitant process (2004, 41). Assemblages are both objects and activities. The mobile Internet is neither one nor the other, but rather the event of their reciprocal configuration (Taylor 2009, 332). The notion of the assemblage makes understanding the mobile Internet in situ whether that situation be physical, symbolic or virtualpossible. The materialities and imaginaries of the mobile Internet are fluid and dynamic, and thus their apprehension and analysis must be likewise methodologically open-ended and plural.