Moving Data

Less than two years after its 2007 release, the iPhone revolutionized not only how people communicate with each other and the world, but also how they consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, the iPhone and other smart phones have redefined as well as expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture?

Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability—especially its "lickability"—and its "biographical" story. Contributors provide ethnographic studies illuminating patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the app store and its perceived "crisis of choice;" and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and routines of sharing, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining traditional notions of media usage and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled with changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspective and argument, this collection reorients the practice and study of media critique.

Pelle Snickars is head of research at the National Library of Sweden and coeditor, with Patrick Vonderau, of The YouTube Reader. He is a media scholar and the author of several books on media and media history, from digital photography and filesharing to amateur film and lantern slides. His work can be found at www.pellesnickars.se/.

Patrick Vonderau is associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including the history of film marketing and distribution, industrial film, and YouTube. He is also a cofounder and board member of NECSEuropean Network for Cinema and Media Studies (http://www.necs-initiative.org/).

Table of Contents:

Introduction, by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau

Data Archaeologies

1. With Eyes, With Hands: The Relocation of Cinema Into the iPhone, by Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro

2. Navigating Screenspace: Toward Performative Cartography, by Nanna Verhoeff

3. The iPhone as an Object of Knowledge, by Alexandra Schneider

4. Media Archaeology, Installation Art, and the iPhone Experience, by Jennifer Steetskamp

5. Hard Candy, by Kristopher L. Cannon and Jennifer M. Barker

Politics of Redistribution

6. Personal Media in the Digital Economy, by Göran Bolin

7. Big Hollywood, Small Screens, by Alisa Perren and Karen Petruska

8. Pushing the (Red) Envelope: Portable Video, Platform Mobility, and Pay-Per-View Culture, by Chuck Tryon

9. Platforms, Pipelines, and Politics: The iPhone and Regulatory Hangover, by Jennifer Holt

10. A Walled Garden Turned Into a Rain Forest, by Pelle Snickars

The App Revolution

11. iPhone Apps: A Digital Culture of Interactivity, by Barbara Flueckiger

12. Slingshot to Victory: Games, Play, and the iPhone, by Mia Consalvo

13. Reading (with) the iPhone, by Gerard Goggin

14. Ambient News and the Para-iMojo: Journalism in the Age of the iPhone, by Janey Gordon

15. Party Apps and Other Citizenship Calls, by Anu Koivunen

16. The iPhone's Failure: Protests and Resistances, by Oliver Leistert

Mobile Lives

17. I, Phone-I, Learn, by Anne Balsamo

18. EULA, Codec, API: The Opacity of Digital Culture, by Lane DeNicola

19. "The Back of Our Devices Looks Better than the Front of Anyone Else's": On Apple and Interface Design, by Lev Manovich

20. Playing the iPhone, by Frauke Behrendt

21. Mobile Media Life, by Mark Deuze and The Janissary Collective

Coda

22. The End of Solitude, by Dalton Conley

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index