Mobile Interface Theory: Location-Aware Mobile Devices in Urban Environments

James Carey famously noted how the telegraph’s separation of communication from transportation resulted in a “social nervous system in which signaling was divorced from musculature” (Carey, 2009, p. 215). Mobile devices make this statement increasingly true while pushing back on his assertion that geography has been made irrelevant. The authors of these books posit that mobile interfaces do not simply divide us from our surroundings or distance ourselves from others, but connect us to social networks and physical environments. These devices, particularly more powerful “smart phones,” help individuals to sense, communicate, and play with others. These three books explore how mobile interfaces in the urban environment offer new ways to consider public space, though they also outline the pitfalls of constantly transmitting and receiving one’s location. As multifunctional devices are adopted on a mass scale, mobile interfaces become an increasingly relevant entry point for a host of important issues having to do with mediated communication, including identity, privacy, and cooperation. This is particularly true in non-Western contexts where adoption of cellular phones has outpaced that of desktop computers.