Jordan Frith

Locative Mobile Social Networks: Mapping Communication and Location in Urban Spaces

Abstract This study conceptualizes the new spatial logic created by the social use of location aware mobile technologies, analyzing how mobile communities are formed by the mapping of social networks in urban spaces. It explores two main areas with the goal of understanding how locative mobile social networks (LMSNs) challenge the traditional logic of networks. First, it conceptualizes LMSNs by comparing them to (1) traditional transportation and communication networks, and (2) mobile social networks (MSNs). Second, the paper discusses potential social implications of LMSNs, such as privacy, surveillance, and social exclusion.

Splintered Space: Hybrid Spaces and Differential Mobility

Abstract Early theories of the internet imagined that individuals would begin living most of their lives online, decreasing the importance of physical mobility and urban spaces. With the development of internet-enabled mobile phones, these early predictions have been proven false. The internet has not decreased the importance of physical mobility; instead, the digital information of the internet has begun to merge with physical space, leading to new types of hybrid spaces. These hybrid spaces are becoming increasingly common, and they may change the way physical space is negotiated and understood. At this early juncture, however, it is crucial to critically examine the development of hybrid spaces and how they may lead to issues of exclusion and exacerbate issues of access. This essay takes a critical approach to the development of hybrid spaces, arguing that what is often lost in discourses about these new understandings of space are questions of who gets to experience this convergence of the digital and the physical.

Here, I Used to Be: Mobile Media and Practices of Place-Based Digital Memory

This article examines how location-based mobile media technologies are affecting the ways individuals experience the relationship between memory and place. We argue that location-based mobile applications that allow people to check in to places or record their routes represent new practices of place-based digital memory. Many individuals are using mobile media to mobilize place and memory together to create new forms of digital network memory from which they may begin to remember their pasts and to write their histories—a kind of rhetorical and poetic memory making. To help illuminate these practices, we analyze applications such as Foursquare and My Tracks and draw on research in mobilities studies, new media studies, and memory studies to introduce and advance concepts such as personal digital archiving and digital network memory. These practices of place-based digital memory have consequences for understanding the interrelationships between mobility, place, memory, and mobile media.

Wearing the City: Memory P(a)laces, Smartphones, and the Rhetorical Invention of Embodied Space

This article extends research on the production of embodied space by focusing on the relations between place and memory. Beginning with a consideration of how wearable technologies enable new spatial practices within the constructed order of the city, we develop a conceptual framework to understand these spatial practices by returning to the rhetorical art of memory and the building of memory palaces. The art of memory, exemplified by memory palaces, offers a rhetorical resource for understanding how smartphones as wearable technologies may be incorporated—that is, brought into the body, as integral to the production of embodied spatial memories. We argue for the memory-palace builder as an inventive rhetorical (and mobile) figure who not only walks but also wears the city, composing and embedding hybrid memories into and onto hybrid places and, thus, providing a coherent way of being and acting in contemporary urban space.

Social Network Analysis and Professional Practice: Exploring New Methods for Researching Technical Communication

This article provides background on social network analysis, an innovative research paradigm that focuses on the importance of social networks. The article begins by giving background on the development of social network analysis and different methods used by social network analysis researchers. The article then examines how these methods can be used in the field of technical communication by focusing on how technical communicators form social networks and connect diverse audiences.

Communicating behind the scenes: A primer on radio frequency identification (RFID)

Mobile media researchers have increasingly focused on smartphones as locative media. However, our field has not devoted as much attention to another mobile technology used to track far more people and things than smartphones: radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are used to track products and people, and they are an increasingly important part of the infrastructure of the Internet of Things. This article argues that mobile media scholars have much to contribute to scholarly analyses of RFID. I make that argument by first giving background on RFID as a mobile technology. I then identify and discuss four areas of research related to RFID tags—Big Data, surveillance, space and place, and nonhuman agency—that are particularly relevant to mobile media scholars.

The digital “lure”: Small businesses and Pokémon Go

Most of the discussion about Pokémon Go has focused on the end-user and the playful nature of the game. Experts have mentioned the game’s commercialism, but they have done so mostly by talking about the data collection practices of the app developers. This commentary piece takes a different approach by examining how businesses have used Pokémon Go’s “lures” to attract foot traffic. The main goal of the article is to show how the ludic, digital wayfaring of location-based games can be used by individual places to attract players. While the focus is on business owners, I will also address how game mechanics could also be used to encourage prosocial behaviors such as voting (in noncompulsory voting countries).

Big Data, Technical Communication, and the Smart City:

Big data is one of the most hyped buzzwords in both academia and industry. This article makes an early contribution to research on big data by situating data theoretically as a historical object and arguing that much of the discourse about the supposed transparency and objectivity of big data ignores the crucial roles of interpretation and communication. To set forth that analysis, this article engages with recent discussion of big data and “smart” cities to show the communicative practices operating behind the scenes of large data projects and relate those practices to the profession of technical communication.

Developing a Content Strategy Course and Interdisciplinary Skills: A Teaching Case

The content strategy course has gained more interest for inclusion in the technical communication curriculum. However, content strategy combines a range of interdisciplinary skills, and technical communication scholarship has only briefly discussed how best to teach content strategy and whether we should devote a standalone course to the topic. This teaching case describes a content strategy course that combines the necessary content strategy skills students require and demonstrates how future research on course development in this area could further guide the technical communication field.

From hybrid space to dislocated space: Mobile virtual reality and a third stage of mobile media theory

Research in the field of mobile communication studies (MCS) has generally moved away from focusing on how mobile phones distract users from their physical environment to considering how the experience of space and place can be enhanced by locative smartphone applications. This article argues that trajectory may be complicated by the emergence of a new type of mobile technology: mobile virtual reality (MVR). While an increasing number of handsets are specifically developed with MVR in mind, there is little to no research that situates this phenomenon within the continuum of MCS. The intention of this paper is accordingly twofold. First, the article conceptualizes MVR as a connective tissue between the two sequential tropes of MCS: physical distraction and spatial enhancement. Second, the article introduces the concept of ‘dislocated space’ as a way of understanding the embodied space MVR might configure.