Mediated Mobilities

Media, Culture & Society2014, Vol. 36(3) 285 –301

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Mediated mobilities

Emily KeightleyLoughborough University, UK

Anna ReadingKing’s College, London, UK

AbstractIn this article we introduce the themed issue ‘Mediated Mobilities’. We begin by articulating some of the potential relationships between media and mobility critically addressing the key conceptual distinctions that underpin them and the methodological demands placed on media studies when exploring the complex ways in which mobility is embedded in contemporary media ecologies. In the first instance we consider precisely what is meant by mobility, and, more specifically, interrogate the dynamic relationship between mediated mobility and immobility. We then move on to develop a methodological framework or agenda for research on mediated mobilities. This framework traces how existing analytical trajectories in media studies research need to be developed and synthesized in order to be able to account for the multiple modes of mobility facilitated by media technologies, texts, institutions and audiences. In the last part of the article we examine the development of innovative methodologies and forms of analysis that give emphasis to movement and trajectory, but also human and algorithmic agency.

Keywordsglobalization, mediated mobility, methodology, multi-modal, multi-scalar, temporality

Mobilizing media studies

This special issue emerged from our growing awareness of the extent to which studies of contemporary media are sensitive to fluidity, transience and change in space and time.

Corresponding author:Emily Keightley, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK. Email: [email protected]

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This concern is becoming embedded in research relating to all points of the circuit of culture, from the analysis of media institutions and media production, to audiences’ reception and participation in mediated communication, not to mention research examin-ing transitions and relationships between points in the circuit. While sensitivity to spatio-temporal movement has coalesced into a distinct analytical perspective in sociological research under the rubric of ‘mobility’, media studies has only recently sought to address how mobility is articulated and realized in and through processes of mediation. While individual studies certainly recognize the fast and flexible movement of media technolo-gies, communicative content and media institutions, and the ways in which media are intertwined with social experiences of mobility such as migration, flexible working and tourism, a broader move to theorize the relationship between media and mobility is absent. The precise ways in which mediated communication and representation are shaped by and implicated in social processes of mobility, and the ways in which the practices and experiences of mobility are mediated has yet to be engaged with fully and explicitly by media scholars. This issue is an attempt to begin mapping this theoretical terrain and to make our own contribution to the development of the concepts and innova-tive methods we use in mediated mobility research that examines the relationships between media and mobility in contemporary culture and social life. This builds on a number of, albeit disparate, previous and current moves to place mobility at the centre of media analyses, including a number of new international funded research projects in this area (see for example, Jeffrey et al., 2013). However, mediated mobility is not to be con-fused with the narrower concept of mediated mobilizations which has emerged from new social movements theory. The latter, such as in Luis E. Hestres’ (2013) recent research on internet mediated advocacy and public mobilization, concerns the particular ways in which political activists and engagements within the public sphere are increasingly being generated through digital media and social networking in particular. Neither do we use mediated mobilities in the same sense as that suggested by Chin et al. (2009), in which they frame the concept purely in terms of the circulation of discourses of identity in new ways through electronic communications. Our view is that the term ‘mediated mobilities’ names the broad emergent cluster of ways in which different kinds of mobilities, includ-ing the mobility of people, the mobility of material artefacts and the mobility of data are themselves experienced and articulated through particular historically situated media ecologies. These ecologies can refer to pre-digital contexts in which various kinds of mobility were mediated through earlier forms and practices as well as digital media ecologies which not only require us to rethink the methodologies we use to analyse mobilities, but also provide new means to do so.

In this article we articulate some of the potential relationships between media and mobility, critically addressing the key conceptual distinctions that underpin them and the methodological demands placed on media studies when exploring the complex ways in which mobility is embedded in contemporary media ecologies. In the first instance we consider precisely what is meant by mobility and, more specifically, interrogate the dynamic relationship between mediated mobility and immobility. We then move on to develop a methodological framework or agenda for research on mediated mobilities. This framework traces how existing analytical trajectories in media studies research need to be developed and synthesized in order to be able to account for the multiple modes of



Keightley and Reading 287

mobility facilitated by media technologies, texts, institutions and audiences. In the last part of the article we examine the development of innovative methodologies and forms of analysis that give emphasis to movement and trajectory, but also human and algorith-mic agency.

From theories of globalization to mobilities

In literature on globalization, mobility has emerged as a defining feature of late modern experience. Globalization research has shown how modernity has seen an unprecedented movement of peoples in the form of economic migration, tourism and displacement. Paul Hopper (2007), for example, has examined the ways in which communication and media forms are now networked globally in ways that are patchy and uneven. He argues that information flows are difficult to ascertain because there is no agreed method for deter-mining particular aspects of cultural globalization such as connectivity (Hopper, 2007). The infrastructure of economic production and capital itself are increasingly mobile as production continually shifts between newly forming free trade zones and digital tech-nology allows international financial transactions take place almost instantaneously. Cultural, mediated and communicative content has become predominantly unmoored from, or at least transformed, in terms of their intimate connections to time and space. The production and circulation of media content is in many cases independent of national borders and digital technology provides new possibilities for images, sounds and text to persist over time and be reused and recontextualized in new historical moments. As Diane Crane (2002) argues, globalization theory has enabled us to account for the move-ments of cultural imperialism, of cultural flows and networks, the different meanings produced by globalized multicultural active audiences, as well as the power and agency over global cultural products through different cultural organizations at city, state and interstate levels. However, while theories of globalization have enabled us to focus on the directionalities of movements and flows, and to some extent the agents of power behind them, what they miss are the differentiated complexities of on-the-ground prac-tices of cultural globalization.

Mobile technologies and mobile subjects mean that our mediated communication and participation is done on the fly and is decreasingly defined by fixed or determined spatial boundaries. From global access to virtual museums to the geo-positioning fea-tures of social networking sites, spatial mobility becomes a defining feature of mediated experience. Thus, theories of globalization have a lot to offer in terms of macro-scale conceptualizations of the international dimensions of media and human relationships in terms of the concentrations and flows of capital and labour. But the idea behind an approach defined through the lens of mediated mobilities as to how information, com-munication and forms of representation travel through time and space is to draw atten-tion to the granular experiences of both mobilities and immobilities. As John Downey suggests in his article in this special issue, the analytic lens of mobility allows us to consider both how and why some cultural content and processes move in particular ways as well as ‘the economic, political and ideological forces that determine [their] relative mobility’. What we suggest here is an approach that draws on the sociological literature on mobility in order to shed light on the particular lived experience of




mediated mobilities, as well as the moments of transition and translation between the micro and macro scales of the processes of mediation of mobilities. It is not that a focus on mediated mobilities requires wholesale theoretical revision, but rather – as Tomlinson (2007: 148–70) argued in relation to globalization theory – for certain phenomena it is necessary to use a different lens that extends particular concepts. The lens of mediated mobility can extend and deepen aspects of the analytical strategies that have emerged from theories of cultural globalization.

As movement in both time and space has become an increasingly central feature of social and cultural life, mobility is used as an explanatory device and analytical frame-work across humanities and social science research. This has been most fully conceptual-ized and applied within the work of the sociologist John Urry. The mobility turn has emerged over the past decade, signalled by its own journal Mobilities Research. First published in 2006, the journal is ‘transcending disciplinary boundaries’ and is putting into question the fundamental ‘territorial’ and ‘sedentary’ precepts of 20th-century social science. A concern in the last few years about how to deal with mobility in methodologi-cal terms is a further signal of its emerging centrality (see for example collections by Büscher et al., 2011; Fincham et al., 2010). What is noticeable about research which locates itself in what we might call a ‘mobilities paradigm’, is that it largely emerges from a concern with social experiences and processes of mobility, and seeks to account in some way for media in those processes: studies therefore tend to emphasize mobility in media use and overlook other modes of mediated mobility such as that pertaining to media institutions, regulation, textual content or technologies themselves. This is where media studies has not yet stepped up to the (moving) plate.

Mobility, even if not always recognized explicitly, is certainly then by implication a key concept in contemporary media research. In political economies of the media and cultural industries the mobility of economic capital, media production and ownership are all critical foci, particularly in relation to the accountability of media institutions and the ways in which they function as and contribute to public spaces of deliberation and debate. Nowhere has this been more pertinent than in the recent phone hacking scandal and sub-sequent Leveson Inquiry, in which mobility is implicated in many ways, including the mobile capital of transnational patterns of ownership, the mobile patterns of transient cultural work, and the ways in which digital technologies allow unprecedented traffic between public and private domains. The mobility of media industries has also been considered in relation to the increasing mobility of symbolic resources. Theories of cul-tural imperialism, globalization and glocalization are all underpinned by an understand-ing of media industries and their output as unevenly mobile. This mobility has far-reaching implications for symbolic plurality, cultural creativity and cultural power. Mobility is also fundamental to the changing nature of media technologies and their integration into everyday life. In the (partial) move from analogue to digital technologies, not only has there been the convergence of communications technologies allowing new modes of social engagement, technologies themselves have become more portable allowing the mediation of experience to occur in new sites and transform these lived spaces.

Nevertheless, these mediated modalities of mobility have to be seen in relation to those elements of media and of social and cultural life more broadly that remain less mobile, or indeed remain territorially fixed and static. As Urry (2007: 19) notes, one




important example of this is the continuing presence of spatially static communications infrastructure such as telephone masts, internet cabling and TV aerials, as well as relative immobility of some media technologies: the workstation, the television, the cinema. For every movement of data via Facebook, Twitter and Google, that data must be stored somewhere and transferred within the euphemistically termed digital ‘cloud’ that in real-ity involves technically fixed ‘server factories’ that have come to dominate once rural areas (Reading, forthcoming). All modes of mobility rely on material, emplaced, stable infrastructures. The environmental and social costs of these infrastructures are much easier to identify and quantify than when we simply look at the mediated mobilities they support and so they have to be drawn in to any political economic analysis of mediated mobility. In this sense specific mediated mobilities need to be conceived of as embedded in existing social, political and economic processes rather than naturally occurring phe-nomenological experiences or processes. They do not occur in a vacuum. They require various kinds of resources and labour. And just as the laws of physics state that any movement requires energy, communicative mobility is also implicated in a political economy of resources that requires the commodification and use of the earth’s material resources, as well as those that are cultural, economic and social.

In addition, there are the on-going immobilities of people themselves. As Tara McPherson notes in an earlier special issue of Vectors of Mobility, despite all the mobili-ties offered by technology, and the mobilities of messages via social and mobile media, the human cost of the Hurricane Katrina disaster reminds us:

The dead in the city of New Orleans were those unable to leave, primarily those without the financial or physical resources to evacuate in advance of the hurricane. They were, in a word, immobile, trapped in the raging waters that consumed the historic city, left behind to die. (2006: 1)

Technologically mediated mobilities have social and cultural ‘imbrications’, with mobil-ity remaining a social and economic phenomenon (McPherson, 2006).

At the same time as requiring resources, mobility can also be harnessed as a resource in itself for other social and economic processes. As Mark Andrejevic argues:

If mobility has, at times, claimed for itself the attributes of a certain kind of freedom … this freedom can be put to work. The conquest of space, in the digital era, refers to the creation of a ubiquitous electromagnetic atmosphere – not merely extension across space, but also a ‘filling-in’ of space, so that wherever one goes, the network can be accessed, information can be retrieved, and feedback generated. Information is generated not simply about the movement of objects, but about the movement of messages, and, recursively, the tracking of the movement of messages. (2013: 521)

While movement in digital networks can be fast paced and non-linear, and mobile tech-nologies allow access to new social experiences on the move, our movements can also be tracked and traced, commodified and packaged, sold and resold. Our movements on the web are traced and the information used in attempts to guide and influence our future movements online. Digital technologies allow for increasing securitization of our move-ment in physical space, not simply across national borders but our transit through other




kinds of space, such as identity cards for accessing schools and our places of employ-ment, to digitally encoded tickets for accessing leisure parks such as Disney World (which now takes biometric information on entry). Mediated mobility does not only imply an increase in free movement in time and space, but also in the ways in which movement across time and space is managed and regulated.

At the same time both mobility and immobility are the subjects of mediated represen-tation. The representation of mobility itself, as in news coverage of migration or the curtailed mobility of recent flood victims in northern India, is developing as a complex synthesis of emergent and shifting spatial frames, with traditional spatial conventions of the bounded nation-state and embedded local identities. Our very understandings of the relationships between mobility and immobility are subject to the frames and discursive strategies employed in the production of communicative content while this content itself is articulated in mobile ways. New user-generated forms of content, such as vernacular images of protest generated using mobile personal media technologies, involve a com-plex interplay of traditional and emerging genre conventions, and their circulation involves a new transience and distributed pattern of diffusion.

While all media technologies, textual content and mediated experience cannot be reduced to a straightforward increase in mobility, neither is the nature of mobility sim-ply about the production of a new spatiality. Rather, considering the dynamics of mobil-ity as a set of relations between spatio-temporal movement and stasis, opens up opportunities to explore the mediated nature of contemporary social, political and eco-nomic processes, and the particular ways in which power and agency are performed and negotiated within them. In this sense, we are advocating the development of a politics of mobility, an analytical lens through which the ways in which spatial and temporal impermanence produces new constellations of socio-political relations. Mapping the ways in which mobility is mediated leaves us with the question of how we go about doing media research that is sensitive to the multiple modalities of mobility articulated in and through media systems, using media technologies in the interpretation of media content. How do we address the research problems that arise from transient, ephemeral communication that is on the move? In the first instance this is primarily a methodologi-cal question, but it is also one that has the potential to take us to the heart of epistemo-logical questions relating to mobility as an analytical frame and conceptual category. It is to these issues that we now turn.

Mobile methods

To begin a discussion of mobile methods it is worth setting out the problematic within the social sciences of an inadequate set of methodological tools for undertaking an analy-sis of mediated mobility. This problematic has become visible as traditional methodo-logical distinctions and approaches have been challenged by new media technologies. For example the boundaries between public and private communication have become more porous in digital contexts. Distinctions between media production and reception are fuzzy and more dialogical, with the rise of user-generated content making the notion of authorship itself notoriously difficult to define. Even the relatively stable distinction between textual content and communicative medium has become less easily framed




under conditions of interactive media platforms and technological convergence. Our very notions of proximity and distance have had to be rethought as the fixed relations between time and space have become less stable. Law and Urry (2004) succinctly set out the consequences of not having a methodological strategy that can overcome problems of conceptual instability that arise in designing research which is sensitive to the mobile. They argue that the social sciences deal poorly:

with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear again the day after tomorrow. They deal poorly with the distributed – that is to be found here and there but not in between – or that which slips and slides between one place and another. They deal poorly with the multiple – that which takes different shapes in different places. They deal poorly with the non-causal, the chaotic, the complex. And such methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional – time-space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual; and the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains which follow the movement and displacement of people, objects, information and ideas. (2004: 403–4)

In relation to the traditional analysis of media and mediated experience, existing research methods usually involve the fixing, isolation and abstraction of their research objects and processes. For example, while content analysis is able to trace changes in the content of communication over time, the necessarily static coding frame imposes limits on the potential recognition of the ways in which media content and the discourses that consti-tute it are increasingly diffuse and in flux. Similarly, such content analysis cannot cope with the advent of transmedia industries and transmedia storytelling, where different elements and versions of what is termed ‘the storyworld’ are distributed across different media and different platforms reaching varied audiences.

When considering practices of media reception, in-depth interviewing can produce detailed descriptions of media use. However, this method disembeds practices of use from their sites and spaces of performance. Because of this it cannot adequately account for the changing meaning of media, or indeed the different kinds of audiences for essen-tially the same product but who access it through different story strands and media. An adult fan of the enduring globalized BBC series Dr Who for example, may not watch the BBC children’s Sarah Jane’s Adventures, whereas their children might watch both, but they would both deem themselves ‘fans’ of Dr Who as the storyworlds are intercon-nected. Furthermore, methodologies that presuppose a distinction between media pro-ducers and consumers inevitably fail to address the fluidity in our media practices in which we have the potential to move (although not seamlessly or evenly) between these two roles, as is seen in the case of the burgeoning of online fan fiction.

In the special section ‘Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Mobilities Research’ in Mobilities, D’Andrea et al. (2011: 149) argue that advancements in the concept of mobilities research have not been matched by innovations in forms of analysis or methodological approaches. In particular they identify that there is a key challenge in thinking through methods that can integrate micro and macro forms of analysis. On the one hand there is a huge body of work examining from different perspectives the global flows of symbolic and economic capital and people, from Giddens (1989) to Cresswell (2006). At the same time there has been the emergence




of work that specifically addresses the complexities of movements in relation to mobilities across multiple intersectional dimensions. Yet methods themselves have remained largely conventional and static (D’Andrea et al., 2011: 151). However, there are a number of notable but discrete innovations in mobilities research included in that issue. Justin Spinney (2011) uses mobile video ethnography as a way of extending the descriptive capabilities and data capture possible by tracing mobilities through the ethnographer him or herself being mobile. His research examines the mobilities of cycling and thus uses mobile video mediations as a method to capture it as a kinaesthetic embodied journey practice (2011: 152). Misha Myers (2011), using the perspective of performance studies to examine mobilities, suggests multi-modal methods that include spontaneous conversations with refugees while on the move. Jo Vergunst (2011) uses old and new technologies in multi-site ethnographic analyses of trekking practices, cultures and policies in north-east Scotland, while at the same time warning that the uses of new technologies, such as GPS, mobile and digital audio and video recorders, seem to distance the researcher from the very sense of movement that they are seeking to research. Michaela Benson (2011) argues that the methodological requirement is not so much the deployment of new technolo-gies to investigate mobilities but rather a case of situating the particular methods of a project within the epistemology of the researcher. She argues that, for example, with middle-class lifestyle migrants, the researcher should not assume that just because a family has moved country mobility is the main defining feature of their life narratives. However, although these explorations of innovative methods are use-ful more broadly, they do not account for the particular mediations of mobility that we are seeking to capture here.

The methodological innovations explored in the various examples collected together by D’Andrea et al. tend to focus on ways of conducting research on physical modes of mobility, albeit in most instances these are mediated in some way. Our concern is that methodological innovation has to occur in research that takes processes and practices of mediation as its research object, whether from the perspective of media systems, textual representations or media reception and use.

There has been a rising awareness of methodological challenges posed by the degra-dation of conceptual distinctions which underpin media research (audience/text; pro-ducer/consumer; public/private) at the same time as the emergence of a flourishing sociological engagement with mobility in social life, yet there has been a surprising lack of attention paid to the specific methodological problems that mobility across traditional conceptual distinctions poses for media and communications research. While existing methods do in many cases capture some elements of mobility identified in previous work, such as change in representation over time or the geographical diffusion of media content, what is not possible from the singular application of existing methods is a sense in which mobility itself is actively produced or articulated across media ecologies as symbolic, communicative and economic systems.

Therefore, perhaps predictably, what we propose here is not one new or existing method that can account fully for the mobility of media and the social experiences it produces. Instead we would like to set out a methodological agenda that we see as a precondition for an analysis through the lens of mediated mobility. We then go on to




explore how this methodological agenda can be manifested through the combination of existing and newly developing research methods in different ways.

A methodological agenda for mediated mobilities

The notion of mediation as a set of social and cultural processes that are intrinsically structured by the dynamic of mobility suggests two key methodological moves to be made in combination in order to produce empirical research sensitive to the mobile nature of media and communication. The first relates to how we deal with media that are constantly on the move and require methods which tread the thin line between media-centrism and forms of social determinism. The second relates to how we deal with move-ment itself and requires methods sensitive to the three key dimensions of mobility: temporality, spatiality and directionality.

The notion of mobility implies fluidity in social relationships to and articulated through media. Our positioning in relation to media is increasingly complex, and we inhabit multiple, shifting positions in a mobile media ecology. Research methods need to recognize the ways in which our experience of media texts and technologies is now, for many us, within a milieu that is immersive and socially connected in ways that eschew traditional separations between audience, text, technology and institution. Shaun Moores (2012) identifies a move away from media-centrism that is necessary to the theorization of mobility. We argue that this is also a methodological imperative as the aim of analys-ing mediated mobility is not simply to describe the ways in which the media are mobile in and of themselves, but to account for the ways in which they contribute to new (and indeed old) experiences of mobility which are central to social and cultural life. We rec-ognize that this suggestion to move away from media-centrism is certainly not new and has been called for from the 1980s onwards, although it has not necessarily been heeded so comprehensively. Mark Deuze’s work on Media Life (2012) is an excellent example of the decentring of media. In articulating the ways in which we live in rather than with media, Deuze (2012) makes it possible to engage with the mediation of mobility as a social experience, such as connectivity, participation and spatio-temporal acceleration. Considering media as an indivisible constituent of social experience forces a methodo-logical focus onto modes of engagement in and through media, with the implication that the integration of ethnographic methods of participation and observation is really the only way in which we can move away from the abstraction and isolation of media from their contexts and practices of use. For example Urry (2009) identifies methods such as participant observation, time-space diaries, and the analysis of blogs and forums as methods that allow this kind of analytical movement. These methods allow us to follow mediated experience across traditional methodologically reinforced boundaries such as those between public and private spaces, temporal domains of past and present, produc-tion and consumption. Mediated communication is seen not as separate from but as inter-twined with practices and the production of meaning in mobile worlds.

However, replacing media-centrism with a diametrically opposed social determinism is equally unhelpful. As Kubitschko and Knapp (2012) note in relation to Mark Deuze’s perspective in Media Life (2012), there is a risk that media become conceived as neutral channels through which social life (in this case mobilities) are performed. Media




institutions, structures, texts and technologies remain manifestly visible and, while media may be irreversibly embedded in social experience, we still perform social action through them, and the material political economy of their im/mobile structures gives shape to our social experiences and action. In seeking to apply a mobilities paradigm in media and communications research we must be alive to the risks of over-emphasizing performativity without a corresponding concern with the structural ways in which mobil-ity is operationalized and structured by media institutions, technologies and content, and how they in turn are structured and regulated. As Bissell (2009) suggests, there is a ten-dency in mobilities research to focus on active social mobilities: acts, gestures, agency. There is relatively little attention paid to how individual and social groups are being acted upon by structural mobilities and immobilities. While he tends to focus on how the experiential dimensions of immobility can be addressed methodologically, this also needs to be considered from a structural perspective.

Among other initiatives in methods for mobilities research this is also overlooked. For example nowhere in Büscher et al.’s (2011) list of 12 mobile methods, spanning partici-patory methods to the analysis of memories, is the analysis of mobile communicative infrastructure mentioned. There are some studies that attend to this embedding of mobil-ity in the institutional structure and practices of communications and associated indus-tries, for example in technology-focused media and communications research Mimi Sheller has examined the role of airports as technologies for the management of borders. However, what is necessary is the development of methods that allow us to work across social experience and mediated communicative structures to keep them in view of one another.

This means devising methodological approaches by combining methods that can account for social im/mobilities and media im/mobilities, and their relationship to one another. In media studies there is always a temptation to cast media as mobile and social experience as static. This places media as the agent, determinant or definer of mobility, and so fixes our methodological attention on media itself. This overlooks the ways in which media can themselves facilitate, place limits upon or regulate social mobility – such as the digital technologies of passport control or the political economy of rolling out fibre optic broadband cable – and elides a recognition that mobility is neither simply a property of media nor of social practice, but is a process which emerges from their inter-relation. Consequently, rethinking the methods that we use is not as easy as simply bolt-ing on a qualitative social method to examine the use of a particular media technology or reception of particular textual content. It involves a bolder methodological move. Research questions have to be formulated to take into account a mobile media ecology in which both social methods and methods which address media characteristics, content and structures will be required. But these methods should not be seen as separate tools addressing separate dimensions of any given research question, but rather they need to be developed and deployed in concert and positioned as continuous with one another: political economic analysis synthesized with observational methods, textual analysis with process-tracing, interviewing with multi-modal methods.

This methodological move away from media-centrism also implies an application of multi-scalar methods (Bisht, 2013) which allows our analytical lens to zoom in and out to take into account the ways in which mediated mobilities are shaped and produced




through the interaction and negotiation between media and experience at different levels, from the individual mobile practices to macro-level structural constraints. As D’Andrea et al. (2011) suggest, this multi-scalar approach is important in order to avoid misleading micro-macro distinctions: as subjects and objects move across spatial, social and cultural settings they are not doing so independently of the political and economic structures that shape subjectivity, locality and mobility, but are actually embodying, recoding and updating a larger material and symbolic regime. The methodological challenge is not to examine how centres of power generate discourses that regulate mobility that may also be appropriated by mobile formations that inadvertently transform power–knowledge relations. Rather, the methodological challenge is to systematically provide analytical guidelines that enable other researchers to examine and compare similar formations (D’Andrea et al., 2011: 158). For example, bringing political economic and ethnographic methods together may allow for an analysis of the ways in which the meanings of mobile media content are produced through the interplay between the embedded everyday sta-bilities and fluidities of media use, and the shifting structural features of the media sys-tem in which it occurs, which makes media content available in particular ways, forms, moments and places.

In relation to the way it deals with spatial and temporal movement, media studies has been criticized over the years for both ahistoricism and spatial centrisms, including Euro-centrism, western-centrism and US-centrism. Significant moves have been made to address these tendencies, both by an historical/mnemonic turn in the social sciences as well as a move towards comparative media analysis. While the historical turn in media studies has attempted to provide longitudinal accounts of transformations and continui-ties in mediated representation and experience, the mnemonic turn has worked towards making sense of the mediation of relations between the temporal tenses in personal life and public culture, analysing how these moves inform and structure social relationships and identities. The adoption of an Einsteinian notion of relational space-time, in which time is internal and specific to the system in which it occurs, rather than a Newtonian sense of clock time as an independent and external measure, is becoming widespread in media and communications research (Keightley, 2012). Rather than the simple compres-sion and speeding up of time proposed by Virilio (2000) and Harvey (2001), mediated mobilities understands the experience of temporalities as multiple and intersecting to include micro, meso and macro articulations of time arising from the combination of the movements of globalization and digitization. These different temporalities interfere with each other as well as then inciting mediated processes of connection and disconnection, embodiment and disembodiment and emplacement and displacement (Reading, 2012).

At the same time, however, it is important to recognize that there has been the emer-gence and consolidation of a comparative media research agenda (Livingstone, 2003). While initially this involved a focus on the nation-state and comparisons using a national frame, more recent comparative media research has resulted in a problematization of national-territorial frames, producing what might be termed ‘transcultural’ analyses of media institutions, content and audiences (see for example Hepp, 2009). Quantitative and qualitative methods have been used to map these media cultures, attending to not just national differences but transnational commonalities and patterns. While comparative media research of this kind has tended to focus on the macro-scale, research that attends




to lived mediated practices and experience has tended to focus on the specificity of a mediated space and place, the multi-layered nature of its mediation, and the particular social affordances embedded within it. Media are, in this sense, conceived as the tools and vehicles by which space and place and the movements between are produced and articulated. For example, in this special issue Yan Yuan has examined how several ‘urban villages’ in China have their own multiple mediated spatialities and temporalities. In studies of this kind mediated mobility tends to be explored from the perspective of social experience and so routinely utilizes social and ethnographic research methods.

However, neither of these temporal or spatial methodological moves are sufficient in isolation – it is the combination of a temporal and spatial sensitivity that will enable a move towards realizing a methodological approach that is sensitive to the multiple temporalities and spatialities of mediated mobilities. Thus John Urry (2007) has sug-gested that mobility needs to be examined in a four-dimensional time-space. New methods adequate to the task have to be both emplaced and entimed in order to be sensitive to the fluidity and transience across both of these domains. This is increas-ingly recognized at a theoretical level. What is less developed in media and communi-cations research is how we apply this methodologically. As we have argued, methodologies sensitive to the ways in which we move between different dimensions of mediated experience are necessary: one approach we propose to this draws on theo-ries of assemblage to capture the ways in which mobilities are polylogical, multidirec-tional and changeable across space-time.

The concept of the assemblage is sometimes misunderstood as simply a collection of pieces that fit together: however the concept that has emerged from Félix Guatarri and Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus conceives of the assemblage as a mass noun involving giving emphasis to processes and actions:

An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously.… There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author) … an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders. (1987: 23)

In terms of forms of analysis, Deleuze and Guatarri then argue that with the assemblage:

We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine. (1987: 4)

Understanding mediated mobility in terms of processes of assemblage allows then for the recognition of the unevenness of globalization and mediation and of the intermesh-ing and intersecting of micro, meso and macro levels at which these operate. Mediated mobilities involve different mobility and media agents at various levels working through different material practices and discursive formations to consolidate or mobi-lize and mediate the medial assemblage. Mediated mobility can be seen in this sense as




interaction between an accumulation of spatially and temporally specific mediated political, economic, social and individual experiences processes.

However, the question remains as to how we analyse the nature of the interaction between the constituents of these accumulations and make sense of the ways in which these accumulations shift and change over space-time. Are mediated mobilities best understood as ‘a little machine’? Where in this is human agency? One concept that addresses human agency in context is the notion of intermediacy. Although developed specifically in relation to the mediation of time, the concept of intermediacy is helpful in accounting for the ways in which mobility is produced through our active navigation between media and between their various modalities (textual, technological, infrastruc-tural) from particular social contexts and perspectives. The notion of intermediacy sug-gests that time is:

produced through the interaction between media and social contexts of consumption, time can be produced through the interaction of multiple media in any given milieu, and … time can be experienced through the negotiation between the various temporal logics of technologies and symbolic content. They [zones of intermediacy] are also always inhabited. They are not simply spatial zones which exist independently or objectively, they are arenas of temporal experience which are brought into being through their performance. The temporal structures and logics of the constituent elements of the zone can be described and analysed, but it is only an analysis of the ways that they are navigated and negotiated that addresses specifically the production of lived, mediated time. (Keightley, 2013: 68)

Where the notion of the assemblage attends to the constituent elements of mediated experience and the dynamics of their layering, intermediacy attends specifically to the creative navigation that occurs within and between these mediated constellations.

The concept of assemblage encourages us to examine mobility as polylogically con-stituted, as operating in various modes and levels, and continually emergent in space and time, while intermediacy encourages attention to the agency involved in navigating these mediated assemblages. In combination they inform a methodological approach which attends to both the connections between constituent elements of mediated experience in time and the ways in which groups and individuals actively navigate these over time. In other words, we require methodologies that do not simply describe movement, they need to account for the trajectories of mediated mobility. Paying attention to trajectories of movement forces us to account for why certain (im)mobilities occur and to what effect? From where/when to where/when has an idea, cultural content, social experience or tech-nology moved? In whose interests has this movement occurred and who or what has shaped this process? This moves us towards an analysis of agency, direction of move-ment, purpose and ultimately power in mobile communication which occurs over time and space. Trajectory in this sense implies attending to both cause and process in order to think about mobility, not simply in terms of free movement, but in terms of intention-ality and unevenness in communicative relationships. These are not linear or even singu-lar relations of power but implicate complex and often imbalanced webs of visibility and recognition, friction and flow, agency and structure.

So how is it possible to develop methods that can achieve this sense of trajectory? While trajectory can be traced as a single or at least coherent direction of travel, the notion




of the assemblage suggests that the conditions in which trajectories are produced and undertaken involve a variety of interpenetrating media and modalities of communication. The causal conditions for mobilities are therefore complex and require methodological strategies that can deal adequately with complex causality. In the first instance dealing with complex causality can be effectively addressed in research design. In the field of political analysis Bennett and Elman note the value of the case study approach in this regard as they allow for the making of ‘inferences on complex events and interactions even when only one or a few cases exist’ (2006: 264). In relation to mediated mobility this allows for the particularity of the interpenetration of different media, their communicative modalities, the social conditions in which they occur, and the agency of those individuals and groups that navigate them. While methods associated with globalization start with broad macro flows of people, media content or infrastructures, a case study approach allows for the complex, competing and sometimes counteracting variables that produce specific kinds of mediated mobilities to be assessed. As Downey and Stanyer (2010) note, methods that are sensitive to complex causal conditions have been slow to develop in media studies, particularly in comparative media studies which adopt quantitative approaches. In their own research they have developed and applied the method of fuzzy set qualitative content analysis which adopts more sensitive calibrations of the properties of discrete cases to explore the complex interplay between variables in any given case while maintaining clear mechanisms for comparison (Downey and Stanyer, 2010).

However, methodologies that attend to complex causality in and between cases are not the sole solution to researching mediated mobility. Noting the difference between two fixed moments in time and place is important, but exploring the detail of how pro-cesses of mobility unfold between these points is also crucial. It is of course impossible to analyse mediated movement in real time. Any attempt to do so always involves a fix-ing or slowing down of the movement itself to explore its character, causes, conditions, contexts and consequences. It is necessary to separate out and deal sequentially with the constituents of mobility that in practice occur simultaneously, with the ways in which individuals and social groups move within and between these assemblages. The social conditions informing these movements interact; they are inseparable in practice but nec-essarily differentiated in the process of analysis.

There is, of course no one single or guaranteed solution to this methodological quan-dary, but there is a variety of strategies that enable empirical research and analysis to be more sensitive to the ways in which movement happens. One cluster of methods for apprehending the complex dynamics of mobility involves following the movements of cultural content, ideas or technologies as they unfold over time and space, that is, pro-cess-tracing. While the method inevitably involves selection and interpretation of the relationship between points in mobile mediated processes, it offers the possibility of developing an analysis which can deal with the interaction of socially, historically and politically embedded conditions and the ways in which these are moved through and negotiated over time and in this sense for agency and structure to be held in view of one another as the basic structures which enable, shape and constrain (im)mobility.

What we wish to add or emphasize in the adoption of methodological approaches such as the case study or process-tracing in research on mediated mobility, is a multi-scalar and multi-modal dimension to these methods. While methodologies such as these




already have the potential to address the complex causes of particular cases of mediated mobility and the ways in which these mobilities unfold over time, in order to explore the meanings as well as the mechanisms of mobility in a media-saturated culture we need to attend to micro experiences of mediated mobility (for example by utilizing those ethno-graphic methods advocated by Urry but potentially incorporating quantitative social research methods such as surveys), as well as macro-contexts (for example by gathering data on and exploring macro-social conditions, institutional and regulatory structures), which facilitate or constrain them. It is entirely possible to examine particular or multiple cases of mobility and the processes they involve from the perspective of one particular social-cultural plane, such as the institutional level or the level of individual experience. But this results either in the reduction of mobility to a set of structural conditions and masks the ways in which mobility is manifested and made meaningful in mediated expe-rience, or it unmoors experiences of mobility from the structural features of the media which inform it. Here again we see the need for a zoom function on our analytic ‘lens’ to account for the ways in which mediated mobility is produced, articulated and experi-enced in the tensions and interrelationships between individual media users, social groups and formations, institutional structures, and macro-economic and political condi-tions. This multi-scalar approach attends to ‘experiential and structural dimensions of mobility, while methodologically demonstrating how they are interlinked’ (D’Andrea et al., 2011: 157).

The other demand specific to mediated mobility is that these approaches also need to be applied in ways which are multi-modal as mobility is produced and shaped by differ-ent co-present modalities of media such as their textual content, technological features or material infrastructure, to changes in modalities such as from the analogue to the digital. This requires the innovative combination and application of methods that analyse not simply textual content or even the diffusion of media messages, but the mobile properties of a given medium or its material infrastructure. It is in the interactions between these modalities that different possibilities for mobility of information, meaning and experi-ence are produced. In addition these modalities and the relations between them are con-tinually changing alongside technological developments over time. While process-tracing is in itself historically sensitive, historical changes in media have occurred in interacting but distinct modes, for example the shrinking of the size of personal media devices is different from the ability to access television content on demand rather than viewing being dictated by programming schedules. While these are distinct elements of changes in media over time, they interact to support specific kinds of mobility that acquire par-ticular social meanings, making attention to multimodality an important methodological element in tracing the processes of mediated mobility and case study examples of it.

Coda

The case we have made in this article is that the lens of mobility needs to be applied to media, not only because media are themselves increasingly textually, technologically and institutionally mobile but also because they are an irreducible constituent of the social experience of mobility itself. While the theoretical case for considering mediated mobility is relatively clear, we still need sustained methodological reflection on how to




make best use of mobility as an analytical lens. The methodological agenda we have mapped out for studies of mediated mobility has returned us to several old and basic but nevertheless periodically resurgent methodological problems faced in media studies: walking the line between media-centrism and social determinism; accounting for both temporal and spatial change; and how to account for and apprehend complex causes in evolving processes. While inevitably there is no one-size-fits-all-research solution, there are particular types of methodological approaches, such as a case study approach and process-tracing, which allow for some of the manifestations of these methodological problems. Within these approaches specific methods ranging from the textual to the his-torical, the social to the document-based need to be deployed in concert in order to address two key features which, in combination, are distinctive to mediated forms of mobility: multimodality and multi-scalarity.

In the subsequent articles there are a number of innovative methodologies presented for analysing the mobility of media and for exploring the kinds of forms, patterns and experiences of mobility that media support or curtail. Anja Kanngieser, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter in ‘What is a research platform?’ provide an account of the question of the mediated mobilities paradigm method in terms of collective modes of research produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strate-gies of investigation. Mirjam Brujim examines mediated mobililties in the context of mobile communications within mobile populations in the African context, particularly on the Cameroon-Nigerian border. Yan Yuan examines the material mobilities of television within a Chinese rural migrant community in an urban village. Justine Humphrey exam-ines changes over time to the imaginary and myths related to mobile working. John Downey in his article explores how ‘mobility’ might be used as a lens to answer questions about the processes involved in the public sphere. In Crosscurrents Justine Lloyd explores the uses of the ‘info van’ in communities in Australia in terms of the confluences of mobil-ity and locality in community-based media practices and Wallace Chuma explores the social meanings of mobile phones among South Africa’s digital generation.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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