The Story Of Mobile

What happens when stories meet mobile media? In this cutting-edge collection, contributors explore digital storytelling in ways that look beyond the desktop to consider how stories can be told through mobile, locative, and pervasive technologies. This book offers dynamic insights about the new nature of narrative in the age of mobile media, studying digital stories that are site-specific, context-aware, and involve the reader in fascinating ways. Addressing important topics for scholars, students, and designers alike, this collection investigates the crucial questions for this emerging area of storytelling and electronic literature. Topics covered include the histories of site-specific narratives, issues in design and practice, space and mapping, mobile games, narrative interfaces, and the interplay between memory, history, and community.

With the rise of smartphones and the proliferation of applications, the ways everyday media users and creative professionals represent, experience, and share the everyday is changing. This collection reflects on emergent creative practices and digital ethnographies of new socialities associated with smartphone cameras in everyday life.

Although the Internet takes us everywhere in cyberspace, it usually requires us to be seated behind a desk. In contrast, the cellphone lets us walk through the world, fully connected. Cellphone explores the history of mobility in media--from books to cameras to transistor radios to laptops--and examines the unique impact of a device that sits in a pocket or palm, and lets us converse by voice or text. The restricting and liberating edge of accessibility transforms restaurants, public transport, automobiles, romance, literacy, parent-child relationships, war, and indeed all walks of life, trivial and profound. Like an organic cell that moves, evolves, combines with other cells, and generates, the cellphone has become a complex sparkplug of human life.

Millions of people do not read for one reason: they do not have access to text. But mobile phones and cellular networks are transforming a scarce resource into an abundant one. Drawing on the analysis of over 4,000 surveys collected in seven developing countries and corresponding qualitative interviews, this report paints a detailed picture of who reads books and stories on mobile devices and why. The findings illuminate, for the first time, the habits, beliefs and profiles of mobile readers in developing countries. This information points to strategies to expand mobile reading and, by extension, the educational and socio-economic benefits associated with increased reading. Mobile technology can advance literacy and learning in underserved communities around the world. This report shows how.

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

Mobile phones are a ubiquitous technology with a fascinating history. There are now as many mobile phones in the world as there are people. We carry them around with us wherever we go. And while we used to just speak into them, now mobiles are used to do all kinds of tasks, from talking to twittering, from playing a game to paying a bill. Jon Agar takes the mobile to pieces, tracing what makes it work, and puts it together again, showing how it was shaped in different national contexts in the United States, Europe, the Far East and Africa. He tells the story from the early associations with cars and the privileged, through its immense popular success, to the rise of the smartphone. Few scientific revolutions affect us in such a day-to-day way as the development of the mobile phone. Jon Agar's deft history explains exactly how this revolution has come about - and where it may lead in the future.

Africa and especially Sub-Saharan Africa has during the past decade witnessed one of the fastest growing markets in mobile communication. This growth is recognized to have played a pivotal role in Africa’s socio-economic development. It has had a huge impact on residential living patterns; on business networks and models; and on government services and income sources. The mobile industry has contributed more to economic growth than in any other comparable region globally introducing innovative, broadly used applications. Technical topics discussed in the book include:• Mobile Development in Sub-Saharan Africa;• Telecom Liberalization in Africa;• Role of Mobile in Socio-economic Development;• Mobile Applications in specific sectors;• Security in African Mobile;• Role of Prepaid in Africa