By André Lemos & Fabio B. Josgrilberg
It is a great pleasure to present Wi: Journal of Mobile Media’s third issue. What differentiates it from previous issues is its focus on a single country, namely, Brazil. More importantly, with views, cases and theoretical discussions made by Brazilian researchers and artists.
By Eduardo Campos Pellanda
Cell phones are one of the icons of the post-modern age because they represent many possibilities converged in one single device. They connect people, and at the same time, they are used more generally to organize life through textual, audio and video platforms:
“… as soon as the cellphone began hooking into the Internet or offering some of its features—books, newspapers, magazines, live and delayed conversation in text, telephone, videophone, radio, music recordings, photographs, television—the cellphone became a home away from home for communications, a mobile home or pocket hearth, a traveling medium of media.” (Levinson, 2004, p.53).
By André Lemos
Paradoxically, mobility media are localization media. It is interesting to note that locative media, which emphasize places, are furnished by mobility technologies that combine devices (laptops, smart phones, PDA and GPS) and RFID sensors, ensuring connectivity using wireless digital networks (Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, 3G and Bluetooth). Moving is “dis-locating”—but not in the sense of erasing the existing place, rather it opens a possibility for creating a new sense of place through social practices such as urban annotations, location-based games, political mobilization, mapping and geo-tags. If mobility was a problem in the “upload era” (having to leave the workplace or home, and to deal with incompatible equipment and networks in conjunction with a lack of localization services), then today, in the “download era” of locative media, mobility has become an opportunity for appropriating public space (Dourish et al., 2007). Apart from its physical and symbolic characteristics, place gains an informational layer as an electronic database, and it should be thought of in its social, cultural and imaginary, but also informational, dimension.
By Lucas Bambozzi
I’d like to address the term ‘site’ as a field of semantic migrations, as migrations that occur due to cultural dislocations, linguistic operations, technological influences, poetic licenses or theoretical digressions.
We usually share definitions that could be applied to a number of artistic works that are established in dialogue with their surroundings: as in site-related, context-specific, context-related… site-oriented… . These are the ‘places’ of the word, in its range, differences and associated connotations that both imprison and cause reverberations at the same time.
By Gilson Schwartz
Only 2.6% of the Brazilian population has mobile Web browsing habits, compared with 15.6% of the U.S. population; Brazil shows about one-fourth of the intensity of the mobile Web phenomenon that exists in more developed societies. However, mobile phone penetration is quite high, with over 150 million cell phones in service all over the continental extensions of Brazil.
Even Internet access has been on the rise, with Brazilian users playing a substantial part in expressions of digital culture—as in the case of Orkut, which counts 70% of its audience in Brazil—and in a thriving “LAN house” industry. This latter phenomenon is especially prevalent in the peripheries of large Brazilian cities, as well as in every distant village with Internet connectivity—such as Campinápolis, Mato Grosso, which is little more than a former roadside construction barracks and an outpost for neighbouring Xavante Indian tribes.
By Fernanda Bruno
Surveillance and mobility have historically maintained close relations: the demarcation of borders and territorial protections, the control of migration and the flow of people, goods, diseases etc. all represent ancient lineages of the intersections between these two processes (Salter & Zureik, 2005; Foucault, 2007). An initial historical glance seems to show that surveillance practices and techniques usually operate so as to refrain mobility. The relatively static and paralyzing forces of surveillance, with its territorial controls, spatial examination and inspection of the flow of people, goods etc. seems to be opposed to the deterritorializing and relatively unpredictable forces of mobility, which pose a risk to social order (Adey, 2004). However, a careful examination reveals another relationship between surveillance and mobility which does not exclude the previous one, but rather overlaps it.
By Lucia Santaella
In the South American context, especially in Brazil, the main theories adopted by scholars of communication studies for decades have been the critical theories rooted in the Frankfurt School, mainly represented by the works of T. W. Adorno and J. Habermas. With the advent of the new media culture, also called digital or cyberculture, the trends in critical theory took new directions with the works of J. Baudrillard and P. Virilio. Among the new key issues of the critical debate were “the end of real time”, “the collapse of space”, “the agony of the real”, “the disappearance of experience”, “the obsolescence of the body”, “dromocracy”, “immateriality”, and “simulation”.