Departmental Papers (ASC)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
1-1-2013
Publication Source
Mobile Media & Communication
Volume
1
Issue
1
Start Page
153
Last Page
159
DOI
10.1177/2050157912464491
Abstract
A key guarantor of social trust and a necessary feature of democratic societies is a stable sense of social distance. Social distance is the cultural imaginary within which an individual’s coordinates of social status and contingent social location allow or inhibit contact with similarly and dissimilarly located others. The rearrangement of customary social distances by new communication technologies is a source of considerable social anxiety. In mobile communication, this context collapse is instigated by a distinctive combination of affordances: deep connectivity, the accelerated speed and volume of communicative exchange, enhanced social legibility and asymmetric communicative transparency. Robust and effective levels of social trust depend on a political will to build strong democratic accountability and civil rights guarantees into emerging mobile architectures. Identifying specific recalibrations of familiar social distances by regimes of mobile communication and assessing the effects of these recalibrations in democratic terms is a central task of mobile research.
Copyright/Permission Statement
Marvin, C., Your smart phones are hot pockets to us: Context collapse in a mobilized age, Mobile Media & Communication, 1(1), pp. 153-159. [2013]. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications
Keywords
asymmetric transparency, connectivity, context collapse, legibility, mobile communication, social distance, social trust
Recommended Citation
Marvin, C. (2013). Your Smart Phones Are Hot Pockets to Us: Context Collapse in a Mobilized Age. Mobile Media & Communication, 1 (1), 153-159. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157912464491
Date Posted: 22 April 2019