Mobile Media Methods

Mobile media such as smartphones, apps, and social media are an integral part of everyday life, used by billions of people around the world. For students and researchers, mobile media also offer a treasure trove of new concepts, methods, and techniques to do research – representing a new phase in digital methods. Across disciplines, researchers rely upon mobile media for quantitative and qualitative projects, to gather data and document sound and images, engage with participants, and disseminate findings.

This is the first textbook devoted to explaining these innovative and groundbreaking mobile media methods. Exploring the opportunities and limitations mobile media offer for methods, the book covers a range of topics from mobilities and placemaking to virtual reality and AI, as well as new kinds of mobility such as e-scooters and connected cars. Student-friendly features such as practical guidance on how to gather and analyse data alongside exercises are also included. Underscoring the book throughout is the definition of methods as not just a series of tools and techniques, but as an invitation to rethink how to conceptualize, practice, study and theorize the relationship between research, data and the field.

Drawing from the best of mobile and digital communication research, Mobile Media Methods offers a clear, accessible, and practical guide to mobile media methods. It is essential reading and a useful resource for students and scholars of digital technology and research methods. Acknowledgements
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Abbreviations and Acronyms

1. Introduction
2. Methods
3. Placemaking
4. Mobilities
5. Practices
6. Play
7. Data
8. Futures

References
Index "Mobile Media Methods by Larissa Hjorth and Gerard Goggin is a welcome contribution to scholarship on mobile communication. Hjorth and Goggin help us to see how mobile media, and the portable affordances it provides, allow us to examine social processes “in the wild”. They show us how it also provides fine-grained data with which to understand these social dynamics. Hjorth and Goggin are well-positioned to guide us through this new terrain as they outline both its potentials and its ethical challenges."
Richard Ling, Nanyang Technological University

"Mobile Media Methods is an important tool for understanding the potential and use of mobile media in research. As world experts in mobile media, Hjorth and Goggin are uniquely positioned to identify and describe the myriad of ways that mobile media can be used to help us empirically apprehend and investigate the social world."
Lee Humphreys, Cornell University

Larissa Hjorth is Distinguished Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

Gerard Goggin is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.