Mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities: Shaping alternative consumer cultures in mobile media communication

Abstract

This study aims to update notions of how the practical elements of mobile communication (i.e., microcoordination and synchronization) alter the interconnectedness between places and mobilities. Based on ethnographic research on personal shoppers’ mobile purchasing practices between mainland China and Hong Kong (HK), this article argues that mobile communication, as a social practice, extends relational places in cross-border shopping, on the one hand, and transforms the performances of mobilities that are used to anchor the spatial identities of shoppers and localities for consumption, on the other. Shoppers’ mobile communication practices create variable interactions between mobilities and places, manifested as mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities. The consumer cultures of HK personal shopping are anchored by the multiplicity of places and shifting mobilities of people, data, and objects. Mobile communication in/of HK is a medium through which people from the mainland can consume the symbolic space and “localness” of HK, embodying the “spatial selves” of personal shoppers through digital expressions of mobilities. Shoppers produce place-inscribed communicative mobilities of themselves and of commodities in HK through differing synchronization and coordination patterns in two places (Tsim Sha Tsui and Sheung Shui), based on the fact that the former is an international and local-brand tourist center and the latter has risen as a new “parallel trading hub” for cross-border consumption.

Digital borders in spatial-temporal mobility: Social inclusion and exclusion of Chinese migrant students in Macao

“…Smartphone and mobile social media use seems to reinvigorate the multiple forms of different inclusion and exclusion, as it blurs the boundaries of “us” and “them” and promises to blur online/offline boundaries of social interactions (Bolander & Locher, 2020; Lim & Pham, 2016; Stewart & Gachago, 2016). However, even if with the aid of mobile social media (Wei et al, 2018; Xie, 2021), the borders as “complex social institutions” are never being crossed and lead only to digital and social inclusion (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 3). Internal borders, such as social and cultural boundaries, will be never-ending but “even a lifetime offers insufficient time to complete” (Hurd et al, 2017, p. 13).…”

“…Recent research on mobile media and migration has captured the affordances of smartphones, mobile technologies, and mobile social media that provide migrants with homogenous space-time mobilities (e.g., Georgiou & Leurs, 2022; Järv et al, 2022; Xie, 2021), but little attention has been paid to the complicated spatial-temporal mobility landscape (re)constituted by mobile social media. On the one hand, mobile use of social media supplements migrants’ physical mobility based on its portability, locatability, and multimediality (Ling & Campbell, 2009; Marvin, 2013; Schrock, 2015), as smartphones are easy to carry and allow migrants to “virtually engage with physical environments through GPS tracking and can be used synchronously with other activities and applications” (Kuru et al, 2017, p. 104).…”

“…Over the past two decades, smartphone and mobile social media platforms have profoundly changed migrants' cross-border experiences, including their ways of mobility in space and time, and their practices of digital/social inclusion and exclusion (e.g., Chang & Gomes, 2020;Ling & Campbell, 2009;Xie, 2021). Mobile social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are accessed through mobile devices and connect migrants with other people to share messages, photos, and information that accelerate interactivity and broaden potential audiences (Humphreys, 2013;Wei et al, 2018).…”

Utilization of Big Data Analysis Through Public Video, Virus Data Cooperation, and Social Media as the Surveillance to COVID-19 in Indonesia

“…Media and communication studies have demonstrated remarkable agility for methodological innovation in the past, not least because the inflexibility of institutionalization into competing camps is less pronounced here than elsewhere in the social sciences (Helles Achmad Maulana Sirojjudin: Utilization of Big Data Analysis Through Public Video, Virus Data Cooperation, and Social Media as the Surveillance to COVID-19 in Indonesia & Ørmen, 2020;Xie, 2021). Recognizing the potential of Big Data to support many kinds of explanations, perhaps it could repeat that success.…”

“Creepypasta”: Images Of Waiting For Death And Danger In The Online Space

“…However, it would not be quite right to consider the images of death and danger that arise in the Internet space only from the point of view of their digital nature, since most of them, united by the general term "creepypasta", show similar signs with folklore narratives and myths. The peculiarity of broadcasting images of waiting for death and danger in the Internet space (Xie, 2020) is the inability to maintain linear subject-object relations with this image. "Creepypasta", as a special kind of narrative and a set of "terrible images and codes" in the Internet space, has a kind of compulsive force that forces a person to lose the usual position of the subject, depriving him of the ability to identify narratives and other people as objects.…”