The place of emplaced visualities: A case study of smartphone visuality and location-based social media in Shanghai, China

Changing ethnographic mediums: the place‐based contingency of smartphones and scratchnotes

“…To draw on Crawford (), our smartphones are participants in dynamically redrawing boundaries around who and what is included and excluded and thus, as well as our embodied presence, we must also recognise the influence of the cultural artefacts associated with the act of research. Indeed, as Hjorth and Gu () argue, smartphones narrate a sense of identity, sociality and place in new ways, shaping how place is experienced and shared co‐presently. I discussed earlier how the sudden flourishing of a notebook can disrupt the very field setting that an ethnographer intends to record, but there are also more political aspects of research to consider, the statements of wealth, privilege, power and culture that we make when producing our voice recorders or smartphones; the smartphone is not a neutral artefact.…”

Disruptive ambient music: Mobile phone music listening as portable urbanism

“…Thus, this engagement with the city through music enacted by these music lovers and their smartphones can be understood as a way of giving a ‘new tonality to the streets’ (Thibaud, 2003) and a kind of atmospheric attunement, that is, an ‘intimate, compositional process of dwelling in spaces’ where ‘things matter not because of how they are represented but because they have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements’ (Stewart, 2011: 445). Playing music loudly with the mobile in public places is an example of ambient intimacy (Hjorth et al, 2012), as personal comfort provided by the phone when being on the move, afforded by the pleasurable experience of listening and of connecting the physical surroundings with the familiar loved sounds and the resonances of previous listening.…”

“…Playing music loud with the mobile in public places is an example of ambient intimacy (Hjorth et al 2012) as personal comfort provided by the phone when being in the move, afforded by the pleasurable experience of listening connecting the physical surroundings with the familiar loved sounds and their previous listening.…”

Mobile games and ambient play

“…And yet, as seen in the case of the LBS Jiepang in China, against the networked destination focus of the gamifi ed Jiepang , respondents use camera phone photo-taking and sharing to emphasize the importance of movement through different localities and temporalities (Hjorth and Gu 2012). The unoffi cial role of camera phone images soon became the main motivation for users, so much so that Jiepang rebranded itself to address this phenomenon.…”