Discourses on Mobility and Technological Mediation. The Texture of Ubiquitous Interaction

Mobility is more and more mediated, supported and transformed by technological artefacts and infrastructures. Especially technologies labelled as mobile, pervasive, ubiquitous or nomadic, show an interesting shift in the shaping of sociotechnical environments and mediated interaction. Starting from some recent contributions on mobile and ubiquitous computing, the paper attempts to draw connections between discourses and practices related to the technological mediation of mobility. The assumption is that discourses circulating in different public arenas shape core meanings attributed to technologies, beliefs about them and also directions of development for technological artefacts. The discursive practices examined concern mobility-centred theories of globalization (academic discourse), the relationship between the media and mobility (mass-media discourse), and the designers’ discourse, drawn from three settings of design and development in mobile/ubiquitous computing. As a result, the concept of ubiquitous interaction is presented as emergent pattern of mobile communication and theoretical framework to propose questions for future research, considering how mobility and its opposite (immobility) can bring the emergence of mobile techno-elites entitled to travel both physically and virtually.