Mobile Mapping

This book argues for a theory of mobile mapping, a situated and spatial approach towards researching how everyday digital mobile media practices are bound up in global systems of knowledge and power. Drawing from literature in media studies and geography -- and the work of Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey -- it examines how geographical and historical material, social, and cultural conditions are embedded in the way in which contemporary (digital) cartographies are read, deployed, and engaged. This is explored through seventeen walking interviews in Hong Kong and Sydney, as potent discourses like cartographic reason continue to transform and weave through the world in ways that haunt mobile mapping and bring old conflicts into new media. In doing so, Mobile Mapping offers an interdisciplinary rethinking about how multiple translations of spatial knowledges between rational digital epistemologies and tacit ways of understanding space and experience might be conceptualized and researched. -This book operates both as a theoretical media text and a literary exploration of experience in the digital age, making it useful for both undergraduate and seasoned researchers studying new media and space. -It keys into a number of different fields including geography, cultural studies and media studies, and other cross-disciplinary work in which the author is involved, allowing accessibility to a wider reading audience than a mono-disciplinary piece. -This monograph is not another dense intellectual analysis - rather, by using stories and ethnographic material it aims to engage a broader and less-scholarly, yet intellectual readership while maintaining academic rigor. Its structure also allows for different reading styles in different parts, allowing readers to dip into the sections which most interest them.