To browse Academia. Her thesis explores answers to questions like: How did the production and consumption of private colloquial mobile images, as a visual phenomenon, develop from being a practice among a few individuals to being a widespread global habit?
With an increase in use of mobile images in everyday life, how have its socio-cultural and visual effects been perceived? In what places has this happened? The first and second chapters are a study of the cameraphone and its amateur use in early years, and the legitimation and value given to this early creation by artistic and media cultural gatekeepers. This is done through an ethnographic analysis of the Pocket Films Festival, and a global journalistic timeline of cameraphone images and the mediatization of them to create hard news.
She also looks at the times during and after the smartphone mass penetration of the market and the use of its images. The fourth and last chapter is an a posteriori autoethnography of her own practices. Are we finally experiencing what Alexandre Astruc dreamt of: the fact that everyone would be able to use a camera pen?
What transpired once this practice became adopted into the mainstream? The types of communicating vessel systems that form public and private "spheres" constitute a multifaceted, complex system that is connected to an almost intractable range of issues. The fact is that the facets of mobile technology β ubiquity, multimediality, multidirectionality β form a new context in which trends to renegotiate, defend, adapt or challenge notions of public and private are developed by individuals in their everyday lives and by social institutions through their rules and goals.
This book, which brings together presentations from the conference "Public and Private in Mobile Communications", held in March at Beira Interior University, Portugal, particularly favors discussions on the uses that individuals make of mobile devices in their everyday practices. However, as a background issue, it also includes the sometimes implicit approach about the transformations that connect new technologies to certain cultural practices, forms of interaction and political uses.
