Abstract

This chapter explores the co-construction of media and mobilities, engaging key conceptual issues surrounding their cultural, social and spatial implications. Creating a framework that intersects definitions of mediation with definitions of mobility, we survey scholarship across a broad range of applications, experiences and impacts that mediated mobilities maintain in relation to cultural, social and spatial practices across various spheres of everyday life. Interactions of mobility and media are explored in relation to: how media can create connections among mobile people, actions or things; how media may act as forces on mobile bodies or objects; how mediation is sometimes perceived as distinct from “the immediate” or “the real” in mobile circumstances; and how mobile media may foster new interpretations between subjects and “reality.” At the heart of this intersection are questions of place, and how and whether connective media might, through digital placemaking, facilitate movements to, in and through new environments. Putting geographers and digital media scholars into conversation through these sections points to how shifting tensions such as those between mobility and location, engagement and escape, place and “emplacement,” are foundational to the new subjectivities emerging in an era of mediated mobility.