Mobile media -- from mobile phones to smartphones to netbooks -- are transforming our daily lives. We communicate, we locate, we network, we play, and much more using our mobile devices. In Mobile Interface Theory, Jason Farman demonstrates how the worldwide adoption of mobile technologies is causing a reexamination of the core ideas about what it means to live our everyday lives. He argues that mobile media's pervasive computing model, which allows users to connect and interact with the internet while moving across a wide variety of locations, has produced a new sense of self among users -- a new embodied identity that stems from virtual space and material space regularly enhancing, cooperating or disrupting each other. Exploring a range of mobile media practices -- including mobile maps and GPS technologies, location-aware social networks, urban and alternate reality games that use mobile devices, performance art, and storytelling projects -- Farman illustrates how mobile technologies are changing the ways we produce lived, embodied spaces.

Author Biography

Jason Farman is Director of the Design Cultures & Creativity Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and a faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He is also a Faculty Associate with Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His books include Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World, Foundations of Mobile Media Studies: Essential Texts on the Formation of a Field, The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, and Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. His work has appeared or been cited in The Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, Real Life, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, the BBC, NPR, ABC News, the Associated Press, the Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Sun, the Denver Post, among others.