ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to open up the black box of power supply, bringing this invisible and mundane aspect of mobile media and smartphone use to the forefront at a time when recharging has become a public issue as resources and their ecological consequences have generally become more widely discussed issue. This is in line with the move to a ‘materialist, non-media-centric media studies’ (Morley, 2009) and the call to study infrastructures as ‘much more than the cords, wires and material objects … [but also consider] the sociopolitical dimensions of infrastructure and the experience of infrastructures’ (Horst, 2013). A literature overview concerning both supply and use will structure the research field into a more coherent whole, identifying the research needs on the one hand, and the particular contribution an approach such as communication and media studies can deliver on the other hand. Selected examples are used to locate the theoretical debates to build on the new concept of the circuits of infrastructuring.
