ABSTRACT
This chapter claims mobile phones as technologies of creative mediation and world-making. Specifically, it explores their aesthetics as an increasingly significant and generative texture of contemporary society among Yolngu Aboriginal families in the Northern Territory of Australia. Arguing that mobile phones enable forms of “connectivity” and sensuous two-way relationships that exceed the reach of the mostly linguistically oriented literature in this field, the chapter shows how mobile phones have become a means by which Yolngu observe, respond, and participate in the global via YouTube and other forms of social media – a vital means by which they simultaneously claim and perform a distinctiveness and commonality.
