ABSTRACT
Perhaps the two most important advances in digital technology in the past two decades have been the ability of people to access the internet through small portable devices and the increasing integration of digital technologies into the physical world. Mobile digital technology has made this complex configuration of spaces even more complex. The communications scholar Adriana de Souza e Silva argues that mobile technologies help to create what she calls hybrid spaces, ‘mobile spaces, created by the constant movement of users who carry portable devices continuously connected to the internet and to other users.’ Perhaps the most dramatic difference between digital mobile technologies and earlier mobile technologies is the affordance they make available for users to filter the kinds of information they get from their digital devices based on their location, and to automatically communicate their location and locate others in physical space.
