1.
‘Mobile Internet’s
“Creative Destruction”:
Implications for Global Mobile
Policy’
Gerard Goggin, Tim Dwyer, Fiona
Martin, Jonathon Hutchinson
paper for Global Media Policy Working
Group IAMCR, Dublin, 2013

2.
• mobile Internet imbricated in current
economic crisis & reshaping of geo-political &
communication orders
• not just mobiles + Internet, mobile Internet
spans a complex assembly of emergent,
hybrid media forms –– from smartphones,
tablets, and the apps phenomena, through
new televisual ecologies and locative media,
to pervasive computers, connected cars &
smart cities

3.
Life’s better shared

4.
•
•
•
these developments are not well captured in Internet
governance & policy discussions, nor in traditional global
media policy frameworks (whether telcos, broadcasting, or
media diversity)
key challenge we face as citizens, policy-makers, and
researchers, is develop, democratize, and open-up Internet
governance and policy to discussion, deliberation, and
debate by the very large publics now interested in it
e.g. intense world-wide interest among users in intellectual
property and copyright laws is notable here, because new
forms of sharing are core to contemporary mobile and social
media – yet such counter-publics and their user cultures,
visions, and values are not well recognized in media policy

5.
Moving Media
• three-year Australian Research Councilfunded project Moving Media: Mobile Internet
and New Policy Modes
• mapping responses of policy institutions and
actors to the range of forms of mobile
Internet and the new kinds of governance
these are eliciting

6.
mobile Internet
mobile Internet involves convergence between the
broadband Internet and other media technology
along at least three major axes:
1. with mobile telephony and telecommunications;
2. digital television broadcasting;
3. new media ecologies evolving around locative,
spatial/mapping, and sensing technologies
4. communicative mobilities + other kinds of mobilities
(e.g. transportation; automobility)
(1)

7.
figure 1: axes of mobile Internet convergence

8.
case studies
• news on smartphones, tablets, and other
mobile Internet platforms;
• television and mobile Internet technologies;
• health apps;
• locative media;
• mobile Internet in cars.

9.
approach
• analysis of policy documents, observation/engagement with
policy fora, interviews
• Twitter-based analysis of discourses and networks associated
with new areas of mobile Internet, to gain data to map policy
dynamics
• seek to understand specificities of mobile Internet forms,
uses & infrastructures in particular settings – case studies will
draw on research across a range of countries including
Australia, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, UK, US, Mexico,
South Africa and India
• use Global Media Policy database to document, categorize,
analyze and visualize information – and make it available to
other researchers

10.
mapping health apps
• we have archived and mapped #mHealth, #healthapps,
#mobilehealth
• next image represents a conversation of 7963 tweets which is
increasing by approx. 10 000 tweets per week
• experimental, developing methodology
• preliminary finding is that there are1463 communities in this
data set with four lead influencers who are influencing a top
20 other participants/influencers
credit: Jonathon Hutchinson, Fiona Martin

11.
new media forms & actors
from mobile Internet
• some areas such as locative media or health apps
draw on antecedent technologies, & histories & uses;
also social imaginaries such as sharing
• each of the major players in these new areas is
unlikely to interpellated by traditional national or
global media policy
• stances of players varies a great deal, e.g. Google has
been quite engaged in media policy fora (esp. under
banner of Internet freedom), others such as
Facebook and Apple shown some reluctance

12.
mapping the media forms of
mobile Internet
• a necessary starting point is mapping the
particular forms of mobile Internet – in the
case of locative media, for instance, we know
relatively little about how its affordances and
uses, connect to its social imaginaries, and
political and cultural economies;
• then we can begin to map the ways in which
the actors in locative media (& other areas)
attach to global media policy

13.
Source:
http://www.flickr.com/photo
s/mildlydiverting/5065226/

14.
Twitter v. Foursquare
• Twitter not at first thought of as a locative media platform:
‘Twitter developed geotagging capabilities to encourage a
richer user experience and more contextually relevant, finely
granulated data. One of the key means by which Twitter both
encourages location disclosure and accesses this information
is via their subscribers’ use of third party applications
interacting with the Twitter interface’. (Wilken & Goggin,
2013)
• ‘check-in’ application Foursquare has taken different route
from Twitter –keeping its API accessible, to allow partners
such as Instagram to provide location-based data

15.
actors in mobile Internet are increasingly
important part of emergent policy ecology:
‘what used to be multilateral arrangements
amongst state actors, has now turned into a
highly complex landscape, where states and
intergovernmental institutions share the stage
with private corporations, standard setting
entities, civil society organizations, epistemic
and technical communities’ (Raboy and
Padovani, 2010: 15).

16.
for many actors in mobile Internet – such as
Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and apps developers
-- the starting point of global media policy is obverse
to state actors: instead, private corporations, startups, commercial and social entrepreneurs, software
developers, scientists, public health advocates, and
NGOs seek to create a new stage, or theatre of
immanent media, in which states and
intergovernment and supranational organization
media policy lies in the wing, if acknowledged at all.

17.
locative media concerns
• new information ecologies with pervasive of locative media
• raising new issues about privacy, use, disclosure of user location
information, ethics of advertising & marketing
• Internet media entities such as Google and weibo dominate
contemporary media landscapes but are only partially covered by
existing national privacy protections & may be slow/unwilling to
respond to requests to delete data or to address potential breaches
of codes or laws
• media companies are rolling out locative media technologies
commercially on a mass scale without any debate about what rights
citizens and users might have to use these infrastructures or what
their informational ‘commons’ aspects might be – what other kinds
of ‘sharing’ might & should be supported by locative media

18.
health apps
• growth of the mhealth apps industry responds to crisis in
healthcare funding in industrialised countries and looks to shift
costs
• re-orientation of health policy to everyday delivery of healthcare
via media services and products and communications networks
involves has seen a convergence of health, information, comms &
media
• policy concerns include digital citizenship (information literacy, data
protection) and media content regulation (advertising, content
classification, speech laws)
• governments have been reluctant to regulate the developing
industry on an innovation and economic policy basis, leaving largely
US based apps store providers as defacto corporate regulators
Fiona Martin, ‘A Smarter Smartphone?’, IAMCR paper, 2013

19.
conclusion
• Mobile Internet is an important site of contemporary media,
social, and political transformations — in the vanguard of how
our present crises are to be worked through
• we need to understand what mobile Internet actually is, does,
and means as media – as this is by no means straightforward;
& to map and theorize the discourses, actors, and modes by
which different forms of mobile Internet are beginning to
appear in global media policy
• early signs that mobile Internet appears to profoundly expand
the domains and modes of policy-making, the actors involved,
and the processes of public engagement and deliberation.