Emerging Mobile Internets:  New Communication Politics, Policy & Citizenship. New research on mobile media, mobile health and driverless cars. Presented at IAMCR 2014, Hyderabad, India July 15th-19th. Gerard Goggin, Fiona Martin & John Hutchinson - Moving Media, University of Sydney. Part 1 Locative Media 2 Driverless Cars 3 mhealth

1. Emerging Mobile Internets:
New Communication Politics, Policy
& Citizenship
Gerard Goggin, Fiona Martin & Jonathon Hutchinson
(Sydney)
@Mobileinternetz
http://mobileinternetresearch.net/

2. emergence of mobile tech policy & law
• with flexibility of the cell phone and the emergence of
mobile media, the line between regulating for content
versus carriage is blurring, with profound consequences for
law, policy, and regulation
• alongside the ITU and WTO, cell phone issues have become
policy concerns for other international bodies such as the
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and
organizations involved in Internet governance
• the rise of cell phones has coincided with a new landscape
of policy expectations, framework, and actors.
See: Goggin, Gerard. ‘Mobile Communication Law and Regulation.’ In
International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, ed. Ang
Peng Hwa and Robin Mansell. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.

3. mobile policy actors
• while state-based law and policy have
remained important, independent
telecommunications regulatory agencies are
key players
• because of the lack of alignment still among
broadcast, telecommunications, and Internet
law and policy, many issues in mobile data
services are also dealt with via self- and co-regulatory
bodies.

4. democratic deficit in mobiles policy
• unlike the Internet governance area, where the
multi-stakeholder model has secured widespread,
if precarious support, mobile policy remains an
obscure and inaccessible area — with a stark
democratic deficit in citizen involvement and
public benefit
• e.g. regulation of apps remain under the “bottle-neck”
control of corporations such as software
and computing giants, e.g. Apple and Google.

5. research gap
• cell phones and mobile media are vibrant part of media research, when
it comes to policy there is little research that does justice to its
complexities
• especially on the regional framing & geopolitics of policy; cf. most global
telecommunications policy is based on narrow, neoliberal paradigms (cf.
Goggin, Global Mobile Media 2011)
• add to which mobiles policy out of step with realities of cultures of use
& social functions evident in majority world
• available work largely comes from law, economics, engineering, and
telecommunications policy
• rather than other traditions – e.g. global media and communication
policy, or information policy - which have grappled with restructuring of
telecommunications, and the new challenges of convergent media,
especially the Internet — but not really tackled the policy and legal
issues raised by mobility

6. Moving Media
• Australian Research Council Discovery project Moving Media:
Mobile Internet and New Policy Modes (CIs: Gerard Goggin, Tim
Dwyer, Fiona Martin; researcher: Jonathon Hutchinson) hopes to
theorize contemporary mobile media
• mapping responses of a wide range of international policy
institutions and actors to the range of forms of mobile media &
Internet and the new kinds of governance these are eliciting
• Range of international case studies on: news diversity; locative
media; connected cars; wearable computers (Google Glass); mobile
health applications
• More information on Moving Media blog:
http://mobileinternetresearch.net/latest/

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

8. case 1: smartphones as sensor media

9. University of Illinois's PLATO IV terminal, which used an infrared system
c. 1971 (from F. Ion, ‘From touch displays to the surface: A brief history
of touchscreen technology’, Ars Technica, 5 April, 2013)

12. Ley de Geolocalización
(Mexican Geolocalization Law)
• The Mexican House of Representatives passed the
Geolocalization Law on September 2011, followed by the
Senate on March 2012.
• the Geolocalization Law extended existing provisions to require
telecommunications carriers to make geolocal data, gathered
through cellular mobile devices and networks, available to
agencies — hence the title of the law.
• to target drug dealers, kidnappers, and blackmailers who use
mobile ICTs to carry out illegal activities
See: Gerard Goggin and César Albarrán-Torres. ‘Locative Media, Privacy, and State
Surveillance in Mexico: The Case of the Geolocalization Law.’ In Locative Media,
ed. Rowan Wilken & Gerard Goggin (Routledge, 2014)
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13. Ley de Geolocalización
13

14. Connected Cars, Driverless Vehicles
and Mediated Automobility

15. ICT in Creative Arts, Business
and Science, Mitchell et al. 2003
Invention:
“Manufacturers”
Application:
“Consumers”
Leadbeater, 2008
Innovation Policy
Moment

16. The Australian Policy Push
OECD
Research on Road Transport and Intermodal Linkages (RTR)
Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS)

18. Transforming Personal Mobility
Mobility Internet
Driverless vehicles
Shared vehicles
Specific purpose vehicles
Advanced propulsion systems

22. Mhealth apps,
networked
bio-data
&
the monitorial self

23. Transforming healthcare
• Shifting costs and responsibility from institutions
to care providers and citizens
• Curative to preventative
• Modularised and ‘incentivised’ health care
• From patient to monitorial self
– subject of constant real-time, digital
surveillance
– a self-caring, responsible citizen who acts on
technological health imperatives
– discriminating consumer, digitally literate

24. Mhealth: a media and communications concern
• Sensing, recording, storing,
representing and
communicating bio-data
• Shaping user experience of
mediated environment
• Managing remote
consultations/networked
therapeutic forums
• Communicating public health
information

25. Apple is positioning its Health app as the point of
aggregation for all the user’s different health data, and
Health Kit the development platform to enable that
integration. But critically, indications are that the health
data will for the most part be collected by sensors
(Nike+, Withings Scale, Fitbit Flex etc) of other
wearable manufacturers….
(D.Waite in Shaugnessy, 2014)

26. Hybrid policy framework
contested:
- communications
infrastructure
provision
- comms & content
standards
- data privacy &
access
- speech regulation
- consumer rights
self regulated: therapeutic
and wellbeing
highly regulated:
medical
prescriptive and co-regulatory:
information
privacy
light touch:
telecommunications and
media
innovation/competition
policy: software

27. Tracking the new policy actors on Twitter

28. Social media network analysis (SMNA)
Who are the key influencers in mhealth policy discussions
and why?

29. References
Goggin, Gerard. ‘Mobile Communication Law and Regulation.’ In International
Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, ed. Ang Peng Hwa and Robin Mansell.
Vol. 4, ed. Sandra Braman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
Goggin, Gerard, Tim Dwyer, Fiona Martin. ‘Moveable Media: Mobile Internet & New Policy’
in Creativity, Innovation an Interaction: Public Media Management Fit for the 21st
Century, Michał Głowacki & Lizzie Jackson (eds). Routledge. 2013.
Goggin, Gerard, Fiona Martin, and Tim Dwyer. “Locating the News in the Mobile Worlds of
Audiences,” Journalism Studies. (2014).
Goggin, Gerard. “Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social,” Future
Internet vol. 4, no. 1. p. 306-321. 2012
Goggin, Gerard and César Albarrán-Torres. ‘Locative Media, Privacy, and State Surveillance
in Mexico: The Case of the Geolocalization Law.’ In Locative Media, ed. Wilken & Goggin.
Lupton, Deborah (2012) M-health and health promotion: The digital cyborg and
surveillance society. Social Theory & Health (2012) 10, 229–244
Wilken, Rowan and Gerard Goggin, ed. Locative Media (Routledge, 2014)
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