Logless

New post over in the ever-neglected Clickable World blog of mine, including (gasp!) fiction. You are warned.

New Mobile Media Books

I'm really enjoying two new books just out from Routledge: Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (2012 Routledge) edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson, and Mobile Technology and Place (2012, Routledge), edited by Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin. Too bad they aren't more affordable (hardbacks, library prices; these are library copies). Both are excellent examples of an Australian cottage industry of sorts on mobile media research that Goggin and Hjorth seem central to.

On this latter point, see:
Goggin and Hjorth (eds) Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media (Routledge, 2009).
Hjorth, Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile (Routledge, 2011).
Hjorth, Games and Gaming: An Introduction to New Media (Berg, 2011).
Hjorth and Dean Chan, Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific (Routledge, 2006).
Goggin, Global Mobile Media (Routledge, 2010).
Goggin, Cellphone Culture: Mobile Technology and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2006).
Goggin, New Technologies and the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), which is a wonderful new book on how traditional media (esp. journalism and broadcasting) are changing in the face of emerging technologies and practices of new media.
Goggin and Mark McLelland (eds) Internationalizing Internet Studies (Routledge, 2008).

and others.

Combined with the almost as prolific work of Adriana de Souza e Silva (Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, 2012 with Jordan Frith; Net Locality, 2011, with Eric Gordon; and Digital Cityscapes, 2009 with Daniel Sutko), that's quite a subdiscipline emerging. And add to that Jason Farman's new award winning Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media (Routledge, 2012), and others, we're seeing a significant boom of research on mobility, locality, media, and computing in just a few years. It's hard to keep up with it all.

In any case, I'm looking forward to using both Daniel Palmer's and Chris Chesher's essays from the iPhone book in my semiotics class this Fall.

Tintin + Lovecraft

A couple of years ago, a Scottish artist, Murray Groat (aka Muzki) produced a great series of faux Tintin covers, based on H.P. Lovecraft stories. I just stumbled across these. Given how proprietorial (if that's a word) the Herge folks are, it's not surprising that they cannot be found anymore on Muzki's site, though other resourceful bloggers have posted them. Needless to say, I find these quite amusing and creative.