“Defining Mobile Television”

I just received word that my article “Defining Mobile Television: The Social Construction and Deconstruction of New and Old Media” has been published by the journal Popular Communication. The article is a companion to another piece that I shared as a work in progress on the blog, “The 800-Pound Gorillas in the Room: The Mobile Phone and the Future of Television,” which is set to appear in the next few months in Kelly Gates’ edited collection Media Studies Futures. Whereas “The 800-Pound Gorillas” was concerned mainly with the ongoing battles between the telephone and broadcasting industries over the future of television, “Defining Mobile Television” uses the case of mobile television to think about technological change (and convergence) in more theoretical terms. In dialogue with film historian Rick Altman and with scholarship on the social construction of technological systems, I propose the concepts of “social deconstruction” and “disintegration mechanisms” as means of accounting for the mid- and late-life “identity crises” that the mobile phone and television have experienced over the last two decades. I’ve attached a brief excerpt below. For the full article check out Popular Communication vol. 10 no. 4 (2012).