Mobile Media in Everyday Life

The aim of the course is to enhance your theoretical understanding of key issues concerning the many intersections of digital mobile media and urban life. The course will enhance your theoretical understanding of rapidly changing developments regarding the intensifying use of mobile media and the digitization, datafication and ‘smartification’ of everyday life. You will become familiar with key themes, concepts and approaches in this multidisciplinary field through academic work and policy, industry artistic and civic projects. Each class session you work on developing an original research approach for your individual assignment. You will learn to position yourself academically by developing ways to inquire, analyze and reflect on digital media in relation to everyday life in the city. You will also practice presenting your results in written and oral form according to academic standards. After the Introductory meeting, we explore and investigate how digital media shape our urban lives through weekly thematic angles such as Past, Places, Interfaces, Relations and Cultures.

In a short time-span, mobile media apps and interfaces have become part and parcel of everyday urban life. Think for instance of watching Netflix on the go while traveling, navigating through the city using digital maps, searching for a date based on physical proximity through apps, collectively experiencing outdoor media art projections, or Quantified Self sport and health trackers. Digital mobile media like smart sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), apps and social media dashboards now constitute the very infrastructures, practices, and institutional arrangements on which (urban) life itself is based. Mobile media shape how we live, work, travel, spend leisure time and experience the city, as well as meet others. 

This course is the equivalent for course MCMV17005: Urban Mobile Media: The Myth and Messiness of Connectivity. If you've completed Urban Mobile Media before, you cannot take the course Mobile Media in Everyday Life. 

A maximum of 5 exchange students will be admitted to this course.