SOCIALIZING THE NETWORKED INDIVIDUAL

Abstract

This panel adds the question of emerging and changing socialities to the broader nexus of mobilities and mobile communication studies, using the emerging concept of "mobilie socialities." "Mobile socialities" demarcates a new constellation of media scholarship that seeks to encapsulate human subjectivities of media as they are embedded in human processes, structures and experiences of mobility and sociality. The concept speaks to and critically builds upon notions of ‘networked individualism’ (Rainie & Wellman, 2012), ‘network sociality’ (Wittel 2001) and ‘mediated mobilism’ (Hartmann 2013) to conceptualize productive ways of studying the social lives inherent in digitally mediated structures, subjectivities and practices of mobility. The four ethnographic papers on this panel develop this emerging concept through important topics including migration, experience, temporality, and precarity. In addressing the phenomena of people on the move and the role (or not) of mobile media in everyday instances of mobility and sociality, this panel contributes to a broader understanding of differing types of ‘mobile figures’ in networked times.