Table Of ContentCREATING
WITH
MOBILE
MEDIA
MARSHA BERRY
Creating with Mobile Media
“Creating with Mobile Media is a book that encapsulates the key paradigms
of creative practice in a mobile world in a thought provoking, academically
grounded and joyful approach to making personal, sharable art. Marsha Berry
brings her deep insight and unique ability to cut through the jargon and situ-
ate creative practice in a context that can be understood by creative practitioners
and theorists from fields including new media, cultural studies, literary studies,
creative writing, screen studies and filmmaking. By sharing and interrogating her
own creative practice via an accessible and deeply considered digital ethnologi-
cal lens, Berry strikes new ground in the theorising of creative practice research
in a mobile world. The smartphone as we all know is a vital part of everyday
life in the 21st-century. Drawing on the image and practice of the wayfarer and
“‘being there” and reflecting on her own mobile art in video, photography and
poetry, Berry’s work stands as a key example of the seamless interrogation of cre-
ative practice in the academy. In Creating with Mobile Media, Berry brings fresh
insight into the importance of the mobile phone as not only a means of commu-
nication but also a way of expressing ourselves, of thinking about and of making
and sharing our art in an ever connected world”.
—Margaret McVeigh, Senior Lecturer and Head of Screenwriting
and Contextual Studies, Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Australia
“Marsha Berry writes on the cusp of anthropological investigation, poesis, and
art praxis. Her writing is a self-aware and honest transaction with her reader. She
does not want to overwhelm us with theoretical muscle but she does want to
encourage us to think and do in ways that set us free from superfluity. She is
a teacher above all and the book displays both insight and care for those who
spend time in her company”.
—Stephanie Donald, Professor of Comparative Film,
University of New South Wales, Australia
“This is a timely and important book in a climate of increased recognition and
valuing of creative practice research in the academy. Written by someone who not
only knows this world, but also does this world, it is a rich, insightful and playful
account of how mobile media are influencing the lives of creative practitioners—and
how creative practices are emerging from mobile media users. A truly wonderful
book for researchers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines, from
anthropology to ethnography, and creative writing to screen production”.
—Craig Batty, Director, Higher Degrees by Research, School of Media
and Communication, RMIT University, Australia
“Marsha Berry’s compelling new book explores the ubiquity of mobile media
and its symbiotic relationship with human everyday practices and sociality. Berry
argues that the networked and hybrid (online/offline) lives we now live provide
new opportunities for extending both our creative practices and social circles, a
digital futurism that is neither dysphoric nor utopian. This book is a powerful
contribution to both creativity and ethnography scholarship, and simply a darned
good read! Go buy it”.
—Anne M. Harris, ARC Future Fellow and Vice Chancellor’s
Senior Research Fellow, RMIT University, Australia
Marsha Berry
Creating
with Mobile Media
Marsha Berry
School of Media and Communication
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Melbourne
VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-65315-0 ISBN 978-3-319-65316-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65316-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950697
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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A
cknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support of the former Design
Research Institute, RMIT University as well as the School of Media and
Communication and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC),
RMIT University. I would also like to offer special thanks to Associate
Professor Margaret Hamilton who worked together with me and pro-
vided valuable insights and knowledge from a computer science and
information systems perspective for numerous mobile media projects.
I would like to thank Stefan Schutt, Peter Wilkin, Benjamin Solah,
Paul Amoz Tan, Marion Piper, Jenny Weight, Lucinda Strahan, Maddy
Morris, Dean Keep and Mel Jepson for their generous participation in
Twitter poetry projects.
I would like to offer special thanks to Professor Jo Tacchi for suggest-
ing me to write a book that would draw together a decade of my creative
practice and ethnographic research into mobile media in the first place,
and also to Professor Heather Horst, Distinguished Professor Larissa
Hjorth and Associate Professor Craig Betty for their generous encour-
agement of this project.
Wholehearted thanks are also due to Glenn Ramirez and Shaun Vigil
and the rest of the support team at Palgrave.
And last but not least, I would like to thank my children (Nicholas
and Natalie) and good friends for listening to me and caring about my
ideas.
v
c
ontents
1 Creative Practice Meets Ethnography 1
2 Playing with Visual Vernaculars 25
3 Performing Selfies with Smartphones 45
4 ‘Being There’ with Smartphone Apps 65
5 Improvising and Collaborating Creatively
with Social Media 87
6 Evoking Narrative Landscapes with Mobile Media 109
7 Making Films and Video Art with Smartphones 131
8 Looking over Mobile Media, Creative Practice
and Ethnography 153
Index 167
vii
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 3.1 Footies as creative vernacular for self-affirmation.
Photo by Marsha Berry 54
Fig. 3.2 Conversation about selfies and footies.
Screenshot by Marsha Berry 55
Fig. 5.1 From Twitter Poetry #conku project.
Photograph and text Marsha Berry 102
ix
i
ntroduction
Imagine there are no smartphones. Imagine your days without access
to social media, family, friends and school or work as you move around
about your daily business. How would you manage your life? Mobile
media is everywhere—literally. An almost symbiotic bond has developed
between our smartphones and ourselves. Think about all the things you
do most days with your smartphone: talking to people, texting, com-
menting on social media posts, taking a selfie, posting photos of reflec-
tions, clouds and sunsets, sharing cat memes and videos, playing games,
reading news articles, sending calendar alerts, responding to emails
and so the list continues. No smartphones would mean we would be
cast adrift from many those we are connected with through networked
technology. Much of what we take for granted would require a special
effort on our part. We’d lose many of the conveniences to which we have
become accustomed. We’d also lose a source of constant entertainment
as well as communication. But this presents a somewhat idealized picture
of our relationship with mobile technology—symbiosis is a relationship
of co-dependency that can have a dark side, after all.
The assemblages of mobile media are double-edged and not with-
out popular controversy. Like many technological advances, they have a
dark side as well providing us with new benefits and conveniences. Media
commentators regularly decry the time we spend being connected, the
anxiety we feel when we are disconnected, the ways in which life has
sped up, the lack of work and life balance and the lack of time we feel
we have to engage with the reasons we work—home and family. On the
xi
xii INTRODUCTION
other hand, we are bombarded with advertising that exploits our fears
of being unconnected and falling behind in a world giddy with techno-
logical consumerism. It is easy to persuade people that life was better in
a “before” where there were no wireless mobile computing and demand-
ing social software such as Facebook and Twitter: when everyday life and
social interactions were not so mediated. Newspapers carry claims that
the pressure to be constantly available and connected causes stress and
actually diminishes the ability to concentrate with some media reports
arguing that mobile media is rewiring our brain (Bea 2013, n.p.). We
are perpetually connected to our phones. Media scholar, Sherry Turkle
(2008) calls them virtual leashes that constrain and control us whereby
“we are tethered to our ‘always on/always on us’ communication devices
and the people and things we reach through them” (2008, 2)—yet there
is evidence that they have also fuelled creativity by providing new outlets
for creative impulses.
The central thematic focus of this book is on how mobile media has
created new opportunities and contexts for creative practitioners. This
notion provides a centre of gravity for this book where I draw together
my own creative practice research with ethnographic projects I have
undertaken. Over the past decade (2006–2017), I have explored how
mobile technologies insinuate themselves into everyday social activities
and rituals to become part of daily routines, and how artists and writ-
ers can use networked technologies to extend both their creative prac-
tices and audience reach. I am interested in how the lines between online
and offline everyday life become blurred through both smartphones and
mobile media.
My methodology dances in the space between creative practice
research and digital ethnography. I have avoided a hard and fast distinc-
tion between online and offline following prominent digital ethnogra-
phers, Hjorth and Pink (2012). What lies between creative practices, and
mobile and social media remains under-theorized and it is my hope that
this volume goes part of the way to address this gap. The creative prac-
tices I explore include improvising, performing and playing with vernac-
ular as well as with poetic forms of creative expression.
My approach to these creative activities and practices is inductive,
intuitive and is influenced by non-representational theory (Ingold 2011)
and ethnography as well as creative practice research paradigms and
debates. Creative practice research has been concerned with theorizing
the actions of making of creative artefacts as research processes in ways
