Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture?

Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability--even its "lickability"--and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 1)
• I Data Archaeologies
• 1 With Eyes, With Hands: The Relocation of Cinema Into the iPhone (p. 19)
• 2 Navigating Screenspace: Toward Performative Cartography (p. 33)
• 3 The iPhone as an Object of Knowledge (p. 49)
• 4 Media Archaeology, Installation Art, and the iPhone Experience (p. 61)
• 5 Hard Candy (p. 73)
• II Politics of Redistribution
• 6 Personal Media in the Digital Economy (p. 91)
• 7 Big Hollywood, Small Screens (p. 104)
• 8 Pushing the (Red) Envelope: Portable Video, Platform Mobility, and Pay-Per-View Culture (p. 124)
• 9 Platforms, Pipelines, and Politics: The iPhone and Regulatory Hangover (p. 140)
• 10 A Walled Garden Turned Into a Rain Forest (p. 155)
• III The App Revolution
• 11 The iPhone Apps: A Digital Culture of Interactivity (p. 171)
• 12 Slingshot to Victory: Games, Play, and the iPhone (p. 184)
• 13 Reading (with) the iPhone (p. 195)
• 14 Ambient News and the Para-iMojo: Journalism in the Age of the iPhone (p. 211)
• 15 Party Apps and Other Citizenship Calls (p. 223)
• 16 The iPhone's Failure: Protests and Resistances (p. 238)
• IV Mobile Lives
• 17 I Phone, I Learn (p. 251)
• 18 EULA, Codec, API: On the Opacity of Digital Culture (p. 265)
• 19 The Back of Our Devices Looks Better than the Front of Anyone Else's: On Apple and Interface Design (p. 278)
• 20 Playing the iPhone (p. 287)
• 21 Mobile Media Life (p. 296)
• V Coda (p. 296)
• 22 The End of Solitude (p. 311)
• Bibliography (p. 317)
• List of Contributors (p. 329)
• Index (p. 333)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Much has been made of Steve Jobs's still-heralded iPhone. Edited by Snickars (head of research, Swedish National Lib.) and Vonderau (media studies, Ruhr Univ., Germany), who also coedited The YouTube Reader, this book is not quite a paean to the-little-black-smartphone-that-could, but its 22 essays do spend a lot of time analyzing the device's high points and its contributions to global culture. The authors present the iPhone as artwork (created by "artists" and also a platform to create art); near human; and a tool to encourage good citizenship and civic responsibility. There is less on the specifics of how the iPhone uses data and more about what the device makes possible in general, though a chapter titled "The iPhone's Failure: Protests and Resistance" raises critical questions about Apple's proprietary control over essentially all communication and content used under its umbrella. VERDICT This book addresses some interesting though esoteric concepts relating to digital culture. Most applicable in a philosophy or mass communications course.-Stacie Williams, Harvard Medical Sch. Lib., Boston (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This reviewer has slogged through many cryptic books on the social impact of living in a wireless world. But with Moving Data, he finds himself reading through each of the 22 short, concise essays two to three times--not because he is trying to part the miasma, but because he is trying to squeeze out every last little nuance. The well-written essays in this wonderful little book range from insightful to downright fun, looking at the iPhone (and the iPhone as a metaphor for the wireless world) from a well-grounded media studies perspective. Each essay succeeds, more or less, in being about exactly one thing, whether that thing is how Steve Jobs was like Willy Wonka or how news has become less an information service and more a real-time ambient, and participatory, field. The book is a great source from which to branch off into discussion or exploration, or for inspiration to just plain sit and think. The material is not necessarily easy and assumes some basic knowledge of the field, but it is a very worthwhile work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. P. L. Kantor formerly, Southern Vermont College