Wising up : revising mobile media in an age of smartphones

This special issue seeks to unravel some of the social and cultural layers of media that constitute smartphone culture today. It presents various cases which highlight the divergent uptake of smartphones, and in so doing it seeks to provide a set of insightful questions for media and cultural studies inquiry today. Although some of these questions have been initiated by mobile media previously (Goggin and Hjorth 2009), the smartphone amplifies some of the challenges for reconceptualizing media convergence and being ‘online’. This is particularly prevalent in Australia given the relatively high uptake of smartphones in light of the slow roll-out of a fibre-to-the-home National Broadband Network (NBN). Do smartphones reinforce digital divides between rural and urban, young and old users? Or do they signal emergent geo-ethnographies of media practice that take new terrains of difference?