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that mediation implies a more technical aspect of content trajectivity, while mediality also implies
the interaction and co-creation, which may or may not emanate from content circulating among
users and machines.
This is an aspect in the concept of mediality which not necessarily opposes representationality but
rather implies the mobility or circularity of representations between users and machines. 97 In this
view representation still retains its relevance, but its ‗meaning-value‘ is altered inasmuch as it is
understood as inherently in-flux, fragmented, and co-created.
Multimodal Mobile Media Objects (4MOs)
Significantly, this research focuses on the medial externalisation of memory via digital storytelling
as a practice of co-creating and sharing multimodal media objects which are circulated among
users, media, spaces and times. As indicated above, multimodal mobile media object is a digital
representation in which video, image, text, audio are converged to create a narrative, and is then
made publicly available on websites, blogs, audio-video platforms, etc. Here, DS denotes a
process while media object refers to a result of such process.
Characteristically, media objects are characterised by mobility which, as proposed by Lev
Manovich, refers ―not to the movement of individuals and groups or accessing media from mobile
devices, but to something else, which so far has not been theoretically acknowledged: the
movement of media objects between people, devices, and the web.‖ 98 Furthermore, media objects
are characterised by mediality which refers to the relationship (or in-flux engagement) emerging
between users, media objects and objects of representation. This relationship is ‗fed‘ by the
circulation of representations, which, as the go along, are used to co-create meaning (or memory)
through their mediality.
The Connectivity Turn
In this research the idea of digital memories, memorials and storytelling is closely related to the
connectivity turn. 99 From the perspective of the mobility of media objects, the term rests on an
97 See William Straw, ―The Circulatory Turn,‖ in Barbara Crow, Michael Longford, Kim Sawchuk (eds.), The
Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2010.
98 Lev Manovich, Software takes command, draft book, 2008, available from
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html, accessed 8 August 2011.
99 Cf. Andrew Hoskins, ―Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn,‖ Parallax, forthcoming
2011, who uses the ‗connective turn‘ to grasp ―the enveloping of the everyday in real-time or near-instantaneous
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