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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
Mobile technology forces us to reconsider the legibility of space and how people
rediscover the everyday space, because when the movement of the city and human
mobility - both technologically mediated - cross each other, multiple specialties can be
melted in the threshold of a hypermobility era (Santaella, 2008 apud Da Silva, 2008).
Historically, human societies always faced barriers to communication such as distance
and movement (Geser, 2004). Technological developments in communication
throughout history have focused primarily on solving the problem of distance (Aguado
& Martínez, 2009); the mobile phone had a decisive impact on the problem of motion.
Because of it, it was possible the evolution from a interlocal communication to a trans
communication (Geser, 2004), where connectivity no longer depends on the place, but
on the person, and where accessibility is no longer discontinuous, but continuous.
Thus, the mobile devices have become an indispensable complement to the social
subject.
Lemos (2008) said that in contemporary cybercities there is a close relationship
between mass media functions (such as press, radio and TV) and digital media with
new post-mass functions (Internet and its various tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts,
P2P networks, social networks, and phones with multiple features.) The evolution of
city-communication binomial accompanies the development of communication
technologies.
It’s important to remember that the relationship between journalism and mobility is not
established in recent times. However, its most consistent characteristic, since the
wireless telegraph, is no doubt nowadays because of a set of mobile devices that are
truly significant structure for the news story from a distance. The changes appear not
only from a technical point of view, but from the perspective of practices that redefine
the way we communicate and circulate information in our society.
You can add to this relationship between journalism and mobility new ways to deal with
urban space as far as portability, mobility, ubiquitous and mobile journalism become
factors induced by mobile technologies and geolocation processes.
Such journalistic practices related to these technologies pose new challenges in the
field of communication studies and cyberculture; the appropriation of these tools
provide an increase in the range of possibilities for the analysis of objects constructed
in the vicinity of "mobile network society " (Castells, 2006). This is the space where the
newsgames would be involved.
Lemos (2008) divided mobility into two levels: physical/spacial (transport) and
virtual/informational (media). The newsgames, therefore, will fit in this context named
by Santaella (2008) "culture of mobility" as an advanced variant of cyberculture caused
by mobile technologies characterized by portability and personalization.
Therefore, the newsgames in the context of mobile communication impose a new
dynamic to the journalistic process especially for the impasse between online and
traditional journalism because of the new way in which the contents are produced and
distributed. More to read headlines or updates from moblogs and microblogs, mobile
newsgames would deepen the knowledge on a subject as the individual moves on the
urban space, implying another different degree of involvement with journalistic content.
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