Abstract
This chapter introduces a basic perspective of the book, consisting of considering smartphones as infrastructural media technologies, which means to understand the ways in which the use of these devices is imbricated within a multi-layered web of other technologies. In a more evident way compared to previous communication technologies, smartphone uses depend on a set of infrastructures, whose influence is crucial to understand users’ situated practices. After a theoretical introduction to the studying of infrastructures in media studies (what is defined as an infrastructural disposition), the chapter considers five more in-depth, main infrastructural levels that characterise smartphone practices: electricity, signal, data, operation systems, and platforms. Each level is described and exemplified on the basis of qualitative interviews with smartphone users.
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Magaudda, P. (2022). The Smartphone as an Infrastructural Media Technology. In: Young People and the Smartphone . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06311-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06311-4_2
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