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  • The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies ed. by Jason Farman
  • Elena Foulis
Jason Farman, ed. The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. New York: Routledge, 2014. 326p.

It is no surprise that, whether we use them or study them, technologies are providing new possibilities of analysis and integration in the classroom. Jason Farman’s edited volume points to the need to carefully examine how social media, mobile phones, tablets, apps, games and even location-based technologies are producing new dialogues and platforms that are at once useful tools of instruction and offer new perspective on the study and production of storytelling. Indeed, the contributors to each chapter offer multiple perspectives on how scholarship and instructional practices work within storytelling and mobile media.

Each chapter of the six parts in this collection starts with a description of how the authors will help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age. Additionally, each chapter includes a list of two to three keywords with definitions that are used throughout the essay. For example, Farman starts his introduction with the definition of the term “creative misuse” to explain the innovative ways scholars, artist, and authors make use of current technology to produce storytelling projects. Technologies found in mobile software were not intended to be used as a place of narrative production, yet they have proven to give voice and to imagine place and history as something that can be both permanent and experiential. Farman contends that the results of these projects often produce a “deeper sense of place and a stronger understanding of our own position within that place” (5).

While each section focuses on a particular area such as design and practice, mapping, games, and others, they all have in common the production of storytelling in different capacities. However, some of the chapters will be more applicable for those interested in specific technologies. For example, the section focused on space and mapping with articles written by Didem Ozkul and David Gauntlett, Lone Koefoed Hansen, and Paula Levine, offer detailed descriptions on the use of GPS tracking and mapping on the analyses of different art, literature works and personal narratives. While each of the authors offers his or her own analysis of the technology he or she uses, instructors can easily adapt activities [End Page 214] that utilize GPS tracking and mapping to study the production of narratives that defy and incorporate time and space. In her article “On Common Ground: Here as There” Levine focuses on the use of empathic narratives and spatial dissonance when she studies web-based projects such as, San Francisco <-> Bagdad, The Gulf Oil Spill, The Berlin Wall, The Wall-The World and Transborder Immigrant Tool and concludes that these location-based and mobile technologies “are constructing new geographies and territories formed through new interconnections and lived experiences of proximity that reshape the daily spaces in which we live” (154).

Other sections call attention to the new formats for writing and reading and producing narratives that do not follow a specific, or traditional, structure and that are often developed across multiple platforms. For instance, in Part II the essay “Dancing with Twitter: Mobile Narratives Become Physical Scores” Susan Kozel, Mia Keinänen, and Leena Rouhiainen give detailed and practical approaches to using Twitter to produce and analyze micro-narratives using a project called Intui Tweet, often used by dancers. When using Intui Tweet, dancers recording their “bodily tweets” produce scores that rely on listening to one another. The practicality and permeability of such projects comes from the way the term “narrative” itself is being questioned, thus giving instructors across several disciplines the opportunity to adapt it to their own class projects.

Of particular interest to me, but also as a section that incorporates many of the themes and technologies described elsewhere, Part VI describes how technology is being used and appropriated as a social justice tool. This last part of The Mobile Story, titled “Memory, History, and Community,” with articles by Alberto S. Galindo, Marc Marino and others, demands that we re-think the notion of memory and history as static and permanent events. The essays in this section describe...

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