This journal represents a step forward in the development of mobile communication studies as a field. This field has been establishing itself through a number of other initiatives as well, including conferences, symposiums, edited books, listservs, and centers for research. Despite this momentum, little attention has been given to defining – and justifying – the field itself. This essay begins by questioning whether there really is, or should be, a distinct field of study for research and theory on mobile media and communication. I then proceed to address this question by highlighting themes in the literature that illustrate how mobile communication is distinct from other forms of mediated communication and information exchange, with correspondingly distinctive social consequences. The essay argues that there are indeed justifiable reasons for treating mobile communication studies as a field. However, like the technology itself, this field is – or at least should be – highly integrated with research and theory of media and communication more broadly.

Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate ‘imagined audiences’ on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of ‘micro-celebrity’ and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

The mobile phone’s global diffusion has generated hope in its ability to enable individuals in developing countries to increase their income and life opportunities. However, numerous socio-cultural factors contribute to the outcomes of technology in diverse contexts. This article uses Alcoff’s (2006) theory of positionality and the notion of socio-techno practices to examine mobile phones and the labor relations of young rural-to-urban migrant women working in the low-level service sector in Beijing. This study argues that the women’s gender, age, class, and rural origin produce particular constraints on their ability to generate higher income and find better jobs. It also reveals that some employers use mobile phones for surveillance of employees, which was not likely before since most migrant women do not have landlines. This article shows that as much as the mobile phone is a liberatory and equalizing technology, it can also reinforce rather than upset patriarchal power relationships.

Through ethnography and interviews, this article examines the social media–based transnational reselling of Western luxury by Chinese women through the lens of gendered transnational prosumption. Linking prosumption to debates on the feminization of labor, it analyzes the paradoxical implications that neoliberal global capitalism's demand for more agentive and participatory prosuming female subjects have for international feminist politics. Disrupting the boundaries between the commercial or public and personal, virtual and physical, and work and consumption, transnational mobile middle-class Chinese women have “reinvented” prosumption as a cultural, technological, and economic solution to the contradictions that inhere in competing demands of different gender regimes. In their hands, prosumption becomes a gendered response to the tensions inherent to China's Post-Socialist modernity, allowing some women more choices, autonomy, flexibility, and mobility through the strategic performance of gendered identities and networks. But such freedom is often already contained by the biopolitical governmentality of both advanced capitalism and the patriarchal Chinese state, which divide women based on class, race, and nationality; render employment precarious and atomized; encourage consumer global citizenship; and foster a self-promotional, commoditized, and “always-on” interactive subjectivity. As such, this article seeks to complicate the current discussion of prosumption by highlighting the structuring imperatives of gender, class, race, and nation.