Julia M. Hildebrand

Roughly ten years ago, a new "mobile medium" entered the public discourse: the consumer drone. Since then, the technology has entered private, public and commercial spaces beyond its military ties. Yet questions remain about how consumer drones impact users, reconfigure adjacent technologies such as the smartphone and influence contemporary visual culture along with emerging socio-technical environments such as the internet of things. To explore these questions, I draw on data from ethnographic and auto-technographic fieldwork, semi-structured user interviews and ongoing socio-cultural trends and developments. The chapter's goal is to further unpack such human-machine entanglements in civilian drone contexts. Moreover, research into them can open up provocative intellectual avenues for mobile media and the future of mediated communication more generally.

The practical and visual experiences with “tourist drones” are at the center of this chapter. How does leading drone manufacturer DJI imagine drone use in tourist, travel, and adventure spaces? How do those visions compare to the realities of the creative practice? Finally, what kinds of views of the world does the tourist drone open up? I respond to these questions by critically analyzing DJI’s Avata commercial, which showcases first-person-view (FPV) drone use in tourist, travel, and adventure contexts. In particular, I discuss how the strategic “just plug and fly” narratives minimize necessary preparations and skills in favor of an idealized depiction of tourist drone use in seductive locations. At the same time, the advertisement provides valuable insights into contemporary tourist drone views and how they expand the framework of the tourist gaze. Similar to how places became “kodakized” with handheld cameras, places now become “dronisized” in the vertical and horizontal exploration by flying camera. “Seeing the world as a picture” transforms into “seeing the world as a parkour” in FPV drone videography. The chapter concludes with considerations for future research as well as the future of tourist drone use.

“The medium is the message” argues media scholar Marshall McLuhan. This famous aphorism can help us make sense of the contemporary workings of social media. One of his students and equally noteworthy media theorist Neil Postman built on this approach and offered five things we should know about technological change more generally. In this textbook chapter, I apply his five ideas to the context of social media to unpack the socio-cultural effects of advertising-based social networking sites. What can we learn from this approach and how do we move forward?

The camera drone opens up new aerial ways of seeing, moving and relating. I concentrate on the example of drone-logs, the juxtaposing of sky video with ground audio, as an innovative – technographic – approach for video ethnography and elicitation. As a hybrid of multiple technologies and techniques, drone-logs can sharpen the focus on fleeting, slippery, sensory and kinaesthetic motions, notions and emotions. Ultimately, I argue for the value of auto-drone-technography as an analytical approach for researchers to consider their own affective mobilities within the research process and acknowledge their respective relational emplacements from distanced and detached multi-directional perspectives.

Several noteworthy artworks are starting to critically and creatively engage with LIDAR technology. One example is Where the City Can’t See from 2016, said to be the first fiction film shot entirely with the LIDAR laser scanning technology. Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by author and journalist Tim Maughan, the short film depicts life within the near-future Chinese-controlled Detroit Economic Zone. We follow this narrative through the machinic LIDAR gaze, a three-dimensional aesthetic point cloud play of colors, shapes, dimensions, and movements infused with glitches, deflections, and disruptions. The film plays with not only the top-down logics and aesthetics of LIDAR mediality through its visual effects and story line, but also the creative bottom-up means of countering them within the film narrative, as well as in the film-maker’s own hacks of LIDAR cameras. In this chapter, we critically explore Where the City Can’t See as an artistic “anti-environment” that illuminates LIDAR technology not only as an emerging mobile media infrastructure but also a new visual aesthetic and cultural medium. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from mobile communication, media ecology, and mobilities research, we discuss how this LIDAR artwork both situates and unsettles such an emerging media environment. In doing so, our analysis also speaks to scholarship into contemporary and emerging mobile communication and mobile media art.

Mobility, sociality, and culture undergo novel configurations when the smartphone becomes as essential to the journey as the passport. At the same time, the necessary communication infrastructures and networks across the globe are improving and expanding, allowing people to connect and stay connected, but also making it harder and harder to disconnect. As a result, travelers do not have to sign out when setting out to explore the unfamiliar. Independent from travel, researchers have pointed to an “erosion of the online/off-line distinction”[1] caused by continuous engagement with and easy access to mobile devices and the Internet. What, then, does this blurring of the boundaries between online and offline mean for travel? Moreover, some argue that “new media are N(YOU) media; new media are a function of YOU.”[2] In other words, social media are ego-centric devices that revolve around and cater to the user. This understanding of “N(YOU) media” raises questions about how the continuous occupation with the self enhances or inhibits encounters with other people, places, and practices while on the move. In this interplay of people, devices, and data, what is lost and what is gained?

[1] Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction, (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015), 15.

[2] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 3.

We live in a 24/7, online, omnipresent, global network of media environments. Screens and more screens, thousands of satellites surround the planet, millions of miles of fiber optics in the metropolises, computers, TVs, Kindles, iPhones, iPods, iPads, each storing and streaming music, videos, films, websites, blogs, news, sports, opinion, art, and science—all connected via that vast network we call the Internet. And there are newspapers and books, too, like the one you are reading now. Media are vast environments, environments of consciousness and culture, organized via the technologies of a vast, global, and interplanetary network. The network is the underlying structure of media in the 21st century. Marshall McLuhan was one key thinker in the field of media studies who understood and pointed to the relevance of media technologies in our lives. Although most of his ideas come from the 1950s and 1960s, many of them couldn’t be more applicable today. For example: McLuhan essentially predicted the World Wide Web thirty years before it was invented. Moreover, he coined a term which you may have heard elsewhere before: the Global Village. The global village is what we live in today. But what did he mean exactly?

In this chapter, I explore how some of McLuhan’s major media theories apply to the fictional story of the episode "Hated in the Nation" about social media threats and hacked robotic bees. The aim and value of the chapter is twofold: First, I highlight the timeliness and applicability of some of McLuhan’s main approaches from the last century in this example of Black Mirror. Second, I critically explore a potential near-future media ecology that includes autonomous insect robots in public spaces and an out-of-control online shaming culture. Ultimately, this analysis will shed light onto existential dynamics among technologies, environments, and humans as shown in the context of violent domestic drones directed by volatile social media forces.