Julia M. Hildebrand

This article critically explores the high heel as a mobile medium by discussing the contentious footwear through the lens of media ecology and mobilities research. Employing the McLuhans’ ‘laws of media’ or ‘tetrad’, I highlight what the high heel enhances, obsolesces, retrieves from the past and flips into when pushed to an extreme. This tetradic reading also draws on contemporary feminist media studies and a gender and media ecology subfield. Ultimately, the article shows to what extent the high heel is an ambiguous and divisive medium that extends the female and male body; shapes and is shaped by past and present cultural, social and political environments; and affords a range of physical, corporeal, social, imaginative and affective (im)mobilities.

When the novel coronavirus moved around the planet in early 2020, reconfiguring, slowing down, or halting everyday mobilities, another transport mode was mobilized: the pandemic drone. We highlight the increasing prominence of this aerial device by surveying international media coverage of pandemic drone use in the spring of 2020. To address a range of pandemic drone affordances and applications, we organize manifold cases under two broad categories: sensing and moving with the pandemic drone. Here we ask: what roles do, and could, drones play during the pandemic? Following the empirical examples and related mobilities research, we theorize the drone versus virus and the drone as virus. As such, the work identifies avenues for mobilities research into pandemic drones as a growing mobility domain. Moreover, in thinking through the pandemic drone, we demonstrate creative extensions of mobilities thinking that bridge biological and technological, as well as media and mobility frameworks when multiple public health and safety crises unfolded and intersected.

This article makes the case for including frameworks of media ecology and mobilities research in the shaping of critical robotics research for a human-centered and holistic lens onto robot technologies. The two meta-disciplines, which align in their attention to relational processes of communication and movement, provide useful tools for critically exploring emerging human–robot dimensions and dynamics. Media ecology approaches human-made technologies as media that can shape the way we think, feel, and act. Relatedly, mobilities research highlights various kinds of influential movement and stillness of people, things, and ideas. The emerging field of critical robotics research can benefit from such attention to the ways of thinking, feeling, and moving robotic forms and environments encourage and discourage. Drawing on various studies into robotics, I illustrate those conceptual alignments of media ecology, mobilities, and critical robotics research and point to the value of this interdisciplinary approach to robots as media and robotics as socio-cultural environments.

The figure of the civilian camera drone remains ambiguous and contested. Its promises and perils shape contemporary imaginaries of future mobilities and visualities. Donny the Drone by Mackenzie Sheppard is one example of a fictional short film that creatively engages with such ambivalent scenarios in the story about a sentient quadcopter. In this article, I explore this techno-futurist narrative in how it serves as a heuristic for a mobile utopia. Themes of mobility and aerial commons, visuality and cosmopolitanism, relationality and affective subjectivity, along with domination and political mobilization emerge from the utopian thought experiment about a camera drone becoming human. Ultimately, I show how the evolving figure of the civilian drone serves as an experimental platform and utopian method towards elevated visions for an imaginative reconstitution of society.

In this article, I discuss camera drones as mobile media that help access, collect, and shape physical, digital, and social spaces. As such, consumer drones afford "communication on the fly" in their medium-specific configuration of aerial navigation, visual production, and networked communication. Drawing on in-depth interviews with drone users and auto-ethnographic drone practices, I first highlight what physical-material conditions the flying camera mediates. An analysis of what digital-intangible formations the sensor medium collects and creates follows, before I turn to the sociospatial relations the buzzing mobile interface can establish and disrupt. I show how these conditions of communication on the fly shape user practices of place-sensing and place-making. Through the lenses of mobile communication research, media ecology, and mobilities studies, I ultimately illuminate how the ambiguous aerial system helps expand our thinking of and with notions of communication on the move.

Driverless automobility presents a “technological sublime” (Marx 1964; Nye 1994, 1997) encompassing both promises and perils. The light side of the emerging transportation future lies, for instance, in the newly gained freedom from driving. The dark side of this sublime includes ethical challenges and potential harm resulting from the required socio-technical transformations of mobility. This article explores contemporary visions for the self-driving car future through the lens of the sublime and some of its theoretical variations, such as the natural (Kant 1965), technological (Marx 1964; Nye 1994, 1997), electrical (Carey and Quirk 1989), and digital (Mosco 2005) sublime. Nissan’s IDS Concept preview clip (2015) and the Chevrolet FNR trailer (2015) serve as examples for this analysis, which aims to demythologize the visual rhetoric of the depicted awe-inspiring self-driving systems. The sublime’s inherent dialectic of inducing both pleasure and displeasure is removed in the corporate utopian visions in favor of an exalting partnership between human and machine. This strategy succeeds by setting the mobility future in the context of controlled parameters such as the trustworthy communicative vehicle, the vital and independent protagonists, and the harmless and unharmed environment. Recognizing such recurring strategies and identifying the controlled parameters which allow the sublime object to electrify, not terrify, is key for a sensible engagement with such imagined futures and their social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, and ethical implications. Such premediations (Grusin 2010) of awe-inspiring technological formations and the underlying logics ask to be unpacked toward decision making that considers all potential facets of the sublime future.

Following Emily Keightley and Anna Reading in their conceptualization of mediated mobilities', I illuminate useful connections between media ecology and mobilities research and make the case for a combined modal medium theory. Both fields align clearly in their interest in technology and technique, media and modes, and messages and moods. A fruitful starting point in the suggested transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework is the exploration of the specific medium along with its materialities. In the second step, different kinds of environments and possible choreographies the medium affords ask to be considered. In a broader conceptualization, the term medium' refers not only to technological entities but also to subjects (tourists), practices (dancing), and places (cities), which likewise prompt different messages and moods. Ideally, research occurs on a synchronous level by following the routes of media and modes across space, and on a diachronous level by exploring the roots of media and modes across time. The objective is to promote a material medium literacy that questions capacities and agencies of forms and materials in their respective contexts.

Following Graham Harman in the charge that Marshall and Eric McLuhan's laws of media are applicable beyond human-made artefacts, this article takes this framework in considering the screen as medium. The screen is a material and virtual principle found in both old and new communication
technologies, as well as in non-human environments (e.g. beaver dams and solar objects). Employing Lucas Introna and Fernando Ilharco's concept of screenness as starting point and common thread, we formulate tetrads of human-made, animal-made and natural screens. Expanding the
tetrad is helpful in exploring human and non-human media ecologies and how they may interrelate. We reveal several resonances across media through the concept of the screen and argue that the proliferation of material surfaces of display occludes deeper histories of media objects as well as
connections between human and non-human ecologies. This wider application strengthens the laws of media as an epistemology for the ecological workings of a medium. Our conclusion points to non-human theory in reconsidering both the tetrad and the kind of hard technological determinism read
into Marshall McLuhan's work more broadly.