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.

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.

“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?

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 book explores recreational uses of consumer drones from the lenses of media ecology, mobile communication, mobilities research, and science and technology studies. In this provocative ethnography, Julia M. Hildebrand discusses camera drones as mobile media for meaningful play. She thus widens perspectives onto the flying camera as foremost unmanned aircraft, spying tool, or dangerous toy towards a more comprehensive understanding of its potentials. How should we situate drone practices in recreational spaces? What ways of seeing, moving, and being do hobby drones open up? Across chapters about drone geography, communication, mobility, visuality, and human-machine relations, Aerial Play introduces novel frameworks for drone affordances, such as communication on the fly, disembodied mobilities, auratic vertical play, and drone-mindedness. In the mobile companionship with her own drone, Hildebrand contributes an innovative “auto-technographic” method for the self-reflective study of media and mobility. Ultimately, her grounded and aerial fieldwork illuminates new technological, mobile, visual, and social relations in everyday spaces.

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.