Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices: Life through the Looking Glass

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices: Life through the Looking Glass explores the role of mobile technologies in everyday life via the extended case study of Apples mobile operating system (iOS) for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Via a detailed application (including numerous extended examples) of the experiences associated with Apples iOS devices, Charles Soukup examines contemporary screen culture and how individuals navigate it via mobile technologies. Mobile devices provide a lifeline that sifts through, limits, and simplifies the complexities of rapid, vast, circulating information in postmodern culture. Particularly, simple, game-like applications with clear rules and numerical outcomes exceptionally focus, frame, and filter an overwhelming media-saturated culture. Rather than merely outlining the problems associated with a world dominated by digital screens, Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices offers a means for understanding screen culture as well as viable solutions to the challenges facing contemporary social life.

Reviews

This postmodern ethnography refreshingly moves the discourse of mobile technology beyond dystopian hype and into the realities of everyday experiences. Soukup takes us through our looking glasses on a flaneur's journey of discovery phrased in terms that make it almost easy to see the truths and quirks of what iOS does, and how it affects our world. Im looking forward to my students classroom discussions after assigning this reading! -- Grant Kien
Rather than offering the standard lament about our growing dependence on screens, large and small, and increasingly ubiquitous, Charles Soukup has constructed a thoughtful, nuanced, and thoroughly readable exploration of the emerging logic of our mediated lives that critiques, yes, but also appreciates the logic of screen culture. A worthy addition to any media scholars library, Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices is especially valuable for its personal, accessible, and engaging prose that deserves the widest possible audience. -- Andrew F. Wood, San Jos State University
For every reader willing to be honest with him/herself, Soukup's thoughtful argument exposes the peril in our modern tendency toward the mindless use of digital technology. -- Matt Barton, Southern Utah University

Author Bio

Charles Soukup is professor of communication at the University of Northern Colorado.