Mobile Phone Cultures

Catalog description

Over the years, the cellphone or the mobile phone ceased to be just an extension of the landline telephone as a range of locative, social and networked media converged into it. Even as they have global impact, mobile media technologies influence and are influenced by socio-cultural factors in specific places, and so mobile phone cultures are both global and local at the same time. In this course, we will be studying the revolutions in youth culture, desire, gender norms, and political propaganda that are emerging as new hardware, apps, and internet services are being added to mobile media. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.