Play narratives: Mobile technologies and the play of time and place
Thomas Maschio · 2021
This chapter focuses on the play of and with mobile technologies and devices, and how this play has altered culture-wide experiences of time and place. The chapter illustrates how my interest in story culture and narrative connects with communications specialists’ desire to tell more compelling stories in the new digital medium. The business brief for the projects on which the chapter is based was to understand the sorts of narratives that would be most compelling in this space as well as to understand the deep emotional connections people were developing with the new mobile devices. It was in this initial project that I began to develop the idea of a play narrative as a way of understanding important aspects of behavior on the digital space. My first step was to reach back to classical ideas about the cultural significance of play. The chapter also considers the relationship between Western ideas of self-invention, mobility, and of vitality in relationship to the digital culture of mobility.