The notion of making media mobile can be traced back to the “first time someone thought to write on a tablet that could be lifted and hauled – rather than on a cave wall, a cliff face, a monument that usually was stuck in place, more or less forever”. In his bookCellphone, Paul Levinson refers to mobile media as “the media-in-motion business.”' Since their incarnation, mobile phones as a means of communication have been a focus of great fascination as well as debate.' In the book, Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone, Gerard Goggin notes how the ability of portable voice communication to provide ceaseless contact complicates the relationship between the public and private spheres of society.' The development of the portable telephone can be traced back to its use by the military in the late nineteenth-century.' By the 1930s, police cars in several major U.S. cities were equipped with one-way mobile radios.' In 1931, the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation designed a mass markettwo-way radio. This radio was named Motorola, which also became the new name for the company in 1947.' In 1943, Motorola developed the first portable radiotelephone, the Walkie-Talkie, for use by the American forces during World War II. After the war, two-way radio technology was developed for civilian use. In 1946, AT&T and Southwestern Bell made available the first commercial mobile radiotelephone. This service allowed calls to be made from a fixed phone to a mobile one. The book, the transistor radio, the Walkman, and the Kodak camera are also bearers of portable information and early examples of mobile media consumption. For a time, mobile phones and PDAs were the primary source of portable media from which we could obtain information and communicate with one another. More recently, the smartphone has rendered the PDA obsolete by combining many features of the cell phone with those of the PDA. In 2011, the growth of new mobile media as a true force in society was marked by smartphone sales outpacing personal computer sales. While mobile phone independent technologies and functions may be new and innovative the need and desire to access and use media devices regardless of where we are in the world has been around for centuries. Indeed, Paul Levinson remarks, in regard to telephonic communication, that it was “intelligence and inventiveness" applied to our need to communicate regardless of where we may be, led logically and eventually to telephones that we carry in our pockets”. Levinson credits the printing press for disseminating information to a mass audience, the reduction in size and portability of the camera for allowing people to capture what they saw regardless of their location, and the Internet for providing on-demand information. Smartphones have altered the very structure of society. The ability of smartphones to transcend certain boundaries of times and space has revolutionized the nature of communication, allowing it to be both synchronous and asynchronous. These devices and their corresponding media technologies, such as cloud-based technologies, play an increasingly important role in the everyday lives of millions of people worldwide. Forms of mobile media, such as podcasts, can be downloaded or streamed over the internet.
