In this article we argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement. New kinds of researchable entities arise, opening up a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical, and new avenues for critique. The mobilities paradigm not only remedies the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas. It also gathers new empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations, methods and motivations to examine important social and material phenomena and fold social science insight into responses. After an outline of the mobilities paradigm, this article provides a wide-ranging review of emergent `mobile methods' of studying (im)mobilities. We discuss some of the new researchable entities they engender and explore important implications for the relationship between the empirical, theory, critique, and engagement.

Hybrid reality games and location-based mobile games use urban spaces as the game scenario and are played with the aid of mobile technologies equipped with location awareness and Internet connection. This article conceptualizes hybrid reality and location-based mobile games within the area of game studies via their three main characteristics: mobility, sociability, and spatiality. In addition, the article proposes a theoretical framework for studying these games focusing on the possible implications of transforming urban spaces in playful environments. Last, one location-based mobile game, BOTFIGHTERS, and one hybrid reality game, CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? are used as examples of how these games (a) create a new logic of game space, (b) transform the relationship between serious life and playful spaces, and (c) transform the perception of urban spaces and patterns of mobility through the city.

This article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-based, and hybrid-reality mobile games. It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used as playful spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies to show how the concept of play has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity: first, the transformation of Baudelaire's flaneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the "phoneur"; second, the idea of derive as used by situationist Guy Debord; and last, the wall subculture called parkour. The authors present a classification of the major types of mobile games to date, addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play apparent within these former tropes of urbanity. With this approach, they hope to address two weaknesses in the current scholarship--namely, differentiating among a range of types of games mediated by mobile technologies and assessing the important effects of playful activities.

Future assemblies: theorizing mobilities and users: Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey, Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. xii + 331pp. ISBN 0262033550, $29.95 (hbk)
Jo Groebel, Eli M. Noam and Valerie Feldmann (eds), Mobile Media: Content and Services for Wireless Communication. Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. xxi + 255pp. ISBN 0805858806, $34.50 (pbk)
Mimi Sheller and John Urry (eds), Mobile Technologies of the City. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. viii + 200pp. ISBN-10 0415374340, $121.00 (hbk)." New Media Society 9(6): 1029-1036.

/ Mobile, location-aware technologies are cultural tools for the re-enactment, re-embodiment and recontextualization of history and memory in our everyday life. The transformative potential of spatial practices that creatively employ these technologies can renegotiate our experience of place by allowing us to co-inhabit past and present storied spaces of different cultures. The research project Mapping Footprints explores alternative means of knowing and making place through a spatial practice which mediatizes heritage conservation sites with archival records. In the context of Elvina site, a heritage place of Aboriginal culture in Sydney, we experiment with a place-making practice where the re-storing of memory renegotiates archived oral histories and the geography of the site. We will look at the role of mediation, performativity, and representation in shaping both the development process and the experience of this augmented, storied landscape.

Mobile media, especially cellphones, are now seen and heard everywhere, forming an intrinsic part of the daily lives and habits of billions of people worldwide. Curiously, despite this wide diffusion and remarkable rate of adoption, as an advertising platform the cellphone is, in the words of one commentator, still very much a mass medium waiting for the kiss of life'. This article examines why this is the case, by exploring the complex mobile phone ecosystem' and the factors that contribute to the rather hesitant adoption of mobile advertising, with particular attention to the inherent conflicts amongst the interested parties in the system. It does this through a meta-analysis of themes and issues evinced in mainstream media and the advertising trade press. Study of this data is supplemented by drawing on a number of critical studies within the available research literature on the subject.