Mobile Media and Time

Lee Humphreys, Chair and Professor, Communication, Cornell University

2pm in 102 Mann

Reception to follow in the Hub

In this talk, Dr. Humphreys examines our experience of time and contemporary mobile and social media. First, she describes a collaborative oral history study which identified early temporal experiences of emerging cellular phone use in the 1990s and early 2000s. This study describes the ways temporalities were experienced in the technological, textual and social uses of early mobile phones. Drawing on a second study, Dr. Humphreys further examines media and time by comparing contemporary mobile and social media with newspapers to reveal corporate media practices of reusing content to perpetually feed “new” content. Drawing on memory studies, this study describes “on-this date media” as an everyday temporal media practice that links 20th century mass media to contemporary mobile and social media. Taken together, she argues that notions of “real time” often associated with digital and mobile media are more nuanced through temporal representations and rhythms of mobile media in everyday life.

Lee Humphreys is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her research explores the social impacts of communication technologies. Specifically, she studies the ways people incorporate mobile and social media into their everyday lives. An expert in qualitative research methods, she is the Director of the Qualitative and Interpretive Research Institute at Cornell. She is the former Chair of the Comm & Tech Division of ICA, and co-chair of the ICA Professional Standards Committee, where she led the writing of the ICA Code of Ethics. She is an ICA Fellow and currently an associate editor of JCMC. She is on the editorial boards of Journal of Communication, Social Media & Society, Mobile Media & Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Methods and Measures, and Information, Communication & Society among others. She received her BS in Communication from Cornell University and received her MA and PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.