Mobile things—lost, found, and made

Abstract

Destination Earth (DE) refers to an initiative by the European Union, launched in 2022, to build and maintain “a highly accurate digital model of Earth to monitor the effects of natural and human activity on our planet, anticipate extreme events and adapt policies to climate-related challenges” (European Space Agency, 2022, n.p.). Compared to the cyberspace widely celebrated as a realm apart, from the 1990s and into the 2000s, DE is a particularly ambitious example of the so-called digital twins (Savage, 2022) that promise to reintegrate online and offline realities in a new category of infrastructure, namely, the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) (Bunz & Meikle, 2018)—which the field of media and communication research has barely begun to address. As I review the schedule of the 2022 Paris meeting of the International Communication Association to prepare for a hybrid online–offline reunion against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic, a search for the text string “internet of things” returns neither session headings nor paper titles—none. The subfield coming together in the pages of Mobile Media & Communication, from the outset, raised shared and foundational questions concerning the definition and delimitation of media, communication, and mobility. What, indeed, is mobile about mobile media and communication (Jensen, 2013)? Ten years on, IoT is reiterating and radicalizing the conceptual and methodological challenges. From early feature phones to current smartphones, mobile media enabled users to move about as they communicated, to maintain contact with individuals and objects of interest elsewhere, to interact with other subjects, and to act on things at a distance. With mobile media, entire contexts of private and