ABSTRACT

This article explores the embodied experience of smartphone users in urban darkness, and considers how the geo-locative and network functionality of mobile media impacts upon the perception of safety and risk at night. City spaces at nighttime are often perceived as less safe, and the habitual trust we place in familiar strangers during the day can becomes imbued with caution, suspicion and fear. Women in particular are typically advised to reduce nighttime risk by remaining in well-lit, more populated areas, not travelling alone, and keeping mobile phones handy. Indeed, in contemporary popular culture, media coverage increasingly links heightened physical safety with the use of geolocative mobile media – this is evident in the reporting of the sexual assaults and murders of Jill Meagher, Eurydice Dixon, and Aiia Maasarwe in Australia, and Mollie Tibbetts in the United States. This article draws on original ethnographic data collected in Perth and Melbourne (Australia) from 2016 to 2020 to examine how mobile devices as both communicative and location-aware interfaces are used to provide women with a perceived or ‘felt’ sense of bodily safety and security, and the potential implications this has on users’ pedestrian traversal of the urban dark.

摘要

本文探讨了智能手机用户在城市黑暗中的具体体验，并考虑了移动媒体的地理位置和网络功能如何影响夜间安全和风险的感知。夜间的城市空间通常被认为不太安全，白天我们对熟悉的陌生人的习惯性信任可能会充满谨慎、怀疑和恐惧。通常建议女性留在光线充足、人口稠密的地区，不要独自旅行，并随身携带手机，以减少夜间风险。事实上，在当代流行文化中，媒体报道越来越多地将提高人身安全与使用地理定位移动媒体联系起来——这在澳大利亚吉尔·米格尔、尤丽迪斯·迪克森和艾亚·马萨维的性侵犯和谋杀报道中很明显，和美国的 Mollie Tibbetts。本文利用 2016 年至 2020 年在珀斯和墨尔本（澳大利亚）收集的原始民族志数据，研究如何使用移动设备作为通信和位置感知界面来为女性提供感知或“感知”的身体安全感，以及这对用户在城市黑暗中的行人穿越的潜在影响。