Journal Reflection #6-Jenna Kelley

In her article, “Connectivity, Collaboration, Search”, Jennie Germann Molz discusses the importance of mobilizing texts. Molz describes that mobility has the ability to create communities through connectivity. She focuses mainly on travel bloggers as she states, “interactive travellers, in a similar way, use the premise of sharing knowledge not only as a way of finding or sharing travel information about the world, but as a way of organizing themselves as a mobile knowledge community” (98). She zeroes in on travel bloggers because since they are mobilizing themselves, and are posting about it. They are mobilizing their knowledge through writing, especially by using mediums like internet café’s, GPS data, location-aware mobile platforms, etc.

I can relate to this notion because, for example, my sister traveled to Uganda, Africa. The only way she was able to share her travels with us in the moment was to travel to an Internet café and pray that they had WIFI. What are highlighted through mobilization with writing are connectivity and how many different mediums one can be reached on. Me, as writer, just bringing my laptop with me to a different city and blogging about my travels is a mobile way to connect with others.

Mobility has changed writing, because now that we discussed how it highlights connectivity, we can elaborate the idea of networking. Molz says, “I find this social logic behind mobility and knowledge intriguing, in part because of the rich collaborative and technologically mediated model it suggests for researchers developing mobile methodologies” (92). Writing through mobility has changed because it now creates a way for those to reach out to others. For example, someone can look up and airbnb or hostel and network by reaching out to a host online. Next thing you know, that individual can be sleeping at the host’s house or complex because of the mobility of writing. Also writing has changed the way people think about something. Through mobilization, tourists would record their observations and deliver them back home. With this being the case, their family and friends back home gain a sense of ‘an epistemological individualism’, whereas, they create a world for themselves that they have not even witnessed yet. All in all, mobility has changed the way we write through networking connectivity, the developing mobile media that is being created, and the idea of creating preconceived notions from seeing somewhere through mobilized writing before physically being there.