The
rise of mobility through mobile technologies such as portable laptops,
smartphones, and GPS devices has changed the way people communicate, and has opened
the doors for entirely new genres of digital media such as travel blogging and
apps that, for example, connect backpacking communities or “couch surfers”.
Mobility now allows travelers (and the public in general) to use internet-based
outlets to post about their experiences, whether it be photos, text snippets,
or full-length accounts of a particular place or event. The ability to share
writing on the move increases connectivity between people around the world.
Mobility has changed writing by making it accessible to everyone with few to no
limits—you can send a tweet from halfway across the globe with a simple data or
Wi-Fi connection. You can update your Facebook status or post a blog entry
while boarding a plane to Africa, and a web user enjoying the content from the comfort
of their home wouldn’t know the difference. Writing has also become more
informed, as it is easier to obtain accurate information at previously unprecedented
speeds through sites like Google and Wikipedia—all available with the touch of
a few buttons on a mobile phone or computer.
Mobility highlights the fact that
writing can translate to any and all contexts, whether it be read from the
digital screen of an iPad or in print from a textbook or magazine. Mobility
gives writing a new immediacy that wasn’t present in the age of print-only
texts or, more recently, the era of the clunky desktop computer. With phones
and laptops, a wealth of information is available to us at our fingertips, at
home or on the go. As stated by Molz, however, it could be said that the
widespread adaptation of mobility has made this feat of vast connectivity seem
somewhat less remarkable. Writing has assumed a new aspect: mobile flexibility,
and it’s difficult to remove yourself from this perspective in this day and
age. We have become so accustomed to having any text we could possibly want
available in seconds that we forget that writing didn’t always have the same
level of mobility.
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