The unchallenged persuasions of mobile media technology

Abstract

In recent years, networked devices have taken an ever tighter hold of people's everyday lives. The tech companies are frantically competing to grab people's attention and secure a place in their daily routines. In this short paper, I elaborat further a key finding from an analysis of Finnish press coverage on Google Glass between 2012 and 2015. The concept of pre-domestication is used to discuss the ways in which we are invited and persuaded by the media discourse to integrate ourselves in the carefully orchestrated digital environment. It is shown how the news coverage deprives potential new users of digital technology a chance to evaluate the underpinnings of the device, the attachments to data harvesting, and the practices of hooking attention. In the paper, the implications of contemporary computational imaginaries as (re)produced and circulated in the mainstream media are reflected, thereby shedding light on and opening possibilities to criticize the politics of mediated pre-domestication.