Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices

Book excerpt: Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices: Life through the Looking Glass explores the role of mobile technologies in everyday life via the extended case study of Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. Via a detailed application (including numerous extended examples) of the experiences associated with Apple’s iOS devices, Charles Soukup examines contemporary screen culture and how individuals navigate it via mobile technologies. Mobile devices provide a lifeline that sifts through, limits, and simplifies the complexities of rapid, vast, circulating information in postmodern culture. Particularly, simple, game-like applications with clear rules and numerical outcomes exceptionally focus, frame, and filter an overwhelming media-saturated culture. Rather than merely outlining the problems associated with a world dominated by digital screens, Exploring Screen Culture via Apple's Mobile Devices offers a means for understanding screen culture as well as viable solutions to the challenges facing contemporary social life.