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Visual mobile communication, mediated presence and the politics of space

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DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2011.571885

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Visual mobile communication, mediated presence and the politics of space

Mikko Villi; Matteo Stocchetti

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To cite this Article Villi, Mikko and Stocchetti, Matteo(2011) 'Visual mobile communication, mediated presence and the
politics of space', Visual Studies, 26: 2, 102 — 112
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 Visual Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, June 2011
Visual mobile communication, mediated presence
and the politics of space
MIKKO VILLI and MATTEO STOCCHETTI
This article is a study on the role of mobile phones –
particularly camera phones and photo messaging – in the
management of social space, or what we like to call the
‘politics of space’. Our notion of social space is a metaphoric
representation of the nature and intensity of the
involvement that inspires the uses of mobile
communication technology for interpersonal
communication. We discuss three themes: the motives for
communicating with photo messages, the role of visuality
in visual mobile communication and the role of visual
mobile communication in the politics of space. In our study,
we apply the proxemic theory developed by Edward T. Hall
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and the ritual view of communication as defined by James
W. Carey. Our empirical engagement with photo
messaging as a communicative practice suggests at least two
insights. First, it has all the traits of ritual communication.
Second, the distinctive value of visual communication in
this type of telecommunicative practice seems to consist
mostly of mediated presence and the synchronicity of the
gaze. We conclude that the mobile phone is an ambivalent
technology for ambivalent desires: a tool for maintaining a
feeling of presence in the state of absence while preserving
the possibility for absence.
INTRODUCTION
A historic shift is occurring in the communicative
environment of society. A simple concept for this very
complex shift is mediatisation. The study of
mediatisation – the role of media and mediated
communication in the societal changes affecting late
modern societies – is attracting increasing attention
from scholars in different disciplinary domains (see
Lundby 2009 for a recent review). In this article, we look
at the social function of visual mobile communication and
the notion of mediated presence as a particular dimension
of mediatisation. More precisely, we focus on photo
messaging: a form of communication in which
photographs taken with a camera phone are sent direct
from a mobile phone (see Villi 2007 for a more elaborate
definition of the concept of photo message). The
prominent technological application for photo
Mikko Villi (Doctor of Arts, MSocSc) works as a researcher at Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland. His background is in communication
studies. The Arcada study forms a part of his doctoral thesis titled ‘Visual mobile communication: Camera phone photo messages as ritual communication and
mediated presence’.
Matteo Stocchetti (PhD) is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the Master’s programme in Media Management at Arcada University of Applied Sciences,
Helsinki, Finland. His research interest is mainly with the impact of media on the competition for the distribution of values in society.
ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472-5878 online/11/020102-11 © 2011 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2011.571885
messaging is MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service).
Lately, photo messaging has also been increasingly
realised by email, IM (instant messaging) and other
Internet-based media. Although the development of
mobile phone communication is characterised by a
progress from interpersonal voice transmission to
broader media consumption and content production, we
concentrate on direct interpersonal, phone-to-phone
communication. Therefore, the sharing or publishing of
camera phone photographs on the web (e.g. on
Flickr or Facebook) is beyond the scope of the present
article.
In our article, we study visual mobile communication
from a critical perspective – largely neglected in
previous studies on mobile communication – and
discuss the impact of mobile communication on the
politics of space: the competition over the use of space as
a social value. Critical attention is paid especially to
the concept of mediated presence as used to capture the
most salient trait of mobile telecommunication: the
possibility for close communicative engagements
among distant agents. We argue that mobile
technologies do not support actual presence, but rather
a form of absence in which proximity can be established
and preserved through mediated communication.
At the core of our effort is an interest in reviewing this
tension between the promise of presence and the actual
state of absence. Technologies and applications, such as
photo messaging, are presented as connecting distant
others, establishing a state of connected presence (see
Licoppe 2004, 147). We believe that more critical
attention should be paid to the effects of this change in
the way people manage their social space. Space, as time,
is a fundamental value, the social use of which is
constitutive of the social order itself. Paraphrasing
Harold Lasswell (1936/1950), if politics is about ‘who
gets what when and how’, the politics of space is
essentially about who can be where, when and how. In
studying this, we apply the proxemic theory developed
by Edward T. Hall and the ritual view of communication
as defined by James W. Carey.

The article addresses three questions.
• Why do people communicate with photo
messages?
• What is the distinctive role of visuality in visual
mobile communication?
• What is the role of visual mobile
communication in the politics of space?
To address the first question, we use data from a limited
empirical exercise. The role of this exercise, ultimately, is
to generate questions and not to prove any certain theory.
Put otherwise, in addressing the practice of photo
messaging as a social practice, we opt for an
epistemology of reasonable doubts rather than scientific
truth. The relevant suggestion from this exercise is that
people seldom use photo messaging for transmissive
purposes, but mostly for ritual ones, for establishing a
sense of sharing, participation and fellowship.
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The paper is divided into three sections. In the first, we
introduce the conceptual framework of our research. In
the second part, we discuss the results of our empirical
exercise in connection with results from other research
in this field. In the concluding section, we offer critical
reflections on the impact of mobile communication
technology on the politics of space.
THE HIDDEN DIMENSION, THE POLITICS OF SPACE
AND MOBILE COMMUNICATION
Social Space
Starting from the seminal work of Edward T. Hall (1966)
on communication and distance, we postulate that the
spread of mobile communication technology, and
specific technological advances in visual mobile
communication, offer new opportunities or strategies for
the management of interpersonal communication in
relation to two different concepts of space: the physical
distance that separates the communicative agents, and
the more elusive notion of social distance as defined by a
set of more or less implicit rules, expectations, cultural
norms and social codes.
Human life occurs and is experienced within natural and
social concepts of time and space. Arguing for the
importance of the psychological experience of social
distance, Edward T. Hall noted that:
Social animals need to stay in touch with each
other. Loss of contact with the group can be
fatal for a variety of reasons including exposure
to predators. Social distance is not simply the
distance at which an animal will lose contact
Visual mobile communication 103
with his group – that is, the distance at which it
can no longer see, hear, or smell the group – it
is rather a psychological distance, one at which
the animal apparently begins to feel anxious
when he exceed its limits. We can think of it as a
hidden band that contains the group. (1966, 14)
The need to exert a certain control on time and space
reflects the fundamental importance of these dimensions
of human life. The importance of the proxemic theory
formulated by Hall, in this respect, is that the hidden
dimension of human behaviour is the conceptual place
where the responses to this need can be problematised.
This conceptual horizon is also suitable to appreciate the
deepest implications of change in communication
technologies. As Hall argued:
Social distance . . . has been extended by
telephone, TV, and the walkie-talkie, making it
possible to integrate the activities of groups
over great distances. Increased social distance is
now remaking social and political institutions
in ways that have only recently begun to be
studied. (1966, 15)
The accelerated pace of technological innovation has
increased the need for systematic study of what Hall
envisaged as the expansion of social distance – the
physical distance at which individuals can entertain
social relations of some sort. However, there is an
important terminological distinction to be made. Hall
defines as social space the part of the physical space that
is socially relevant – relevant for social purposes. He
distinguishes personal, social and public distances, and
measures the far and close phase of each, respectively, in
‘feet’. This categorisation misleadingly implies a direct
correlation between physical proximity and affective or
emotional relevance: the closer to someone one is, the
more important the person is. In mediated societies this
kind of linkage is problematic, and the popularity of
mobile communication technologies expresses
fundamentally the possibility of maintaining meaningful
relations in a perpetual manner without physical
proximity.
In this article, we are not interested in the actual
measurement of social space, but rather in the way
available technologies affect the conceptualisation of
distance, presence and absence. For this reason, we use
the term social space, as opposed to physical space, in
order to describe the psychological distance between
communicative partners. Rather than an actual space,
our notion of social space is a metaphoric representation
of the nature and intensity of the involvement that
inspires interpersonal communication and the uses of
 104 M. Villi and M. Stocchetti
mobile communication technology, and in our case,
especially interpersonal visual communication. This
conceptualisation is compatible with the idea that the
meaning of space and space-related features in the
socio-political world depend on the agents’ purpose,
rather than the other way around (Stocchetti 2001).
The extension of what Hall calls social space may indeed
increase the number of communicative partners and
functions of our social horizon, but at the same time it
feeds the need to preserve the intensity of particular
relationships: the intimacy with those few that we
consider close, even and especially when they are
physically distant. We argue that the fundamental
ambivalence of mobile media consists of their usability
as tools for both presence and absence: to induce a
feeling of presence and to facilitate absence. More
explicitly than in Hall’s proxemic theory, the role of
communication technology is here assessed in relation to
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both the needs of, and the opportunities associated to,
the control of the social space as a distinctive and
fundamental social value. Hall sees the social relevance
of space, but is not explicit about its social implications.
If space is an important dimension of human behaviour,
the control of the uses of space itself is an important
value which, as other values, may be unequally
distributed in society and worth competing for.
In essence, the politics of space is about the management
of distance, presence and absence, and the use of
communicative space for the management of social
relations: keeping close with certain individuals even
when physical distance keeps us apart; keeping others at
a distance even if they may be more accessible in physical
terms. In the politics of space, power is the capacity to
influence the distribution of social distance/proximity:
to influence more than to be influenced. From the point
of view of a community of people, once mobile media
expand Hall’s social space, the need to maintain the
integrity of a collective body becomes prominent, not
only in time but also and especially in space. The
problem, in mediated societies, is not only about the
circulation of information but also and especially about
the preservation of connections threatened by
fragmentation and ultimately, distance.
Ritual Communication
The ritual view of communication, introduced by James
W. Carey (1989), is useful in capturing some key
dimensions of the politics of space in the realm of mobile
communication. Carey (1989, 15) makes a distinction
between the ritual and transmission view of
communication. In the transmission view,
communication is defined by the transmission of signals
or messages over distance for the purpose of control.
Communication fails if the message distorts for some
reason or other. By contrast, in the ritual view,
communication is defined as the maintenance of society
in time; not the act of imparting information but the
representation of shared beliefs (Carey 1989, 18).
Communication is more connected to the relations
between people than transmission of explicit
information or knowledge. According to Carey (1989,
18, 43), the ritual view of communication is typified by
such concepts as sharing, participation and fellowship,
and is a means of producing and maintaining
communality and community. The ritual view of
communication, as defined by Carey, is close to the
phatic mode of communication, first described by
Roman Jacobson and Bronislaw Malinowski, which
serves to maintain a contact between communicators,
without necessarily communicating any explicit content
or exchanging meaningful information.
If the social impact of mobile communication
technology were to be considered just from the
perspective of the transmission view of communication,
the importance of distance in the management of social
space would be too easily oversimplified. Another
problem with the transmission view is that the social
significance of communication is associated with the
message and its content, rather than with the
communicative act itself. Our argument is that when
communication between humans occurs increasingly
independently from spatial constraints, ritual forms of
communication seem to gain a relative saliency
compared to transmission when reconstituting intimacy
in conditions of absence.
In our article, we join several views expressed in previous
studies and offer a unified view on social space, ritual
communication and presence-in-absence in the context
of photo messaging. According to Vetere, Smith, and
Gibbs (2009), the phatic function sustains social
connection and human awareness in mediated
communication. Phatic connections are primarily aimed
at establishing and maintaining social bonds between
individuals over and above the exchange of information
(Vetere et al. 2009, 178). Intimates communicate often
non-verbally but nevertheless in highly expressive and
nuanced ways, contributing to a sense of presence-
in-absence in a ritual manner (Vetere et al. 2005, 476–7).
Nardi, Whittaker, and Bradner (2000) have found similar
examples in instant messaging (IM). They coin the term
‘outeraction’ to describe a set of communicative
processes outside of information exchange. For example,
IM buddy lists can be used to maintain a sense of

connection within an active communication zone in
times when there is no actual conversation. These
awareness moments produce a feeling of connection
(Nardi et al. 2000).
Available research indicates that the use of images in the
context of photo messaging is also tied quite firmly to the
ritual view of communication. Studies on photo
messaging (e.g. Mäkelä et al. 2000; Hjorth 2005; Rivière
2005; Koskinen 2007) suggest that its social implications
are captured better by the ritual model than the
transmission model since the connection created by the
message is often more important than the transfer of
information contained in the message itself. These
conventions stem largely from the practices of mobile
communication in general. According to Geser (2004,
7–8), the mobile phone supports continuous ‘grooming
calls’, which have primarily a non-instrumental,
socio-emotional function. The use of the mobile phone
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is often similar to face-to-face communication, where it
is common not to aim at conveying specific information
but rather at expressing affection (Geser 2004). Photo
messaging functions in maintaining the connection, in
the same sense as Licoppe and Heurtin (2002, 106)
describe the use of short, frequent mobile phone calls in
strengthening the formation and maintenance of deep
bonds, not because of their content but because of the
reassurance they bring. Photo messaging can also be
regarded as a form of gift-giving, like text messaging.
The processes of exchange can transform messages into
things that have a special value and ritual properties. For
example, the routine sending of nightly goodnight
messages is a symbol of commitment, an act that closely
resembles ritual gift-giving (Taylor and Harper 2002;
2003, 25–8).
Yet, establishing and maintaining a connection in a ritual
manner is only one dimension of photo messaging, and
it cannot be generalised to apply to all uses of photo
messages, even less to the communicative uses of camera
phone photographs in general (see e.g. Ling and Julsrud
2005; Döring et al. 2006, 205). What the studies on
photo messaging suggest, however, is that the social
value of communicative behaviour is independent from
the informative value of the image-message itself. In
addition, if the dimension of control – or what we like to
refer to as the politics of space – is looked at only from a
transmissive perspective, the needs for avoiding isolation
and preserving connection remain impenetrable to
analysis.
Mediated Presence
Studies on new media and communication technologies
have begun to use the concept of presence and related
Visual mobile communication 105
concepts such as awareness in an effort to offer a more
accurate connotation of the social rationale for the use of
new communication technology. Presence is often
defined as the sense (or the illusion) of ‘being there’
(IJsselsteijn et al. 2000) or ‘being there together’
(Schroeder 2005, 342) in a mediated environment.
Howard et al. (2006) regard presence as the subjective
sense of social others while separated from them by time
or space. Presence in the context of mobile
communication should then not be confused with actual
or physical presence; it is presence only in a figurative or
illusory sense, it is mediated presence. Connections based
on mobile technology can extend mediated presence in
time, making it an almost perpetual condition. Examples
show how mobile phone users experience social presence
through a ‘pulsating movement between foreground and
background awareness’ rather than through clearly
demarcated acts of engaging in communication (Ito
2005, 15).
The use of mobile communication technology is
particularly inspired by the need for intimacy, since
mobile phone users – especially when messaging –
interact mostly with their intimate ones. People
experience a shared mobile space that is generally
available between a few friends or with a loved one (Ito
and Okabe 2005, 264; see also Koskinen 2007; Ling 2008;
Villi and Matikainen 2008). The mobile phone involves
the scaling down of the relational network (de Gournay
2002, 203) and supports tendencies towards closure
rather than the opening up to new acquaintances (Geser
2004, 25). In accordance, photo messages support
closeness, in particular between friends and family
members, and function to maintain and enforce social
bonds (see e.g. Oksman 2006, 103; Döring et al. 2006,
207; Koskinen 2007, 135).
Mobile phone communication is a means to separate
oneself from the co-located but unfamiliar people and
join with the more intimate ones, who happen to be
located somewhere else. Gergen (2002, 227) uses the
term ‘absent presence’ to describe the state where one is
physically present, yet at the same time absorbed by a
technologically mediated world elsewhere, being socially
absent. Bull (2005, 178) notes that, as people become
immersed in the mobile media bubbles of
communication, the spaces they habitually pass through
in their daily lives increasingly lose significance (see also
Geser 2004, 36; Ling 2008). Media technology enables
evasion in situations of (unwanted) physical proximity,
e.g. when messaging during boring meetings or in
uncomfortable situations. In this light, the concept of
mediated presence can be used in the context of mobile
communication to describe a form of relationship in
which communication resembles what Hall (1966, 119)
 106 M. Villi and M. Stocchetti

calls the ‘personal close phase’, but which, contrary to
Hall’s conceptualisation, occurs among individuals
separated by notable distance. This association between
the idea of mediated presence and the need to keep in
touch with a selected few is even more evident when
images enter the scene.
All photographs offer presence-in-absence. ‘Spatial
immediacy’ (Barthes 1977/1991) can be read as the
ability of a photograph to provide in itself a presence in
space by being in front of the viewer as a material
artefact, the here-now of an event photographed
in some other place, some time ago. The then of the
photograph is present here and now. According
to Green and Lowry (2003, 57), the overriding
experience of the ‘what has been’ and the countervailing
force of what we see also being unquestionably
‘present’, are merged in a photograph. Sontag (1977, 16)
writes that a photograph is both a ‘pseudo-presence’
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IMAGES IN USE: PHOTO MESSAGING AS A
SOCIAL PRACTICE
We have so far discussed the first of the questions (Why
do people communicate with photo messages?) posed in
the introduction and turn now to the analysis of the way
the people in our survey actually describe the
reasons – or the communicative purposes – that inspire
their use of photo messaging. We analysed the photo
messaging practices of students and members of staff at
Arcada University of Applied Science in Helsinki,
Finland. With a questionnaire we gathered data from 54
students and 37 staff members, and augmented the data
by interviewing individually eight of the respondents.
Interviewees A–D were from the student group and
Interviewees E–H were Arcada staff members. The study
was carried out between November 2006 and August
2007. In this article, we do not use the results from the
questionnaire, as the quantitative data obtained in the

and a ‘token of absence’. However, in a photo message questionnaire were used primarily to provide
there is at least one important aspect, independent background information of the study group and used in
of the actual content of the image, that enhances the sampling the interviewees. The description of the
feeling of presence: immediacy of communication. research methodology in the Arcada study is placed as an
A photo message can offer the same type of spatial appendix.
presence as any photograph, yet it can also provide a
From this exercise, we can draw at least two insights.
presence in time. A conventional photograph can
First, the practice of photo messaging has all the traits of
mediate an event from there-then to here-now, but a
a ritual form of communication aiming to preserve a
photo message forms a connection between there-now
sense of intimacy and commonality. Second, the
and here-now. Photo messaging is, therefore, more
distinctive value of visual communication in this type of
about communicating over space than communicating
practice seems to consist mostly of mediated presence
over time.
and the synchronicity of the gaze: the possibility for two
Empirical data from studies on MMS messaging people to be seeing the same, and thus to maintain social
provides examples of how the wish to be present proximity where physical distance applies. Examples
can be communicated by sending photographs from the Arcada interviews indicate this type of
interpersonally in almost real time. Scifo (2005, 368), behaviour. Upon arrival in Spain, Interviewee B sent a
for example, relates photo messaging with presence, photograph (see Figure 1) of her and her boyfriend as an
when she notes that sending a photo message
is meant to give access to and to share the place in
which the sender is situated. According to Rivière (2005,
174), photo messaging brings up the emotions of an
imagined ‘being together’ when combining the
immediacy of the exchange between mobile phones and
the instantaneousness of the photographic act. In
another pioneering study on photo messaging
(Koskinen et al. 2002, 78), it was concluded that digital
images are used to share one’s visually mediated
experience (other examples of similar practices and
conventions can be found in e.g. Mäkelä et al. 2000;
Kindberg et al. 2004; Aoki et al. 2005). Thus, the
distinctive added value of photo messaging compared to
previous forms of mobile messaging (especially text
messaging) is visually mediated presence and the FIGURE 1. ‘This is how it looks like, and it’s warm and sunny’. Photograph
synchronous gaze. reproduced with the permission of Interviewee B.
 Visual mobile communication 107

MMS to her parents in Finland ‘to let the people back

home know that we just came and that we’re OK, and
this is how it looks like, and it’s warm and sunny’. The
photo message ‘gave them [her parents] an
understanding of what we’re experiencing’.

Photo messages are tools for mediated presence,

evidencing ‘that you are somewhere’, in a ‘certain
situation’ (Interviewee C), but also invitations to share a
mediated space, as in ‘I wish you were here’
(interviewee H). Interviewee E could imagine sending an
MMS from a party to somebody who could not attend,
‘so that also she [the absent one] could take part’.
Interviewee G noted that ‘[i]t has to be so much distance
that the person can’t share the moment’. Interviewee B
also stated that physical vicinity makes sending photo
messages unnecessary, as she does not see a big need to
send a photo message to her boyfriend as ‘we just spend
so much time together’. The use of photo messages as
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mobile postcards came up in a couple of the interviews.

Interviewee H commented that ‘[t]he longer the distance
the bigger reason there is to send. You send postcards,
these are instant postcards’.
Two male interviewees explained how they had sent
photo messages most frequently during the military
service, when they had to spend longer periods separated
from their girlfriends. When asked about the frequency
of sending photo messages to his girlfriend, Interviewee
A replied: ‘Not at the moment when we live together, I
see her face enough. But when I was in the army it was
quite a big communicational help, because she didn’t
know what I was doing and I didn’t know what she was
doing.’ The photo messages sent during the time in the
army were often about feelings and moods. When
returning back to the base from a furlough, Interviewee
D sent a photo message (see Figure 2) to his girlfriend
from the train: ‘The mood is blue when you are in the
army . . . the same blue chairs every Sunday night . . . I
wanted to share that feeling with my girlfriend.’ The
photograph in itself is used to establish a connection, a
sense of sharing and loving fellowship, and to share the
mood with the girlfriend; the longing for her presence is
subsumed to the photograph. The seats are empty, void
of any human presence. The blue mood of the journey
away is embodied by the blue seats. In this sense, the
photograph depicts the emotions of that (recurring)
Sunday night well.
Camera phone photographs can also be shared with
co-present people, for example in order to enrich a
mutual experience or to support a mutual task
(Kindberg et al. 2004; Jacucci et al. 2005). However, our
data do not provide examples of photo messaging used
in situations when the communicators are located in the
FIGURE 2. ‘The same blue chairs every Sunday night’. Photograph
reproduced with the permission of Interviewee D.
same place. The subjects used to send MMS messages
only when there is a physical distance between the sender
and the receiver. In co-located situations, other forms of
photo sharing were used: showing the image on the
phone screen or using Bluetooth to transfer the
photograph to a mobile phone in close vicinity.
However, a photo message can act as an invitation or
inducement for others to join the absent one. Thus it can
lead to a physically co-located encounter, supporting
meetingness (Satchell and Graham 2010, 256–7). Urry
(2003) stresses the importance of mobility in order to
encounter other people, places and events, to be bodily
present. This ‘meetingness’ involves combinations of
increasing distance and intermittent co-presence (Urry
2003, 156, 163). Photo messaging provides a sense of
constant connectivity (Satchell and Graham 2010, 252)
in situations of intermittent co-presence.
These traits of photo messaging are well illustrated by
the concept ‘telecocoon’ (Habuchi 2005): a sphere of
intimacy free of geographical and temporal constraints.
People who form telecocoons are constantly attentive to
their group of friends. They experience a sense of a
persistent social space, a shared virtual space that is
generally available between a few friends or with a loved
one (Ito and Okabe 2005, 264). Another useful concept
is that of ‘full-time intimate community’: a
round-the-clock set of both co-located and mediated
 108 M. Villi and M. Stocchetti

relationships within an exclusive group of friends

(Matsuda 2005, 30).

The camera attached to a phone makes it possible to

communicate photographs to distant others in almost
real time, enhancing the feeling of connectedness.
Camera phones transform photography towards a digital
and networked form of visual communication. A similar
need to share moments is exemplified by Twitter and
other microblogging applications, which provide a space
for people to communicate their everyday whereabouts
and experiences in short messages in a timely fashion
(Oulasvirta et al. 2010). The power of now (Wilhelm et al.
2004, 1406), so characteristic of photo messaging, is
firmly linked to the real-time web represented by the FIGURE 3. ‘Greetings from hospital’. Photograph reproduced with the
continuous flow of tweets, status updates and news permission of Interviewee G.
alerts.

Visuality in Photo Messaging: Punctum and synchronous gaze – the act of seeing together – a
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Synchronous Gaze
We will end this section by reviewing the distinctive
importance of visuality in visual mobile communication
through two concepts: punctum and synchronous gaze.
The important point here is that the distinctive social
importance of vision for both concepts can be better
assessed from the perspective of the ritual view rather
than the transmission view of communication.
The emotional ambivalence of photo messaging can be
discussed in relation to what Roland Barthes
(1980/2000) calls the ‘punctum’. The punctum is the
detail in a photograph that attracts the viewer. It is in
contrast to the ‘studium’, the cultural coding or cultural
context of the photograph, the general knowledge in the
photograph. In addition to the detail in the photograph,
time can also be the source of punctum (Barthes
1980/2000, 42, 94–6). Or, more accurately, the passage of
time, the fact that the person or object in the photograph
existed and does not necessarily exist anymore. The
spiritual sufferance is associated with the absence in time
(which, at the extreme, is death).
However, there is another kind of loss built into a photo
message. The other portrayed in the photo message is
almost certainly alive, yet she is not with the receiver of
the message at the moment of reception. She is absent,
and this absence – not absence in time, but absence in
space – can be a source of punctum, of a temporary loss.
Thus, what the notion of punctum does, in practice, is
express the subjective awareness of absence produced –
somewhat paradoxically – by the visual activation of a
feeling of presence.
The possibility of almost real-time photographic
communication inherent in photo messaging enables the
practical possibility that in the past was available only to
individuals sharing the same space in the same time.
‘You can show unusual or strange things happening at
the moment they happen and you can send a picture of
that to friend or somebody, hey something like this
happened right now’ (Interviewee C). To achieve a sense
of presence, one does not have to see the other person,
but rather to know or believe that they are seeing the
same view. Interviewee G provided an example of a
photo message (see Figure 3) she had sent to a friend
from the hospital after injuring her leg. The viewpoint in
the photograph is very personal, it is Interviewee G’s
everyday view of her own leg and not, for example, a
view from the hospital window. The photograph
communicates her situation as a patient in the hospital
and enables a synchronous gaze.
The practice of photo messaging, in other words,
surrogates physical distance with image-sharing as a
form of synchronous gaze, which expresses the need for
social proximity. The emotional load of vision is
reinforced by the quasi-simultaneity of the gaze as a
ritual use of images to (re)gain control of the social space
by re-creating a sense of intimacy. Interpreted within the
interplay of presence and absence as expressed in
Barthes’ notion of punctum, the synchronous gaze – and
the opportunity for intimacy and control that it
implies – seems a salient feature in photo messaging.
PHOTO MESSAGING AND THE POLITICS
OF SPACE
We have suggested that the practice of photo messaging
is a fundamentally ritualistic form of visual communi-
cation aiming at the preservation of intimate relation-
ships over distance. In the concluding part, we would like

to address more specifically the implications of this
analysis of what we call the politics of space: the
competition for the control over the social uses of
space.
The development of mobile communication technology
fosters the dream – or the nightmare – of a complete
saturation of the human communicative environment.
In such an environment – one in which every piece of
information can reach anybody, anytime in almost real
time – the notions of absence and presence pick up
ambivalent connotations that make these two concepts
melt into each other. This possibility has important
social implications, since the very notion of proximity is
based on the possibility of distinguishing presence from
absence, but also the possibility of distinguishing those
who are physically and/or emotionally close from those
who are not.
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The idea credited in the mainstream social discourse –
that mobile communication technology is capable of
preserving social proximity and, in so doing,
compensating for the social implications of physical
absence – hides the fundamental fact that the same
technology also facilitates physical absence. Mobile
technology lowers the social costs and risks of absence;
although it presents itself as a tool of presence, the
mobile phone is indeed a tool for absence. This
ambivalence is socially relevant because it affects the
nature of the relations that individuals can effectively
manage through mediated communication.
To conceptualise absence as a form of media-dependent
presence is a linguistic move that hides the fundamental
ambivalence of mobile technology and the impact of
these technologies on the control of space as an essential
part of the modernity project. The notion of mediated
presence expresses the effort to reduce, and if possible,
eliminate, the costs of distance, by reducing and possibly
eliminating the social value of proximity in connection
with the problem of trust or reliability in social relations.
This idea seems coherent with the process of
disembedding, considered by Giddens as a distinctive
trait of modernity, which he described as the ‘lifting out
of social relations from local contexts of interaction and
their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space’
(Giddens 1990, 21). Various forms of disembedding
symbolic tokens, such as money and expert systems, are
both based on trust that, as Giddens notes interestingly,
‘is related to absence in time and in space’ (Giddens
1990, 33).
The concept of presence appears as a linguistic tool
associated with the efforts of reproducing reliable forms
of communication and trust independently from
Visual mobile communication 109
physical distance and presumably other space-related
variables. The point is about disembedding trust from
proximity. The efforts in this direction, however, do meet
resistance. Available research shows that alternative or
adaptive use of mobile communication technology by
individuals in an effort to re-establish pre-modern forms
of communitarian relations (Geser 2004) are the norm.
The use of the mobile phone to reproduce the type of
communication and interaction which characterises
premodernity (Roos 2001) is unsurprising and rather
compatible with the hypothesis that people do, when
they can, adapt available technology to their needs,
rather than the other way round. People living in the
pre-industrial society enjoyed frequent ‘grooming talk’
with a tightly integrated social network. Mobile
communication restores this sense of connection and
community: it produces a ‘social lifeline’ in a fragmented
and isolating world (Fox 2001).
As critics of postmodernity such as Bauman (2001a,
2001b, 2006) and Beck (1992) have suggested, the
relentless exhortation to take advantage of available
freedom feeds both the demand for more freedom (as
the only way to deal with uncertainty) but also a
dramatic need for reassurance. If indeed the success of
mobile phones can be partly explained by the fact that
they allow to perform compensatory functions for what
people have lost – and the key concept here is
presumably that of community – a logical supposition is
that the efforts to recover what is lost are influential in
inspiring individuals’ adaptive use of available
technology. From the perspective of individual users, the
interest in presence may actually signal the interest in
togetherness and ritual social bonding as a distinctively
problematic dimension of mediated communication in
postmodern conditions. Put differently, the problem
here is to compensate for the need to feel part of a
community that cannot exist anymore here and now but
is elsewhere. Compared to the past, the freedom from the
constraints of space only makes simultaneous presence
more difficult.
What is, in conclusion, the role of photo messaging in
the politics of space? Our hypothesis points to the
ambivalence of this technology that reflects and supports
the broader ambivalence of presence and absence in the
conditions of postmodernity: two (very) different but
co-existing practical possibilities inherent in the
management of social space in contemporary society. We
want others to be present but claim the right to be
absent; we seek for presence but reserve the possibility
for absence, and social proximity in absence, in order to
be able to access different spaces (and different
intimacies) simultaneously.
 110 M. Villi and M. Stocchetti
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors want to thank the students and staff at
Arcada who helped in realising this study. Our
appreciation also goes to the guest editors of the special
issue and the three anonymous reviewers. Special thanks
are in order to Asko Lehmuskallio, Juha Herkman,
Nathalie Hyde-Clarke and Janne Matikainen for their
comments.
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APPENDIX – DESCRIPTION OF RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY IN THE ARCADA STUDY
The sampling procedure for the interviewees was
purposive. It consisted of searching the questionnaire
data for good informants – such people that have sent
MMS messages, and especially for those that have sent at
least a few messages per month. The main objective was
to find actual users of photo messaging, so that their
views would not be only hypothetical but arise from
authentic conventions. We did not aspire for
representativeness to some larger population, or even to
the Arcada group consisting of 91 respondents.
A semi-structured model was used for the interviews. A
set of questions divided into themes was presented to all
of the interviewees. The dialogue during the interviews
was staged according to a thematic, topic-centred
structure, which also allowed unexpected themes to
 112 M. Villi and M. Stocchetti
develop (Mason 2002, 62–3). The interviewees could
continue their thoughts along new lines as well, and they
were asked to elaborate on certain themes that seemed
interesting, to express reflective and critical views. They
were also free to introduce new topics into the
conversation, but this rarely happened. The main interest
was in the perceptions and interpretations of the
interviewees.
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The interview material was classified thematically under
the headings sharing, interpersonal communication,
visual communication, camera vs. phone, mediated
presence, ritual, transmission, connection, immediacy,
transience, intimacy, mundane and personal
communication. These thematical headings derived from
the study of previous literature and were thus not
oriented by the data.