Dissertation
Consumer drones as mobile media: a technographic study of seeing, moving, and being (with) drones
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Drexel University
May 2019
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/5mq7-t193
Abstract
For an increasing number of civilian "pilots," consumer drones are an empowering means of obtaining and communicating insightful views from above. For an increasing number of skeptics, the buzzing flying machines symbolize a threat to locational privacy and physical safety. Despite instructive scholarship on a variety of contemporary drone applications and competing public narratives, the literature on consumer drones lacks empirical research on the socio-spatial, communicative, mobile, and affective dimensions of particularly personal drone use. In the recreational domain - with roughly 878,000 registered drone hobbyists estimated to hold over 1.5 million camera drones in U.S. households -, usage continues to increase with the potential to reconfigure everyday practices and spaces. This study critically analyzes personal drone uses in terms of which drone flying and image-taking practices hobby drone pilots adopt, how those take shape in everyday spaces, for what purposes they are pursued, and with what outcomes. Conducting offline and online ethnographic research, in-depth interviews with 25 users and experts, visual analyses of drone-generated imagery, and auto-ethnographic drone flying and image-taking, I explore the socio-spatial, mobile, visual, and relational affordances of the flying camera in everyday spaces. Combining the theoretical frameworks of media ecology, mobilities research, and science and technology studies, I discuss drones, not only as aerial vehicles, but as mobile assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies, networked communication systems, creative platforms for spatial exploration and visual discovery, and, last but not least, relational artifacts that shape spatial relations, social formations, and affective entanglements. As such, the grounded (and aerial) fieldwork not only fills gaps in the social-scientific literature, but also advances our understanding of new mobile practices, emerging infrastructures of visualization, and multi-spatial human-technology interactions. In addition, the project contributes a new "auto-technographic" method to the literature in mobile and mediated communication. Overall, the analysis responds to a trend towards increased mobile autonomy of media in the form of drones and robots more generally and initiates questions about how such autonomous and robotic technologies shift the meaning of mobile media.
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Details
- Title
- Consumer drones as mobile media
- Creators
- Julia M. Hildebrand - DU
- Contributors
- Mimi Sheller (Advisor) - Drexel University (1970-)
- Awarding Institution
- Drexel University
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Publisher
- Drexel University; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Number of pages
- viii, 207 pages
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts and Sciences; Communication, Culture, and Media; Communication; Drexel University
- Other Identifier
- 9473; 991014632313504721