Toward a Rhetoric of Locale: Localizing Mobile Messaging Technology into Everyday Life

Abstract

This article explores the social meaning of locale in mobile communication research and introduces an approach of user localization to study technology integration. It investigates how locale forms an essential role in mobile communication in the way that practice, agency, and identities are articulated into a user localization process of incorporating technology into user's everyday life. It argues that the use of mobile communication technology is both a complex and dynamic interaction with its surrounding social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions, and an articulation work of self and locale.