Dr Marsha Berry

Research Area/Interests:

Marsha's research investigates mobile media and geoplaced knowledge, urban spaces, postmemory, and evolved art. Currently, she is involved with transdisciplnary research project teams comprising colleagues and postgraduate students exploring Bluetooth nodes, mobile media in the everyday and the fluidity of private and public spaces in urban landscapes. She supervises postgraduate research by project students in video, animation, photomedia and interactive media. Her research discipline area encompasses critical theory and philosophy, narratology, cultural studies and performance studies. She is also a practicing artist.

Trains and Mobile Phones

Mobile telecommunications have not been addressed in depth as a city planning issue and as mobile phones become increasing poly-functional the issues surrounding their transformative effect on public spaces become more complex. In postindustrial cities, our ideas about the boundaries between public and private spaces are undergoing change. Mobile communications create an ability to contact work, friends and family constantly so that private concerns spill over into public places. We address what mobile phone use on trains shows us about the changing nature of public transport spaces.

Mobility is changing the ways people interact. Since the appearance of digital mobile phone networks, mobile phones have become part of suburban and urban landscapes globally. Both the use of public transport and mobile telecommunications are integral for daily life and self-presentation in most large cities such as London and Tokyo.

Public places and spaces are being transformed into hybrid geographies through the introduction of new spatial infrastructure. Mobile telecommunications infrastructures have been laid over aging modernist industrial infrastructure such as suburban railway networks.

We are interested in the ways people engage with mobility, in the intersection space of the train with mobile phones. We conducted a survey interview of commuters at a busy railway station in the heart of Melbourne to investigate their interactions with and within public transport spaces in order to see how they are engaging with the evolving new space in their everyday social practices.

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