Mobile Personalization

Overview & Synopsis

People were watching and listening on the move long before the iPhone’s launch. The world of always-on streaming, accessible anywhere, has a pre-history: magic lanterns, drive-in theaters, and portable radios. In *Mobile Personalization*, Justin Grandinetti and Charlie Ecenbarger place Netflix, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, and other corporate claimants in a lineage that includes the build-out of sprawling, invisible infrastructures—undersea cables, server farms, and adtech. These “architectures of mobility,” together with their Silicon Valley underwriters, make seamless, algorithmic streams possible and profitable. The upshot is an evolving regime of mobile personalization, with entertainment for consumers and data-driven monetization for companies. *Mobile Personalization* recasts foundational ideas from Raymond Williams, including “flow” and “mobile privatization,” to account for the algorithmic delivery of targeted video and audio to lucrative audiences. As this important new book argues, the mobile streamers have delivered convenience, but also audience fragmentation and behavioral capture.