This paper draws the contours of a hitherto unexplored concept: connectivity justice. It refers to the rights and opportunities of individuals and organizations to manage whether and how they connect to different, especially digital, networks and infrastructures. It may range from having a bus-stop or mobile transmitter close to where one lives to possessing the means and skills for using digital authorization apps or booking platforms. As such, connectivity justice overlaps with, but also extends beyond mobility justice and data justice. The paper presents a conceptual overview of mobility justice, data justice and related terms – such as “mobility data justice” – showing how these terms overlap with connectivity justice, while at the same time crystallizing the distinct properties of the latter term. In a digital society, connectivity is largely a precondition for the capacity to move and to utilize media platforms involving datafication processes (with their positive and negative implications). At the same time, connectivity entails the capacity to withdraw from networks and thus avoid certain types of interactions, such as, surveillance. Connectivity justice is thus not only a matter of justly distributed opportunities to connect and utilize digital resources; it also concerns the right to disconnect. The latter aspect has been discussed especially in relation to certain forms of digital(ized) labor, but can be applied across social realms pertaining to citizens and consumers with various needs, desires and passions. As a case in point, the hospitality industry (including hotels, coworking spaces, etc.) provides good opportunities for studying how connectivity justice interacts with mobility and data justice pertaining to different clienteles. Connectivity justice may spur critical discussions within the field of geomedia studies that break away from any universalizing ethics in favor of an ethics of care. 

Whereas media reliance is one of the classical concepts in media and communication studies, this article argues that deep mediatization imposes a renewed relevance of the term, as well as a need to develop a more nuanced framework for studying its social implications. Traditionally, media reliance was used to explain how people develop a citizen identity. Today, while connective media, datafication and AI have transformed what it means to be reliant on media, the very concept is marginalized and theoretically under-developed. Against this backdrop, the article starts out from an overview of how media reliance, and related terms, have been utilized in media research and then develops an analytical framework that accounts for different social modes and realms of media reliance. The matrix is implemented to crystallize blind spots in the research field and to highlight new types of questions that different research strands could address in times of pervasive connectivity.

Escalating smartphone reliance is a debated issue, especially when it comes to the digital wellbeing of young people. Hence, this article addresses smartphone use as a morally contested activity among young adults. We first analyse the existence of moral dissonance pertaining to one's own smartphone use - whether one uses the device according to internalised norms or not. Second, we explore moral distancing - to what extent morally problematic smartphone use is ascribed to others rather than to oneself. Combining survey results with focus-group interviews from Sweden, the study shows that moral distancing is less pronounced among young adults than in the overall population. It also shows that young people's capacity to domesticate digital media in a morally congruent way plays into the social reproduction of gender and class. While the smartphone is socially normalised, young adults, especially women, report a great deal of moral reflexivity and distress in relation to the device.

The coming of the post-digital workplace? A survey of how white-collar workers experience and cope with digital media reliance. New media technology can both hamper and amplify workers' agency. Much research shows that the ambiguities of digital reliance are accentuated among office workers, especially knowledge workers, who spend most of their working time handling different types of information and data. Thus, in times of constant connectivity, people might feel compelled to create time-spaces for disconnection, or find spatial and temporal routines for restricting their use of digital tools. This article provides a quantitative analysis, based on a survey, of how private and public officials (“white-collar workers”) in Sweden experience and handle digital media reliance at work, with a special focus on whether they think communicative and territorial agency are enhanced or constrained under digitalized working conditions. Based on a principal component analysis (PCA), five dispositions toward (the handling of) digital media reliance are identified: the skepctical, the embracing, the captivated, the reluctant and the disciplined. These dispositions are further analyzed in relation to demographic and contextual variables, pointing especially to the significance of employment sector. While digital media reliance is appreciated and associated with extended agency by many informants, the study also reveals different facets of post-digital sentiments and tactics. These are particularly constitutive of the skeptical disposition, reflecting inclinations to avoid certain media and find alternatives to digital tools, but also in the disciplined disposition which encompasses internalized routines for media use. The study also shows that the normalization of digitalized work processes is entwined with, and necessitates, different forms of territorial micro-politics extending beyond the workplace per se.

Geomedia, representing an epochal shift in spatial mediations and spatialized media, changes daily life. This future-directed thematic issue advocates for contextualized understandings of geomedia that transcend contemporary hegemonic representations of technology. It recognizes the transformative powers of geomediatization processes and asks what “geomedia futures” such processes might bring about. Bridging critical geomedia studies and critical future studies, it challenges dominant narratives about tomorrow’s technological society and promotes the exploration of diverse, equitable, and sustainable futures with and under geomedia. Through numerous methodological approaches, the collected articles examine the role of geomedia in contexts such as urban planning, tourism, surveillance, governance, and policy. The thematic issue emphasizes the importance of envisioning alternative futures that resist technological rationalization and unethical exploitation of geospatial data, supporting more inclusive and human-centered mediatized places. This work contributes to ongoing debates in geomedia studies, highlighting the need for critical and interdisciplinary approaches to understand and shape our technological future.

Current research suggests that coworking spaces (CWS) both respond to and legitimize work precarization. This is an important critique. Less acknowledged, however, is the fact that CWS also (re)produce eliteness. Thus, to the aim of offering perspectives that remain underrepresented in CWS research, I here scrutinize CWS as promotors of class privilege. I build my case on the premise that class privilege has to do with more than merely economic superiority and seek to dismantle, in particular, the role of geomedia technologies in the (re)production of CWS eliteness. With clues derived from a literature review as well as analyses of real-life cases, I here recognize CWS as places of elite (non-)consumption, as hubs of elite mobility, as nodes in elite networks, and, ultimately, as elite territories in the (super-)gentrified geomedia city. I end my article by reflecting on the dialectics of CWS eliteness, thereby suggesting how precariousness and eliteness are interlinked.

Coworking spaces are contradictory places. Typically, they are constructed as connected, domestic-like places for hard work and as recreational, aestheticized destinations for individuals in search of work-life balance and opportunities for partial disconnection. This article contributes an immanent critique of coworking spaces through the overarching notion of “coworking space territoriality”. Our point of departure is the concept of post-digital territoriality, which captures how individuals and organizations in various ways try to counter the downsides of escalating digitalization and reclaim a sense of bounded place. To further elaborate the subversive potentials of coworking spaces, however, the “post-digital” is brought into dialogue with “post-work” and “post-tourist”; two other “post-” concepts that contain ideas and practices that characterize the contradictory nature of coworking spaces. At the intersection of all three facets of territoriality, we argue, the coworking space emerges as a spatially and socially bounded comfort zone. The suggested approach informs the ongoing conversation about the ambiguous role of coworking spaces in broader transformations of society, especially in terms of social inclusion and exclusion. The theoretical arguments are anchored in a substantial literature review as well as in first-hand empirical data from a “hot-desking ethnography” covering ten different coworking spaces in Oslo, Denver, and Palma de Mallorca.