ABSTRACT
How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? When trying to portray the diversity of urban spaces, mobile phones open narratives to include more kinds of voices in a more complex portrait of social relations. This chapter examines examples of this emerging genre, specifically focusing on Voces Móviles (VozMob) and The LA Flood Project, each of which tell the stories of Los Angeles that typically go untold. VozMob is a journalism project that allows itinerant day laborers, or jornaleros, to report and publish the events they witness in the city. The LA Flood Project is a work of locative art that presents both real and imagined accounts of Angelenos who have encountered a crisis. Both of these projects use mobile phone technologies to complicate the very notion of “mobility” by calling attention to the ways economic, racial, and ethnic status facilitate or restrict movement whether in the forced movements caused by natural calamities or in the itinerant nature of jornaleros, whose constant movement is a sign of their marginal status. Together these projects show how mobile technologies act as media of inclusion by allowing a diversity of voices to speak about a city as the storytellers cross this heterogeneous urban landscape.
