Mobile Media Decision-Making: Toward a New Theory

Mobile media decision-making is a mid-range, integrative theory that addresses the transformative role of mobile media in contemporary decision-making processes. Accordingly, mobile media augment human cognitive processes by being accessible to users as they move through and act in the world. Moreover, this theory accounts for the emergence of mobile autonomous systems that can move through and act in the world, in the absence of human cognition. As an analytical tool, this theory can be applied to understand specificities of how humans and nonhumans act, move, know, and produce agential change in the world. It can inform scholarship that explores social and material impacts, moral–ethical dimensions, and the design of mobile systems that augment and supplant human decision-making processes.