The term “pocket” appears a number of times in this book, a curious reoccurrence between chapters. Those brief mentions of pockets—an app name meant to emphasize its portability, a fieldwork moment when an informant pulls her/his phone out to check an app, a location for a researcher who always carries a phone to constantly access an app, and the observation of a discrete app-based interaction on a phone tucked quickly away for privacy—hint at the variety of significant functions of mobile applications, or mobile apps, on cell phones as observed through anthropological lenses. Portability, ease of access, ubiquity, and privacy are all features that, while linking them to other forms of digital media, make mobile apps a unique phenomenon to study.

That is not to say that mobile apps should be understood separately from other forms of digital media. To focus on the digital and to reify it as novel is, as Miriam Aouragh points out, often done so in ways that project Orientalist notions of modernity, civilization, and progress, ignoring human agency (Aouragh 2012). It is highly problematic to exclude digital histories ¹ and the non-digital dimensions of these mobile apps; thus, this book is not only about mobile apps. Our analysis is meant to be critical and contextualized within communities, recognizing the complex ways in which in-app (sometimes called online or virtual) and onground (physical) worlds interact. Whether this inquiry comes in the form of conceptualizing in-app and onground sites as “collocations” (e.g. Cool 2012 as discussed below) or critical reconceptualizations of social networks, we have depended upon methods and insights from digital anthropology to further the study of religious mobile apps (e.g. Whitehead and Wesch 2012; Boellstorff et al. 2012; Boellstorff 2015; Kozinets 2010). In Chapter 8, for example, Josiah Taru uses Heather Horst and Daniel Miller’s seminal work Digital Anthropology (2012) to focus on the growing cannon in digital anthropology that addresses the centrality of the human in discussions of digital culture. This discussion is of central anthropological interest, as it is not just about locating the role of human agency in digital environments, but asking, more fundamentally, what it means to be human in relation to the digital (e.g. Miller and Horst 2012; Boellstorff 2012). This anthropocentric focus underlies all of the chapters in this book; it is reflected, for example, in the questions that Robert Phillip’s Orthodox informants ask about who they are as they seek to find a way to text on the Shabbat in Chapter 3 and the role of mobile apps in the development of Catholic subjectivities Katherine Dugan discusses in Chapter 7.

The unique portability of mobile apps means that they can—and do—appear in many locations, foregrounding the role of particular sites in mobile app use and linking the study of mobile apps to anthropological interests in issues of space/place. Several of the works in this book focus on spaces using the terms “online” vs. “onground” to contrast digital and physical sites, as well as address their relationships to each other. These discussions draw their terminology from works such as Jennifer Cool’s study of the Cyborganic collective. Cool points out that while as early as the 1990s, anthropologists decoupled “social location from physical space” (e.g. Appadurai 1990, 1991; Gupta and Ferguson 1992), and physical space continues to play a significant role in relation to, or perhaps in tandem with, virtual spaces (Cool 2012, p. 18). She goes on to explain:

[r]ather than arguing for a return to place-based ethnography of face-to-face communities (see, e.g. Foster 1953; Redfield 1960), my emphasis on place builds on a concept of colocation—the colocation of people, jobs, and social activities together in particular places and channels of communication—that applies equally to online and onground. This understanding of colocation is informed by Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media…. (2012, p. 18)

Cool’s study of colocations emphasizes that both the onground and online function as social sites that contribute to place-building processes. In this volume, several authors attend to such questions not only through the use of the terms “ongound” and “online,” but also in drawing attention to the ways in which the relationship between these spaces breakdown the notion of a real/virtual world dichotomy, as I will address later in this chapter.

At the time of publishing this book, in 2019, we occupy a unique moment in digital culture history when many humans have only recently become accustomed to the ubiquity of mobile media. Until the past decade, we were more likely to conceptualize the onground and online as separate “spaces” due, in part, to the limited technological access points of online sites. In the preface to the second edition of Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff reflected on how this conception was changing with the development of mobile smartphones, which had become common in between the publishing of the first edition of his book in 2008 and the second edition in 2015. He wrote,

[m]any virtual worlds (including Second Life) can now be accessed using tablets and other mobile devices. This does not eliminate the gap between the online and offline, but makes the online accessible anywhere in the physical world. The online can now share in our mobility, leading to new possibilities for the “overlay” of the digital and physical. (Boellstorff 2015, p. xviii)

The timing of these comments is particularly insightful; the gaps that Boellstorff saw shrinking in 2015 were further effaced the next year by the development of the Pokémon Go app by Niantic, a gaming app released in July 2016. Pokémon Go’s mobile game allowed users to encounter virtual creatures imposed on onground landscapes, interacting with an actual “overlay” of the virtual in the physical world.

The game’s market release was a key cultural moment, when ideas about the relationship between onground and online came to the foreground of public discourse. For months after Pokémon Go first came out, public attention was focused on the “dangerous” ways that the game effaced the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. Concerned with idea that “real world” bodies could somehow inhabit “virtual” worlds, or at least be impacted by them through their activities, news sources obsessively cataloged injuries received from inattentive players, to the point where an individual’s twisted ankle and bruises could be nationally debated (e.g. “Playing Pokémon Go Is Becoming Dangerous” 2016). Pokémon Go also challenged cultural concepts about the significance of physical spaces in relation to virtual ones through global discussions about where it was, and was not, appropriate to play the game (e.g. “Where Pokémon Should Not Go” 2016).

Much of the public discourse about Pokémon Go in 2016 reflected an unease with the blurred boundaries between online and onground environments, a conversation only possible due to the unique portability and ease of access associated with the use of mobile apps. Pokémon Go now has more users than ever, with a reported 147 million active every month in May 2018 (Phillips 2018). As digital publics have become more accustomed to the daily use of mobile apps, concerns about portability and ease of access have lessened. Little media attention is now paid to the issue as mobile media, and its attendant perceived dangers have become ubiquitous.

While this last use of the term “ubiquitous” refers to its con...