Abstract
Spectatorship has been investigated in film and media studies, aesthetics and art history,
and has gained prominence from the 1990’s with the focus on digital media in these fields. In
this article I investigate the implications of two notions of contemporary spectatorship for
viewing moving images on smart phones, by studying how they are depicted in popular
representations; television series, an advertisement and social media. The first is
participation1, with new technologies such as smart phones linked to supposedly more
empowered participatory practices than those that preceded these technologies. The second
is the cinema dispositive2, which in current theory is often dismissed as leading to passive
spectatorship. I aim to interrogate the complexity and contradictions inherent in both
concepts and how they have recently been theorised in film and media studies, by focusing
on two aspects that seem to facilitate participation through smart phones. The first is
distance; I investigate whether and how it is reconfigured as a factor that may feature in
participatory spectator practices. The second is mobility, where I consider some limitations of
the physical body-screen relationship between spectators and smart phones.