


However, as a background issue, it also includes the sometimes implicit approach about the transformations that connect new technologies to certain cultural practices, forms of interaction and political uses. This book, which brings together presentations from the conference "Public and Private in Mobile Communications", held in March 2015 at Beira Interior University, Portugal, particularly favors discussions on the uses that individuals make of mobile devices in their everyday practices. The fact is that the facets of mobile technology – ubiquity, multimediality, multidirectionality – form a new context in which trends to renegotiate, defend, adapt or challenge notions of public and private are developed by individuals in their everyday lives and by social institutions through their rules and goals. The types of communicating vessel systems that form public and private "spheres" constitute a multifaceted, complex system that is connected to an almost intractable range of issues. I provide a basis for this framework first by making an argument for the umbrella term " interactive media, " as interactivity is the one feature that links all of the media considered here and is therefore the feature that is least likely to change second by extending Lisa Gitelman's concept of " social and cultural protocols " of media with the suggestion that they could be further broken down into delivery, use, and demand protocols and finally, based on a synthesis of key works in the literature, especially those that address the basic elements of interactive media, by identifying three core principles of interactive media (digital, databased, and networked) and discussing and their associated protocols. The goal of this framework is twofold: 1) to offer students a more critical lens with which to engage as they go about employing these media in a variety of contexts, and 2) to offer scholars a simplified, design-based framework for furthering research and theory. In an effort to provide a framework for digital literacy that encourages critical thinking about the tools of digital media, this paper outlines common themes within their design.
