The ability to receive and view television programs (and other moving image material) on the cellular phone should be seen as part of a larger system of asserting private space in an environment that is crowded with both people and technology. I begin with Walter Benjamin’s notion that the rise of the private individual can be indexed to the set of practices that transform the dwelling place into an interiorization of the external world through the collection of images and objects while at the same time acting as a place of refuge from the external world. Linking those observations to Raymond Williams’ notion of mobile privatization, I argue that the contradictory impulses of moving through the world while retreating from it are the product
