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30 Mobile Culture Studies | >mcs_lab> 1 (2020)Johanna Menhard | Entanglements on and with the street on my smartphone stopped working. From then on, the only way to connect to the internet was open wireless networks, which must be found by walking the streets, searching for areas where I could connect. This limitation and segmentation of streets into wireless and non-wireless areas condense the experience of the localization process. My located body was a moving body in stop motion, hopping from spot to spot, moving on awkwardly in fragments of connection and dis-connection. Even though this situation interrupted my whole fieldwork setting and enabled doing the research as planned, it turned out to be fruitful for answering the question: What does the human-smartphone-entanglement on and with the streets do and how does it affect the body in motion? A lot of practices and mediated connections which could have been experienced on the streets in motion en passant were then restricted to certain areas. When I arrived in Warsaw, I had already made plans to meet Engelbert, a pensioner on his way to Tartu, who was willing to give me a ride from Warsaw. We agreed on meeting at 11 am and, as I hadn’t heard from him otherwise, I decided to visit a place to fix my problem with my phone and then go back to the meeting point at the scheduled time. But as I entered a shopping mall to use the toilet and looking for a mobile phone shop, I entered an area with wireless internet and suddenly received mails, voicemails, text messages, notifications and updates. In that moment I was suddenly confronted with Engelbert´ s change of plans, worried messages, missed calls, and stressed ques- tions asking why I was not answering. Although I had written him a message that I had no Internet connection, he had continued to send me messages via WhatsApp. Maybe he didn’t get the message or misunderstood it? Either way, he had been waiting at the meeting point since 4 am in the morning. Rushing out of the toilet, I called him immediately and was confronted with a mixture of anger, disappointment, and lack of understanding. Suddenly I felt guilty for not being able to receive and answer his messages, for being disconnected.24 In the following weeks, I was definitely getting in contact with places and people through apps, but not en passant. I orientated myself to areas where I assumed I could connect to the internet and stopped at corners within reach of shopping malls, universities, train stations, cafés and open-city-access-areas. Whereas others navigated with their navigation apps in the city or texted/talked with others in motion, on the bus, in cars, in trams, I was hopping from access point to access point and was trying to deal with as much as possible in a short time: answering messages, looking for a restaurant, searching for an address, getting in contact with possible hosts, calling family, calling friends, planning my trip, making connections with locals to spend my time with, and so on … while standing in the entrance hall of a train station or while sitting on the stairway of a shopping mall. After staying a week in Tartu, Laupa, and Tallinn, and then heading to Helsinki and Stockholm, I was exhausted, but still had to go on with this method, as I felt dependent on it. Where could I sleep if I didn’t get in contact with people, who could host me? How could I move on, if I didn’t get access to transportation possibilities? Why was the failure of my smartphone while moving around in unknown cities so deeply affecting me? 24 Based on fieldnotes on my meeting with Engelbert, 01.08.2019