Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Canberra.
We’ve reached the last session of Digital Humanities Australasia 2012, and it’s the one I’m in as well. But we start with Mark Coté, whose interest is especially in smart phones. He begins by asking whether long-term humanists may sometimes feel as overrun by the digital humanities as inner-city dwellers may now feel by smart phone-wielding users.

Nonetheless, the digital humanities are an exciting development, and there’s now a need for some conceptual inquiries into the digital humanities. One area for this is the relationship between the human and technology, which must question the nature of the human, and its ontological status as ‘natural’. There has always been a constitutive relationship between the human and technology, Mark suggests, and this understanding runs counter to a more traditional line in western metaphysics which distinguishes craft, knowledge, and nature.

Seattle.
Finally, we move on to the fabulous Steve Jones and his colleague Rich Wolf to finish this session (and day) at AoIR 2011. Steve notes the degree to which the mobile phone has become a coterminal device in our presence. Through a student project, Steve and Rich led the development of an app for observing and understanding the scaffolding of privacy, security, surveillance and connectiveness. The app provided a location-based as well as social network service for students on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus.

Rich says that this was using a REST-based architecture, in which clients request representations of resources from Web servers; this may describe any meaningful resource that can be addressed. It plugged into the Foursquare API as the underlying REST service, in order not to reinvent the wheel, and used Apple’s Xcode development environment for iOS applications. (There’s more technical information here, but reporting on all of that correctly is asking a bit much of me at the end of a long day…)

Seattle.
The next speaker in this bumper session at AoIR 2011 is Andrea Guzman, who’s interested in the media framing of mobile phones. She has worked through a range of media texts from the New York Times and the Washington Post in the years 2006 and 2010 which discuss such issues, focussing especially on articles which mention mobile phones in their lead paragraphs.

Where mobile phone uses by adults are discussed in such articles, they are framed most of all as a necessary tool for coordinating work, coordinating life activities, and living in modern society. They are portrayed as especially important for more powerful people as well as for parents. A second key frame is convenience – this emerges in 2010, and sees phones as convenient tools for commerce as well as for making charitable donations (given that the Haiti earthquake had just happened then).

Seattle.
The next speaker in this AoIR 2011 session is Miao Feng, who asks about the privacy consequences of a site like Foursquare? Location-based services are nothing new, and address a local mass audience; what needs to be examined is how technology is diffused, what social change it promotes, and how it is culturally and socially negotiated.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Adriane Stoner, whose focus is on the historical trajectory of mobile media development. There are three ideological themes which can be observed in the rise of all new media, as James Carey argued: capitalism, popular imagery, and universalism.

New media were often accompanied by the rise of a powerful capitalism – new media is economically powerful, and existing economic systems usually need to be reconstructed as a result of their emergency, as powerful new monopolies are naturalised. Popular imagery associated with new media points to the notion of the electronic sublime – the rise of a more intelligent society. Finally, universalism embodies the idea of a great brotherhood of humanity – new media as holding the potential for a global network connecting us all.

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Meghan Grosse. She begins by pointing out how mobile devices have changed how we function in public and private spaces – not least also with the rise of apps, which have enabled us to personalise our mobile experience. The road here has been long; mobile phones have gradually added functionality, and the explosion in the range of apps has been a recent development which now no longer relies on hardware changes, but software development.

With the emergence of these tools also came the presumption that people should take advantage of these. These apps enable people to stay in touch with work, friends and family, which can make otherwise dead time useful, but also creates new expectations for people to stay up-to-date with things happening in their fields of professional and personal interest.

Seattle.
The final panel at AoIR 2011 for today begins with Guillaume Latzko-Toth, whose interest is in mobile devices and the notion of intimacy. By mobile devices, he means mobile digital information and communication devices: portable, hand-held devices through which media is accessed and collaboratively produced. Mobility doesn’t simply mean moveability or portability in this, but rather, this refers to devices which are used while the user is mobile. Such devices are digital and versatile; they are app-enabled.

By intimacy, on the other hand, Guillaume refers to the dimensions of proximity, contact, and privacy. Mobile devices are a technology of proximity, and at the same time we are in a proximity relationship with them – mobile devices are close to us in a spatial sense, in an emotional sense, and in a metonymical sense; we wear them on us, or keep them very close to us, we are closely attached to them emotionally, and they are similar to us to the extent that the represent and encapsulate our identity.

Seattle.
The Wednesday keynote at AoIR 2011 is by the abundantly energetic Tom Boellstorff, whose provocation to us is to rethink the digital. This is about both online and offline, and is interested in exploring emergent research areas. After all, what do we mean by digital: just the things we plug in, or the things which are online – or is there more to it? Part of the point here is also to reconnect the digital to indexicality – to return to the roots of the term ‘digit’.

Tom’s early work has been focussing on research into gay and lesbian culture in Indonesia – how are these concepts positioning themselves in contrast to, or adapting ideas from, Western gay and lesbian culture? Additionally, he’s also worked on Second Life; he’s been interested how a space like this transforms existing theory and practice. His current interests tend towards questions of methods, fieldsites, and ethics.