Mobile and Wireless Technologies

Hamburg.
The last ECREA 2010 panel tonight starts with my QUT colleague Tanya Nitins, whose interest is in locative media. There’s been significant development in this in recent times, through wireless devices and and GPS-enabled phones. This divides into social-annotative, commercial-annotative, navigational, and combined forms of locative media.

A number of concepts have been applied to this – LBS, geospatial Web, GeoWeb, pervasive computing, sonic signage, GPS, and many other terms. We must therefore develop the language to communicate more clearly with one another as we research these technologies.

Hong Kong.
The second presenter in this session at The Internet Turning 40 is Huang Sheng-min, who will present in Chinese with a translator; his focus is on the developing Chinese media and telecommunication industry, with a growing integration of telecommunication and television networks.

There have been significant struggles around this over the past ten years in China: both the broadcasting and telecommunication industries in China are still immature, and both were affected by a directive which required both networks to merge into one to avoid the construction of duplicate physical networks - this was suspended, however, and both industries pursued their own developments, separately. Over the past year, then, the broadcasting industry pursued a digitalisation programme, while the telecommunications industry moved from 2G to 3G. In 2010, however the integration idea was put back on the table.

Milwaukee.
The next session at AoIR 2009 starts with Andrew Herman, who introduces the idea of 'Blackberry capitalism'. He notes the shift towards wireless Internet use in recent years; most US Internet users now access the Net wirelessly, for example, and trends are similar in many other countries. There is no distinction in much of the data between wireless and mobile uses, however; mobile Internet use entails some very different practices from mere wifi access. Mobile communication has similarly changed away from mere mobile telephony, of course; the possibilities of mobile communication have extended well beyond talking and texting, but don't simply converge with wireless Internet usage practices.

London.
The last Transforming Audiences session for today (that went fast!) starts with Geoffroy Patriarche, who focusses on mobile communication and its impact on transforming everyday mobility. Media and ICT use is itself also dependent on the logic of situations, of course. Geoffroy approached this topic by examining the ICT practices of young adults (25-25 years) in Brussels, especially while using public transport.

Media and ICTs take up travel time, and accompany the user every day; for some, they are also taken along because they will be needed upon arrival. There are immediate distinctions between different ICTs in the way they are stored during travel (e.g. mobiles vs. laptops); this is also influenced by security and usability considerations (some devices are locked, securely fastened to clothes or bags, or hidden, to prevent theft or accidental activation, while others - such as iPods - are prepared beforehand for easy use during travel). Use is also influenced by time concerns - in public transport, there is usually not enough time for laptop or Internet use or the reading of books, while there is no such constraint experienced in newspaper reading, music listening, or mobile phone use.

Brisbane.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2009 is Orit Ben-Harush, whose interest is in communication in social networks, and she begins by introducing the idea of 'friendworks': that is, a specific group of people (considered as friends) within one's entire social network. Her study traced such networks in a small Australian seachange community in New South Wales, and also especially focussed on the use of mobile phones by this community.

Social network as a term is too broad for this sort of analysis - and while friends and friendship are rather vague terms in this context, they are nonetheless highly productive. Social networks overall include family, friendworks, work-related networks, location-based connections, and online relationships, and there are overlaps between these network components, of course.

Brisbane.
The third speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Rowan Wilken, whose interest is in the metaphors applied to mobile telephony. The power of metaphor lies in the fact that it enables one well-know domain to provide an interpretive framework for another, less known domain. Metaphor proliferates, therefore, especially also in descriptions of new technologies, and has been studied in some detail in relation to the Internet, but less so for mobile technologies.

Common metaphors include navigation - cyber, for example, comes from the Greek kybernetes, or steersman, and the information superhighway is a more recent metaphor in the same vein. Such metaphors also point to the need to regulate and control these spaces, and are also related to a common group of transportation metaphors. Another common metaphor is linked to pioneer myths - as in Howard Rheingold's book Virtual Communities, at one point subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. These perpetuate western colonial metaphors and a private property model, some have argued - again highlighting possible regulatory frameworks for these new technologies.

Leuven.
Finally in this session at EuroITV 2009, we come to Sander Smit. His interest is in interactive networked multimedia experiences, combining TV, Web, and mobile communication. Such combination is not easy given the different histories of such technologies, and yet there is a strong push towards convergence here. Additionally, there is a push towards open service models, away from the proprietary telecom-driven frameworks of the past.

This involves the roll-out of personalisation and social networking elements in many contexts, using a variety of technological channels (Internet, mobile, broadcasting) to access available content and services. Such services themselves constitute a bundle of previously separate services, which are now combined and offered as a single service proposition to users. As a result, the service domain will become increasingly complex - which not least also means that managing information, privacy, and security becomes increasingly difficult. On the flip side, there are also substantial new opportunities for advertising.

Copenhagen.
Finally for this COST298 session we move on to James Stewart; his interest is in how we create place and space, especially in the context of using personal ICTs (pICTs). This also ties into the question of user co-creation, of course, especially where it is looking forward towards future uses. The research project took place here particularly in the context of branded meeting places - locations which were clearly marked as governed by an established brand (e.g. Starbucks, McDonald's).

Some interesting activities here included linking online and physical spaces, and connecting with Twitter and Facebook in order to enable group interactions. The 'virtual' and the 'real' are increasingly blurred in the process; in practice, they are linked by electronic gateways. The idea of tagging emerged as a very important practice in this (tags understood here as anything from metadata tags to signs, logos, stamps, barcodes, and much more) - we appropriate the world by tagging, and we can see our and others' tagging activity for example in map-based representations.

Copenhagen.
The next speaker in this COST298 session is Simona Isabella. She notes how the mobile phone as a technology that crosses public and private spheres can be seen as an embodiment of contemporary society. Overall, the meaning technological artefacts assume depends on internal technical as well as external social factors; technologies are socially shaped, within the constraints imposed by technological possibilities, and may ultimately even be domesticated - but in different ways by different groups.

Mobile telephony history shows these developments: in Japan, for example, the humble pager evolved into a medium for interactive text communication, while the landline picture phone in the US failed because of concerns over privacy. Today, the emerging broadband society can be described as a society of perpetual contact; the mobile phone embodies and enacts this. By adding Internet access features, it transforms telephony from one-to-one to one-to-many; additionally, the use of social networking sites through mobile devices heightens the always-in-touch nature of contemporary society.