Blog

Sydney.
I chaired another session in the morning, and so I couldn't blog it... The first post-lunch session at Mobile Media 2007 starts with a paper by Marsha Berry, whose interest is in cartographies of mobile mediascapes; mobile places are places in between, threshold places, sites of reception and production which are characterised by the interrelationship between imagination and bodily experiences. In these spaces we find ritual gestures (such as the use of SMS as quasi-postcards) and the performance of the self; they raise perennial questions of embodiment and consciousness of our own experiences. Additionally, we are also surrounded constantly by surveillance in such spaces, as well as enacting a form of sousveillance through our own cameraphones and mediamaking. Telepresence is ubiquitous.

Sydney.
The final day of Mobile Media 2007 has started, and the opening keynote today is by Misa Matsuda (the other scheduled keynote speaker, Shin Dong Kim, unfortunately couldn't make it here). Parent-child relationships are now mediated by mobile technologies, and this provides and insight to the complex relationship between technologies and society overall. Japan is at the forefront of this, as it has the highest up-take of mobile Internet access, which may be seen as foreshadowing the future for mobile technology overall. This began with DoCoMo's introduction of i-mode phones, and is enhanced now also by GPS, data transmission, and music download capabilities, for example. Japanese society's transformation may therefore be indicative of future global changes, too.

Sydney.
The second keynote this evening at Mobile Media 2007 is by Leslie Haddon, who shifts our focus to children's uses of mobile technologies. His research focussed on 11-16-year-olds, and looked at as well as beyond their communicatory practices - including also uses of mobiles as cameras, music players, content transfer devices, games consoles, Internet and television platforms. Some of the teens involved in this study obtained their first mobiles at age 8-10, and many had already owned more than one phone in their lives (often traded down from parents and siblings). Gradually, they had acquired more and more functionality, and they therefore have an understanding of the history of fashionable phone features and uses over the past years; upgrades were motivated in part by fashion, but also by the wearing out of existing phones.

Sydney.
We're now in the final Mobile Media 2007 keynote session for today, which opens with Rich Ling. He begins with some data collected in Norway, which show that in age groups between 9 and 25, there is a tremendous change in the use of SMS, mobile, instant messaging, and email, as opposed to landline telephony. It is also evident that since the late 90s, mobile phone ownership amongst teens and adolescents has grown to close to 100% in Norway, and these groups are also the most prolific senders of text messages. Why this quick and thorough growth in mobile phone ownership especially in the teen age range? Rich suggests that teen emancipation is a key driver here.