Tartu
In this post-lunch session on the final day at CATaC 2006 we're focussing on mobile technologies, and Andra Siibak is the first presenter. She notes the increased scale and magnitude of social interaction through computer-mediated interaction; this also involves youngsters forming their identities and creating favourable impressions of themselves. Despite the wide range of identity portrayals available to them, women still appear to present themselves in what are thought to be the most favourable formats, as Andra found for the Estonian social networking site Rate (and we're focussing here especially on the site's dating aspects) - here people are able to view photos of others and rate them.

Estonians are generally seen as relatively shy, and therefore find this service very useful. The site offers a top 100 page of the most interesting and most handful people on Rate; for this, users must be included in the 'attention list' of other users on the site (a list of people they are tracking) - the top-rated people usually add a new photo of themselves every week and constantly update their profiles with new information. Currently there are some 354,000 people registered in Rate, and 800-1600 people register daily; there are some 15 million page on the site views every day, and some 76% of high school students use the site daily. The user age ranges between 5 and 75 years, and gender is distributed relatively evenly.

How are the most 'remarkable' users presented here, then? Andra studied the visual presentation of these people, and investigated whether there is a preferred look for 'attractive' Rate profiles. The most widely used form of portrayal was of individuals by themselves - this seems congruent with the search for dates as it might indicate sexual and other availability. Further, most people were simply posing, and not portrayed doing any specific activities - this could indicate availability as well; indeed, nobody was depicted as engaged in sporting or athletic activities, which could be seen as taking away time from potential romantic involvement.

In terms of framing, there was a focus on depiction from a 'far personal' distance - the distribution drops off towards both a closer personal or intimate focus as well as towards social or public depictions. Most women posed with a smile on their faces, and some 30% appeared demanding or seducive. On the other hand, men frequently posed with a serious face. Women preferred a more private setting, while men preferred public or outdoors settings - this would indicate some common assumptions about gender roles, perhaps. Similarly, many women showed off their body as an achievement - and many of the women in the 'most remarkable women' group were blondes, and/or had long hair.

The 'sensitive new age guy' was also in evidence - many of the listed males were posing in dreamy poses and/or used relatively 'soft' headings for their titles; that is not to say that some macho poses both in pictures and in text were not also represented, however. Even these men clearly showed some strong attention to style and dress, however.

Overall, then, the women seem to follow relatively traditional stereotypes of what men look for in attractive women. Men, on the other hand, are caught between macho and metrosexual stances. Both pose mainly alone, creating an aura of availability. These top 100 portrayals could be considered as setting overall trends, then, as they have been selected by users from amongst all of the portrayals available on the site, and they contain powerful messages about what the young believe to be socially acceptable and apropriate portrayals.

Mobile Phones as Transitional Objects for Parent-Child Separation

Rivka Ribak now moves on to a talk about the mobile phone as a transitional object. The phone is usually celebrated for its ability to allow teens to communicate in spite of parental controls and spatial and mobility limitations - but this study focusses on the role of the mobile phone in parent-child relationships. It positions the phone as an object, and indeed as a transitional object rather than a means of communication.

Studies which discuss the introduction of communication technologies into the home often focus on gender differences - the landline phone, for example, followed a different trajectory from other technologies where women and young people immediately adopted it as a highly attractive technology. The mobile phone was used by youngsters in a similar way - it became a way of taking your friends with you, and bringing them into your home; kids could bypass parental restrictions, authority, and control, and created a peer culture of mediated communication through collective practices, collective reading and composing of messages, and initiating specialised communication. Parents are almost completely absent in such analyses. Other studies present the mobile phone as a kind of remote control or umbilical cord between parents and their children; as kids grow up, this cord becomes ever longer and is eventually disconnected - again this places parents in a relatively remote position.

Rivka's study focusses on a different approach, which works against a model where (in order to grow up) kids need to separate themselves from their families in order to 'launch' themselves into their own lives. This, she suggests, is a culturally specific view which does not necessarily apply elsewhere - Israelis, for example, desire more children and have more children than people in other industrialised countries, and these kids remain a central focus of concern for parents for longer than elsewhere; Israeli adolescents also reported more parental care and less parental control than others.

A useful tool here may be Donald Winnicott's Object Relations Theory, where transitional objects are used by kids to securely separate from their parents (e.g. teddy bears) - this object is the focus of a great deal of cognitive and emotional activity, it is chosen by the children and respected by the parents rather than subjected to standard parental control (favourite teddy bears are more rarely washed, for example). The object becomes vitally important to the kid, becomes a comfort and a comforter, is taken everywhere and cherished for its familiarity, and becomes an almost magical object.

The mobile phone might be seen in a similar light, then - and Rivka studied the use of such phones by middle- and upper middle-class Israelis. Phones were usually bought by parents but personalised by the adolescents; they were seen as a kind of tracking device by children and parents, but rarely used in this form (and if so, only for brief moments). Parents also usually cover the (sometimes very large) phone bills, and this was seen by parents as the price that needed to be paid in exchange for the surety provided by the phone. Children felt bothered by their parents' contacting them, but at the same time, they never filtered their calls (out of worry that something might have happened) - there was also a strong sense that people's own parents were 'better' (less intrusive) than those of others in their use of mobiles for tracking their children. There is, then, a limited sense of freedom amongst adolescents: rather than reporting to parents where children were going, this could now be done on the fly by parents calling in - this is not total freedom from parental control, but a delay of the controlling action.

The mobile phone may be able to be portrayed as a transitional object, then - and in parent-child relationships, it appears that the object is more important than the communication which it potentially enables. On the one hand, it provides a means of gradual separation between children and parents, but it is also just as much between parents and children - and indeed it is symbolic of that gradual separation.

Uses of Mobile Phones in the Estonian Context

Pille Runnel and Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt now present a study of Estonian mobile phone uses, in order to develop a taxonomy of the mobile phone services available here. Previous research has mainly focussed on communicative aspects of mobile phone usage, but the changing functions of mobile phones need to be addressed more - these might include m-commerce, camera phones, social positioning, and others.

There can be a number of m-services, then: one classification would divide them into those dealing with information - and this further splits up into provision of information (e.g. reporting disturbances, voting in polls and TV and radio shows, reporting utility balances), and retrieval of information (e.g. library due date reminders, teachers' messages to parents, tourist information, bank balances, news, weather) - and those dealing with purchases and other commercial transactions (buying bus or parking tickets, playing lotto, paying taxi fares, buying drinks, reading newspapers, Internet access, buying ring tones or background images, or accessing SMS poetry, astrology, dating systems, or quizzes).

However, an alternative classification of such services could be in a two-dimensional matrix with axes ranging from pragmatic to entertainment services, and from public services provided by public providers to public services by private mediators, services provided by a mix of public and private entities, or entirely privately provided services (for example, in this matrix a lottery might be a public entertainment service provided by a private mediator). Further, there are also more basic classifications according to phone function (use for email, as a notebook, for voicemail, and as a camera).

In summary, then, there is a great deal more research to be done on the many uses of mobile phones. The mobile phone is no longer only a communication device, but also serves as a wallet, newspaper, notebook, and music box, amongst many other uses - indeed, in the Estonian context, mobile phones are not used so much to access Web and Internet services, but to use mobile-native services which sometimes surpass the Internet altogether and are stand-alone applications. As a reuslt, usage has become quite fragmented, and applications vary quite substantially across different groups in society.

Technorati : CATaC2006, Estonia, Israel, gender, mobile phones, mobile services, online dating, stereotypes, transitional objects
Del.icio.us : CATaC2006, Estonia, Israel, gender, mobile phones, mobile services, online dating, stereotypes, transitional objects