Mobile Media, 2007 and Beyond

Sydney.
I'm spending the next few days at the Mobile Media 2007 conference, which is already shaping up to be a very interesting event. The first plenary kicks of with Leopoldina Fortunati. She notes the important role of Australasian countries in academic debates around ICTs and mobile communication - a shift from a European focus in the 1990s. This has been driven by the increasingly important economic role of these countries; Asian countries now are the key market for mobile devices, of course (and Australia is in an interesting position as a bridge between Asian and European cultures). The research community on mobile communications has itself been highly mobile, therefore.

What is necessary, though, is a greater focus also on areas still neglected (Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere) as well as groups left out, and the focus of Leopoldina's talk is especially on the question of gender in relation to the use of mobile devices. So far, studies have operationalised gender only in an instrumental way, comparing women's uses of mobile devices only against the male 'norm'. Significant differences between male and female uses of devices are often not observed, but this may be a failure of our research questions to identify such differences. What, then, does the mobile phone offer to women; does it serve to improve their social conditions?

Gender is a social construction, a series of models, a set of individual, family, social roles, a body of images and figures; behind it, there is a discipline of labour which indicates double work and double places of work; it is undergoing continuous transformation, and constitutes a process of becoming rather than a fixed category. This may also provide an alternative explanation for the general delay in women's adaptation of new technologies; it is explained not in an overall hostility towards technology, but in women's need to renegotiate an already gendered new technology for their uses.

Along the way, a reconceptualisation of generation is also necessary. While generation is often used implicitly to refer to a specific age cohort, a reconceptualisation would enable us better to understand the adoption processes of new technologies by younger users. What is necessary here is to understand such generations in their historical context, to work to characterise their social profile. Additionally, we must challenge the definition of the domestic sphere, must redefine everyday life, and better understand its moral and social economy. This enables us to better understand how ICTs enter this sphere, and how they affect the material and immaterial labour which takes place in this space.

The mobile phone supports especially immaterial reproductive labour; it represents a spread of 'fixed capital' beyond the classic productive environment (e.g. the factory) and increases the range of users well beyond the conventional productive environment. What is necessary now is a new stage of research on mobile communication on a theoretical and methodological level; new questions, new forms of asking, and new forms of samples.

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