Mobiles and the Public

Sydney.
The post-lunch session at Mobile Media 2007 is started by Janey Gordon, who focusses on the use of mobile phones in critical situations, contributing to the public sphere; she's focussing especially on the SARS outbreak in China in 2003, the tsunami in the Indian ocean in 2004, and the London bombings in 2005. SARS was initially underreported, and news about it was restricted by the Chinese government, until a Beijing doctor became a whistleblower about the crisis; in this context, the mobile phone became a key tool for the spread of grassroots information about it. SMS messages were later also used to send out blanket information to the public in order to manage public knowledge.

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was also a communication disaster: information from the areas affected earlier did not reach the authorities in other areas which would be devastated by the tsunami (but then the event also happened on a major holiday). Much of the initial coverage of the event took place through acts of citizen journalism, through the mobile phones and cameras of residents and holidaymakers on the ground at the time (and many of this material has now been bought up by commercial news organisations).

The 7/7 bombings in London were also covered in the main by citizen journalists at first. This coverage was also facilitated in good part by BBC News Online as it invited the public's coverage of the event onto its own pages. Indeed, the volume of voice and mobile calls increased quite significantly in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, and congested the mobile networks. In each of the three cases, utilisation of mobile communication networks by governments was not necessarily to the benefit of users, however, and indeed in some cases hindered users' utilisation of these technologies.

The next paper is by Maya Kriem, whose focus is especially on the use of mobile phone technologies in Morocco. She identifies a divergence between two conflicting modernities in the country - an official, Westernised one, and a subversive, Islamic modernity. Her case studies are protests around the recent trial of 14 Moroccan hard rock fans for alleged Satanism, which was seen as a show trial to placate Islamists in the country, as well as on recent protests for and against legal reforms to bring about greater gender equality, which were organised largely using mobile technologies.

Do such demonstrations have the power to promote change, however, or is the mobile phones here simply used in support of either cause? Indeed, the role of the mobile phone may simply be in enhancing everyday social practices of any kind; in Morocco, it has been identified both as promoting liberal sexual practices, and the Islamisation of public spaces. (This is exemplified for example by Morocco's sex workers, who use mobile phones for organising their clients while wearing traditional Islamic veils in public spaces - thus becoming both invisible as sex workers and hyper-visible as Muslims.)

Maya briefly outlines the introduction of distinctions between public and private space in Islamic culture, and the introduction of the veil as a form of protection for women; this has also had the effect of relegating women to the domestic space, however. Today, the role of the veil has become more multifaceted; it can act as a political, religious, or social statement, but also to enable women's movement beyond the boundary of the house. The mobile phone has taken on a similar role, enabling users to maintain a balance and erect a boundary between public and private. It mediates the construction of hybridised identities and the contestation and dialogue between the two modernities in present-day Morocco.

Finally, we're on to Bram Lievens. He notes the wide range of mobile devices now available to us - a mobile evolution which organises more and more of daily life around mobile technologies. Increasingly, of course, such devices converge around multi-function, multi-platform, versatile mobile devices. What does this mean for public and private spaces; indeed, does it create a shift from the private public environment (the family living room) to a public private environment (private mobile use in public spaces)? Bram and his team developed a multiplatform content delivery platform (MCDP) as a technological trial to identify user needs, motivations, and trends. They found that not every application or content can be transposed to such a platform, and that public/private boundaries are determined by user practices; users stick to the primary functions of devices, there is no automatic shift of user practices from private to public spaces, old habits die hard and innovation comes through familiarity, and there is a need to focus on the notion of user practices - the level of domestication of technologies is crucial.

There is now a reverse mobile privatisation: public space is experienced through a private, individual space, while at the same time private space is brought into the public space. Both public and private spaces as defined broadly here in everyday practice: public space is defined as all spaces which are perceived as public or have public character, while private space is a space where others can be excluded in order to create a secure and confidential environment (including private uses as conducted in public spaces - increasingly, private space is a state of mind). Borders between the two are increasingly challenged, therefore, and domestication plays a key role in this process.

This is defined not by technological possibilities, then, but by actual user practices; this is what determines the real level of domestication. In this context, old habits die hard - each media platform has its own usage patterns which persist even as media content is transposed from one technology to the next (TV to PC, etc.), and innovation takes place through familiarity; users want to maintain control; each platform (especially for audiovisual content) has its own scale of experience, and space and context influence that scale; and usage is not always driven by rational decisions only, and is affected also by public perceptions and environments.

Domestication plays a central role here: it is driven by the primary affordances of technologies (their primary purpose as perceived by users - in the case of a mobile phone, for example, telephony rather than gaming or television), interaction with the technological object (contact, perception, and acceptance), and confrontation with other practices (the space occupied by one technology in relation to others). Use of mobile technologies is strongly determined by user practices, then - the public/private relation is only one of the elements determining it, and is joined by factors such as primary functionality, difference in user practices in public and private spaces, and the fact that old habits of media consumption die hard. The more a technology is domesticated, the more the public/private boundaries blur, and in terms of technology development, therefore, user practices and public/private relations must be taken into account.

Technorati : Mobile Media 2007, Morocco, citizen journalism, mobile, private, public, public sphere