Mobile Phone Use in Australia, the United States, and China

Sydney.
I'm afraid I missed out on blogging the last session at Mobile Media 2007 as I was chairing it, so we're on to the post-lunch session already. My paper with Liu Cheng is in this session, and the PDF is available here, Powerpoint here. The first presenter is Jayde Cahir, though - one of the editors of the 'complex' issue of M/C Journal which we've just launched. Jayde begins with a focus on the Cronulla riots on December 2005, during which text messages and emails were instrumental in organising both sides of the riot which took place broadly between Anglo and Lebanese Australians. This led to the introduction of strong new laws criminalising the transmission of messaged inciting hate, and allowing for the confiscation of mobile phones.

What such laws point to is the question of mobile text messaging as a public or private form of interaction. Empirically, text messaging is generally perceived as a private form of communication which is less intrusive and public for example than conducting a phone conversation; text messaging is often chosen, therefore, for communications of a more private or intimate nature, and in contexts where privacy for oral conversations is difficult to achieve. At the same time, the sharing of text messages received is also a common form - but here, too, the phone owner (though not the sender of the message) is able to control who sees messages received.

From a legal perspective, text messaging is understood as an uncontrolled public broadcasting system, and for that reason, law enforcement agencies were allowed to intercept and analyse messages sent and received, or indeed stored on mobile phones and provider equipment (though some of the provisions of such legislation have more recently be repealed). Jayde's research shows that most mobile phone users felt that such legislation did not pertain to their own practices, but that it constituted an annoyance nonetheless. What such responses raise are questions of access and ownership, however; this relates to access to mobile phones themselves, and to text messaging systems, as well as to ownership of messages sent (with claims to ownership split between sender, network, and receiver).

The new laws challenge rights to privacy, as well as perceptions of privacy, and demonstrate a blurring of public and private spaces. Such problems are likely to be highlighted further during the APEC summit in Sydney later this year, where further measures to track, analyse, intercept, and block text messages and mobile phone communications will be put in place.

The next speaker is Naomi Baron, whose focus is on patterns of mobile communication in the United States. There, landline telephony has traditionally dominated; in 2000, it had twice as many landlines per inhabitant than Europe, for example. The same was true for PCs. This has delayed the emergence of mobile phones and especially SMS as communications technologies; SMS has long been a very poor cousin to technologies like landline phones, instant messaging, and (only much more recently) talking via mobile phones themselves. Changes were driven by the role of mobile phones in communication after 9/11, by aggressive marketing, by a reduced price for communication (which is now more competitive with phones and Internet messaging), but there is still some way to go.

The U.S. culture is also a culture of orality, of speaking in public spaces, which is significantly different from Japanese culture, for example. Such cultural distinctions are replicated around the world; they are joined also by gender differences in usage, and further, economic factors also contribute to differences in mobile phone usage. As phones do become more prevalent in the U.S., physical characteristics of the mobile as a personal and personalisable technology and other related factors are important drivers of uptake. Usage is highly varied between different users, however; phone decoration and personalisation (e.g. through ringtones) were largely limited, texting is used, but it is unclear how frequently users text, and texting remains used much less than oral conversations.

Conversations were frequently with partners within a very small radius, or conversely with people far further away, same-age friends and parents were the most frequent partners for Naomi's university-based sample of respondents. Keeping in touch, arranging to meet, sharing news, and killing time while waiting or travelling were the main uses for voice calls; arranging to meet, sharing news, killing time, and keeping in touch was the overall order of uses for texting (this is also highly variable between different genders, however). Texting is used especially where the sender can't talk, where talking would take too long, or where the receiver can't talk. Interestingly, many users also pretend to talk on their phones - often to avoid talking to people they know who were in their physical vicinity, and for female users often also where they felt unsafe.

Most American students have not yet begun to see the potential for phone personalisation; this may change with the introduction of the iPhone. The talking function of phones remains largely an extension of face-to-face activities; the texting function is largely used to make short-term arrangements. Technology (and this is a general trend in American culture) is also used to 'control the volume' (and pretending to talk is a key use here): to limit or prevent interaction with others both in the same physical vicinity, and at a distance.

My own paper came next, and I think it went pretty well. I was presenting very much on behalf of my co-author Liu Cheng, of course, who is now back at his day job at Yunnan Daily Press and whose expert knowledge in the field informed much of this paper. The full paper is online here.

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