Mobile Media Theories

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.

Of Marsha's 2006 class of multimedia students, 70% used their mobile phones to produce images and videos; 80% accessed the Internet from their phones; none used their phones for email. All used SMS, 30% used MMS; 64% transferred files from their phones to computers, and 55% used bluetooth. Media ecologies and social practices further adapt to address issues like surveillance, privacy, safety, social appropriateness, cultural differences, sacred spaces and taboos, and each of these are avenues for further research.

Up next are Minerva Terrades and Yann Bona Beauvois, whose focus is on a combination of concepts such as technology and affectivity into 'technoaffectivity'. The key example here is the modification and use of mobile phones or keitai by Japanese teenagers, for whom the phone is like a must-have part of their own body without which existence is hardly imaginable. In the process, teenagers become keitaisha - portable persons - whose interaction amongst one another involves a variety of possibly simultaneous interactions between persons and phones. (Minerva draws a distinction between what is complex and what is complicated here: complexity simultaneously embraces a multitude of objects; complicated processes are made up of a succession of (in themselves) simple operations.)

By repeating simple operations in interacting with their mobile phones, teenagers are able to to sustain their social relationships, and such interactions and the devices used therefore have an effect and affect on them. In the process, identity is built and established, and this is facilitated through the social network of the peer group, which becomes a telecocoon for the individual. This means that the affective attachment between users and devices is very intense, as the keitai also becomes a diary of messages, photos, and other indicators of events which have had a transformative meaning. The subject is sustained through the mobile affectivity and the context of contacts within which this takes place; as the context changes (through a move from lower to higher school, for example), the uses and affect for the keitai also change. At the same time, Tokyo is a highly regulated space in which such technoaffectivity can play and circulate only at particular times and in specific spaces.

The next speaker is Jenny Weight, whose interest is especially in 'mobile phone time'. She highlights especially the use of mobile phones in managing deadline time (at its simplest for example in the use of mobiles as alarm clocks) as well as in enhancing banal-time (shopping time, downtime, flexitime). Such different types of time might reflect different modes of the self. How does such time usage impact on identity, what is the role of location on this experience, how does multitasking affect such time use, and what are the aesthetics of mobile time?

Temporal modes necessarily depend on context (and contextual location). Deadline time is a modernist, and industrial time, but other types of time (including banal-time) may at times be embedded in deadline time. The mobile media experience is a form of mash-up which layers personal experience and media use on top of the experience of the physical space within which the user exists. 'Proper' time is structured, ordered, a construct of industrialism, and complicated by late capitalism. Banal-time is enjoyable, controlled chaos; it is characterised by behaviours such as drift, observation, and distraction, and not oriented towards goals or progress. In banal-time, friends are available, communications are informal, unrehearsed, and intimate, information is available, and (mobile) play is possible; spatial specificity is surmounted, and deadline time is kept at bay.

If machines communicate different forms of time, then, they can be described as time machines; the mobile (like the PC) can perform, engage with, and enhance many different relationships with time. Time is contextual and embedded, and banal-time demonstrates how different times can be embedded within one another. The frame is unavoidable here; deadlines frame banal-time, while banal-time frames mobile media time. What becomes possible, then, is that we can design our own time; this is part of the use of mobile devices to maintain and enhance our own identity - but what does 'identity' mean in this context?

The final speaker is Iain Sutherland, whose interest is in the scares around brain cancer as caused by mobiles and mobile transmissions. He notes the shift from media audiences to media users with mobile technologies, introducing the virtual into real and local contexts, but he aims to recover the affective dimensions of mobiles as media technologies through his paper. Mobile phone systems sit at the connection point between public and private, virtual and corporeal, and from this, an affective conception of risk can arise.

Iain highlights the case of the development of a mobile phone tower on the propery of a church in Yarraville; in accordance with building requirements, the tower was proposed to be designed in the form of a Christian cross. This application created a great deal of resistance, but could not be dismissed upon health grounds alone; it points to the affective dimension of mobile phone technologies. He also highlights the development of mobile phone accessories which act as augments to the human body, from textable, vibrating mobile phone cushions to a variety of other technologies, and which further demonstrate the incorporation of technologies into the body's corporality and spatiality.

In Yarraville, responses to the development proposal were sharply emotional, and focussed around health risks; these may be seen as driven by the embedding of the body in virtual systems. Such fears persisted even in the absence of significant proof that mobile radiation was a health risk (but also in the absence of positive proof for its absence); additionally, the greatest risk of mobile radiation is posed by handsets, not by phone towers. What such responses work from, then, is an affective knowledge of risk, not from determinate judgments, but aesthetic, reflective judgments and even synaesthetic judgments which combine questions of health risks with psychological effects and visual impact. The perception of risk arises from the connection between such judgments, not from any of them in isolation. Affect is that which escapes capture and containment, and the Yarraville case uncovers such affect.

Technorati : Japan, Mobile Media 2007, affect, fear, media, mobile, phone, teenagers, time
Del.icio.us : Japan, Mobile Media 2007, affect, fear, media, mobile, phone, teenagers, time