Mobile Media 2007

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.

Sydney.
The next session at Mobile Media 2007 starts with my paper, co-authored with Rachel Cobcroft, Jude Smith, and Stephen Towers (PDF available here, Powerpoint here).

Kathleen Cumiskey is the next speaker. She notes that there is significant research on the actual use of mobile phones, but less on the meanings users themselves ascribe to such use; her research focusses on such use stories, instead. The use of mobile phones during face-to-face interaction renders remote others present, while denying the presence of those physically present. This is related to the psychological idea of 'mattering': in the process of mobile phone use, remote participants are identified as mattering, while physically present participants are shown to matter less.

Sydney.
The next keynote speaker here at Mobile Media 2007 is Judy Wajcman. Her focus is especially on the question of work/life balance in a mobile environment, and she highlights the home-to-work and work-to-home spillover which mobile technologies have made possible. Such spillover can be both positive and negative, even though research focus has been mainly on negative aspects; this is a shift from earlier interest in developing family-friendly work/life policies. At any rate, the boundaries of home and work are clearly being blurred, and the mobile phone is often positioned as a threat to the quality of personal life (while others also see it as an enabling technology, of course).

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.