CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

In our examination of 20th century technologies, we paid a great deal of attention to how transportation affected media. Paperback books, for instance, increased in popularity because people needed something to read while traveling by rail. Books obviously pre-date trains, but the medium adapted to satisfy the emerging need for easily portable literature. This week’s focus goes beyond transportation and another earlier topic, mobility, to study mobile media.

Farley (2005) chronicles the development of the mobile telephone. Although companies planted seeds in 1946, it took decades for them to bear any fruit. I still remember the novelty of the cordless phone, which I remember thinking had all the features you would need since you could still talk on the phone while you were outside in the yard. In the early to mid 1990s, some of the farmers in my community bought cell phones so they could communicate while they were working in the fields. I used a cell phone for the first time in 1997, while working my first radio job. It looked pretty much like the bag phone Farley shows in the article (p. 30). I would take the phone with me when I would go out for remote broadcasts so I could communicate any problems back to the station, essentially using it for the same purpose as the farmers.

In week 3, Kellerman (2006) asserted a societal impact of wirelessness is the perception of personal virtual mobility and expression as democratic rights (p. 101). Using the computer no longer means sitting at a desktop machine; cellular telephones are really microcomputers keeping users in constant contact. As access becomes ubiquitous across the world, the media that provide information and facilitate communication need to adapt. After mainframes and PCs come a third age, one of ubiquitous computing. According to Dourish and Bell (2007), “ubiquitous computing suggests that each user will be served by tens or hundreds of computational devices, located not simply on the desktop but spread throughout the environment. In ubiquitous computing, then, the site of interaction with computation is the everyday world, whose fabric and contents have been augmented with computational capacities, and whose meaning might also shift with these new technology interventions and augmentations” (p. 1).

At one of the Subway locations in Garner there is a sign asking customers not to use their cell phones while in line because it is rude. I joked with the sandwich artist about the difficulty of communicating with someone while he or she was had another, invisible conversation partner. Dourish and Bell touch on this issue as well, writing “Certainly, the rise of ‘cell-phone-free zones’ in public spaces, or cell site dampeners deployed in places such as churches and restaurants suggests emerging norms about the appropriateness of access to information in difference spaces; norms that may, of course, be acknowledged and enforced socially rather than technologically” (p. 12). I have wondered more than once if the FCC’s ban on cell phone use on airplanes is really because of potential interference between the cockpit and ground control. It is annoying enough when someone will not turn off the overhead reading light; I cannot image the ensuing mayhem if someone chatted incessantly on a cell phone for five hours. It would be enough to make even the most docile person violent.

“Because mobile devices create a more dynamic relationship with the Internet, embedding it in outdoor, everyday activities, we can no longer address the disconnection between physical and digital spaces,” writes de Souza e Silva (2006, p. 262). She introduces the notion of a hybrid space where the virtual and physical come together. Without a doubt, “Multiuser environments, constructed metaphorically as public social places, have attracted many people willing to socialize with others outside their situated geographical boundaries” (de Souza e Silva, pp. 269-270). Now a user’s mobile device enables interaction with his or her physical environment, allowing him or her to better socialize within and even with the geographic boundaries. Hybrid-reality games like Botfighters and Mogi turn a city into a giant game board (p. 266). The mobility of media allows game players to visualize the city in new, different ways. Dourish and Bell remind us transportation systems also affect our sense of geography. “When first visiting London and traveling on the Underground, one's experience of the city is of a series of islands connected by Tube stops until one day one walks down the street, realizes that some of those stops were only a couple of blocks apart, and starts to experience the city as a continuous phenomenon” (p. 5).

Until reading Mann, Nolan and Wellman (2003), I never considered an auto-flush toilet as a surveillance device. Add this to the list of surveillance I regularly encounter in my office (which has cameras in the studio, library and hallway), at traffic lights, store parking lots and the pharmacy (where I need to show my ID and sign for over-the-counter pseudoephedrine). I have an added level of surveillance in that not only does Gmail read all my emails, but as a state employee all my emails are considered public documents and can therefore be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request. This causes me to sometimes self-censor or opt to communicate verbally rather than by an email – especially in regards to keeping information private via the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. I know some professors who will not give out any grade information via email, or only communicate to the student’s official university email.