Wk 13 | Mobile Technologies
de Souza e Silva -- Cyber to Hybrid
de Souza e Silva (2006) asks how "mobile technologies reconfigure our perceptions of space via users who are always potentially connected to the Internet and to other users?" (p. 3). Clearly, anyone with an itchy cell phone thumb and a partner who values undivided attention can attest to some of the difficulties raised by this question. We can also observe the unique situation of occupying two places at once--a hybrid space that fosters co-presence among adherents of new mobile technologies. What I seem to take away from de Souza e Silva's article is the reinforcement of a theme I've been wrestling with all semester: just because we can use a technology, should we? I know this sounds a bit strange coming from an admitted technophile, but perhaps the issue didn't become salient enough until the pieces on mobile media.
de Souza e Silva writes that "the emergence of portable communication technologies has contributed to the possibility of being always connected to digital spaces, literally "carrying" the Internet wherever we go" (2006, p. 3). This ubiquitous connectivity--what Peter Morville calls ambient findability--seems always to be discussed as a possibility in the most positive sense of the word, and while I certainly paint myself as a technophile who bookends his day by checking e-mail, I also value the ability to shut the valve on the information flow and have a legitimate excuse for not responding immediately to an e-mail as I usually do ("sorry; I was away for the day on a trip to the mountains with my wife"
. Phones built for the mobile Web strip me of that safety net, and that alone may be the only thing stopping me from hopping on the 3G network bandwidth/wagon (aside from the aforementioned undivided-attention-liking wife)
Farley - Mobile Telephone History
Farley's piece on the history of the mobile phone (should have been titled: "From Zack Morris to BlackBerry" offers an anchoring sense of the progression of telephony, especially for me. I used to work at the telephone company in my small home town, and part of my job was curating (read: cleaning) the telephone museum, so I recognized a great deal of the materials that Farley discussed, but, more importantly, I recognized the importance of preserving the histories of "new" and "emerging" technologies to remind us of what it used to be like before gadgets like mobile phones reached the level of ubiquity that they have today. I also thought it was ironic to read that advances in mobile telephony took off so quickly here and so slowly outside the U.S. (p. 23), yet today it's quite the opposite: Scandinavia and Japan in particular are far ahead of us in stretching the boundaries of mobile capabilities. Can we leapfrog again one day past our competitors? With a president who is addicted to his BlackBerry, yes we can.
Mann, Nolan, and Wellman - Sousveillance
MNW seem intent on bringing about a radical army of "below watchers" to invert the fishbowl, as it were, and turn the surveillance back on the surveillers. Reading this, I was struck by how similar it sounds to the culture jamming movement, a group of people and organizations (AdBusters, for example) who got fed up with the ever-presence and intrusive nature of advertising to the point of hijacking billboards and other spaces to create their own counter-messages back to Corporate America. Like MNW's sousveillance, though, the movement fails to take off with greater enthusiasm because most people are complacent enough to accept the facts that they will always be bombarded with ads and with monitoring technologies. In fact, both could be thought of as belonging to an amorphous and often-nefarious "Big Brother" that exists somewhere over our heads, making decisions that impact our lives in ways we can't control. Sousveillance and culture jamming are illusions of reclaiming some shred of that power. Little tidbits of stories in which a regular Average Joe uses citizen-surveillance to throw off the shackles of power abuse (like the one Zach posted) are little better than fairy tales to feed outrages citizens their dose of Kool-Aid. "You're being watched, but look what other people have done about it! You can too!" The idea that we can somehow "enhance the ability of people to collect data about their surveillance [and then] neutralize surveillance" is bullshit on any real level. Regaining power on any legitimate scale through sousveillance (or culture jamming) is a myth, and in fact worse than fairy tales; at least people accept fairy tales as fantasy and not possibility. The best we can hope for is to raise awareness, and that is, at best, not much more than a fantastic possibility for change in and of itself.
Dourish and Bell -- Infrastructure of Experience
For reasons unknown to myself, the nagging issue for me throughout D&B's piece on ubiquitous computing was not what these "hundreds of thousands of devices distributed through a physical environment" will look like or how they'll operate (p. 2), but whether the "low power demands" of each will be a realistic claim when magnified to the sheer quantity they seem to describe. It's not often this semester that I've considered energy demands alongside the discussions of new technologies, and I certainly didn't expect to do so in the week on mobile media. But while we devote ourselves to hours of studying hybrid games and mobile devices, perhaps we should also be conscious of the significant and fundamental changes in infrastructure and daily life theses developing technologies will bring. D&B's focus on "social infrastructures" is certainly an interesting angle to take on this issue, but I'll be interested to see more on the cultural impact of insufficient physical infrastructures that need to accompany the better-than-Moore's-law pace of rapidly developing mobile technologies (see AT&T's 3G network outages when the iPhone 2nd gen was released, for example).