‘Playful Identities’ research blog

Thursday, 30 March 2006, V2_ in Rotterdam hosted an evening on internet use in China.

The Great Leap has become a popular metaphor to describe China’s turbulent and fast-paced economic modernization process. Many Chinese citizens have seen their private freedoms increase significantly but official policies of ‘opening up’ have neither changed the political system nor the state control of public media. TANGENT_LEAP brings together a group of experts and activists using bottom-up media such as the web, e-mail, blogs and sms as forms of self-organization to create an emergent middle landscape, somewhere between the official media rhetoric, and the private sphere.

Speakers were Karsten Giese, Zhang Ga, Isaac Mao, Martijn de Waal, and Guobin Yang. The latter spoke to the audience via Skype, apparently a very popular way of communicating in China too. He spoke about ‘play’ on the Chinese internet and gave many examples of ludic expressions on the internet. His thesis is that politics is mingled with play in the Chinese internet, saying that “all politics and no play makes the internet a dull place”.

Guobin also published an article on this topic in a newsletter special by IIAS (International Institute for Asian Studies) on the Chinese internet (#33, dated March 2003).

It was a pretty interesting evening. Nice to hear some informed stories about the current state of the Chinese internet, instead of the regular doom stories about government blocking and censorship. Most participants were confident that the internet will develop as an area for free speech anyway, in spite of efforts by the government to hamper this.

Funny, yesterday I discussed my preliminary paper on mobile communication as gift-culture (following the well-known anthropological classic by Marcel Mauss) together with my colleague PhD students. At one point we were talking about the consequences of this gift-exchange view, whether this would mean that people not in the gift-circle (have-nots or want-nots) would be left out of the circle. I said yes, definitely. And here’s a post on textuality.org that seems to confirm this:

According to a new study, the new social outcasts are teenagers and young adults without mobile phones. The ;The Sydney Morning Herald; reports.

Mobile phones are the portals to friendships and social networks, the ultimate measure of social status and portable shrines to self-image, he says. And if no one’s calling, there’s little shame in programming your phone to ring you, checking for non-existent text messages or talking up a storm with an imaginary friend.

Katz says. “To not have a phone feels like social banishment. It really is an issue of being excluded, of being an outsider.”

Everyone knows mobile phones can be irritating as hell to others, especially in public places. But as soon as we ourselves are calling, we don’t care so much any longer about others near us, do we…?

SoMo is a cool & funny design project that questions our behaviour in public spaces, and gives us some sanctions to ‘enlighten’ others. 5 Different mobile phones have been designed:

- SoMo1 is the electric shock mobile.
- SoMo2 is the speaking mobile.
- SoMo3 is the musical mobile.
- SoMo4 is the knocking mobile.
- SoMo5 is the catapult mobile.

pic source: http://www.erational.org/netart/recallme/

news source: www.newsday.com

The ubiquitous presence of the mobile phone can be a nuisance during class, meetings, concerts, the movies, etc. USA company NaturalNano claims to refine and market a radio-frequency shielding paint that can block signals in spaces treated with the paint. It ca also be used to create private networks inside spaces. The technology works at the nano-level, of which I cannot say anything informed, but apparently leaves open some sort of selective access control, which means that some signals can be allowed through while others are being shielded. Legal problems may arise, as blocking radio frequency signals is illegal in some/most countries. I wonder whether this technological fix is more useful than social mechanisms for preventing unwanted phone calls?