A couple of days ago i bought a new UMTS-enabled phone, finally :-). It’s a Nokia 6233. So now i’ll be able to publish from anywhere, thanks to this app i found, called Kablog.
Archive for the ‘announcements’ Category
First mobile post!
Tuesday, August 8th, 2006Mobile phone annoyances
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006According to a yearly recurring research by Dutch consultancy bureau CheckItOut (a Newcom branch), teenagers as well are annoyed by people talking too loud in their mobile phone, or having stupid ringtones.
47 % thinks loud conversations are a nuisance
46 % dislikes irritating ringtones
38 % doesn’t want to listen in on other people’s conversations
The poll was held among 585 young people between 12 - 25 years.
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Among the total Dutch population, the numbers are even higher, according to the Telecom monitor 2006 (source www.nu.nl):
62 % is annoyed by loud conversations
60 % hates listening to other people’s conversations
40 % hates annoying ringtones
37 % doesn’t like his/her partner to answer the phone during a normal conversation
35 % doesn’t like loud ringtones
EU launches ‘Mobile Safety for Children’ consultation
Saturday, July 29th, 2006The European Commission has started a public consultation about the issue of child safety and the use of the mobile phone. The consultation is undertaken within the framework of the “Safer Internet” programme.
A “Public consultation document” (PDF file, 142.2 KB) has been released that describes the issue. In short, the EU sees the following risks:
1) “Exposure to illegal or inappropriate content” - Children may be exposed to unwanted or illegal content via the mobile phone.
2) “Ease of contact by predators, bullying” - Children may be prone to harassment via the mobile phone.
3) “Risk of high expense, exposure to advertising by mobile marketers and phishing” - Children may lose a lot of money by unknowingly using services or being tricked.
The report suggests a couple of solutions:
1) Content classification
2) Opt-in versus Opt-out
3) Age verification
4) Filtering and blocking (including blacklisting)
5) Notice and take down procedures
6) Moderation of chat rooms
7) Raising awareness
Dedicated mobile phones for children
Doing something about all this hovers, as always, between legal rules and restrictions on the one hand, and self regulation of the industry on the other hand.
The whole report breathes ’social impact’ thinking, whereby new technologies are portrayed as an outside force, threatening the current stability and order of things. Apart from that, what is conspicuously lacking from the document’s list of possible ‘risks’ or ‘challenges’ - in my view - are the more interesting sociological and philosophical questions. For instance:
- Question of ‘digital divide’ - Is there any ‘risk’ in not having access to the mobile phone (e.g. due to financial situation of family; geographical coverage; lack of education; etc.)? What does it mean for the social position of the child not to have a mobile phone, especially when his/her peers all have one?
- Questions of parental trust and educational development: What does it mean for a child to be given the trust to use the mobile phone, or conversely, what does it mean not the be allowed one by the parent(s)?
- Questions of social networks - What is the contribution of the mobile phone to the formation of social ties with other children? Is the mobile phone an indispensable tool for creating social bonds?
- Question of personal identity development - What influence does the mobile phone have on the development of personal identity and autonomy of the child? Is it aiding the development of a sense of personhood? Or is the mobile phone creating a “distributed self”, a form of selfhood beyond singular and autonomous, but interdependent and distributed?
Update (not perished…)
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006Yes yes, still here.. after finally moving to my own apartment in the east of Amsterdam and becoming responsible for my own dirty dishes, and after finishing Sources of the Self, the magnum opus by Charles Taylor’s (yes, the Liberian dictator-philosopher 
it’s time for a little update on what I’ve been up to lately:
- Writing on my paper about mobile communication as gift culture. Unfortunately it was turned of for the book by Katz, Ling and Campbell.
- Reading: i.a. Taylor, and a lot of literature on mobile communication.
- Succeeded in getting the NWO grant for the art/science project. Really cool: I joined a preliminary plan by artist Esther Polak and anthropologist Ab Drent who want to work with the perceptions and visualisations of space amongst the pastoral Fulani herdsman in west-Africa. The project as it is planned now would take place in Nigeria. The idea is, as said in an earlier post, to let scientist and artist cooperate in a project, with both of them learning and gaining insights from the other. I’ll write about it some more as when the plan gets more concrete
- Done some other stuff: thinking about the site www.playful-identities.nl (not even working properly, so no clickable link here..); going to some symposia too: Christiana Seidel’s symposium about selfhood; ICT yearbook by SCP & Rathenau in The Hague on Monday May 15.
Things to do….
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006Things are getting busier now: I have said yes to several opportunities of presenting a paper before a group:
- March 15: I will present a preliminary paper about mobile communication as gift culture in the P.I.G (’Playful Identities Group’, as we have appreciatively dubbed ourselves…)
- March 20: paper about mobile communication as gift culture in the “AIO overleg” (PhD meeting).
- May ??: present second draft of this paper in the ‘Vakgroepoverleg’.
- September 18: a presentation about technology & theory (we will separate identity, play and technology as the 3 main domains to focus on in our literature studies).
- Finish this paper and hope to have it published
And besides that, I also will
- have a meet-up Februari 9 with Tim vd Hoff, who is going to create the research website at www.playful-identities.nl.
- give a little presentation later that day about some articles, during the second lesson of the course by Valerie Frissen about technology
- write a art-science proposal before March 1
- prepare a presentation for one of the final courses of Valerie in April (I think).
And I thought I had all the time in the world to just read books…
Dutch documentaries about the Internet
Thursday, February 2nd, 2006VPRO’s digital television channel HollandDoc is broadcasting a couple of really interesting documentaries this week about the history and development of the internet. From January 30 until February 5 2006, these series will be visible both as a LIVE! stream and on demand, under the title “Internet, hopes en hypes: Uitzendingen over het verleden, heden en toekomst van de nieuwe media”.
Check it out here (Dutch only…).
Science-Art project NWO: mobile art
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006NWO programme “Transformaties in Kunst en Cultuur” (Transformations in Art and Culture) (website poorly updated) is starting a science-art project (Geestesoog NWO #3 Sept. 2005 3-5 PDF file in Dutch) to research the interplay between academic study of new cultural developments and art. Academic research that receive sponsorship by NWO, have been invited to contribute ideas. Our research project ‘Playful Identities’ too has been asked to come up with one or more science-art proposals.
While I was looking for projects that have something to do with mobile technologies, science and art, I found a couple of results that can be categorised into either mobile films or locative art.
category short films/animations for mobile devices:
Mobile Fest Festival for Short Film
Pocketshorts Funding for Short Film makers
Mobilemediafest Short Film Award
Cellflix Festival for Short Film
category locative:
The Milk project
Amsterdam Realtime
Graz Mobile Landscape (see earlier post)
Interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance
Mood phone in the make?
Thursday, January 19th, 2006According to Textually.org, a student has won a price awarded by Motorola for a competition to make the world “seamlessly mobile”. Student John Finan has written an essay (PDF) about a ‘mood phone’ that would be very useful for someone with e.g. the Asperger sydrome, a mild form of autism that makes it difficult to assess non-verbal clues.
This raises some interesting questions, e.g. whether human emotions are attributable to machines (yes, I think, to some extent), and how this transforms ‘the medium into the message’.
More info in this Herald Sun article.
Steadily adding links to other research projects
Thursday, January 19th, 2006On the right hand side, you will find an increasing number of links to other research projects I’ve come across. Many of these are in the form of a weblog too. This makes it easy for me to keep track of them by adding them in a really nice RSS reader I have just found for the Mac: Vienna. And it’s open source too!
An interesting one I just found is Torill Mortensen’s blog. She has written a little piece about work vs. play:
Work vs play
Make tea not war (wonderful name) in Wellington comments on our effort to make a researcher’s guild on Wow. Mostly it is a musing at how some people make their hobbies into their job.This is interesting, because it says something about work as opposed to play, and positions itself in a discourse where certain assumptions are accepted as truth.
1) Playing because it is work can not really be fun.
2) A hobby has to become less interesting if you learn so much about it that it starts to appear to be work.
3) Work is something we do for the sake of duty, enjoying it makes it suspect unless the pleasure is tied to ambition, duty or hard-earned skill.
4) All study of something people do at their leisure is suspect, as the researcher appears to have found an excuse to spend more time with their hobbies than other people.
Luckily, there is more to work and play than this.
Reading a few classics now….
Thursday, January 5th, 2006I have recently bought a bunch of anthropological classics, works written by well known anthropological oldies. These works I consider interesting for my research, because they introduce and elaborate concepts I think can be usefully applied - in moderated form perhaps - to the use of new technologies. Not only that, I think using older concepts and theories balance the tendency to see current (technological) developments as “radically new” and “revolutionary”, a “complete breach from everything we ever knew before”. Utter rubbish of course, most would agree 
Yet still the tendency is there to over-stress the newness of it all. Using older thoughts can counterbalance this a bit, I think.
Some titles:
- Arnold van Gennep - The Rites of Passage (originally published in 1908; useful because of its focus on socio-cultural change and the concept of liminality)
- Marcel Mauss - The Gift (orig. 1950; useful because gifts are a cultural/economic way of bonding, based on reciprocity. This, I believe, can be applied to the way people nowadays exchange SMS text messages, and little phone calls ’bout nothing’)
- Victor Turner - From Ritual to Theatre: the human seriousness of play (1982; Turner has written a lot on ritual. The exploration of playfulness in culture is useful for our topic ‘Playful Identities’)
- Mary Douglas - Natural symbols : explorations in cosmology (1970; Douglas also wrote a classic about purity and danger and taboo)
I also intend to read (or at least look into) a Dutch translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘Tristes Tropiques’ my colleague Bibi gave me. Lots to read still in my own field, let alone beyond the boundaries of anthropology… :/