Anybody can upload a short mobile phone clip to the website 15×15.org which is then displayed on the homepage for 15 seconds as one of 15 clips being shown simultaneously.
Interestingly, most people seem to film themselves and then put it online… Affirmation of the mobile phone as a tool for reflexive creation and expression of personal identity?
BTW: I am being eating by a purple Tyrannosaurus Rex…
(Thanks Tim for reminding me!)
Xen Mendelsohn from Xellular Identity has a very interesting interview with Nick Wright from Mobile Youth Trends. Nick is co-author of the mobileYouth 2006 report. Some of the good stuff:
- Young people don’t use their mobile phones ‘just for fun’ but also for serious matters: to say something about themselves and their relationships with other young people (self-expression).
- Branded goods play an important role in this self-expression.
- Texting is "a reaffirmation and a reminder that “I’m with you�."
- Many young people feel depressed after a whole day without SMS. Some young people even go to rehab clinics for being "text-addicts"!
- The mobile phone has taken over the former position of cigarettes in offering a private space for unsupervised private communication. (And some studies suggest young people are smoking less and less because their money now goes to phone bills - MdL)
- Texting is attractive because the language can be deformed so that no adult can understand it. (This is also pointed out by Mitzuko Ito in an article (in Ling & Pedersen: 2005) about how traditional institutions like family and the classroom are being challenged by the mobile phone - MdL).
- The phone itself allow for personalization (wallpapers, ringtones, etc.) and enables young people to express themselves and "advertise their identity as part of their peer group." (> Interesting notion "advertizing identity" - we are all designing and branding ourselves to some extend).
- The basic social needs of young people are: "Social Networking, Communication, Status display, Personalisation and acting as a Behavioural Platform."
- Mobile operators realize too little of these characteristics of young people’s interaction with the mobile phone.
Read the whole interview here!
Last Friday, October 27, I did a talk for the Transito Festival 2006 at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. It was an evening about identity and technology.
Here’s the PDF of the presentation Mobile phone as gift culture (Dutch).
(Via the mobile-society@groups.l.google.com mailinglist)
The SFGate has an article dated February 27, 2006 about the impact of the mobile phone. The somewhat over the top title of the article is "The world’s a cell-phone stage: The device is upending social rules and creating a new culture". Of course the article goes on in using the usual terms like: "revolutionary", "seismic cultural shift", "new realms", "upending existing social rules and creating a new culture ", etc. Some brief comments by Howard Rheingold and Paul Levinson. Last alinea kinda interesting:
Your phone is you The negative perceptions about bad cell phone use suggest that the way we use our cell phones can have a strong effect on how others perceive us. In the Cingular Wireless survey, more than one-fourth of respondents formed opinions of someone based on their ring tone, while 7 percent have ended a relationship due to rude or offensive wireless behavior. In the BBDO Worldwide study, 31 percent of Americans said a cell phone revealed as much about a person as their car. "Cell phones are now just like your clothes," said Clifford Nass, professor of communications at Stanford. "It’s a very personalized thing. The assumption is you can wear anything you want, so this tells you something about me." The cell phone still has a long way to go, said Levinson, in transforming our lives. "It’s still early," he said. "Television has been here 50 years, computers 25 years. The cell phone is still in its infancy. Every sign indicates it will continue to be hugely important to us."
Textuality.org reports that many of the English(?) office workers have an infatuation for hightech mini-gadgetry such as mobile phones, Blackberry’s, iPods. They are dubbed G.O.S.S.I.P.S - Gadget Obsessed, Status Symbol Infatuated Professionals. The research was done for recruitment firm Office Angels. From the Reuters press release:
LONDON (Reuters) - An iPod and 2 mobile phones are the latest must-have accessories along with Sushi for the status-conscious office worker, according to a survey released on Wednesday.
The poll, conducted for recruitment firm Office Angels, found 67 percent of 1,500 respondents considered so-called “micro-gadgets” like Blackberrys, laptop memory sticks and small mobile phones to be the ultimate status symbols.Office Angels branded the people in the survey as GOSSIPS (Gadget Obsessed Status Symbol Infatuated Professionals), a morphed version of the archetypal 1980s Yuppie — Young Urban Professional.
Almost half (45 percent) of those questioned thought any ambitious worker should own at least 2 mobile phones — one for work calls and the other for social chit chat.
The survey also found food such as sushi, organic salads and sashimi — thinly sliced raw seafood — were rated highly by office workers compared with traditional sandwiches or burgers with chips.
Nearly a third of office workers also admitted to spending over 10 pounds a week on coffee, even if they could get the beverage for free at work.
Apparently, the smaller the better, casting doubt on the Goffmanesque idea that it is all about external display, the “presentation of self”. Carrying such items with you as little ritual tokens (fetishes) may be more about highly personal feelings of security and confidence.
On new years day, I traditionally go to see a movie to recover from my hangover. Yesterday it was Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog. What a great movie! It’s a tale about Timothy Treadwell, who lived closely among grizzly bears in Alaska for 13 years, and ends up being eaten by one. It’s a basically a tragical story about a guy who tries to escape from the chaotic world outside of him and tries to become a better self. Treadwell tries to take his destiny into his own hands, but at the same time becomes more and more trapped in his fixed own world that in the end dictates him and destroys him. Timothy Treadwell is a ‘dead man’: he has already partly left this world to live in a world that only exists in his own phantasy: a beautiful, loving, pure, uncorrupted natural world. Treadwell’s time among the bears of Alaska was a kind of ‘liminoid phase’ (Victor Turner) between regular life and a next stage, in this case very literally: death.
The film has many aspects that have to do with identity, visible in the may paradoxes that were evident in Timothy Treadwell:
- Treadwell played with his own image: he developed a story about himself as being from Australia; he was performing outrage & anger in one of the last scenes against the park rangers (the forces that be in the human world), yet could easily switch back to being calm in the next second.
- Treadwell wasn’t always very consequent in his self-construction, e.g. when claiming that he was ‘the only person out there’, while it appeared that he was in company of a woman at least some of the time, which he tried to hide from public eye (camera).
- On the one hand, Treadwell was very vain, constantly fussing about his hair and doing stuff with bandana’s trying to conceal his receding hairline. On the other hand, he didn’t give much about material goods and status.
- He constantly stressed how dangerous it was among the bears, yet when something happened that didn’t coincide with his romantic view of noble, harmonious nature, he couldn’t accept it, as when a young bear got killed and eaten by starving elder bears.
- Treadwell anthropomorphised the animals, ascribing them human behaviour and characteristics.
- Treadwell’s work wasn’t about the bears as much as about himself becoming a new being: he confessed a few times in front of the camera about his troubled youth and told how he had overcome his problems. He shot many sequences of ‘action-takes’ that could later possible be used in a dramatised film about his life.
- Treadwell’s attempt to carve out a life of his own, be unique in what he does (”nobody can do this”), celebration of individualism, escapism from institutional structures, is a very modern thing, typically of this age.
Go see this film!!
Scientists in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have developped a kind of vibrating jacket that children could wear to receive ‘hugs’ from their parents that are away via the Internet. The jacket is already being tested on chicken. The wireless jacket is controlled with a computer and gives the feeling of being touched. The jacket could be used to transmit feeling over the internet.
This development touches upon issues like:
From the Reuters article:
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore scientists looking for ways to transmit the sense of touch over the Internet have devised a vibration jacket for chickens and are thinking about electronic children’s pyjamas for cyberspace hugs.
A wireless jacket for chickens or other pets can be controlled with a computer and gives the animal the feeling of being touched by its owner, researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) told Monday’s edition of The Straits Times.
The next step would be to use the same concept to transmit hugs over the Internet, it said.
“These days, parents go on a lot of business trips, but with children, hugging and touching are very important,” the paper quoted NTU Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok as saying.
NTU is thinking of a pyjama suit for children, which would use the Internet to adjust changes in pressure and temperature to simulate the feeling of being hugged. Parents wearing a similar suit could be “hugged” back by their children, the paper said.
Saturday, November 19, the 27th Dutch/Flemish Philosophy-day took place. The motto was “Thinking without Borders: challenges for philosophy in the 21st century” (Grenzeloos denken: uitdagingen voor de Filosofie in de 21ste eeuw). It was the first time I attended. The programme started at 10:00 in the morning, which I of course didn’t make quite on time… I’m not that much of a morning person, especially not on a weekend day :).
After seeing the last part of the plenary session I attended the breakout session “Man & culture” chaired by Jos de Mul. The papers presented by both Flemish & Dutch PhD researchers were pretty technical in my opinion. As I lack serious background in philosophical thought - and probably even more troublesome: acquaintance with the discourse by which philosophers tend to express themselves - I had a hard time understanding what was said from time to time. Nevertheless, some speakers provoked thoughts in me, so I made a few scribbly notes which I have transcribed below. Here we go:
What: opening exhibition “Alter Ego” - photo’s of gamers and their online avatars
Who: British artist Robbie Cooper
Where: Home Gallery, Prinsengracht 548, Amsterdam
When: 9 - 24 november 2005 (Thursday - Sunday), 13:00 - 19:00
URL: www.alterego.net & www.seeingtakesasecond.com.
Wednesday evening, November 9, I was at the opening of the exhibition “Alter Ego” at Home Gallery. I was kinda late, supposed to meet my GF there at 21:30, but got stopped along the way by a police woman for cycling without light. She gave me a ticket, what a bummer… }:-(.
Anyway, the gallery is located in a nice old canal house between Leidsestraat & Spiegelstraat. About 25 large images are dangling from fish cords on the wall, each displaying a photograph of a ‘real’ person on the left hand side and a screenshot of his/her virtual personality on the right side. The split-images are accompanied by a text that tells the individual’s story: who he/she is in real life, who she/he is online in what game, and what motives he/she has for choosing this particular character.
The people portrayed are pretty diverse, considering that game culture appears to be mostly restricted to Asian and Western - American - cultures: there are pictures of physically disabled people, two black men, quite a lot of females (Asian & Western) and of course the (stereo)typical geek.
A lot of people make their online character into a ‘better self’: the men often create a sort of super-hero character and the women a strong, beautiful female warrior. Not everybody though: there is a portrait of this US redneck kinda guy who plays a beautiful heroine, and two good-looking Asian girls tell that they switched to playing ugly creatures after being harassed all the time by men in the game.
The stories can be roughly devided in stories that are about “becoming” in the sense of developing oneself: from being a bit shy at first to becoming more and more friendly and sociable, from being averagely handsome to being beautiful. Another theme is “escape”: escape from boredom (the trucker fantasising about playing a spaceship), escape from physical constraints (the handicapped people), escape from social/cultural pressure (the Chinese gay boy playing “guys he wanted to meet” & the US macho-guy playing a woman). The theme of “sameness” in the sense of “living one’s identity”, or simply “being” is apparent too: someone says he behaves the same way online as offline, and the Texan business woman tells she likes bossing around online just like in real life. Finally, attention is given to the economics of gaming culture: a few people explain that they make quite a bit of money from gaming, whether it’s by developing characters for other people, or by writing software that can upgrade players levels by playing for them at night, or a girl that has become popular through gaming and has become a professional model.
Some critical remarks: the split screen portayal of people & their online identity suggests that people have only one online identity instead of multiple. By choosing a form of presentation that juxtaposes offline and online identities, the artist stresses the devide between them in a visual way, although the artist probably intented otherwise. On the other hand, the split-screen portayal suggests that offline and online characters are equal in some way: the online character being the ‘mirrored image’ of the real life character. And finally, the artist seems to have deliberately wanted to portray a diverse group of people, while underplaying the homogeneity of game worlds, as apparent from one of the group photo of an ‘old’ game guild (I forgot the name) that is almost totally white and predominantly between 20-40.
The exposition is sponsored by EA (Electronic Arts - the largest (?) and best-known game developer in the world); Playstation2 by Sony. The gallery itself is a space owned by Dutch party/event-organiser Duncan Stutterheim from ID&T. Certainly no marginal players in the leisure economy …;-)
The BBC has an article about the project: news.bbc.co.uk.
The pictures (and even some more than exibited) + stories can be dowloaded as a PDF file from
www.seeingtakesasecond.com/images/examples_preview.pdf (9 MB).