When I was in Roxy Mas the other day, I got a ringtone from this guy, an antique Indonesian song called “Si Jantung Hati” (= something like “Lady’s Love”).
In the background the Nokia service centre where you have to draw a number - how orderly!
This really unclear picture is from Telset Magazine (edisi 74 July 2007, p.16), one of the many handphone magazines in Indonesia. It shows a queue of thousands of people waiting in front of the Ballroom Hotel Grand Melia in Jakarta on 13 June 2007. What are they waiting for? Is Michael Jackson making an appearance in Jakarta? Is someone giving away free stuff? Nope, these people are awaiting the launch of the new Nokia E90 Communicator. Indonesia is the first country in the world where this device was launched. This device really harbours all the functions that a mobile device nowadays possibly can have aboard. About 1100 invitees could buy the phone on the spot for around 11.000.000 Rp (almost € 900).
In an editorial, Magazine Telset does not fail to notice how ironic it is that so many people are queuing up for a device which costs 1 1/2 times the average Indonesian yearly income. In this country, thousands of people voluntary queue up for hours to be the first to have the E90, while still at this time many more people involuntarily queue up each day to get cooking oil. According to Telset editor, it can happen here because people feel it is prestigious (gengsi) to have such a device, which in turn increases the tendency to see handphones like this Communicator as a symbol of status and success.
Yesterday I visited Roxy Mas in the Cideng neighborhood just west of central Jakarta. According to most people Roxy Mas and neigboring Roxy Square is the main handphone center in Jakarta. The building itself does not look very ’prestigious’ or gengsi I am already adopting local terminology here ;).
Roxy Mas has 5 stories. The upper one is mostly a food court. Downstairs there are also some other businesses (clothing, books). The rest is almost completely filled with handphone shops of the following kinds (roughly in descending order of presence):
- Shops selling handphones, both new or bekas (second).
- Shops specialized in selling SIM cards of various telcom operators, both GSM and CDMA (and nomor cantik (beautiful numbers), which are more expensive) as well as pulsa (credit).
- Shops selling all kinds of accessoires (colored casings, phone holders, danglers).
- Repair shops (also doing other services like unlocking, etc.).
- Official (repair) centres of the major brands (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola).
- Content providers: mainly ringtones. These are basically booths with a computer inside and a guy or girl next to it. He has a mp3 catalogue. For 5000 RP (€ 0,40) per song, he/she will transfer an mp3 of choice to your phone via a data cable, via memory reader, or if even that doesn’t work via bluetooth.
Most of the workers in Roxy Mas are young: between 16 - 25. Some shop owners are older. The majority is female. Also quite a lot of shop owners from Chinese descent. Visitors - overwhelmingly young too - were mostly wandering around together with a friend. It wasn’t particularly busy, maybe I have to get back on a weekend day when most people are free and go shopping for fun. One of the shops I visited looked just like a supermarket.
Lucky capture while drinking coffee in a downstairs coffee bar in Mall Ambassador. People at all tables seemed very engaged in their mobile media, yet people at two of the three tables where also very much communicating with others physically there. The dichotomous view of “absent presence” (being somewhere else than one’s physical place through the use of media) appears not so rigid in this situation. Here & elsewhere may be combined without any problems.
It’s great to be back in Jakarta! Yesterday I looked for a room for the coming weeks.
Today I went to Mall Ambassador, Jl. Satrio/Casablanca. Apparently one of the handphone hotspots in town! The neighborhood has changed a lot since my last visit 7 years ago: many new high rise buildings. In my memory, Ambassador used to be a chic mall with worldwide brand stores (Nike, Adidas, etc.). Now it has transformed into a bustling bazaar with many small businesses, many of them electronics and fashion.
Some pics below to give an impression of the visibility of mobile phone culture.
The last three days I have been at the Mobile Media 2007 conference, organized by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth. The conference was held at the University of Sydney from 2 - 4 July 2007. Some 120 people attended the conference, many of them belonging to the well-known researchers in the field of mobile media.
A wide range of papers were presented. Most of them empirical, focussing mostly on the modern Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea) and Australia. Also quite some theoretical work, e.g. about changes in time and place, locative media, mobile phone anxieties. Almost all empirical work was about teenagers. Most papers were also at the level of devices, not infrastructure.
I presented a paper about the mobile phone and changes in identity. You can download it here. That session was one of the few with enough time for some substantial debate after the presentation (someone had cancelled) Got some useful feedback on it.
I’ll try and write some more substantial things about the conference soon.
Some pics:
Another outdoors advertisement, shot already a few months ago in Amsterdam. The ad says “Who do I want to be today?”. Options are: kroegtijger (don’t know how to translate this, binge drinker or bar fly is a bit too negative), fashionista, paparazza, night butterfly, supermodel. All very much consumer identities. All identities that are mediatized. All ‘global’ identities, that is, recognizable in many different cultural contexts. And all identities in which the mobile phone can be an aid in the pretense to be one of these, to play a role, as if… The ad plays upon the idea of wearable identities: identity as a jacket that you put on or off.
(click to enlarge)
Also, Nokia can be added to the long list of corporations who think we should “be yourself, and do it in style”. The imperative to be yourself paradoxically is a pressure nowadays from which there is no escape…
A week or two ago (just before the migration of this blog the a new server) I walked past an outdoors advertisement in Amsterdam, near where I live. It is an ad for the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnhem. It says “Vrij als vroeger - Even terug naar de jaren ‘60″ (something like “Free as once before - briefly back to the ’60s“).
(click to enlarge)
A brief look at their website tells me it’s an exhibition about leisure time in the 60s. What made me take a snapshot of this was that the picture shows a mobile phone being crushed by what appears a miller’s stone, or a giant tractor tire, I don’t know. So this advertisement basically says that freedom is to be without the mobile phone. It plays upon popular opinion that the mobile phone, handy is it may be, is also a burden and a restraint on freedom. Crush your phone and you’ll be free again :).
What strikes me now as I am writing is the addition of the word “Even..” (briefly, or just a little moment) in the subtitle. It suggests the possibility of temporarily escaping modern day pressures (the obligations imposed by the mobile phone) when visiting this open air museum. Why would we want/need to do so? Why go to a museum for this? And what is good about a temporary solution? I mean, nobody is really going to crush his mobile? I think the ad tries to appeal to the possibility of imagining and actually visiting a time and place when things where not so complicated. The museum then creates a temporary playground for our imagination. We can actually undergo the experience of living an ideal simple life, albeit temporarily.
And here’s another advertisement I found on their website, burning a remote control:
Source - via Textually.org.
A study by Nielsen Media Research suggests that the type of phone you wear says something about your personality:
What your mobile phone says about you:
Nokia
Motorola
Sony Ericsson
LG
Samsung
Whatever your opinion about such research (what do you mean LG is both for “stay at home parents” and “success driven”?), most telling are the comments by readers. The majority of commenters think it is utter crap to see a communications device as part of your identity. They think it is rather sad to judge someone based on what he uses for calling.
They seem to miss the point of the article, however, that your mobile says something about you, even if you do not choose them consciously. These kinds of articles do raise the interesting view that even though we all despise being easily identifiable by the brands we use, we nevertheless are continuously making choices (yes, also subliminally) and rationalize them as ‘functional’ (like the guy who says he always buys Nokia so that he doesn’t have to relearn navigation from scratch). The interplay of brands and identities, of marketing/production and consumption, is far too complicated to just push research like this aside as nonsense…
Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf has an article about environmental problems that arise because of people putting mobile phones and other gadgets like iPods in the coffin of their bereaved. Head of the Dutch gravediggers association Pauline Harmsen is quoted saying:
“Surviving dependants often think those items really belong to the deceased. But they don’t think about the materials in the devices which are bad for the environment”.
What will our great-great grandchildren think about those strange ‘ritual items’ found scattered everywhere in the earth, and dated with great precision to a definite period in the beginning of the third Millennium?
via: nu.nl
