‘Playful Identities’ research blog

[I wrote this blogpost earlier for The Mobile City]

Dutch tech/nerd blog tweakers.net report that Hyves, Holland’s most popular social network, has struck a deal with operator KPN (the biggest telcom in NL) to add locational information to text messages Hyves users send to each other. According to KPN, questions such as “where are you?” and “what are you doing?” are often asked by mobile phone users.

KPN customers can switch the service on by first registering for this service on Hyves. Whenever they send a text message containing information about what they are currently doing to a specific number, they will be positioned on a Google Maps application within Hyves, which may be seen by other Hyves users.

This is just another step in the field of LBS (location based services) that telcoms are seemingly desperately trying to develop. LBS had been a buzzword for some time now, but the real “killer-app” hasn’t come up yet. I’m curious to see how this will develop, since these are very strong partners indeed.

Just a thought, I think questions as quoted above like “where are you?” and “what are you doing?” shouldn’t be taken too literary. We don’t really need or even want to know this information all the time. They are often just a sign of reciprocal involvement with the life of the other person, a type of mobile gift exchanges.

Moreover, part of the fun in talking through the mobile phone is also the joy of imagining what someone else is doing at the moment, and trying to picture where he or she is. It is part of the process of creating “imagined proximity” or “co-presence”. I wonder what kind of new imaginings will arise when this kind of background information is already given through location based services? If we know all this kind of stuff in advance, is there even sense in still making the actual phone call? Perhaps in an unexpected way, LBS as the chicken with the golden eggs may turn out to be a bullet in the telcoms own foot.

3 Days after being back from Indonesia, I moved on to Budapest for the conference “Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence” organized by Kristof Nyiri, where I presented a paper in the small session on locative media. Here’s the draft version:

From Always-On to Always-There (PDF - 412 KB).

This is the poster presentation I gave a while ago at the conference Virtual Ethnography in Contemporary Social Science, organized by The Virtual Knowledge Studio. I forgot to put it online earlier… It’s about the problems that may occur when doing and writing ethnography about the mobile phone.

060925_mobile_phone_ethnography.pdf (2.5 MB)

Is the mobile phone becoming more and more of a device for pastime? It seems many mobile phone operators and content providers think that way. The BBC has an interesting article on new developments in the mobile phone industry, following the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.

The industry is pushing the mobile phone more and more towards a ubiquitous device that offers much tighter integration with internet-based services and content, and brings you entertainment wherever and whenever you want. The mobile phone, originally marketed as a means for business and work, can now still be used when work is done. The mobile phone is becoming a pastime in itself. From Webster’s online dictionary:

1. A subject or pursuit that occupies one’s time and thoughts (usually pleasantly): “sailing is her favorite pastime”; “his main pastime is gambling”; “he counts reading among his interests”; “they criticized the boy for his limited interests”

Interestingly, the BBC article ends with the observation that content on the mobile is marketed as useful for passing moments in transitory situations, like sitting in the train, but in reality mostly used in ‘fixed’ moments, like sitting on the sofa at home or in the office.

The theme of making every moment a useful moment with the help of your mobile is also the new corporate philosophy of Vodafone, according to an interview in Dutch marketing magazine AdFormatie with - I believe - the company’s main Benelux manager. Vodafone invests heavily in its LIVE service, that brings all kinds of content to the mobile. It offer newscasts and plans to bring many other content to the UMTS phone. “Make the most of now”. According to Vodafone’s new payoff - the company dropped “how are you?” - we should all continuously live in the present and strive to make this present always a useful moment.

It makes me wonder, is there no room left for experiencing boredom, ennui, to just simply sit somewhere for no reason and enjoy the passing of time doing nothing? No more “dolce far niente”, no more “grace matinee”? Have we commodified time, submitted it to our instrumental rationality of making time a profitable good? Have we colonised time to our will of being useful all the time? And how possibly can providing yet even more information counter the boredom we already feel with so much options to choose from?

Came across the website of Ludicorp today, the business responsible for creating and developing social software like Flickr. I think their “corporate philosophy� - which they take from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus (MIT Press 1997) - reflects quite a bit of what our research will be about:

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.

But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

Now, what are the parts that triggered me?

“work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill”

> This ‘work ethic’ is also called the ‘ProAm’ revolution (Leadbeater) where professional amateurs become numerous and deliver high quality products and services, because they are amateurs in the original sense of the word (”doing something for the love of it”).
> Points to the blurring of work and leisure. ‘Play’ is to feel free of necessity (of work).

A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow.

> ‘Flow’ is the state of experiencing only the present, of feeling in charge, of wanting to participate, of suspending disbelief, etc. (term by the guy with the impossible name: Csikszentmihalyi).

The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about.

> Points to the intrinsic quality and value of the product one is producing, of the ‘magic’ in the object one is creating, just as Marcel Mauss shows is the case with reciprocate gift exchange (1908). It is not simply about the transaction that has a purely economic value, but about giving away something that is infused with one’s own personality and identity.

I 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… :/

Just a coupe of loose reflection on ‘play’ in contemporary culture….

Saw an item about a week ago on local TV channel AT5 about a festival of BMX cross-bike subculture, called ‘flatlanding’. Young guys doing crazy stunts on BMX-ses. A lot of these subcultures, e.g. skating, surfing, rollerskating, etc. - could be called ‘playfull’ or ‘ludic’. (Mostly) youngster creating an own identity around a game. This brought to mind another thing I saw lately: more and more people are attracted by and involved in historical plays: e.g. medieval fights that are being performed by true armies dressed with harnesses, lances and spears. Mostly males between 20-40 years old that are busy on their free Sundays re-playing their own history.

This raises some questions:
To what extent is our contemporary culture filled with these playful elements?
How is the development of these playful cultural elements related to the increase of leisure time?
Who are these players? Are they by any coincidence the same demographical group as the majority of internet-users? Or has each group its own ‘game’?
What do these games mean for the players? To what extent are they a search for history and identity, or are they just ‘play’ as in leisure?

051004
Yesterday I saw - via the internet - a programme called “Move your Ass TV” on new public television channel Llink about Krumping & Clowning. A group of Rotterdam urban youths come together once in a while to dance together and hang out. There is also a film made about it recently, called “Rize” of which I saw a traler a few weeks ago on the BBC. It’s supposed to come out half October in the Netherlands. These wild dancing styles are originally from the west-coast of the USA, the gang infested neighbourhoods of L.A. People were sick of these death-serious laws and rules of different gangs, that forbid to wear certain colours in some hoods, for instance. People started painting their faces, going out on the streets and dancing wildly. It has some references to traditional African ritual. It is also an inversion of the death-seriousness of everyday life in the LA hoods by clownesque dancing and facial painting. It seems mostly to be about forgetting about everyday life and misery, about letting go of aggression and frustration and boredom (’release’ as Dutch party organisers ID&T call it).

This also seems a good example of ‘playful’ cultural elements that can be said to characterise much of our actual culture. This is - to a large extent - an inverse of everyday life with its structural, imposed, inescapable monotony and predictability. In ‘play’, people become their own agents again. The unpredictable, spontaneous “I” becomes prevalent again over the reflexive “me” (cf. G.H. Mead).
Nevertheless, this seems only part of ‘play’. In play, one is also giving up part of his individuality and becomes one of the group. Is it a (new) search for social bonding, along new lines perhaps?
And finally, there even seems to be a religious tone in a lot of these playful cultural elements: ceremonial rites, denouncing the ‘profane’ for the ’sacred’ (cf. Durkheim). The Krump-dancers for instance stated “we’re not in it for the money, its all about the game”. So it is a self-referential activity (cf. Huizinga). A lot of these games have ‘rite the passages’ too: a staged event or series of activities that incorporate an individual into the group, and designate a breach with ‘old life’ and former status. But many people that are into these games have ‘normal lives’ too. Can it be said that they live multiple lives in parallel worlds? Which one is the ‘real world’? Or are they all ‘real’? Or is this distinction real-virtual becoming meaningless?

Interesting too, BTW, that these playful cultures are so rapidly being distributed worldwide. The mediatisation of (sub-)cultures is another topic :).