I wonder why Auchan made these anti-theft ports transparant? Possibly the visibility of the technology behind this form of surveillance makes people even less inclined to steal stuff..? (“It looks serious so it will surely work well, I’d better watch out..”). Anyhow, transparency is one possible way to visualize the omnipresence of informational devices in urban spaces. Rather than faced with an opaque ‘black box’, we now get a better sense of what networked/informational machines are operational in our presence. I can just imagine these things being built to go off with a spectacular light show when someone tries to steal anything, just to increase public attention and shaming…

Recently I stumbled across two examples that explore its very edges. The first is a fascinating map of the remotest place on earth.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.

(image source)

The map is created by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. It is part of a research that measures urbanisation from the new perspective of travel time to 8500 major cities. Key findings are:

• we passed the point at which more than half the world’s populations live in cities around the turn of the Millennium (2000) – much earlier than the 2007/8 estimate;
• more than half of the world’s population lives less than 1 hour from a major city, but the breakdown is 85% of the developed world and only 35% of the developing world;
• 95% of the world’s population is concentrated on just 10% of the world’s land; but
• only 10% of the world’s land area is classified as “remote” or more than 48 hours from a large city.

The map beautifully shows just how incredibly connected the world has become – not only via telecommunications but also by physical mobility – and how even the remotest regions are now closely tied to the urban sphere. The fact that 10% of the world is more than 48 hours from a large city raises questions about the definition of ‘urban’, as states the news release. More nice maps here.

A second example is the Reuters news that a Nepali telecom firm is planning to expand its mobile phone service to the top of the Mount Everest. The Mount Everest is one of the busiest high mountains. Each year hundreds of climbers attempt to reach the summit. Until now they were dependent on expensive satellite telephones to call family and friends from the top. Now even the highest peak on earth will become connected to the worldwide communication networks.

The question of course remains whether this potential for mobility and connection to ‘the global’ actually contributes to a worldwide “imagined community”. What this map does not indicate is that mobility and connections are unequally divided. Doreen Massey has called this “the power-geometry of time-space compression” (see article). While for global and digital ‘neo-nomads’ the world may indeed seem one homogeneous ’smooth space’, for others it remains firmly divided by barriers and obstacles.

The claim is made that online social networking is a type of game (not really a new idea). Impicitly it is suggested that gaming is the form of contemporary social bonding. Additionally, the relevance of online gaming for “real life” is underlined. This further undermines the old dichotomy between an isolated cyberspace versus real life as two separate domains. Interesting as well to me is the fact that there are reputation systems built into these social networking games. These become mechanisms to enforce reciprocity, which is an important term in theories about gift exchange (Mauss).

Some interesting quotes from the article:

Game design and social networks are merging into one of the most persuasive forces on the net. That assertion was made by a string of speakers at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

“Social networking is a game in and of itself,” explained Jennifer Pahlka, co-chair of the conference.

….

“Social networks offer a revolutionary way for people to play with friends and communities that have meaningful value to them in their real life,”

….

“Logging in and playing with strangers was exciting when the internet was new but the modern web is personal and social and it is clear that the internet is being used for social purposes to connect people rather than isolate them.”

….

“We build up these reputation systems with levels and rankings just as you would if it was a game and by applying these gaming principles it helps build these thriving successful communities.”

[...continued from last post]

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).

Jyri Engeström talked about how mobile technologies have become social objects. Social network theory is good in representing links between people, but not in the nature of these links, what their content is, or through what media these links are actually established. Jyri used the term “social peripheral vision” to describe how we are co-present with others through our mobile media that enable us to be aware of what’s going on elsewhere. Jyri sees games, such as World of Warcraft, as playgrounds to experiment with the use of media for social ends.

(From left to right: Ben Cerveny, Jyri Engeström, and Christian Lindholm. Photo by Kaeru)

Ben Cerveny talked about “Geomorphic organisms”: how networks of people/users together come to function as an organism. He used lot of biological metaphors, but frankly I kept wondering what insights do we gain by this paralel? There was one interesting thing I picked up from his talk. Similar to a flock of birds or a school of fish, in such a collective it isn’t necessary to have a total overview of all that is happening. A little local trigger can be enough to get people moving in a certain direction. This point by Cerveny challenges the dominant idea of rational total control over technologies and puts in place a more instinctive micro-view. It shows how often we are reacting to technological triggers without fully understanding what is going on. This observation seems particularly applicable to the field of “background computing” in which the computer doesn’t take up all our attention but really only works on an ambient level, or – using Greenfields’ talk – its workings dissolve into everyday behavior. Cerveny ended by saying something interesting to my own research project about “Playful Identities‘: “We are constantly at play within the stream of possibilities in the city”. We are “playing the model”. According to Cerveny, these mobile technologies afford a certain playfulness in the way people reappropriate their environment, their lived space. Unfortunately Cerveny did not give much attention to the other side of this: the fact that often we are ‘being played’ by those same technologies.. It is not all about playful mastery of city-space through media.

The last keynote speaker, Christian Lindholm, gave a very entertaining speech that however didn’t really transcend the kind of well-informed techno-babble you encounter on websites such as Engadget, Appleinsider, Digg, and what have you. He talks a bit about handphones, why the Apple iPhone has become so successful, and the race between who puts the biggest screen in a phone. Lindholm sees a big future for the Asus Eee, the very small UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) weighing under 1 kg and costing less than $300. This device is especially attractive to women and children, he says, groups that have largely been ignored by the nerdy hardware marketing bizz. Lindholm’s most interesting point in my view was the term “casual computing”. By this he meant the types of devices that can be used ‘casually’ without disturbing a particular social situation. E.g. in a restaurant you don’t flip open your laptop. But a device the size of a handset you can use there to look something up or check your email.

I would say that theme of casualness, backgrounding, and technologies becoming part of everyday behavior was the overlapping theme of all four speakers. Thus, perhaps, the ‘mobile’ aspect of these technologies is not so much their portability, or the physical mobility they enable, but their integration into everyday life and ongoing social processes.

Oh, and for more pics, see Flickr (tag: twab08).

Thursday May 22 2008 I visited the CHI conference The Web and Beyond: Mobility in Amsterdam. Keynote speakers were: Adam Greenfield (Everyware); Jyri Engeström (Jaiku); Ben Cerveny (Playground foundation, Flickr); Christian Lindholm (Fjord, Nokia).

I was particularly impressed with Adam Greenfield’s presentation. He had a very rich and dense talk based on the material of the book he is currently working on called “the city is here for you to use”. Below some notes about his talk.

Greenfield starts by stating his affiliation with the urbanist tradition of Jane Jacobs and others, who see the city made up of bottom-up processes by ‘ordinary people’. He then described the current state of the city. The (American) city nowadays is characterized by repetition, deliberate attempts to make certain public spaces less attractive to dwell in, and a lot of junk space and privatized commons [although Martijns' recent post shows how these kind of spaces are re-appropriated by kids].

(photo made by Antje Roestenburg)

The result, Greenfield says, is a withdrawal of people into mobile phone’s private spaces. The challenge is to overcome these threats to urban life – “the crisis of the American city” – by refinding what constitutes the city in Jacobs’ tradition. Greenfield tries to find that answer in ubiquitous computing. Networked processors are already showing up in new places, on the level of bodies and on the level of the streets. These become social objects. They help create an “ambient informatics”: delivering information locally upon which you can act. This really becomes ambient when information processing dissolves into behavior. Greenfield gives an example of a woman he saw using her transit card in public transport by swinging her handbag in full speed in front of the reader, almost becoming a choreography.

Architecture and building is becoming increasingly shaped by computation. It changes the city-scape. It changes mobility too. Objects become accessible, scriptable, queryable, and connected. All this changes the way we use cities from browsing to searching. We can now directly look for something and this search can be customized by recombining elements.

Greenfield is somewhat critical of all kinds of informational mapping projects such as the Oakland crime map. People have started to how up at the precinct with such maps demanding more police presence! So are these maps really representing actual risks on the streets, or are they misleading? There are other things more likely to kill you than street crime.

Greenfield goes on to talk about “the big now” and “the long here”. He talks about Twitter, and how it is used to become immersed in other places at the same time. This changes city life. Greenfield calls this “The Big Now”. But places are also accessible from multiple other places. Greenfield calls this “The Long Here”: you don’t enter a place, you enter a time.

Another thing we should be critical of is “differential permissioning”, the way technologies are used to differentiate people into allowed access or denied access to certain places based on predefined characteristics (this is what Graham calls “the software sorted city”). What is happening to public space? Formerly, everyone had the right to use pavements, parks, etc. We’re moving away from guaranteed availability and access, to differential access. [But hasn’t urban space always been differentiated? For example the ghetto vs. the theater, each barring off groups of people that 'do not belong there'.]

We have to keep in mind that cities are not all the same, but all have their own particularity. We also have to take into account unexpected emerging behavior. These “ambient informatics” objects may be hackable and even used for dangerous/bad ends.

Greenfield ends with some “proposals for the real time city” that urban/media designers should leep in mind:

1. Create beautiful seams: read/write access to city

2. Underspecify: do not too much closure to space.

3. Understand changing city life: from flaneur to consumer to user.

Just a few more or less recent items that I find interesting (cutting it up in multiple posts):

Wired reports that hackers have attacked an online forum for epilepsy patients. They placed fast-moving images on the forum, which resulted in a number of epilepsy patient getting a seizure.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

What triggered me:

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs. [my emphasis]

A cruel yet fascinating example of the blurring between online space and the physical, and how the ‘virtual’ is creeping (or in this case seizing) into the world we formerly knew as ‘real world’. Of course, examples abound of people carrying their online avatars with them outside the (MMORPG) game, or people making hard cash out of virtual real estate, etc. Yet what makes this case special I think is the intention of the attackers to target this specific group in this way, in order to inflict bodily harm on actual persons through digitally mediated ways. No doubt they must have imagined epileptic patients getting fits and seizures behind their computers when crafting their attack. It’ precisely this intentional aspect of breaking out of screen space, stepping outside of the bounded online world with its own rules that thrives on willingly forgetting that there are actual people in flesh and blood sitting behind their screen (in their underwear picking their nose), that makes this a special case.

It is just a matter of time before hackers launch similar attacks on the digital infrastructures of the city, be it the RFID transport system, CCTV surveillance, the various wireless data networks, or any combination. The first attempts are already there. The physical seizure this may cause to the city is hard to imagine now.

The BBC reports that Cubans get access to mobile phones, as Raul Castro lifts the ban on possessing them:

Cubans are to be allowed unrestricted access to mobile phones for the first time, in the latest reform announced under new President Raul Castro.

…

Some Cubans already own mobile phones, but they have had to acquire them via a third party, often foreigners.

Cuba’s rate of cell phone usage remains among the lowest in Latin America.

Now Cubans will be able to subscribe to pre-paid mobile services under their own names, instead of going through foreigners or in some cases their work places.

However, the new service must be paid for in foreign currency, which will restrict access to wealthier Cubans.

What strikes me is not only that one of the countries with the most restrictive political regimes and lowest mobile phone penetration percentages is lifting the ban. More interesting even is the way this is presented in various media as almost inevitably leading to huge social change. This news item is phrased in terms like reform (BBC), technological catch-up (Engadget), the new Cuba; Raul Castro is revolutionizing his brother’s island; change (Wired) [my emphasis]. Perhaps the strongest phrase I found on MobileCrunch: “The communist dominos are falling as the dictatorship of the proletariat realizes it can’t stand up against the relentless momentum of the mobile phone.” Here, the mobile phone is imagined almost as a natural force, logically leading to political reform, freedom and democracy.

This reminds me of Tim Cresswell’s keynote speech in which he showed how the term ‘mobility’ is always infused with meanings and values. In this case it seems the mobile phone becomes a symbol for reform, social change, modernity, political opening and transparency. I really feel his point about the value-laden aspects of ‘mobility’ (and consequently also ‘mobile technologies’) is extremely important for all working in the field of mobile technologies. The apprehension Tim voiced in workshop 2 towards the term “mobility paradigm” perhaps also stems from the realization that a paradigm – with enough people ‘in’ it – inevitably means basic concepts (like ‘mobile’) are accepted as validation and legitimization in themselves for working on them. And yes, we too realize that “The Mobile City” has exactly this rhetorical power: a whole new view on, and approach to the city, paradoxically both inevitable as a future image and simply here & now as an empirical fact.

Former Nigerian minister of finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala promotes investing in Africa. On of the interesting examples she gives is the privatization and rapid growth of the telecom market in Nigeria, from 4300 landlines to over 32 million mobile phone subscriptions. Although she doesn’t mention the name, there is clearly a sense of “Glo with Pride” in her talk. Glo is a domestic mobile phone enterprise coming up second to South-African MTN and growing. Their slogan is appealing to Nigerian pride: “we can do it ourselves”.

(click to enlarge)

Skip to the section starting at 8:00 where she talks about the telecom and mobile phone market in Nigeria:

“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

- 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!

I have heard of similar stories about Senegalese fishermen using GPS to inform each other of coordinates of good fishing grounds. Of course, this may be occurring in Nigeria too, with Fulani herdsmen…

Just like the idea was in the case of farmers, the mobile phone has led to a power shift from middlemen to the fishers. I remember from my research in Jakarta in the year 2000 an enthousiastic article  called from Njuwok to New York that hailed the potential of the internet for tahu farmers to trade directly with other markets.

Via the mobile-society mailinglist (post by Rich Ling)

Blog has been silent for a while, which in my case is an indication of doing lots of things at the moment..:). This post on textually.org I found interesting, since media artist Esther Polak and I will be going to Africa (Nigeria) in a couple of weeks for the art/science project NomadicMILK. It’s a project about mobility patterns amongst nomadic Fulani herdsmen and WAMCO truck drivers. We will be traveling with cultural anthropologist Ab Drent, who has done a 10-month research amongst the Fulani in northern Cameroon in 2000/2001.

We will try to visualize to uses of space by both nomads and truckers by means of GPS and find out whether the use of the mobile phone influences their use and experience of space. There is  a preliminary website for the project NomadicMILK with more info about the project.

Anyway, here’s the article:

Pumpkin power dawns for African mobile phone networks
Palm and pumpkin seed oil could soon be generating electricity to help power mobile phone networks across Africa under a plan to replace fossil fuels with sustainable biofuels made from crops grown by local farmers. Reuters reports.
“Swedish telecoms networks group Ericsson and South African cellphone operator MTN said on Wednesday they want to start replacing diesel with biofuels in electricity generating stations powering mobile phone base stations in rural Africa.

“Swedish telecoms networks group Ericsson and South African cellphone operator MTN said on Wednesday they want to start replacing diesel with biofuel in electricity generating stations powering mobile phone base stations in rural Africa.”

Via textually.org

——- update ———
Mobileafrica confirms that several players work on a pilot project in NIgeria:

The MTN Group, the GSM Association and Ericsson have teamed up to establish biofuels as an alternative source of power for wireless networks in the developing world. The three organisations have set up a pioneering project in Nigeria to demonstrate the potential of biofuels to replace diesel as a source of power for mobile base stations located beyond the reach of the electricity grid.

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.”

British site www.modyourmob.co.uk is dedicated to modding the phone. Modding the phone in moderate ways already happens quite often, I think, as a means of personalize your phone. But now telcom operator Orange has stepped into it and gives away prizes to the best mods.

Interestingly btw how the site at more than one place speaks about how this modding supposedly is “big in Japan and it’s going to be massive over here”. This sounds more like a strategy to encourage people to get into it, since we al now Japan is the furthest of al countries in mobile phone development, craze & hype, and we don’t want to stay behind, now don’t we..?

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.

The world’s first open source cellphone Qtopia GreenphoneTM has been released. The phone runs on Qtopia, a specially crafted lightweight operating system based on Linux. Apart from offering a complete mobile software developers kit (SDK) to developers that wish to create their own applications on this mobile platforms, the phone itself has many specifications that make it comparable to a modern smartphone. Maker of the phone is Trolltech, a Norwegian company well known for it’s QT toolkit which forms the basis for the widely used KDE desktop running on all kinds of open source systems, notably Linux.

I think this is a very important step to provide the mobile world as well with open source alternatives. In an earlier post I have already written about the need for open platforms on mobile devices.

BTW, I think the phone looks damn good too!!

———
edit: I believe this is a particularly important development, because the institutional constraints of highly commercialized and closed mobile systems on individual and cultural appropriation of technology (“domestication” in terms of the late Roger Silverstone) mean a much stronger hold on the ways identity can and will be experienced, expressed and reflexively understood. Any research into identity and the mobile will have to take this commercial context of the “media ecology” into account.
———

OK, so I got a new UMTS enabled phone, a Nokia 6233. I got a Dutch T-mobile flat rate internet subscription for € 9,50 a month over GPRS (not as fast as UMTS of course but definitely cheaper). Now I want to use my MacIntosh powerbook running OS X 10.4.7 to go online via my mobile phone over a bluetooth connection. T-Mobile states on its website that using GPRS to connect an Apple to the internet is not possible/supported, but I found out how .

First set up internet access on your phone:
1) On my Nokia, you can set up internet access under Settings > Connectivity > Packet Data > Packet Data Settings > edit active access point > Packet Data Access Point. Fill in “internet” (that’s the access point – or “APN” – T-Mobile uses). Make sure you’re able to browse the internet with you phone.

Now set up your MacIntosh to use your phone to connect to the internet
1) In Mac OS X, choose the Bluetooth panel from the System Preferences. Set up Bluetooth preferences to sync your phone to your computer (I’m not gonna explain that here in detail, just run the Wizzard). Choose the option “Acces the Internet with your phone’s data connection” and tick the box “Use a direct, higher speed connection to reach your ISP…”
2) In the second tab “Devices” of the Bluetooth preferences panel click the button “Edit Serial Ports…”. Add a port and make sure the Device Service is set to COM-1 and the Port Type to Modem.
3) In the third tab “Sharing” of the Bluetooth preferences panel, choose “Add Serial Port Service”. Set the type to Modem, and tick both boxes underneath saying “Show in Network Preferences” and “Require Pairing for Security”.
4) Now open your “Internet Connect” preferences panel from the system preferences. Go to Bluetooth. Fill in at Telephone Number: *99# (for my Nokia that is, Siemens & Motorola: *99***1#, Samsung: *99**1*1#, all other phones also need *99#). I filled in under Account name: guest, and as passwd also guest. Choose Show modem status in menu bar, if you like quick access to this connection.
5) Hit connect et voila, you’re online!

You can check whether you’re connected by typing in “ifconfig” in the terminal. It should say something like this:

macmichiel:~ michiel$ ifconfig
….
….
ppp0: flags=8051 mtu 1500
inet 84.241.202.139 –> 10.6.6.6 netmask 0xff000000

Speed over GPRS isn’t all that bad, I did a test downloading a big file over a nearby FTP connection:

macmichiel:~ michiel$ curl -O ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/DIRLIST
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
3 49.0M 3 1995k 0 0 38437 0 0:22:18 0:00:53 0:21:25 50751

Speed is > 50000 bytes/sec = over 40 KB/s, something I wish I had just a few years back . Quite cool all this, now I am able to get online everywhere, provided there is GPRS coverage.

If you’ re in dire need of someone to call you to save you from a boring obligatory drink with colleagues, or to impress your company, here is the Popularity dialer. Via the website you can subscribe to make a call at a certain time of choice. Escapism through the mobile phone! Now let’s hope you have internet on your mobile phone to quickly subscribe in the toilet when you are in a café with boring people…

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.
———–
———–
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

The 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?