‘Playful Identities’ research blog

(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."

(Via Mobile Cowboys)

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!!

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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.
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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 :-D. Quite cool all this, now I am able to get online everywhere, provided there is GPRS coverage.

(From www.bright.nl.)

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…

According 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

source: EU website

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?

Thursday, June 29 Esther Polak in cooperation with Virtueel platform has organized the workshop Mobile Habits about mapping and mobility in the Balie in Amsterdam. Since I work together with Esther and Ab in the Fulani project, I attended.
About 25 artists, designers and scientists showed up, which turned out to be a very inspiring mix of people. Overall the most surprising and stimulating of the whole day in my opinion was that all more or less spoke the same language.

Apart from a couple of interesting talks by Esther Polak and Christian Nold, Hanne Kirstine Adriansen and Ab Drent, there were also session were the audience had to ‘work’.

Read Auke on Informationlab.org

Click the link below to read some notes I scribbled down during the day. The sign > means a personal thought that occurred to me while listening.

(more…)

Not too long ago I posted these cool designs for mobile phones that make you think about their use in public space. Now here is another line of (humorous) products that make you think about the uses of mobile phones:

• Tru:th - a phone with a build-in alcohol promilage meter you can only use when drunk and are more likely to tell the truth
• Rosary - a phone that portrays religious icons, so you can pray to them on-the-go
• Phish - a phone that makes the water in your fish bowl raise by one degree every minute, so keep it brief!
• Cactus - a phone with sharp spikes on its keys, so the one who is called knows he/she’s really special to the caller

They are designed by a collective that calls itself the MPAA (Mobile Phone Abusers Anonymous). Here’s what they do:

Our primary purpose is to foster awareness of the mobile phone — the devastation it can cause, and the salvation it can offer. We do this by offering meetings, mobile phone discussions, replacement products, activities and much much more.