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.
I’ve been in Australia for a few days now, and finally some time & energy to blog. My travel to Australia and Indonesia started out well. After a grueling 12 hour flight to Kuala Lumpur, a cheerful looking fellow approached me at the gate and told me “This is your lucky day, you are the lucky passenger number 163 million!! you will receive gifts…blabla” and asked me whether I had some time to spare at the airport. I had to wait 10 hours for my continuing flight to Sydney, so I thought this could be fun… The KLIA airport celebrated its 9th year anniversary, 2nd time best airport, and the arrival of its 163 millionth international passenger, which was…me!
I was taken to the VIP lounge, could take a nice shower, which was very welcome. Later that morning a crazy ceremony with band and directing manager airport present. Called on stage, photographers, film crews, interviews, got all kinds of presents, amongst which a return flight KL-Perth, free night stay in a KL hotel, some other stuff like coupons for food & drinks, perfume, etc.
A totally ‘ludic’ experience :). For those who read bahassa Malayu: an article in Berita Harian. Name spelled wrong, I did not come from Stockholm (never even been there), and some complete nonsense quotes about my name being called in the airplane and being afraid of having trafficked something forbidden… Cerita Harian…
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:
My research group is organizing a two-day visit (June 12 - 13 2007) to the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, by sociologist and psychologist Kenneth Gergen. Gergen is most widely known for his book “Saturated Self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life” (originally published in 1991, second edition 2000). He is also known for his idea of “absent presence”.
The first day of his visit, Tuesday June 12, he will give a public lecture called:
Playland - Transformations in Technology, Identity and Culture
Kenneth Gergen will speak about the influence of modern communication technologies on human identities. He will specifically focus on the rise of play elements in digital culture en the transition in thinking about identity as monolithic entities
After the lecture there will be time for questions from the audience.
The lecture is in English.
Date: June 12 juni 2007
Time: 15:15 - 17:00.
Location: Room B2, Campus Woudestein, Erasmus University Rotterdam
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:
