Sad as it is, the Joran van der Sloot and Natalee Holloway case has a funny side to it. And the mobile phone plays a big role in it. More than half of the Dutch population watched the program by Peter R. de Vries on Sunday the 3rd of Februari 2008 about the confessions Joran van der Sloot made in front of hidden cameras. Shortly after the broadcast, SMS messages started circulating: ‘Lig hier op het strand met een wijf te ketsen maar in één keer deed ze niks meer! Kan je ff komen met een boot, een echte vriend […] Read More
Below the announcement of The Mobile City conference I am co-organizing: The Mobile City conference 27 & 28 February 2008 NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute) Rotterdam, The Netherlands “The Mobile City” is a two-day conference about locative & mobile technologies, urban culture and identity. The Mobile City brings academics, architects, urban professionals and media designers together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge? Keynote speakers are Stephen Graham, Tim Cresswell, Malcolm McCullough and Christian Nold. Background The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighbourhoods and crossings intersects with the ‘virtual space’ of […] Read More
The next few months I’ll be posting more often on The Mobile City conference blog than here. The Mobile City will be organized end of February 2008 in Rotterdam, and will discuss the interplay between locative technologies, and urban culture and design. So head over there now…!
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).
Yesterday I went to Urbanfest ’07 in “Dreampark” Ancol, north Jakarta. This festival, organized for the first time, had lots of contemporary culture such as Indie music and hiphop, street games and sports, graffiti, harajuku & cosplay competition, modded bikes, scooter stunting and more. The Ancol website has the full program (basically a whole list of activities with the word urban in it, haha!) The general impression I got was that this festival was an experiment to create a setting in which new modern urban identities can be explored, partly influenced by global culture, partly localized and typically Indonesian. I […] Read More
This is Ramon. I met him at my favorite soto ayam breakfast spot at Jl. Ki Mangun Sarkoro. He has a very special job. He drives around on his scooter to collect cut hair from barbershops and deliver it to salons, where it is used for weaves and extensions. He works for a boss. When he finds many good long pieces of hair, he gets a bigger wage. Sometimes he gets nothing because there is no good hair. With a proud smile, Ramon says many celebrities you see on TV have extensions which he delivered. On his scooter, Ramon covers […] Read More
Today, 17 August 2007, Indonesia celebrated the 62th year of independence from Dutch colonial rule. Although my 3rd time in Indonesia, it’s the first time I am in the country during hari kemerdekaan (freedom day). A great day to do some fieldwork on (playful) identity construction ?. Together with Lisa & Dini, two girls from my rumah kos, I went to Monas (national monument) in the morning. Under a blistering sun we walked to the Istana Negara (state palace), just north of Taman Merdeka (freedom square). Along the road we saw military units parading. At the palace, young people from […] Read More
“Take fun seriously” – great motto for our ‘playful identities’ project ! Taken at transit busway Dukuh Atas, Jakarta, August 15 2007.
One of the most interesting and dynamic discussions in Indonesia is how to combine Islam with modernity. It is a complicated debate, which would merit a study on its own… It does however influence my research about the mobile phone, Indonesian modernity and identities. New technologies like the mobile phone lead to new discussions: from the {belajar-islam} [= “study Islam”] mailinglist: http://www.mail-archive.com/belajar-islam@yahoogroups.com/msg00092.html Antoniobandalem wonders whether muslims are allowed to use products that are made by non-muslims (kafir), such as the handphone. He gets a reply from Chandraleka, an independent IT writer, who says something like (freely translated & abbreviated): 20 […] Read More
With a Flexi card from former state-owned Telkom, you can use public pay phones while travelling the Jakarta busway. I wonder who needs it anyway? Everybody travelling the busway has a handphone..Or maybe for those with empty batteries? .
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 is a somewhat more personal note on my stay here in Jakarta, for friends and family, that’s why it’s in Dutch). Het is gaaf om weer terug te zijn in Jakarta na 7 jaar. Er is niet heel veel veranderd, behalve dat ze in mijn afwezigheid ineens een speciale busbaan hebben aangelegd op verschillende trajecten, waardoor de vrijwel voortdurende file waar je voorheen in stond enigszins opgelost wordt. Ik zeg enigszins omdat ik gisteren met die ‘busway’ twee uur gedaan heb over een afstand die ik achteruit hinkelend nog sneller had kunnen doen. Er zijn verkiezingen gaande in town voor de […] Read More
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 […] Read More
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). – […] Read More
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 […] Read More
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 […] Read More
(via SmartMobs) 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 […] Read More
Below a couple of NomadicMILK videos I posted on Youtube: * NM fieldtrip part 1 * NM fieldtrip part 2 * Google Earth animatie: * Robot demo TheUpgrade!