“Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will pop up their index finger. But ask a youngster and they are much more likely to extend a thumb. “Where texting is happening they use the thumb,” Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel’s ultra mobility group, told BBC News at CES.”
Link: Texting a signal of wider trends (bbc.co.uk)
Video from the Business to Buttons conference, with Hampus Jakobsson and James Haliburton of TAT talking about social connectivity on mobile devices.
“Mobile phones are some of the most advanced personal objects we have, but still there are just technical inventions or stylish skins. What can be done to improve personal communication and social connections? TAT Tenk researches social patterns around mobile applications and will present some of its findings during first half of 2008.”
Link: Can mobile phones become useful as social tools? (businesstobuttons.tv)
Putting People First has a translated section of a French report about mobile phone use by teens.
”...for adults the mobile is a hyper-personal device, an intimate black box with data that absolutely need to be protected. For teenagers on the other hand, the mobile is often as little confidential and intimate as their blogs. They are instead identity and exhibition spaces of oneself, with “museum galleries” of photos, ringtones, videos, and music to share with a community of peers: archiving makes only sense if it can be shared.”
Link: French ethnographic study on teens and mobiles (experientia.com)
“However, the real reason in my mind that the iPhone wins is it’s ability to “stay in social touch”. The email, the SMS, the browsing experience has enabled much of the behavior that social networkers have mastered already on the laptop or desktop. It’s not about the technology, it is about how the device helps you socialize.
“So the iPhone wins because it both keeps us in the flow and keeps us loosely connected. Perhaps a little like adding a “lurking” factor…. iPhone in hand I have a better sense of what my friends and colleagues are doing.. I am more connected without actually thinking about it or working at it. As someone who’s never used a Blackberry and yet observed the “connected” behavior that creates around email (like IM) it’s been a revelation.”
Link: The Mobile Social World of Presence (henshall.com), via)
Book about how mobile communication devices are changing social relationships.
“The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is “there”; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us?
“In New Tech, New Ties, Rich Ling examines how the mobile telephone affects both kinds of interactions—those mediated by mobile communication and those that are face to face. Ling finds that through the use of various social rituals the mobile telephone strengthens social ties within the circle of friends and family—sometimes at the expense of interaction with those who are physically present—and creates what he calls “bounded solidarity.”
“Ling argues that mobile communication helps to engender and develop social cohesion within the family and the peer group. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins, Ling shows that ritual interaction is a catalyst for the development of social bonding. From this perspective, he examines how mobile communication affects face-to-face ritual situations and how ritual is used in interaction mediated by mobile communication. He looks at the evidence, including interviews and observations from around the world, that documents the effect of mobile communication on social bonding and also examines some of the other possibly problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in small groups.”
Link: New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (amazon.com, via)
Into Mobile describes a mobile future – some familiar stuff here.
“Our phone book will manage our single identity and our single list of contacts. When the switch to IP v6 is complete everyone on this planet will have their own namespace and everyone’s mobile phone will act as a server. Everything you do, whether it is in the real world or on the internet, can and will be enhanced by the social element; our social networks will be like air. Displays will surround us everywhere we go and they’ll be connected to not only the internet, but to our mobile devices via a local connection. If one were to walk into a hotel room, a friend’s house or a bar there should be a display that detects your phone, asks you if you would like to initiate a connection and then present you with a stunning interface that can be manipulated with your mobile device. I’m not talking about TV out ladies and gentlemen; I’m talking about a separate user interface created specially for my television using one of the new cross platform runtimes that connects to my mobile and enables the keypad, touch screen or accelerometer inside my mobile device act as an input mechanism.”
Link: Where will the internet in relation to mobile be in 5 years? (intomobile.com)
“Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient….In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?” ”
Link: Fine Dining with Mobile Devices (huffingtonpost.com)
“MobileActive07 convenes people from all over the world using mobile phones in their social change work. Participants include nonprofit practitioners using phones in their organizations in innovative and creative ways, mobile technologists, researchers studying the use of mobile phones, artists and activists. Participants explore how mobiles are used in advocacy, education, health, and democratic participation.”
Link: MobileActive (nonprofitsoapbox.com)
The Yellow Arrow project is a fairly straightforward placemarking-art project. Participants put yellow arrow stickers with special codes on them, send an SMS to describe the place, and then a passer-by can send an SMS query to find out what was written. This project’s interesting, though, because it seems be getting some global momentum.
Link: Yellow Arrow (yellowarrow.net)
An article in The Economist discusses the financial impact of access to mobile phones for fishermen in Kerala, India.
“This more efficient market benefited everyone. Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. “Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare,” he concludes.”
Link: To do with the price of fish (economist.com)
Some questions about whether sharing presence information is just a ‘cheap’ form of social interaction.
“”But some say the flood of information becoming available through mobile phones and other means is not always such a good thing. “I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information,” said Danah Boyd, who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “An increased flow of information should not be confused with a deeper bond.””
Link: Wireless: Can mobile phones give you ‘presence?’ (iht.com)
An interview of Laya Gaye – a researcher working in ubicomp.
“What I find interesting with mobile music is that it democratises the use of music technology and takes it to the streets. The field develops very quickly so it can take various directions at the moment: mobile music is by nature multi-disciplinary, at the crossing between interactive music, mobile computing, locative media and consumer audio, so it benefits from all the current developments in all of these fields.”
Link: Interview with Lalya Gaye (we-make-money-not-art.com)
Tasos Calantzis writes about small devices with big, enveloping screens.
“Instead of BenQ’s mobile phone-type idea, what we’re looking at, folks, is the next generation of mobile device. The one that will change literally everything for quite a lot of people. Every tech editor and gadget fan has been preoccupied for the last year with products like the fabled next generation video Ipod . The gorgeous Onyx concept from Pilotfish and Synaptics treads similar ground. It seems to be all about growing the screen in your pocket.”
Link: The next really big thing (designdirectory.com)
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