Media to Go: From Globalization to Mobilisation Gerard Goggin Department of Media & Communications, U. of Sydney Online Media MECO 3602 Week 6 lecture Mon 25 August 2014
Media to Go: From Globalization to
MobilisationGerard Goggin
Department of Media & Communications, U. of Sydney
Online Media MECO 3602Week 6 lecture
Mon 25 August 2014
Media to Go – overview
• Telephone media: telephones & telecommunications• rise of mobile phone• Mobile phone culture: case of SMS• Mobile media• Enter the smartphone• New characteristics of online media with mobiles
‘The Terrors of the Telephone – The Orator of the Future,’ New York Daily Graphic, 15 March 1877, reproduced in A. Lange, Histoire de la télévision http://histv2.free.fr/theatrophone/theatrophone.htm
’The New York Daily Graphic for March 15, 1877, portrayed on its
front page "The Terrors of the Telephone—The Orator of the
Future." A disheveled Svengali stands before a microphone
haranguing in a studio. The same mike is shown in London, San
Francisco, on the Prairies, and in Dublin. Curiously, the newspaper of that time saw the telephone as
a rival to the press as P. A. system, such as radio was in fact
to be fifty years later. But the telephone, intimate and personal,
is the most removed of any medium from the P. A. form. Thus
wire-tapping seems even more odious than the reading of other
people's letters ... The telephone demands complete participation,
unlike the written and printed page.’
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
"Théâtrophone", Affiche de Jules Cheret (1836-1932), Imprimerie Chaix, Paris, 1896 (A. Lange, Histoire de la télévision http://histv2.free.fr/theatrophone/proust1.htm)
mobile phone – taken-for-granted (old media)
• in Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society (MIT Press, 2012), Rich Ling argues that the mobile phone has achieved status of an essential social mediation technology, like the clock or car
• the mobile phone is a ‘social fact’ (Émile Durkheim); without it, we miss out
participation with SMS
• smart-mobs (Howard Rheingold)• ‘coup d’texte’ (Philippines, downfall of
President Estrada)• ‘sousveillance’ – use of mobiles for election
monitoring, documenting/warning about human rights abuses
• emergence of mobile activism
mobiles & politics
• use of mobiles in Burma in uprisings by monks• Arab Spring – mobiles, Facebook• indignatos – Spanish protests – Jon Postill article• mobile activism in China • the politics of mobile production has also been the subject of
dissent – e.g. oppressive labour conditions in Foxconn’s manufacturer of iPhones – see Jack Qiu’s Deconstructing Foxconn; also article about this
• politics of mobile consumption has been challenged – e.g. the ecological/environmental implications of e-/m-waste – see Toby Miller + his co-authored book, Greening the Media + other articles
Emergence of mobile media
• SMS is a classic moment of the definition of mobile phone culture (2nd generation digital mobiles - 1990s)
• SMS is also an early, basic form of ‘low-cost’ mobile media (Jonathon Donner on mobiles in developing countries)
• from late 1990s onwards, mobiles are increasingly centre-stage – as media form in their own right; also as site of Internet development & media convergence
March of the smartphones
Blackberry (‘Crackberry’)iPod – iPod Touch – Motorola Rokr - iPhone (2007) – iPad
- retrospectiveSee: Goggin, “Adapting the mobile phone: The iPhone and its consumption” (2009), Continuum, DOI:10.1080/10304310802710546
Google phone – Android OS – Samsung Galaxy, Sony Xperia, LG, Vertu, HTC – tablets - phabletsRetrospectiveSee: Goggin, “Google phone rising: The Android and the politics of open source” Continuum, 2012, DOI:10.1080/10304312.2012.706462
new characteristics of online media with mobiles
Mobility
Personalization
Customization
Curated environments – with mobile Internet
Location
Big data
Example 1: apps: walled garden or platform for innovation?
• argument has raged about whether mobile apps are privatized, locked-down, walled garden (e.g. Goggin, ‘Ubiquitous apps: politics of openness in global mobile media’ Digital Creativity 22(3): 148-159 (2011))
• or, rather, whether they are a unique, generative platform for innovative & creativity
(e.g. Barbara Flueckiger, ‘The iPhone Apps: A Digital Culture of Interactivity’, in Snickars & Vonderau ed., Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media, 2012, 171-183)
• apps economy & regulation – Ben Goldsmith
Example 2: locative media•rise of place – Wilken & Goggin (eds.) Mobile Technology & Place (2012)•mobile location-based services•global positioning satellites (GPS) – e.g. use in satnavs•geoweb – Google Earth & Maps•art & urban-based experimentation with locative media•mobile social software (mososo) – e.g. Dodgeball•camera phones & place – ‘emplaced visualities’ (Sarah Pink; Larissa Hjorth)•locative, social media applications – e.g. Foursquare, Jie Pang, Everyblock
locative media globally? policy?• new informational ecologies of locative media• important research emerging
– Eric Gordon & Adriana de Souza e Silva’s Net Locality (2011)– de Souza e Silva & Jordan Firth, Mobile Interfaces in Public Places (2012)– Jason Farman, Mobile Interface Theory (2012)– Rowan Wilken & Gerard Goggin, Locative Media (2014)
• yet little known outside socio-technical experience in North America; yet cultural & social specificity of locative media is key – e.g. privacy, friendship, public & private, and their interactions with gender (for instance) are very specific – as Larissa Hjorth’s work on mobile visualities in South Korea shows
• New area of locative news & journalism• Case of sensors
University of Illinois's PLATO IV terminal, which used an infrared system c. 1971 (from F. Ion, ‘From touch displays to the surface: A brief history of touchscreen technology’, Ars Technica, 5 April, 2013)