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

telephone media

Telstra Corporation T-hub advertisement, May 2010

Budapest Telephone Exchange, c. 1893http://outside.mfor.hu/mfor/images/puska2_130314_640.jpg

‘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)

rise of the mobile phone

Westminister Bridge

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

mobile phone culture:the case of SMS/text messaging

Morse vs SMS

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

Mobile media

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

enter the smartphone

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

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mildlydiverting/5065226/

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)

Further reading:

• Goggin Global Mobile Media (2010)• Goggin & Hjorth, Routledge Companion to Mobile

Media (2014• Goggin & Wilken, Locative Media (Routledge, 2014;

just out)• Andrew Schrock, “HTML5 and Openness in Mobile

Platforms”, Continuum (2014; just out); DOI:10.1080/10304312.2014.941333