09/11 The privacy dimensions of the video iPod Besides discussing amateur content for the iPod, Mimi Ito also points out the more private uses of handheld video
On the other hand, I think it might be worth considering more settings for activity in which palm-sized video might be a plus. You mention ambient video while you work at your desk. Curling up with a small screen in bed, or having very private content viewed in private spaces (let your imagination go wild) are also possibilities for the handheld screen that differentiates it from the TV or PC screen. Some anectodotal things I've heard about mobile phone video suggests that the privacy dimensions of handheld video may be as important as the mobile and portable dimensions.
Mimi Ito commenting Kazys Varnelis iPod Review09/11 Location-Based Mobile Media Blog08/11 Payment is local business, says Key Pousttchi07/11 Mobile Landscape
The city demands continuous interpretation
Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!
Fab wrote:
People of SENSEable City Lab have developed a continuously changing real-time maps of cell phone usage in Graz, Austria. They “track” anonymous data from thousands of mobile phones. The get the data by ‘pinging’ the cell phones, so they probably have an agreement with austrian GSM providers. The project is a means of observing, and reading the city, a tool that traces its evolution and real-time fluctuation.
Info and Pictures via Fab 05/11 Mobile Phone Surveys from Japan by Seron03/11 Wallet phones in Japan02/11 Cell Phone Culture, MIT Communications Forum, November 17Sadly I am not in the Boston area right now, but for all others who are there, I would recommend to check this out. If anybody does, it would be cool, if he or she could report it here or on another blog. And I hope there will be an Audiocast as well.
Cell Phone Culture
Thursday, November 17, 2005
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Bartos Theater, Media Lab
20 Ames Street, MIT
Abstract
No contemporary cultural artifact embodies the genius and the disruptive excess of capitalism as clearly as the cell phone. Ubiquitous in most developed societies in Europe, the Americas and Asia, the cell phone has become a laboratory some would say an asylum for testing the limits of technological convergence. Less a telephone today than a multi-purpose computer, cell phones are game consoles, still cameras, email systems, text messengers, carriers of entertainment and business data, nodes of commerce. Particular age cohorts and subcultures have begun to appropriate cell phones for idiosyncratic uses that help to define their niche or social identity. This Forum will examine the cell phone as a technological object and as a cultural form whose uses and meaning are increasingly various, an artifact uniquely of our time that is enacting, to borrow the words of a contemporary novelist, a ceaseless spectacle of transition.
Speakers
James Katz is professor of communication and director of Rutgers University's Center for Mobile Communications Studies, which he founded in 2004. Katz' research focuses on how personal communication technologies, such as mobile phones and the Internet, affect social relationships and how cultural values influence usage patterns of these technologies. His books include Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology (Transaction, 2003, editor) and Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk and Public Performance (Cambridge, 2002, co-edited with Mark Aakhus). He is also the author of Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Expression (MIT Press, 2002, with Ron Rice).
Jing Wang is professor of Chinese cultural studies, and the head of Foreign Languages & Literatures at MIT. Her research interests are focused on contemporary Chinese popular culture and its relationship to marketing and advertising. She worked at Ogilvy in Beijing for two summers as a consultant for the Planning Department, and is currently finishing up a book manuscript [Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture]. Wang's presentation on cell phone branding and youth culture in China is based on some of her work at Ogilvy.
Free and open to the public.
More information: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum 02/11 Mobile technology's impact on Africa's poorCell phones plug Africa's poor into mobile banking
Cell phones are serving as a bank in your pocket, providing virtual accounts for South Africans excluded from the financial mainstream by exorbitant charges and branch networks clustered in wealthy white suburbs.
[...] A 2003 survey estimated that only half of South African adults had a bank account, but a third of those without an account owned a mobile phone. Cell phones have spread quicker than bank accounts across the rest of Africa.
"People might not have shoes but they have a cell phone," said Brian Richardson, chief executive of Wizzit, a small start-up that pioneered cell phone banking in South Africa. "We can turn that phone into a bank in your pocket."
FinMark, a British-backed non-governmental organization that looks at ways financial markets can help the poor, estimates at least half of all bank accounts in South Africa will be administered via cell phones within five years. 02/11 Building on people's existing practices, says Mimi ItoFrom the Q&A [of] Anthropologist Mizuko Ito
Q: What are some of the factors that determine how much impact a technology is likely to have?
A: I think the main factor is the degree to which it builds on people’s existing practices, lifestyles, and social lives. That’s how you get these breakthrough technologies, like text messaging.
That's one reason the Blackberry works so well. It (just) takes email and adopts it for the mobile phone. Now with disruptive technologies this takes a bit longer, but then...;)
See also:
What is the ultimate mobile device for now? | |
