Author Archive
The spectrum auction has just ended in Canada (details) and bidding reached record levels - triple what was expected, according to some analysts. There is lots of chatter about this in the media and on the blogs, but relatively little attention has gone to what will happen to that money. If bidding was unexpectedly high, and spectrum is effectively a “free” resource owned by all Canadians, will that money go back into our pockets?
There are 30 million people in Canada. Shared equally among us, that would be about $140 per person. Will it be distributed that way? Or in some other fashion? The government isn’t saying, but this is a government with no national broadband policy, unlike countries like France or Japan. Perhaps we could invest some of that money back into the internet in this country? According to Simon Avery, writing in today’s (July 23) Globe and Mail, there is rumour of a tax cut with the extra money.
As for the new competitors, early commentary suggests high hopes for Globalive, currently operating a long distance service in Canada and owned by an Egyptian and an Icelander known for discount cell service in other parts of the world (See moconews story for details).
As I passed by the Fido store at Granville and Georgia this morning I noticed a line up - the store isn’t open but people were lining up inside the mall - forming already. On the glass outside were helpful instructions, including the advice that the “iPone” [sic] was only available on a 3 yr agreement. Just in case you hadn’t heard already…
That doesn’t seemed to have dampened enthusiasm, even among the cognoscenti who pen this blog (or some of them, anyway…).
Update: Igor and John have their phones but had to leave them in the store to be activated - activation delays are hitting Canadian network provider Rogers, too. Helpfully, the staff have offered to keep trying and call John and Igor when their phones are ready to pick up.
Igor asked me to come on board with his blog a couple of weeks ago, and the first thing I did was disagree with him on the potential for Mobile TV. Before I even introduced myself. The topic of this post then, is “Who am I and why do I write about mobile?”
I am a professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. I write about, teach about, and do research on the complex interactions between society and technology. I met Igor when he took a course I offered on the mobile information society, a course based on a book that Gordon Gow and I wrote a couple of years ago.
I am as fascinated by wireless gadgets as the next person, and have been doing some user experience studies sponsored by Nokia over the past three years. But that isn’t why I care about wireless/mobile technology. And, despite the billions made on handsets, monthly fees, and text messaging, even the economics of the mobile business for manufacturers operators isn’t that interesting to me.
Why do I bother, then? If you are familiar with Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs” book and web site, you’ll know that mobility is an enabler of much more than on-the-fly dating arrangements, television on the bus, and checking up on your teenage children. In fact, those are trivial outcomes from a social perspective. What really matters, in the long run, is that mobile phones are (potentially) a “convivial” technology, allowing for greater economic, political, and social freedom for the users. We have already seen remarkable successes in this regard, ranging from the grameenphone to Philippine political SMS campaigns. Many other mini-revolutions are underway around the world.
Much remains to be done. The true potential of the mobile phone remains bottled up by network topology designed to enhance the power of operators, restrictive terms of use, high tariffs, and impenetrable user interface design. Peer to peer networking, open source operating systems, hardware and software, and exciting new applications all lie on the horizon, waiting to be built and discovered. That is why I am interested in mobile technologies.
Oh, and I want an iPhone.
…r
UPDATE:
Jan Chipchase, who writes about all things mobile from his perspective as Nokia’s roaming - what, anthropologist? - has spied some mobile TV watching in Tokyo, and writes about it here. For all of his writing on mobile TV, check his blog category for it.
Igor asked me to join him on this blog, but I have to take issue with his last post. I think he underestimates the market for mobile “television” by not seeing how it might fit into an overall media ecology. And does the claim of creating content being the preferred mode for mobile users hold water? I have my doubts.
First of all, no matter what the marketers call it, it isn’t fair to call video on your phone “television.” We should really call it “mobile video” since television is television (commercials, a remote control, living room or den, 20″ screen or more, watched at home or in a bar). What you see on a handset isn’t television and it certainly isn’t a movie, as David Lynch makes clear.
Even if the screen is teeny, and the pictures are jerky, there will be some people who watch it sometimes. I have been watching a surprising amount of video on my iPod Touch and find it pleasant and filling a gap in my commute.
We know from previous generations of information technology that there is rarely a complete displacement effect. When television came in, radio adapted. It gave up its role as a focal point media form (in the living room, with the family gathered around), and became a companion media form (in the car, on the beach) enabled by the transistor radio. Will the mobile phone/handheld become the way in which televisual material migrates to the status of companion technology?
The second problem with the argument that mobile is a creation space and not a consumption space is that it privileges creation as a form of media use that isn’t realistic, given well-known participatory inequalities (see Jakob Nielsen’s post and Alice Marwick’s follow-up analysis). Simply put, most people don’t contribute, they consume.
Even those who do create do so on the basis of wide-ranging and deep consumption patterns. Musicians build on a lifetime of listening to other musicians, filmmakers reference each others’ work, painters and sculptors are inspired by the art around them as much as the landscape and the people. This is the tragedy of insane extensions of the copyright acts around the world, as Lessig and others have pointed out.
I think we will consume on our mobile devices, that it will be non-trivial, and that “television” (or, more properly televisual material) will be part of that consumption. Igor is right, too, in that when the wonderful, stimulating, exciting world around us sparks use to create, we will use our mobile device to do so. But not every moment is exciting, sadly. And we will look to mobiles for diversion and inspiration when we are not creating.
