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.