“Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master. “There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo. “Experimenting with different key combinations [...]
The recently published Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies looks like it has a lot of interesting pieces in it.
Digital Divides and Social Mobility
The Mobile Makes Its Mark – Lara Srivastava
Shrinking Fourth World? Mobiles, Development, and Inclusion – Jonathan Donner
Mobile Traders and Mobile Phones in Ghana – Ragnhild Overå
Mobile Networks: Migrant Workers in Southern China – [...]
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Posted 31 May 2008
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Also tagged: academic, book, cell, culture, ethnography, media, mobile, mobility, phones, poverty, research, sociology, technology, trends
Continuous partial attention is one of the side effects of mobile networked computing; it’s parasitic on our desires to feel connected to other people.
“Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity [...]
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Posted 22 May 2008
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Also tagged: attention, continuous, cpa, fragmented, lindastone, msr, multitasking, partial, research, technology, trends
This week’s Economist has a special report on mobility. Here are links to some of the articles in the report (which seem to be available for free now), more are after the link.
Nomads at last. “Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth”
Labour movement. [...]
Dan Hill put together a piece with the title “The Street as Platform” describing in narrative form the interplay between technologies in the public environment, many of them mobile. It’s not groundbreaking, as he notes in the introduction, but the story form is a nice way of capturing some of the possibilities that mobility bring.
“In [...]
There’s an interesting collection of research papers about the use of mobile phones in Asia from a conference held in Beijing two years ago. Papers include ‘Mobile Cultures of Migrant Workers in Southern China’, ‘How the University Students in East Asia Utilize Mobile Phones’, and ‘News circulation by means of mobile phones in China’.
Link: Mobile [...]
“Only a few years ago, places like Muruguru didn’t even register in the plans of handset makers and service providers. What would a Kenyan farmer want with a mobile phone? Plenty, as it turns out. To the astonishment of the industry, people living on a few dollars a day have proven avid phone users, and [...]
A short NYTimes piece on psychological addiction and BlackBerries.
“Mr. Katz argues that participation gives people a sense of belonging, one traceable to the atavistic desire to congregate and cooperate for safety and survival. In addition, he said, the constant checking is an exercise in optimism, like being an explorer or a gambler. Eternal hope [...]
A treasure trove of research.
“The Mobile Phone & Society website provides information on research related to the social consequences of the mobile phones. The mission is to include all publicly available information on studies about the interaction between mobile phones and contemporary society. Within this context, other aspects of the mobile phones (e.g. related technologies, [...]
Some questions about whether sharing presence information is just a ‘cheap’ form of social interaction.
“”But some say the flood of information becoming available through mobile phones and other means is not always such a good thing. “I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information,” said Danah Boyd, who researches social media [...]
Two interesting articles about mobile phones from the always-must-read Economist. The first, interestingly, predicts divergence rather than convergence and uses cars as the developmental analogue. I’m not convinced by the divergence argument here – unlike cars, mobile phones are general computing platforms than can adapt (or be adapted) to user habits in a way that [...]
Looking to the past in helps us get perspective on the futures we image for technology and society. This article reviews the Dick Tracy wristwatch phone, the Picturephone, and the set-top box for the home television.
“In retrospective writings about Picturephone, several reasons are frequently cited for its failure. Chief among these reasons are: that it [...]
Jan Chipchase asks how we cope with things becoming smaller.
“What happens when more of what we carry is designed and minaturized using nano tech? Will we become a society of attachers, groupers and enlargers? At what point do objects become so small that these strategies fail? At what point do objects that evolve into services [...]
Published by Gabriel White.