The slow death of mass media and the lesson for mobile operators

The Economist, 23-29 April 2005, p. 59: "... news providers ... had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, become places for conversation and destinations where bloggers and podcasters congregate to engage ... in more extended discussions". Who says so? Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the mass media magnate. This article is telling of the slow death of hub-and-spoke (mass) media such as newspapers and television, but this is a discussion for a different blog.

Interestingly, mobile operators take an equivalent perspective on the future of value added mobile services. They throw money developing hub-and-spoke services, namely server downloads (ringtones, music, games, video, TV, etc.). And they expect to see their markets grow as fast as nothing before. Is this a smart strategy?

Take the Internet and the Web as examples. The Internet was around for about 30 years before Tim Berners Lee brought us html and Mosaic in 1992. Until then the Internet was small and unknown and dominated by hierarchical and generally controlled information structures. What fuelled its explosion thenafter? I'd say it was the personal web pages. The technology is easy and anyone can have a go at presenting something (expressing himself) to the world, at zero or very low cost. Do you remember Yahoo when it was the personal page of a couple of guys at Stanford? I do. My own page at the time wasn't quite as popular!

Innovation on the web did not come from a few wise companies down to millions of stupid users. It was the result of millions of brains trying it out. Some good did come out. It seems to me that the few mobile operators today are treating their customers as brainless minions who ought to buy whatever expensive and useless stuff their marketing and R&D departments come up with. It seems to me that giving mobile users the tools to present their own content in their own ways (to express themselves creatively) at zero or low cost would be a much more effective growth strategy. Evidently, the revenue models in this case are not as clear. But it is blatantly short-sighted to use this excuse for persisting with paleolithic hub-and-spoke business models.

Happy Slapping

Watch the video: http://www.al4ie.com/?p=5

What can you say? If only operators offered more possibilities for expressive services, to channel some user creativity to friendlier activities. Not that offensive uses will disappear; one hopes they will be offset (take the web as example). Unfortunately, operators are fixated on download and broadcast models (as opposed to community models) for their value added services that offer clearer revenue streams.

The School is Taken

For the first time in history the school walls have been penetrated; education faces an unprecedented challenge. The fundamental structure and operation of schools have shown remarkable resilience over the past 2-3 centuries, and a unique similarity across countries and cultures. A pupil or teacher of 1800s would still feel quite familiar in a modern school, despite the many and varying reforms. The walls of the school have successfully maintained its internal stability.

The mobile phone has brought a small but unprecedented revolution. Despite regulations to the contrary, mobile phones are being used in the classroom to fight boredom, to keep in touch with those 'outside', to play games with one another inside the classroom, to shoot videos of the teacher, to cheat during an exam. For the first time, pupils and teachers are not alone in the classroom. The mobile phone is unique in piercing the school walls wide open.

Will the kids get over it? Will educators react with stricter prohibition? Will the education system somehow evolve to adapt?

Windowed living

When you switch on your computer, do you have an urge to open a few windows to work on a couple of applications simultaneously (e.g. a couple of web browser tabs, email, a file manager window)? Or, on the contrary, too many windows get you stressed and when you do end up with a few open applications you start closing them down?

Do you feel comfortable maintaining two different SMS conversations with two different people while you also read the newspaper or play with your kid? When you get in your car to go back home, do you have an urge to attach your handsfree on your ear and start making calls?

The mobile phone is so personal, and we have become so deft at using it, often without even looking at it, that we can increasingly multitask between mobile phone use and other activities. Young people casually sustain two or more SMS conversations simultaneously. In doing so they switch between identities and emotional states seamlessly. It's like opening multiple windows on our living.

Hypertext living

On the Internet, hypertext has taken away the linear or, at best, hierarchical organization of information to put in place an anarchic linking of resources, yet highly robust and effective. While web-surfing we experience flow in a labyrinth of of hyperlinks. With every click on a link we cross geographies, subject areas, styles, languages. Hypertext allows each individual to chart his or her own unique path (better, experience) across the vast resources of the web.

The mobile phone plays a similar game with our lives. It does to our social networks what hypertext has done to the Internet. Before the mobile, our life was largely predefined and fairly linear. Disruptions or changes-of-mind were hard to accommodate, thus undesirable. With the mobile phone we can make and review our choices any time, all the time. This is now attractive because it is easy to restructure the rest of our plan fairly easily. With the mobile phone we can move back and forth across the web of our social networks without being bounded by time or space. In the 'traditional' example, a professional exits the family social network in the morning, to join the traffic network, to proceed to the professional network, to meet the sports club network and to rejoin the family network later in the evening. This represents a linear arrangement of social networks in time and space. With the mobile phone, I can escape a boring meeting at work by exchanging SMS with my partner while I also comment on the discussion going round the table. Social networks can be nested or rearranged in time and space at will. We can cross vast expanses of social networking by flowing through our contact list on the mobile phone. And because we can also participate in multiple social networks simultaneously, our living is not only hypertexted, it's also windowed!

Every call, a commitment

Maintaining contact means creating ever-increasing commitments. First, you commit to being accessible. Then, those exchanges that are not "pointless" (or for their own sake) create commitments for a follow-up: a meeting, an action, a call back. Even "pointless" exchanges imply a commitment to make time and attention available to such chat. The more the calls or messages, the more the commitments.The more the commitments, the more stress and anxiety we experience.

Mental payload

The mobile phone gives rise to a mental background or payload. When I carry my mobile phone I am constantly aware that I have the option to call any of the many stored contacts in my device, and that I may be called, expectedly or unexpectedly. Thus I check regularly for messages or missed calls, I am wary of undesirable callers, I am more or less anxious. With my mobile phone, I carry a landscape of social possibilities.

Whose mobility?

Mobility may be overrated. Much (admitedly not all) of mobile phone use is carried out when the user is stationary. Mobility is not as much about the users as it is about the calls, the messages, the data. They travel the world to get to their user who calls for them anywhere anytime.

Non-places restored

The mobile phone suddenly restores meaning to non-places: airport lounges, highways, public transport, shopping malls. Where the physical crowd is empty of social ties or meaning, individuals re-enter their social network via their mobile phones, and thus restore society. We often get an empty feeling and then make an quasi pointless call or message on the mobile to fill idleness in the void. We don't get an empty feeling and we don't make pointless calls when we are in a homely or socially comforting place. We do when the place, crowded or not, is a social void. The moment we make that call, we reinstate social meaning in the non-place, even if it's virtual and even if it's about each individual separately. To those excluded from the mobile society, it remains a non-place. See Timo Kopomaa, "The city in your pocket", p. 41.

Dependence on the mobile phone

Dependence on space, time, social relations is replaced by dependence on the mobile phone. We are so dependent on the mobile because the mobile condenses (intermediates) all our other dependencies which we now avoid or overcome (or we tend to believe that we can do so).

Internet Public and Mobile Privacy

While internet communities remain public, mobile phone communties are airtight private. Whereas the internet opens-up the privacy of the home to the virtual global public, the mobile phone closes-in the public space to the confines of mobile microcommunities.