Introduction

Mobile phones have extended human activities beyond the constraints of time and space by increasing mobile communicability en route and real time interaction. These devices have evolved into multi-functional media that can function as camera phones, camcorders, MP3s, PDAs, wireless Internet and so on, and have constructed and reconstructed people’s everyday experiences. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the number of mobile phone users in South Korea grew rapidly. As the information and communication technology sector has been promoted as the nation’s new growth engine during this period, South Korea has become a global trendsetter, with one of the world’s highest mobile phone penetration rates and competitive infrastructure. By 2004, 36.1 million people out of Korea’s total 48 million population carried one or more mobile handsets, meaning that more than 75% of the total population had taken advantage of mobile phone technology. In addition, 73% of mobile phones sold in 2004 were equipped with built-in digital cameras as well as other media functions. Although there is little information about the number of male versus female users, based on the current penetration rate of mobile phones in Korea, several surveys have suggested that young women in their teens and twenties have been the most active users and consumers. According to a 2004 survey by the Korea Social Research Center, 85% of high school girls, compared to 68.5% of boys, were using mobile phones and were sensitive to maintaining communicability via them. Lee and Sohn’s study (2004) also indicates that young women are active in adopting new multi-media functions of the mobile phone overall, except for games and m-commerce, and their willingness to adopt such functions is significantly stronger than men’s. Such active mobile phone usage among young women in their teens and twenties raises questions about gender politics, technology and new media in Korea, where gender inequality and patriarchal ideology notoriously survive.

The dominant structure of patriarchal capitalist society, in which women have been marginalised and confined to private spaces, especially the home, has been deeply involved in the processes that define women’s lives and identities. They have become accustomed to viewing themselves as the other, through the male gaze. Deeply rooted in the real world, the processes of representation, production, and consumption of new media culture seem to barely escape the restraints of this patriarchal dominant structure. However, it cannot be overlooked that the socio-cultural possibilities, or effects, of new media technologies reshape our ways of perceiving, experiencing, communicating, expressing and maintaining relationships. It is worthwhile asking how a new media technology environment has been articulated in our gendered culture, how the symbolic and material characteristics of media technologies have conditioned women’s experiences, and the degree to which de-gendered recodification has been realised in that articulation. In particular, an experiential understanding is required of the ways in which new digital communication technologies such as mobile phones equipped with digital cameras have been embodied in women’s daily lives. The recent formation of a camera phone culture draws our attention because women, especially those in their teens and twenties, have become active participants in creating its culture.

This study will ask whether women are mere consumers of digital camera phones whose usages are strongly driven by market forces or whether they can expand their own experiences, creating a rift or a difference in the gendered world. It will suggest that the digital camera phone has been adapted, utilised, and appropriated in young women’s daily lives in both an experiential and microscopic dimension. Rather than simply verifying the causal relationship between the digital camera phone and its effects upon young women’s lives or building another abstract theory for understanding young women’s usage of digital camera phones, this study attempts to investigate concrete cases of young women’s uses of camera phones and to pay attention to their practices of deriving meaning from a new media environment. By examining how digital camera phones have been utilised in young women’s daily experiences, this study attempts to look at the degree to which young women can be the producers of their own culture, generating new subjectivities and empowering themselves, and the degree to which their cultural practices can subvert common beliefs in women’s ineptitude with regard to new media technology and its functions.

The Camera Phone as a New Media Environment

The appeal of mobile phones is their transcendence of temporal and spatial boundaries. Mobile phones enable us to be connected at any time and in any place, even when on the move. With telephones we can interact with someone not physically near to us, but mobile phones let us communicate when we ourselves are spatially mobile. As the mobile phone saves our time and effort and, at the same time, frees us from the limits of a physical space to be able to communicate with someone in a different place, it enables a new form of ‘micro-coordination’ of temporality and spatiality (Ling and Yttri, 1999). It is a ‘space-adjusting technology’ with which we can easily move around in different and multiple social spaces (Green, 2002; Palen, Salzman and Youngs, 2001) and can be virtually co-present in different places. Moreover, such use of mobile phones blurs the old social boundaries that separate public space from private space. At the same time, it tends to reconstruct new boundaries between public and private spaces (Gant and Kiesler, 2001; Ling 1999). As ‘an irresistible intruder,’ in McLuhan’s term (1964), it can easily privatize a public space and consequently extend a person’s private communication space in an innovative way. In addition to its mobility and ability to privatize a public space, the mobile phone is not only a social instrument of interpersonal communication, but also a multi-functional medium. It can carry textual and visual information as well as aural information. It allows us to interact via SMS (short message service) and MMS (multimedia message service), to record and edit audio-visual information, to have a PDA (personal digital assistant), to play games and use MP3 files, and to use the Internet and DMB (digital multimedia broadcasting) services. More than an interpersonal communication channel, it can take the role of a data-gathering device, a recording and playing appliance, presentational tool, personal diary, entertainment medium, and so on.

When the mobile phone is equipped with a digital camera, it contributes to the mass production and circulation of digital photography. Since the digital photograph is processed as a form of calculable digital data, it can be more than the record of an event. It can be easily duplicated and manipulated, and thus transforms the cultural meanings of the analogue photograph. The digital photograph then raises questions about the cultural basis of the analogue photograph, questioning objectivity, the sense of ‘that-has-been’ existence. It makes uncertain the one-to-one relationship between reality and its representation (Mitchell, 1992). Moreover, it changes the ways we take, print and store photographs in albums. The photographer can actively participate in the process of generating, transforming, reprocessing and, finally, making meaning from images. On the one hand, the camera phone that combines mobile communicability with digital photography can accelerate the ontological “crisis” of photography as a medium of recording as discussed by Mitchell, Lister, and Manovich. Users can easily edit and distort the photographed images for personal pleasure, and enjoy being the active producers and distributors of those images. On the other hand, users can record the moments of a person’s everyday life and the scenes they witness on the move, making the world in private and public spaces more visible and transparent.

The fixed-line telephone as an antecedent of the mobile phone has exemplified the contradictory gender norms deployed in social uses of media. Lana F. Rakow (1992) argues that the telephone has been a site where the meanings of gender are expressed and realised. Women’s uses of the telephone have been said to reveal women’s propensities and abilities. While the telephone has helped housewives at home to maintain their social relations, the mobile phone allows women ‘to exist in their domestic and work worlds simultaneously.’ Lana F. Rakow and Vija Navarro write, ‘the cellular telephone sits in an ambiguous position for most of them, between being a feminine and familiar appliance (the telephone), and a masculine machine (a mechanical and/or electronic gadget)’ (Rakow and Navarro, 1993: 153). They suggest that although the mobile phone tends to blur the institutional boundaries between the domestic and work worlds, enabling women to simultaneously and flexibly exist in both worlds, it contributes to reproducing women’s traditional role and subordinate social status. More generally, they also argue that gender ideology leads to women living different lives and using technology differently from men.

The advertisements for mobile phones, which have defined and reflected the social usage of the new technology, have displayed women’s mobile phones as instruments of security and relation-maintenance, contrary to men’s mobile phones, which are displayed as a social symbol of masculine power and virility (Katz, 1999). They have tended to project the concept that mobile phone usage is predetermined by conventional gender roles in the real world, and to naturalise gendered mobile phone usage. Indeed, it is often found that women tend to use their mobile phones as instruments of expression and sociability, while men tend to display them as the symbol of their social status and virility, as well as instruments of business (Plant, 2003). In the last two years, Korean TV commercials for mobile phones have often portrayed male models as those users who actively utilise their multi-functions, compared to female models who are confined to either the role of those attracted to these male users or those who become the eye-catching objects themselves that display the glamour of the mobile phone. In these advertisements, men with digital camera phones take pictures of gorgeous women, or draw their attention. Although women have been major users of mobile phones in Korea, the market still assumes that women are passive consumers or objects to fulfill men’s fantasies.

The representation, production and consumption of mobile phone culture have not tended to get very far away from the deep-seated gender system. As gender relations in a society may condition women’s and men’s purposes for social actions as well as their social roles and status, so they may condition the cultural practices of the mobile phone. Women’s usage of the mobile phone has often been characterised by their gender roles or attributed to their femininity. Yet their diverse experiences of mobile phones, especially camera phones, have been neglected. Moreover, little attention has been given to women’s creation of camera phone culture. This study attempts to look at what has been neglected, that is, how the camera phone has been utilised and embodied as an instrument for sociability by young women in their teens and twenties, and what kind of subjectivities they have experienced in this formation of camera phone culture. From an experiential and microscopic approach, it tries to observe the cases where young women adapt the camera phone and consume it in daily life.

Ethnographic Approach to Women’s Everyday Uses of Camera Phones

The ethnographic case study described here examines women’s lived experiences and cultural expressions with camera phones. Rather than collecting objective data that would take a broad view of women’s camera phone usage, or generalising and confirming the gender-specificity of camera phone usage, it intends to retrieve moments of the individual’s diverse experiences and their processes of creating cultures. In order to examine the processes of presenting oneself, making connections, and deriving pleasure from camera phone use, it focuses on those young women in their teens and twenties, who tend to be more active in using new media than other age groups.

For this study, a total of 17 women, including two high school females, 13 undergraduate students, and two graduate students in their 10s and 20s, living in Seoul and neighboring cities, were interviewed between August and December of 2003. There were not only in-depth interviews with each individual, but also group interviews where the interviewees shared their experiences with camera phones. They told the author about their uses of communication media in everyday life, their motives for purchasing mobile phones with cameras, their expectations, the contexts and contents of their camera phone usage, their degree of usage, their perceptions of the relationship between media and gender, and other new media activities related to camera phone use. They also showed and self-reported the photos taken with their camera phones, which were stored and displayed in their camera phone albums, blog-styled mini-homepages, and cyber café communities. Via these talks, this study closely observed the ways in which individuals presented themselves with camera phones, and derived meaning from them. It also observed the various individual methods of presentation with camera phones. In attempting a qualitative analysis of the similar or differentiated usage patterns of camera phones, this study looks at the diverse experiences of young women as agents and subjects who derive cultural meaning from their camera phone use. For convenience, the names of interviewees are denoted only by S1 to S17 and their age.

Reception of Camera Phones: Intimacy with Technologies

Historically, technology has been considered a male domain, and technical ability has been regarded as a sign of masculinity. As culturally associated with masculinity, technology can be understood as a gendered culture or a discursive artifact. Gendered ways of representing technology have been consistently reproduced in daily life (Gill and Grint, 1995). While men have confirmed their masculinity with their technological ability, it has been said that women are ignorant of or incapable of dealing with technology. Judy Wajcman (2001) writes that women are successfully using new machines such as cars, microwave ovens, and dishwashers, but their mastery of the use of these machines does not build self-confidence in the use of technology. A social myth that technological ability is a masculine characteristic and, on the contrary, technical inability is a feminine characteristic, is operating here. Moreover, the so-called soft technologies belonging to women’s domain have not often been considered real technology. It is also habitually assumed that women passively use the technology of consumption (Cowan, 1979; Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993). It is true that men and women show different usage patterns in their uses of new media, such as computers. However, such differences do not substantiate women’s innate inability to use technology (see Turkle, 1984).

The interviewees’ responses regarding use of the multi-functions of mobile phones, including camera functions, have not revealed any technological fears. Although several interviewees felt that men were better at ‘machines’ than women, many said that there was little difference in having curiosity about and using new media, like mobile phones with the new camera functions. Many thought that access to new media technology is different according to one’s personality, taste and sensitivity to technological trends, rather than gender.

Among boys, there are some who hardly use camera functions, and others who decorate their mobile phones. Among girls, those girls who are more active are more often using camera phones. (S3, age 18)

Since most men in my surroundings are old, they hardly show any interests in camera phones. Girls are comparatively young, and many of them have camera phones. (S10, age 21)

At the same time, many expressed the view that mobile phones and camera phones are ‘feminine’ or ‘intimate’ for women. Compared to ‘complicated and delicate’ masculine machines, mobile phones with cameras are said to be ‘small’ ‘tiny,’ and ‘simple to operate,’ and thus provide a media environment that groups of girls of that age can easily access, and through which they can share their experiences. While telephones have conventionally appealed to the loneliness of women tied to private spaces, mobile phones with cameras are compatible with the desires of young women, who are concerned both about their ‘appearance’ and about social relations with girls of the same age.

Boys who have camera phones do not seem to enjoy them. Two boys I know have camera phones…However, they neither show their pictures nor voluntarily propose, ‘I will take a picture.’ While they show their interests in cars and computers and other complex machines, they don’t show much interest in those tiny machines like camera phones. (S7, age 22)

Women are using mobile phones and camera phones more than men. They love talking. Men hardly use SMS. They simply make a phone call. And yet, women talk about trivial rounds of daily life with SMS, and come to have easier access to and to have more concerns about camera phones…Even though men have been changed, women have a stronger tendency to take pictures of beautiful things. (S15, age 21)

Especially, schoolgirls have more interests in appearance. The more girls are using camera phones, and the more they take pictures and exchange them…Girls are better at using cameras. Boys don’t do that. (S17, age 16)

Most interviewees said that before they purchased camera phones they had been little interested in bringing cameras with them and taking pictures. However, now they are continuously taking pictures and having their picture taken in their daily life. As play, as a practice of friendship, or as a way of self-presentation, camera phones have become embodied as one of their everyday commodities. Moreover, most interviewees hope to have or have actually bought a digital camera in order ‘to take more professional pictures.’ They have come to be more actively interested in taking pictures as a form of self-presentation. With camera phones, taking pictures is experienced as an everyday activity, and such activity is expanded to the use of a digital camera. Some interviewees who became good at using the camera phone and have enjoyed these experiences have gone on to the challenge of more professional media and to develop more familiarity with technology in general. This all suggests that women’s ‘inability’ or unfriendly attitude toward technology is an outcome of socialisation rather than women’s intrinsic nature. As one controls a technology more freely, one experiences a kind of empowerment, which in turn gives one an interest in more sophisticated technologies.

With camera phones, I come to like taking pictures. I want to take pictures of me and other things around me. I didn’t have any interest in taking pictures. But as I have been taking pictures with the camera phone, I have had more interests. Now, I want to have my own digital camera. (S8, age 20)

Mobile phone commercials in Korea often demonstrate a star actor ‘coolly’ taking a picture of a woman he fancies. These commercials reproduce the conventions of man as gazer/woman as a displayed object, or man taking pictures/ woman having pictures taken of her. However, in actual practice, camera phones provide a media environment where woman can just as easily be the subject taking pictures with their own gaze over objects. Although taking pictures with camera phones has different meanings to the same activity with an analogue camera – that is, people use camera phones for ‘fun’ or ‘play’ – woman can have the experience of being the subject doing the gazing.

Self -Presentation and Irony of Gaze

The camera creates a division between the viewer and the viewed. Susan Sontag writes, ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power’ (Sontag, 1977: 4). Since to photograph is to frame the object, having a distance from it to some degree, the photographer temporarily has power over the object. Those who see the picture are also put into the same position of subject as the photographer.

The pictures that the interviewees have taken are mostly those of their intimate friends and family, their valuables, objects of curiosity, and themselves. Camera phones, which can capture things very easily at a close distance, allow one to photograph oneself easily.

The conventional structuring of the gaze in mass media has reproduced man as an ‘ideal’ spectator and woman as a viewed object and, consequently, makes women accustomed to looking at themselves through men’s eyes (see Berger and Mulvey). However, women with camera phones frequently photograph themselves, challenging the conventional structure of gaze. One can look at oneself as the object and, at the same time, can practice the I of the subject; I become the observer of me. The process, in which she searches for her ideal image, enthusiastically repositioning her camera phone, enables the woman to be an active spectator. This process subverts the conventions of the gaze, that ‘men act and women appear, men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.’ Several interviewees said that they enjoyed the play of controlling and manipulating images – the shift of position from that of photographer to object to be photographed and vice versa.

I often take pictures of myself with my camera phones. Making various facial expressions, I delete weird looks but leave pretty ones. I take many pictures and later pick out good ones. (S1, age 19)

The interviewees have had the pleasure of being objectified for their own cameras and they have learned by experience the principles of constructing images as well as those of being viewed as an object. They have recognised that photo images don’t reflect their real appearance as it is, but the gaze as the viewer constructs them. They have realised that the relationship between real appearance and image is constructed. Controlling angle and luminosity, and retouching images with photo editing software like Photoshop, they learn how to display themselves in a favourable manner – how to get the images that satisfy themselves.

I wasn’t confident of my appearance. And thus, I didn’t like being photographed. I was ashamed of myself. However, as I am taking pictures with camera phones, I come to gain my confidence. In the past, when my friends asked me, ‘let’s take a picture,’ I said, ‘no.’ But these days, I say ‘yes.’ (S8, age 20)

In the past, young people had a tendency to avoid being photographed. But after the advent of camera phones, today’s young people don’t avoid it…When someone says, “she is an eol jjang(a good-looker)”, others would show great interest, saying ‘pretty,’ ‘weird,’ ‘retouched,’ and so on. Nowadays, everyone is eol jjang. Indeed, most girls can use Photoshop. They can use it to retouch their own face images. (S16, age 16)

This process of making effort to display themselves attractively could be seen as following the desire for an ideal female body molded by capitalist society. As is well known, Capitalist society has indeed capitalised women’s bodies and appearance as the objects of consumption and investment. Yet, as women’s bodies and appearance become resources to enhance feminine value, rather than merely the objects of constraint, the management of their appearance in order to achieve beauty becomes, at the least, a very important topic for these women, as well as an interesting site of contention. With camera phones, women learn by themselves how to design their own images, even if in order to reproduce the cultural stereotypes of beauty, as defined by a patriarchal capitalist society. Several interviews suggested that these activities of self-representation were in the mode ‘to show themselves attractively to others’ and, thus, reinforce the conventions of the gaze.

Boys don’t do that. Yet, girls take pictures of themselves. It’s because they can make their looks the best possible with camera phones. Boys tend to be embarrassed by doing this for themselves. These days, girls have a thick hide…Nowadays, it is important to show myself to other girls as well as boys. Although there’s a self-satisfaction (when one photographs herself), one cannot free herself from others’ eyes. (S5, age 20)

However, it cannot be concluded that all such activities of self-photographing follow the conventional structure of the gaze shaped by that of the patriarchal capitalist society. As women gain more power of control over the gaze as well as over their own images, they can have the pleasure of subverting the conventional patriarchal gaze. Manipulating a camera to transform their body image, and enacting various self-portraits, they can experience the I of the gaze. Moreover, they can reflect on the very act of taking pictures in order to show themselves to others. S6 (age 21), S14 (age 21), and S15 (age 21) had in fact developed a negative opinion of taking self-portraits in a stereotyped posture. They were disinclined to make a pretense of ‘being pretty’ in front of the camera, and to be objectified.

The ambiguities of this situation are played out the more in the context of the close-up. With camera phones, close-up images can easily be taken. These are often distorted images due to the effect of wide-angle lens settings. At the same time, images can as easily be deleted as they are taken. All of this perhaps frees up the photographic situation from some of its previous burdens. The interviewees played with their images in various ways; they used props, staged situations, took fragmentary images, inserted titles, or put them in different frames. They produced various forms of self-representation. When the interviewees were alone, whether they were in their private space or a public one, they amused themselves with camera phones to pass the time. At home, on the subway or bus, in the beauty salon or classroom, whenever they felt bored, they spent their time taking photos of themselves and experienced a new sense of existence. The ‘represented self’ ensured this new, particularly female, sense of existence. At that moment, regardless of place, a woman enjoyed her boredom and loneliness, depending only on her own self. The gaze of the camera in such situations cannot simply be considered a substitute for an imaginary man’s gaze. It could, however, be considered a narcissistic gaze, the gaze of a producer making her own images in various forms, a gaze that was conscious of the gaze of other friends of the same sex, or a gaze that objectified ‘herself’ for herself. Allowing such diverse forms of gaze, camera phones allow the camera to become a tool for self-exploration in a series of new modes.

Capturing Everyday Moments: Making Private Memories

In the past, of course, analogue photographs were often used to produce or reproduce an idealised formal image of family. When cameras became more portable and widely available on the mass market from the 1880s, ‘photography played not merely an incidental but a central role in the development of the contemporary ideology of the family, in providing a form of representation which cut across classes, disguised social differences’ (Williamson, 1993: 238). Whether formally taken by professional photographers or snapshots taken during family leisure or trips, photographs have maintained the fantasy that the family is always in harmony, always happy. When taking a snapshot became a leisure activity, it was used to perpetuate and support specific moments of family life (Holland, 1997). Family photographs have been used for indexical references to represent an imaginary cohesion of the family, and for instruments that celebrate the rites of family life and constitute familial self-presentation and memory. According to Marianne Hirsch, the ‘family photo both displays the cohesion of the family and is an instrument of its togetherness; it both chronicles family rituals and constitutes a prime objective of those rituals’ (Hirsch, 1997: 7). When photographs became embedded in the fundamental rites of familial life, they were framed in certain conventional ways, barely escaping from a hegemonic ideology of the family as ‘stable and united.’ Although this familial ideology has been contingent upon historical and socio-cultural context, it tenaciously resides in the imagery of family photographs. In short, photographs have played a central role in reproducing the institution of the bourgeois family.

Photographs of graduation ceremonies, birthdays, wedding ceremonies, anniversaries, or other familial rites have provided a ‘typical imagery’, consciously or unconsciously shaped by the social expectations imposed upon them. The photographs taken by camera phones are different. While the personal or family album of the past carefully selected the records of life’s moments that were considered important, and tried to perpetuate a kind of identity transcending everydayness, camera phone photographs have rather trivial meanings. The photograph used to give significant meanings to the record of the moment, and to make people nostalgic for ‘what has been,’ in Barthes’ term. However, the moment as photographed by camera phones is the temporary and trivial state of everyday life, and is relocated in the photographer’s playful discursive space. To photograph with camera phones is to play. It is an everyday event, rather than a meaningful ritual designed to record and commemorate the past. With the camera phone a personal medium of mobility and portability, the users can take photographs less tied to their conventional social functions. The interviewees spoke about their pleasure in making informal images by freezing particular moments of everyday life, moments which are less serious but personally intriguing. The material traces of moments that would be disregarded by conventional photography have become the sources of their personal pleasure. All this is perhaps why, rather than preserve photographs in the personal or family album that would constitute and perpetuate a person’s or family’s formal memories, most interviewees use them to share their daily experiences with their friends, filling up the still pictures’ absent context with their lively interpretations.

The merit of the camera phone is its portability, tininess, and handiness. If someone takes out a digital camera to take a photograph, people become tense and hardened. However, with a camera phone, everyone seems to be relaxed, making funny faces. (S7, 22)

It’s for fun. After taking a photograph of my eyes, I say, ‘aren’t my eyes big?’. Whenever I go to cafes and eating places, I photograph them, as if reporting, ‘I have been here.’ I try to take many photographs to tell my friends about them. (S17, 16)

The interviewees capture the trivial moments of everyday life and easily discard them by deleting them. They photograph for fun and for intimate friendships. Although sometimes kept, their photographs are not particularly memorial in the traditional sense. In addition, the screen of the camera phone is not large enough to truthfully represent the time and space of the past; it’s very small and the images are distorted. In short, to photograph with a camera phone is to assume that the event is easily forgettable. This meant that the interviewees were more relaxed in front of the lenses of camera phones.

This camera phone can save 70 photos. No more than 70 photos. If it notifies me that there is no more memory, I click a ‘delete’ key. Although I can delete all or a specific one, I am careless about deleting them all…I use a digital camera to photograph my friends. I print it and give it to them. The camera phone is not for keeping and preserving photographs. (S8, 20)

Figures and animals that are photographed at a distance by camera phones are sometimes hardly recognisable; only the photographer can see them. For example, S3 (age 18) said that she took a photo of some water because she liked its sound, and S10 said that she took a photo of a squirrel on the grass. Yet neither of these images was very recognisable. S 14 (age 21) explained the various looks of her pet from seemingly identical pictures. Such photographs depict experiences so personal and subjective, yet so vague, that only the individual photographer can interpret them. At the same time, any photograph, even those taken for personal satisfaction, is available to be shared with others. As discussed above, to photograph and view images with camera phones is therefore not only a personal activity, but also a form of play with friends.

Sharing Experiences of Photographing and Viewing

Alexandra Weilenmann and Catrine Larsson (2001), who studied the mobile phone usage of Swedish teenagers, indicate that the teenagers’ mobile phone communication often provides the basis for shared experience in social life. This finding argues against the mobile phone as a personal, privatized medium for communication. Although the mobile phone can create private space in public places, exclusive of others, it can also be used in different ways, depending on local contexts. While the camera phone is a tool for personal expression and private memories, it also provides a wealth of cultural material that can be shared and enjoyed in the interactive processes of groups. Most interviewees said that, when they were with their friends, their camera phones no longer belonged to themselves alone. Many photographs saved in their camera phones were in fact taken by their friends. For them it was acceptable to borrow another’s phone to take a photograph, and to compare what they had taken with each other.

My friends who think my camera phone takes better pictures borrow it and photograph…Later, I can find many photographs of the borrower saved in my camera phone. It often happens. (S2, 20)

The photographs taken by camera phones can vitalise and support group dialogues. They can sometimes verify persons or events that one is talking. Not only photography, but also passing around and chatting about has been photographed becomes an important part of friendship culture. The camera phone thus provides a space for exhibition that exposes a slice of personal life, people and things with which the woman has intimate relations.

When I meet my friends, we play with camera phones. We are spending time photographing each other…As we speak of personal things, we show each other our photographs related to our talks. With this camera phone, we can have a real good time. (S4, 23)

In his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Erving Goffman differentiates behaviours at the formal “front stage” from the informal “backstage,” suggesting that a person’s front stage self-presentation is performed within a range that is socially acceptable. To minimise embarrassment from her/his failure in presentation, she/he prepares a presentation carefully within this range. The photo album derived from the camera phone is made not only for one’s own pleasure of self-expression but also in order to show oneself to others. Mindful of interactions with others, one scrutinizes the pictures of one’s private and intimate moments, and continuously revises one’s version.

There is no secret; I show them all…Yet, when I save a photograph, I think it would be shown to others. So I delete poor pictures right away. (S8, age 20)

The individual, who is aware that the photographs saved in the camera phone could be used someday as material for conversation, steadily updates her album and prepares to exhibit her works. This exhibitive space is always open to her friends. Visiting each other’s exhibitive spaces, which are private but ready to please visitors, she and her friends build up their intimate relationships.

Recycling in Cyberspace: Expanding Pleasure

With MMS (multi messaging system) and e-mail, one can send the camera photograph to other mobile phones or PCs. The photographs transferred to a PC can be posted on Internet galleries, bulletin boards, or weblog-style mini-homepages. Thus the Internet becomes another communication media that is embodied in the interviewee’s everyday life.[1] While mobile phones tend to strengthen the intimate relations of a person, they also become interconnected with the Internet and can produce more diverse forms of communication. All but three of the interviewees have posted their photographs on Internet bulletin boards or mini-homepages.

Placed in the vast network of the Internet, camera photographs can be shown and circulated without one’s permission, or apart from one’s intention. Often, however, the field in which these photographs circulate seems to depend on the different social relations of those posting the images.

I have had a meeting with my elementary school mates once every two months. I have often taken the photographs of this meeting and posted at the cyber café for other schoolmates. Then, people leave a message like, ‘I should have gone to that meeting’, ‘she came there?’, ‘her looks have changed,’ and so on. (S4, age 23)

When I photograph unusual things, I am posting it on Cy-world (mini-homepage) and saying ‘I have been to a place and found such a thing.’ I am doing this in order to show it not only to my offline friends, but also my online friends. These friends usually leave messages at the bulletin board. (S17, age 16)

There are obvious a serious of paradoxical inversions here between the public and private nature of the camera photographs. John Berger (1980) divides the uses of photography into the private and public. The former recollects and maintains a record of an individual’s experiences, which are ‘appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it.’ By contrast, the latter records certain events and scenes, which are ‘torn from [their] context,’ and ‘lend [themselves] to any arbitrary use’ (Berger, 1980: 51-52). The public photograph plays the role of witness and reporter about an event whose original context and meaning the reader would not necessarily know. When the photograph taken by a camera phone is displayed and circulated via a person’s mini-homepage or a bulletin board in a cyber-community café, the context in which to be appreciated and interpreted will be changed. In this context, the boundaries between the private and the public become blurred. When the photographs taken by the camera phone capture the moments of everyday life or self-expression and become remediated by the Internet, these personal expressions gain a public channel for circulation; the photographer can expand the space for self-presentation and self-exposure. As her camera phone becomes connected to the Internet, she becomes more conscious of what photographs she will select to show; she is more careful in managing impressions. This expands her pleasure as a producer of her own self-presentation and meaning-making.

Concluding Remarks

Women can use camera phones as materials of conversation and in order to experience a new form of gaze. The camera phone becomes various tools in turn: a tool for one’s own private pleasure, a tool for conversation, a tool to play with acquaintances, and a tool to experiment with ways of self-presentation and self-expression. One can experience oneself as an object and, at the same, as an active spectator. Judith Butler writes that, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of the gender.’ Rather, ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990: 24-25). According to Butler, gender identity is constituted by everyday practices of the assumed gender identity. It is not easy for women, who have been positioned as submissive and passive media consumers in a real world governed by patriarchal ideology, to be active performers. It would still be questionable how far women with camera phones are self-reflective on their play and performance, are free from the existing gendered media culture, and expand their social capital of empowerment. It is difficult to find evidence that camera phone usage helps to enhance feminist awareness.

However, the ways in which the interviewees have used the camera phone to increase intimacy with media technology, to present themselves, to capture a moment of everyday life, to share the experiences of photography and seeing, and to pursue pleasure, suggest that these women are not the mere owners of camera phones, but performers who create various cultural meanings. They develop a more intimate relationship with technology, challenge the conventions of gaze, give meaning to what is taken, and circulate their own expressions. These processes of cultural meaning-making neither directly subvert the existing gendered system, get away from the context of commercialism, nor constitute a feminist mobilisation. However, the uses of the camera phone seem to affect, to some degree, women’s receptiveness to new media technology, and the ways in which they present themselves and have relations with others. With the camera phone, women have another tool that will help them to be cultural producers.

Flis Henwood (1993) argues that to change the gendered culture of technology, one should not merely focus on criticising the characteristics of the gendered technology. One should understand women’s subjective experiences and practices of technology and, based on this understanding, define or redefine technology. The camera phone may be a less serious technology, a technology of daily consumer culture to which everyone can have easy access. However, it is problematic to treat less seriously the technology that women use to a great extent for their interactions and pleasure; it is a male-oriented perception of valuing a technology. The ways in which women utilise and make social meaning from the camera phone cannot be neglected. To recognise and rediscover women’s needs and desires as they appropriate technology seems to be an efficient means to challenge the imbalance of a gendered technological culture.

Author’s Biography

Dong-Hoo Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication at University of Incheon in Korea. She has published articles on transnational program adaptation and new media culture in Korea. Her research interests include media flow in the age of globalisation, women’s reception of new communication technology, and medium theory.

Note

[1] Most interviewees use the Internet one or more hours per day. They usually use home computers to connect to the Internet. They use the Internet mainly to search for information, to join cyber communities, and to communicate with others.
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Introduction

The time will come, when Mrs. Smith would spend an hour with Mrs. Brown very enjoyably cutting up Mrs. Robinson over the telephone. (de Sola Pool, 1977: 33, cited in Due, 2003)

The telephone was launched in the late 19th century, accompanied by the idea that ‘friends will whisper their secrets over the electric wire’ (in Due, 2003 [Kingsbury, 1915: 32]).[1] However, as Beathe Due (2003) notes in her compelling analysis of gender-discourses and telephone-usage in Norway, because of already existing social, cultural and economical bourgeois etiquettes, these discourses were transferred into perceptions of correct usage of the telephone by those who could afford to use and own a telephone. Brief and formal business-related conversations were soon initiated by the bourgeois class. (see also Martin, 1991)

In the wake of these etiquettes, a gender-dichotomised discourse of telephone-usage became quickly widespread: women were perceived as endlessly gossiping about unimportant matters, whereas men were perceived to have disciplined brief business-related phone-calls.[2] To illustrate the dominant gender-specific discourse, Due (2003) refers to a 1929 letter from a reader who sought to organise a new association against female telephone gossip: ‘F.T.M.A.K.E.S.I.O.T’ – ‘Foreningen Til Motarbeidelse Av Kvinners Evindelige Snakk I Offentlige Telefoner’ (‘The Association of Opposing Women’s Endless Gossip On Public Telephones’) (2003: 1).

Today in Norway, more than a century after the telephone was launched, the public telephone booth has been generally replaced by the tiny personal, portable mobile phone. Hence, in addition to mobile phone gossiping in public during the last seven or eight years, sending text messages has been one of the most popular communication forms among young people between fifteen to nineteen years old. Statistics show that more than eight million text messages are sent every day. Since Norway has only 4,5 millions inhabitants, the Norwegians are considered to be amongst the highest text message users in the world (Ling, 2004). Hence, criticism of women endlessly gossiping in public telephone booths has been supplanted by criticisms of girls and women who, using mobile phones, shamelessly share their most intimate and personal matters in public space. It is framed as a double problem: mobile telephone gossiping accompanied by text message-addiction. To illustrate the extent to which text messages engage young people, I asked this study’s young informants how they would experience two weeks without their mobile telephones. In response, some expressed the idea that it would be ‘completely impossible’, ‘exhausting’ or that they ‘would be totally isolated’ and ‘would feel naked and lose the control of the outside world’; in contrast, others said: ‘bloody wonderful’, ‘a relief’, ‘would release the social hypnosis’, ‘okay to get away from everyday hassle ’ and ‘awesome’. Despite the contradictions in these expressions, there is no doubt that text messages engage young people’s lives to a large extent.

As very few studies have engaged with the way in which gender and sexuality are played out at a micro-textual level of text messages, I have sought, using discourse analysis, to understand not only how stereotyped gender-dichotomies are maintained and reproduced, but also the ways in which possible alternative gender performances take place. In a previous article I demonstrated that sexual romantic negotiations are a significant part of young Norwegians’ text messages (Prøitz, 2003; also see Ling, 2005). In this article I focus on the ways in which young people translate their moods and body-languages into texts, a process connected to the emergence of signs of femininity and masculinity in text message love-projects.[3]

After a brief discussion of research methods, I will discuss linguistic dimensions of text messages. Then, after presenting Heidi’s and Randi’s love-project text messages, I will develop a gender explicit analysis. I have changed the names of those participating in the study.

Research Methods

The project on which this article is based was guided by a triangulation of methods: focus groups- and in-depth-interviews, network-maps, drawings, and text and multimedia messages. In this article the analyses are generally supported by all empirical methods, with particular emphasis on interviews and text messages.[4]

In 2001, I did group-interviews of nine young white middle class media-students (15 -16 year old girls) in two groups at a technical high school in Oslo, Norway. During a month in fall 2001, the same nine girls forwarded me all their sent and received text messages. When the informant sent or received a text message, she synchronously and manually sent a copy to my mobile telephone.[5] This resulted in about one thousand text messages.

During 2004, I re-interviewed six of the same young girls from the 2001-study, as well as recruiting nine new (white, middleclass) informants from Oslo and Bodø. In total my sample included, five males and ten females, all 18-19 years old. Six females of the 2004-sequence participated in a further forward-method round, while three females and one male also sent me a sample of their last month’s camera-telephone images, animations and graphics, for a total of 111 MMS.[6]

The duration of the forward-method varied for each individual, lasting for periods ranging from three days to a month each interim of empirical study. Even though there was a large range in the number of forwarded text messages, most of them forwarded between fifty to hundred text messages. All text messages were transcribed by hand in 2001, whereas due to newer technology, I was able to “Bluetooth” text- and multimedia messages from my mobile telephone directly to the computer in the latter empirical period.[7] In all interviews I used a tape-recorder to generate transcripts. Each interview lasted sixty to ninety minutes.

Readings of Discourse Analysis

There was no automatic operation in the forward-method, which was simply based on each informant’s co-operation, willingness and remembering to forward their messages. Therefore, the empirical findings are not to be interpreted as either objective or universal truths. In fact, following arguments put forward by Steinar Kvale (1997; see also Cathrine Egeland, 2001) I suggest that the knowledge that emerges with/in an interview is not seen as an objective knowledge that emerges from the “inside” of the interviewee. Instead, the interview is comprehended as a particular discourse-situation where meanings are negotiated and objects are constituted (Egeland, 2001; Kvale, 1997).

Thus, the analysis of gender performances in this paper implies taking into account principles such as heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity that regulate the production of discourses. In this sense, the knowledge derived from an interview is not an objective knowledge about something, rather it is a knowledge of, with or in between the interviewee and the interviewer; the knowledge is seen as “inter-relational” where negotiations of meanings play a key-role (Kvale, 1997). Being located in a specific time and space, the interview as a discourse-situation is comprehended as a situation in which the interviewee and interviewer are given specific positions in a certain discursive universe where a negotiation of meanings may occur.

In order to analyse text messages used by the young women and men engaged in love projects, I find it necessary to first outline and discuss some noteworthy linguistic aspects of text messages. Hence, in the next section I will shed light on several linguistic aspects of text messages adopted by the young text messagers.

Text Message (il)literacy

In text message communication, aspects of physical appearance such as attitude, posture, voice, marked articulations, accents, gestures, face expressions etc. are not present. As several works on mobile telephone communication have shown, the absence of the entire physical display of communication results in young people’s urge to translate their body language into text messages.[8]

In previous work, I have discussed how informants indicate hesitation or pause by using ellipsis (…), how they emphasise the atmosphere or the weightiness of voice by using exclamation marks, and how they indicate their kind feelings as well as minimise confusion and misinterpretation by the very frequent usage of emoticons and asterisks. In my study, the most frequent emoticon is the ‘smiley’ ‘:)’, mainly used in text message-closings, whereas the asterisk ‘*’ is often seen marking words such as *Koz* and *Klemz* (both words are stylized spellings of hug). As Ylva Hård af Segerstad (2005) points out in her recent study of text message language in Sweden, the asterisk often serve the same purpose as the emoticons, yet, she argues, by adding an asterisk around a typed version of a word, ‘the marked text is marked explicitly as indicating an action…’ (af Segerstad 2005: 330). This is illustrated in Tina’s text message below:

‘Elsker deg også…du får kose deg i helga, da:) *kline og kose med*’
(Love you too…enjoy your weekend:) *making out and hugging*)
(From Tina’s forwarded text messages in 2001)

The Bizarre Mum

Another way of embodying the text is to use capital letters to express a loud shouting voice or anger. However, non-intended usage of capital letters or no use of emoticons or asterisk at all signifies text message illiteracy. According to the young informants, this occurs frequently in text messages from their parents:

My mother thinks she knows how to write messages, but she doesn’t use small letters, only capital letters. She doesn’t even know how to write a question mark… her messages are just weird. (Interview with Tina, Prøitz, 2003: 49).

As friends of the same social circle often have shared background knowledge, text messages do not need to be explicit. As af Segerstad adds, joint references enable them to ‘rely on the receiver’s ability to make pragmatic inferences when decoding abbreviated messages’ (2005: 328). Hence, as Tina’s mother lacks this community specific and text message-linguistic knowledge, her text messages are perceived as bizarre and incomplete.

Among other informants, whose local dialect is different from the hegemonic Oslo dialect (which is phonetically close to the dominant written standard in Norway), maintaining their phonetic spellings in their text messages may be important in order to emphasise their local identity. According to two informants from the northern part of Norway, text messages written in standard language are perceived as eccentric in a negative sense. They both claim that using standard language in their text messages would create a distance from the other person while sounding very formal and impersonal.

Mimicking Modes of Masculinity

Another interesting point is that this community specific language in text messaging can be used in a parodying and ironic sense. One eighteen year old informant, Knut, underlined how he and his friends mimic ‘those lameass smileys’ and add stylised spellings simply to make a joke or as an ironic comment. I suggest that the mimicking of the internalised, community specific modes may be a rite de passage in getting older as they sought to demonstrate that they “outgrew” this practice through their mockery. Their mockery can also be interpreted as a desire to distinguish themselves from ‘mainstream’ text messaging practices. In her study of U.K. men’s lifestyle magazines, Bethan Benwell (2004) argues that the usage of irony may play a key role in constructing masculinity(-ies) in far more ambiguous, multiple and fluctuating ways, especially when compared with traditional hegemonic masculine performances.

The outline above will be the point of departure for the following analysis. Discourses of gender, sexuality, femininity and masculinity in text message communication will be discussed.

Cute Boys and Game Boys

In accordance with how one understands oneself, other individuals or one’s relationship to others’ gender is one of the most significant in terms of social positioning.[9] When I ask my informants what they associate with femininity and masculinity, they tend to be very clear-cut in their characterisations. With the term femininity they associate hearts, flowers, gay men, soft and beautiful movements, emotions, caring, make-up, dresses, whereas masculinity is associated with muscles, groovy cars, hardness, strength, dominance, leadership, straight lines, tightness, roughness – or as André puts it: ‘a person in a jacket, with a deep voice and emotionally limited as only a masculine person may be, – that is masculine.’ (Interview with André, 2004). André’s portrayal of being masculine is consistent with hegemonic bedrock masculinity, defined by R.W. Connell (1995) as:

…the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordinations of women. (R.W. Connell 1995: 77)

The gender-polarized configuration is further underscored when I ask the young informants whether they are able to distinguish a text message by gender.[10] According to the majority of the informants’ perceptions, girls tend to write longer and more detailed text messages than boys. Again, let us listen to Morten’s perception of “gendered” text messages:

MORTEN: Girls have a lot that’s different…they have abbreviations, although they put them in a totally different way than boys would have done. Boys just do it straight, as simple as that I think. They don’t care to nag people with text messages. They say what they have to say and that’s it. Or call me. But girls I think are much more able to explain pretty well what they mean in text messages, straight forward, but quite clear. I think they use more time. I usually receive longer messages from girls.
LIN: Do you write longer replies to girls?
MORTEN: It depends. If they start to chat via texts then I prefer them to call me instead if they want to talk. If I chat via texts and send “yes”, it costs one krone.[11] So maybe seven “yes” on questions, that’s pretty silly. It should be used for what it is meant for, to send messages. (Interview with Morten, 2004)

Other informants support this view by saying that most of the strict, short and clear-cut text messages they receive are written by boys or men. Moreover, most of them perceive that young males in general find it harder to write emotional text messages than young females. Anja, one of the 18 year old female informants, shares these opinions, claiming that girls tend to be much freer in their compositions, whereas boys have a much firmer structure:

Girls tend to use “z’s” and “hugz” and so on in the end. A girl is more slack in their structure whilst boys just tighten up the text as much as they can: “Are you okay? I am. Call me tomorrow” that is the whole message. Whereas girls would write “How are you” and “What have you been doing lately – we must get together soon – do you have a new boyfriend?” A much looser structure, but not always. Boys can also be cute in their texts. (Interview with Anja, 2004).

As further noted by af Segerstad, emoticons and asterisks are often used to ‘convey meaning in a creative way, save time, space and effort and also to help disambiguate text’ (af Segerstad, 2005: 331). Yet, this way of tinting and colouring text messages, is according to the sociologist Rich Ling (2004, 2005) mainly a female practice. In his writings about ‘gendering of text messages’ in Norway, he emphasises that particularly younger women seem to have a broader emotional register when sending text messages than young males:

…female teens write longer more complex messages. They include aspects of standard written language such as capitalization and punctuation. Moreover, they are more likely to include emotional elements in their communications (such as emoticons and items such as “xxx”), and they are more inclined to include in their SMS messages such refined formalities of traditional written letters such as salutations and closings. (Ling, 2005: 336).

Based upon various studies of spoken conversation, Ling states that young women in general seem to have better interaction skills (2004: 164). Other studies (Döring Hellwig and Klimsa, 2004; Hareide, 2002; Lee and Sohn, 2004; Skog, 2002) support this view by claiming that girls tend to be more socially oriented in their mobile phone use, whereas boys emphasise its technological utilities. In addition to research on mobile telephones, various recent network and online studies have shown that participants online interact using the cultural, class, ethnic, gender and sexuality, etc. displays that they already perform in face to face interaction (Bromseth, 2003; Corneliussen, 2003; Nakamura, 2002). Hence, ‘doing virtuality’ is as Lisa Nakamura (2002: 3) claims, never unmarked.

Other researchers have commented on the way in which gender, sexuality and social issues related to magazines are presented to, and adopted by, young people.[12] In Mary Jane Kehily’s (1999) discussion of how magazines may influence young people’s mediation and negotiation of sexual issues, she suggests that young women are more likely than young men to build up a range of emotional repertoires and vocabulary. She argues that young women learn femininity through continual and collective reading of teenage magazines where social and sexual issues are frequently present. Correspondingly, her study suggests that similar issues addressed in magazines for young males would appear to ‘generate feelings of emasculation and suspicion’, here related to gay identity (Kehily, 1999: 71). Here though, Michael Kimmel (1998) and R.W. Connell (1995) argue that “manhood” (here, seen as the traditional “ideal man”, men in privileged and dominant positions) is only attainable for a distinct minority, and further stress that several subcategories of masculinity exist side by side. Other researchers (Hanke,1992; Søndergaard, 2000; Tjeder, 2002) point out that the nucleus of the hegemonic masculine role is still ultimately located within compulsory heterosexuality.

Risky Masculinity

Among the informants, similar understandings about “proper” femininity and masculinity to those stated above seem to be relevant to text message communication between young males. According to Jorun and Maja, both 18, males who are too emotionally articulate would probably lend support to gay associations:

LIN: Do you think that text message communication, where the physical body is absent, may enable males to do more femininity? I mean, can two men or boys write hugs to each other without meeting resistance?
MAJA: I think it will be noticed.
JORUN: If a boy writes to another boy “You look nice today” and adds a smiley with a blinking eye, and they’re just kidding…and let’s say they dislike gay people, I think it will be much more accepted because they are just kidding.
LIN: But girls, can they add more smileys to each other without being questioned about whether they are flirting with each other or not?
MAJA: Yes.
JORUN: Sure.
MAJA: I think the norms give us a broader right to comment on… for example clothes. If I like Lisa’s pants, I may say so in my text message to her, “Where did you buy them” and so on. No one would ever see that as something unusual…
LIN: And if a boy had written to his male friend “You’ve got on nice pants, today!”?
MAJA: Well, it depends on how close friends they are, and there are definitely differences among boys, and there is not an unambiguous answer to this, but I think at least some would have wondered about…in a way… are you gay? (Interview with Jorun and Maja, 2004)

According to Maja, the small gesture of paying another male compliment about his appearance would be noticed as a counter-traditional practice among men. Hence, the practice is not only made visible, but it also becomes risky. Interestingly, as unquestioningly stated by Jorun and Maja, this riskiness does not seem to concern the females. Are the framings different for female same-gender communication? As Willy Pedersen and Hans Kristiansen (2003) claim in a quantitative study of young Norwegians commencing sexual intercourse, young females seem to have more freedom than young males in ‘doing’ various sexual practices. They argue that this is partly because homoerotic activities and interests are more interwoven in female heterosexual practices. For males, homosexuality seems to be more threatening and in a potential conflict with the traditional male gender-role. Pedersen and Kristiansen suggest that female gender-roles are less attached to taboos and stereotyped expectations.

Hence, the question remains as to whether it is in fact possible, as claimed by Anja in the previous section, for boys to “be cute” in their text messages? Although numerous studies seem to maintain and reproduce polarized and hegemonic gender dichotomies, in the following analysis of Heidi’s and Randi’s text messages I will search for a more multifaceted image.

Embodying Gender in Love-Projects

The text messages below are excerpts from two different text message-love projects forwarded by Heidi (text messages a-g) and Randi (text messages h-o). In both cases, text messages formed part of the initiation of love-projects that emerged in May 2004.[13]

The first time I met the girls, in 2001, they were fifteen years old classmates. Heidi was in the middle of a very appealing love-project with Håvard, whereas Randi’s text messages were mainly coordination of sport-activities and parties with her female peers. In Heidi’s case, the drama and intensity of her love-project escalated as performances of gender, sexuality and power relations continuously shifted. The analysis of Heidi’s text messages in 2001 showed that Heidi and Håvard performed versions of gender(s) and sexuality(ies) not commonly associated with their physical sex (like Heidi performed in more masculine ways and vice versa) while they also seemed to challenge each other’s gender positions. However, as the power struggle proceeded, what I found most intriguing was the emergence of a distinct feature in the love-project; namely, a game played through text message-technology (Prøitz, 2003).

Heidi and Randi are now 18 years old, and they are both in the middle of new love-projects. After presenting excerpts of Heidi’s and Randi’s text message conversations, a gender-explicit analysis will follow.

Heidi’s love-project

When Heidi resumed forwarding text messages in May 2004, she was currently in a relationship with Henrik.[14] However, shortly after she started to forward text messages, she entered a new love-project with another young male, concurrent to juggling her relationship with Henrik. Heidi starts the conversation by expressing how much she misses the text message partner:

a) Jeg dævver..Seriøst. Hadde gitt mye for å ha deg her nå. Vi må møtes snart igjen, ok? Savner deg allerede! :) Klem (21:41)
(I am dying..Seriously. Would have given a lot just to be with you now. We must meet very soon, ok? Miss you already! :) Hugs)

Her text message-partner replies five minutes later by reconfirming the mutual affection. Simultaneously he points out one of the love-project’s obstacles:

b) Er litt rart.. Savner deg og..mye! Vil gjerne møte deg igjen;) men helst når du er singel..;) (21:46)
(A bit strange.. Miss you too..a lot! Want to meet you again;) but would prefer to do so when you are single..;)

Almost a quarter of an hour later (with no reply from Heidi in between), the text message-partner continues by stating the second obstacle:

c) Klarer ikke slutte å tenke på deg..hvorfor må du bo i oslo? (22:28)
(Can’t stop thinking about you..why do you have to live in oslo?)

In the next two text messages, I have not been able to locate who the sender is. However, affirmation continues to be the main theme in both of them, yet even more passionate and intense:

d) Går rundt og lurer på hva som feiler meg..er sykt..har møtt deg 3 ganger, men har aldrig følt noe liknende før..vil så gjerne holde deg..kysse deg..blir gal! (22:41)
(Walking around and wondering what’s wrong with me..it’s insane..have met you 3 times, but have never felt anything like this before..want so much to hold you..kiss you..going crazy!)

e) J vet, føler d same..J tror det er fordi vi er ganske like. Vi passer liksom sammen. Hver gang vi møtes klikker d bare. Og d r en SKAM at vi ikke er sammen.. (22:46)
(I know, I feel exactly the same way..I think it’s because we are very much alike. We sort of fit together. Each time we meet it just clicks. And it’s a SHAME that we’re not together..)

Again Heidi’s text message-partner is seen pointing out the obstacles, however now with a request to solve them:

f) Du kommer i sommer sant? Kan du ikke være singel da? Vet jeg spør om mye men hadde vært digg.. (03:03 am)
(You will come this summer, right? Can’t you be single by then? I know I’m requesting a lot but would have been cool..)

Their text message-conversation ends in the middle of the night, after five and a half hour, with Heidi replying in a vague, yet affirming way:

g) Jeg kommer i sommer. Helt sikkert. Om jeg er singel da får tiden vise, men jeg må nesten si jeg håper.. Du er bare så søt du:) (03:06 am)
(I’ll promise to visit in the summer. Definitely. If I am single by then, time will tell, however I must say that I almost hope so… You are just so cute :))

Randi’s love-project

By the time Randi resumed forwarding text messages, she is in the middle of her ‘russefeiring’, which is indicated in her text messages[15] She has just ended her relationship with her boyfriend and has recently met a new potential love-project partner. The first text message refers to an embarrassing incident:

h) Hei.. :) håper ikke du syns ting var rart i dag, etter helgen.. :)
(00:52)
(Hi.. :) hope you don’t think things are weird today after this weekend.. :))

After confirming that everything is fine, a suggestion is posed:

i) absoulutt ikke.. sorry for überkjip kveld as. En annen ting, si fra neste gang du er edru, for jeg har gjerne lyst til å være det en dag. er litt lei fyll..
(00:55)
(definitely not.. sorry for über-dull night, though. Another thing, tell me next time you are sober, I really want to be sober one day, a bit tired of drinking..)

In the next text, the amorous announcement is stated, carefully but clear:

j) btw, en annen ting som jeg tror er litt farlig er at jeg tror jeg begynner å bli litt forelsket i deg..
(00:55)
(btw, another thing that I may find a bit scary is that I think I am falling in love with you..)

The receiver seems obviously flattered as she/he goes on with a rather unstructured (yet conscious?) reply:

k) :) nå ble jeg flau.. :) litt teit kanskje men.. Jeg vet ikke helt hva jeg skal si jeg, men jeg tror ikke det er så veldig farlig.. Hvorfor skulle det egentlig være det? :) jeg er edru hver dag jeg, så det skal ikke bli noe problem.. :) hyggelig med kjip kveld, vi fikk jo tatt noen knuter!
(01:00)
(:)now you’ve made me embarrassed.. :) a bit silly maybe but.. I don’t know what to say, but I don’t think it’s that scary.. Why should it really be scary?:) I am sober every day, so that’s no problem.. :) nice with a boring night after all, we managed to catch some knots! [16] )

Yet another affirming text, followed by a portrayal of an(other?) embarrassing incident:

l) ja! morsomt det ihvertfall! er alltid gøy å være sammen med deg anyways. hvis du blir flau nå så skulle du visst hvor flau jeg var når jeg ga deg et Ganske stort kyss når du var edru foran eks kjæresten din, tihi.
(01:04)
(yes! At least that was fun! is always fun to hang out with you anyway. if you became embarrassed now, you should have known how embarrassed I got when I gave you a pretty huge kiss when you were sober, standing right in front of your ex-boyfriend, tihi.)

Randi excuses the text message partner’s responsibility for the incident, before underlining that her relationship with her ex-boyfriend now belongs to the past:

m) Det kunne jo ikke du vite.. :) han ble jo ikke super fornøyd, men er jo ikke eksen for ingenting.. :)
(01:07)
(You couldn’t know that.. :) he wasn’t very happy, but isn’t my x for nothing.. :))

The conversation ends with two affirming text message-closings:

n) kjipern det as, uansett så er jeg glad i deg randi, sov godt, puss
(01:09)!
(that’s lame, but I am really fond of you, Randi, sleep tight, kiss)

o) Jeg er glad i deg og kjekken! God natt :)
(01:09)
(I am fond of you too, you hunk! Sleep tight:))

Instant, Immediate Intimacy

According to Anne Krogstad (1999), there is a range of possible interpretations in all kinds of communication. To mention just a few of these interpretations, communication may be (mis)leading, betraying, clarifying, confusing or seductive. However, as Krogstad (1999) further notes, what one expresses contributes to the definition and constitution of reality(ies). In Heidi’s and Randi’s text message-realities above, a continuation of initial intimate and romantic love-projects seems to take place. In Heidi’s case, she begins the conversation with an amorous and affirming text message. During the next five and a half hours – and six text messages later – the young couple repeat and re-confirm their love-project in various amorous ways through text messaging. However, to send seven text messages during five and a half hours within an emerging love-project like Heidi’s is, according to my informants, unusually few text messages. At this crucial point of the love-project, a couple of minutes would be the most common, expected and accepted text message-transfer time – or as the nineteen years informant Kristian says: ‘you most likely sit and count the seconds’. Hence, if they exceed this time, most of the informants say they try to make up a reasonable explanation for themselves in order to reduce their rising anxiety. The significance of keeping to the accepted time seems to be particularly important in the early phase of a love-project. The vulnerability one experiences while anticipating a new text message is expressed by Jorun and Maja in this way:

MAJA: If it takes fifteen minutes, I actually think, oh my God, now she thinks I am stupid, that’s why she doesn’t want to answer me…fifteen minutes is far too long. One needs confirmation for one-self I think… One tends to be quite nervous, so one paces about with impatience and continuously checks the phone…is it going to beep soon?
JORUN: Yes, I used to cheer my self up with…well, she is probably having a nap, or a shower, or she eats dinner… you know, its most likely a reasonable explanation, right?
LIN: So what did you fear?
MAJA: That it [the relationship] would end, I think…that it wouldn’t turn out to be anything more serious.
JORUN: One is of course very anxious of being let down… so a couple of minutes…
MAJA: So you receive the message, write and send it back. It doesn’t take long. (Interview with Jorun and Maja, 2004)

Thus, according to the informants, the text message frequency in Heidi’s conversation is perceived as not only unacceptable, but most likely would also play up anxiety. In Randi’s case, the eight text messages and seventeen minutes sequence is far more consistent with the internalised customs as pointed out above. Here, the conversation opens with a vague expression (h and i), before carefully, yet directly revealing an initial love (j). Although the following texts in Randi’s case refer to an embarrassing incident, they also function to clarify and confirm the young text message-partner’s mutual fascination for each other.[17]

Emoticons and signs such as smileys, final points, question and exclamation marks are frequently used in various and distinctive ways in all text messages. According to my informants, a final double dot is used to initiate pauses and hesitations, as mentioned earlier. Moreover, it is also used to soften a text in order to make it more friendly. The usage of final double dots at the end of a sentence may imply that a reply is expected or wanted. The question mark also serves this purpose, in its traditional usage. Jorun describes the custom as follows:

It means…I don’t know why, but it looks a bit weird if we just put it to an end just like that. It may also look like you want to say something more. It is nothing final. You sort of opens up a lot… you are to wonder a bit. (Interview with Jorun, 2004).

The significance of a question mark is further emphasised by Kristian underneath:

It is smart to put the question at the end of the message. If it’s a part of a long message, its easy to forget it if it’s in the beginning. And what one reads in the end is always what one remembers. And when there’s a question mark there, one usually remembers that ‘wasn’t it something I should have remembered?’ So it’s not only posed a question, but you should also reply as well. (Interview with Kristian, 2004)

In line with Jorun’s and Krisitan’s statements above, the initial intimate and romantic love-projects in Heidi’s and Randi’s text messages seem to be “translated” and underlined by the usage of emoticons and non-alphanumeric signs.

Composing the Perfect Sentence

Interestingly, according to Ling’s (2005: 342) recent linguistic study of text messages in Norway, the average message uses only about 20% of a message’s available space. The same tendencies are seen in af Segerstad’s (2005: 322) study, which found the mean length of messages to be no more than 64 characters. Being considerably below the upper limit of 160 characters, af Segerstad suggests that long text messages seem to be too time-consuming and non-effective (ibid).

However, when counting the characters (including the spaces) used in the love-projects above, the average in Heidi’s and Randi’s fifteen text messages is 130 characters, far beyond both Ling and af Segerstads findings. In Heidi’s case, the peak messages were kept just below the 160 character limit (d and e both 157 characters/spaces long, made possible due to frequent abbreviations) whereas Randi’s forwarded peak messages both exceeded the limit (289 and 213). In the latter case, the messages have been sent in two separate parts, which is not only time-consuming, but also costs twice as much.

To re-write and to re-compose a text in order to fit the 160 character limit, or to write a 289 characters long text, is time-consuming. Consequently, in both cases, the young people must have spent time and effort and be willing to pay double (k and l). As a number of informants state, text message expenses do not have first priority when an emerging sexual romantic negotiation is at stake:

I never sent just one message. It was at least two, sometimes three and four parts. So, I burnt off money on text messages, but I couldn’t care less. (Interview with Lasse, 2004)

I thought it was so nice, exciting and fun to write text messages, money or not. I bought new cards all the time. I didn’t notice it at all (laughs) it didn’t matter at all. (Interview with Jorun, 2004)

The importance of a well-composed text message, is further underlined by the eighteen year old informant André in his preparation for his next love-project approach:

I am going to…I am going to write it [the text message] down on a paper in order to make it sound nice … I have to find the…the perfect sentence. (Interview with André, 2004)

As seen here the immediacy and effectiveness of text message-communication are replaced by more time-consuming, but well-modelled sentences. In both Heidi’s and Randi’s text messages, embodying the texts by using emoticons, signs and non-alphanumeric symbols in order to textualise intimacy and affection seemed to be a significant practice. Hence, I argue that text messages in love-projects are a part of an intimate discourse where the social and romantic negotiations are more important than time and expenses (Prøitz, 2005).

DIY-Masculinities [18]

However, what I found most interesting is that distinguishing whether a text message has been written by a female or a male sometimes turns out to be quite difficult, sometimes even impossible. In Heidi’s case, I was able to locate the sender of a, b, c, f and g, due to the additional information from the network-map where Heidi had checked out her most frequent text message-partners, interviews and text messages forwarded before and after the excerpts displayed here; these sometimes used names or other gender-specific indications.

As for Randi, only m, n, and o, include gender-specific terms: using ‘he’ about the ex-partner (m), indicating that Randi most likely had a heterosexual relationship, the usage of Randi’s name (n), as well as the usage of the term ‘kjekken’ which is most used when paying boys/men compliments (o). Interestingly, by just looking at the way the young text message-couples embody their texts, I argue that locating the female and the male is impossible. As for Heidi’s climax-text messages (d, e), as well as five of Randi’s texts, distinguishing the females’ texts from the males’ texts has not been possible even with the additional information.

How can this occur when the young people themselves claim that there are obvious differences between text messages sent by males and those sent by females? As stated by the informants, in addition to various researchers’ comments on gender, sexuality and media, Heidi’s and Randi’s male text messaging-partners should both have been brief in using terms of familiarity and in expressing emotions and intimacy. The denial and effacement of such knowledge and skills would be necessary in order to maintain a particular account of masculinity, or as Søndergaard (2000) notes, as to be successfully integrated as a culturally recognisable male.

On the basis of the informants’ own description of femininity and masculinity, the text message-excerpts seem to be very feminine: long, detailed, very emotionally loaded with a lot of emoticons, non-alphanumeric symbols and signs. One possibility is that in having sexual romantic negotiations, ideas of love and intimacy may be enfolded in more implicit feminising (and infantilising) terms. In this manner, the heterosexual context makes feminised intimacy less threatening to masculinity as the feminised intimacy gestures signal sexual intent. However, as expressed by some of the male informants, detailed and emotional text messages also occur between young male friends where the sexual intent is not a key issue. The male intimacy is portrayed in the interview excerpt below, where 18 year old Knut describes recently received text messages from his male friends:

KNUT: He [Erik] writes for example “Dear friend, sometimes, when I work a lot, or when I’m facing emotional challenges, I tend to feel vulnerable, yet happy. I’m not good at showing it, just want to be strong and independent. However, in moments like this, I feel particularly grateful to have best friends that it’s nice to meet… good to lean against one another. Hugs, Erik :)”, so it goes like this.
LIN: And this…is this a joke?
KNUT: No, it’s not a joke. It’s real.
LIN: How do you know when it’s a joke and when it’s real?
KNUT: Because he is…that’s the way he is. He doesn’t send ironic text messages. But Siri (Knut’s girlfriend) could have done so, or Markus…and even though it has smileys and stuff like that, I can tell that it’s not a joke.
LIN: And André (the classmate), could he write like that, like Erik, or do you two have a totally different mode?
KNUT: André perhaps writes more like…he can write “I am fond of you” and stuff like that, and “hugs” and…being serious about it. Or he can be more like, “you’re a cool buddy”, a bit more like that, or it could be “now I’m in the john taking a dump”
So in a way it’s everything. (Interview with Knut, 2004)

As with Knut’s comments above, I suggest that the key issue is not about being in a ‘safe’ heterosexual context. Instead I argue that young males seem to, as Benwell (2003: 8) notes, ‘embrace the notion of gender inconsistency and evasiveness with less anxiety about its possible “effects”. So boys can also write cute texts?

In the final section, I seek to understand the maintenance and reproduction of gender polarised perceptions as well as examining the key effects of counter masculine narratives and practices.

The Soft Boiled Dick Masculinity [19]

As there seems to be a clear discrepancy between the informants’ perceptions of masculinity and the way they actually practise/perform how to be a young man, I argue that noticeable alternative practices with/in socially accepted gender configurations are emerging. When listening to what the informants associated with masculinity, it seems as though these young people lack positive, affirming and beneficial words when portraying a young male. As pointed out earlier, the young people seem to have certain perceptions of how to act in order to be (or to be perceived) a recognisable and acceptable male. Nevertheless, as seen in the love-project text messages, there are little if no differences in the way they ‘do’ gender. Hence, I will argue that although the discourse of gender as the two-sex model is well established ‘within’ the young peoples’ consciousnesses, gender may appear in practice in far more inconsistent, ambivalent and ambiguous ways.

When further listening to Knut’s outline of masculinity, the ‘Connellian’ configuration of gender practice is characterised in a considerably ambivalent way:

KNUT: Well, a lot of people associate a leader, one who is in charge, one who speaks out in public…more or less, more physical matters, one who plays soccer, goes to the gym- lifts weights, with being a man and with what it is to be masculine. And if a woman or a girl takes on the role of being the most noisiest one in the classroom in combination with playing soccer during recess or uses snus [20] , then you sort of…because I think there are certain premises that are needed to be…or to become a man…First of all you must sort of…well you don’t have to look like a man, but it helps a bit if you do look like a man. If you have beard…but there are two different levels, either you look like a man or you behave like a man. Or you can do both. So if you behave like a man…I’m thinking that you are in a way sort of patriarchal…you sort of want to be in charge….But I mean, it is a very constructed situation, or at least…I mean, it sounds a bit old-fashioned, but in a way there is a big change in relation to what is masculine and what is feminine. At least, it is pretty individual…it is much more like you’re cool because of what you mean and not because you are a man. … However, my status as a man drops each time I go and hug André [male class-mate].
LIN: Are you sure about that?
KNUT: Well, at the same time I feel that it is reinforced, because I feel confident… …it’s twofold because I really want to give him a big hug…and maybe I want it even more as I know …that there are lots of people who think it’s really silly that I give André a hug. And maybe because of that it’s a relief to know that I can do just that, give him a hug. (Interview with Knut, 2004)

According to Lindsay Fitzclarence’s and Christopher Hickey’s (2001) study of masculinity in a sports-context, young males’ status in culturally dominant games such as football/ soccer is to a large extent seen as a test of masculinity. Hence, handling physical pressure is not only a test of character, but also serves to give the boy approval and acceptance. The link between physical activity and ‘being a man’ is pointed out in Knut’s account above. With his example of the noisy, soccer-playing girl with ‘snus’ under her lip, he not only exemplifies a subversive femininity, but also sheds light on the strong hegemonic gender discourses.

In the social and cultural structures that the young Norwegians in my study are a part of, the heteronormative culture is the “governing” culture. This is expressed by various rules and customs as well as social rituals built around the two-sex model. The heteronormative regulation which makes heterosexuality not only expected and dominant, but also perceived as normal and right, is described by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (2002) as signifying:

…the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged. … It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations – often unconscious, immanent to practice or institutions. (Berlant and Warner, 2002: 309)

As emphasised here, these regulative practices are often “invisible” and yet maintained by the immanent mechanisms of “correct” cultural knowledge – such as André’s portrayal of the emotional limited masculine, Maja and Jorun’s connotations of the ‘gay’ text message, or Knut’s example of the dominant, soccer-playing male. With the continuous repeating and citing of culturally acceptable and recognisable performances as male or female, the philosopher Judith Butler argues that an illusion of gender as something substantial becomes fixed and “naturalised” (1990, 1993). In principle, she further claims, men and women may perform femininity and masculinity regardless of their physical sex as one does not have gender but one does gender (1990, 1993).

The ‘Butlerian’ “doing-gender” perspective is gradually outlined by Knut, as he concludes ‘that you are cool because of what you mean, and not because you are a man’. Nevertheless, the ambivalence and contradictions between the hegemonic discourses and the counter-traditional masculinity performance becomes apparent in Knut’s story of hugging his male classmate. This is noteworthy because, although their practice faces social sanctioning, Knut and his friend seem unconcerned about the possible effects of these practices. I suggest that the active production of these types of subversive masculine narratives contributes to providing young males with more socially responsible and alternative versions of affirmative masculinities.

Concluding Comments

Although the ‘F.T.M.A.K.E.S.I.O.T’ (‘The Association of Opposing Women’s Endless Gossip on Public Telephones’) was organised more than seventy-five years ago, the maintenance and idealisation of a conservative picture of femininity and masculinity continues to be reproduced. By continuously demonstrating a heterosexual masculine ideal – as referred to in various studies in this article, accompanied by the young informants’ perceptions, one, as Mia Consalvo (2003: 30) emphasises, simultaneously denies other forms of gender and sexual performance and maintains the dominant version of masculinity (Consalvo 2003: 30). In this article, a more multifaceted image has been found.

By looking at young informants’ text messages in sexual romantic negotiations, I have found that the text messages have all seemed to be very long, emotional and detailed regardless of the sender’s physical gender. With regard to the young males in this study, this is seen as quite inconsistent and ambiguous in relation to traditional masculine performances. One explanation of this discrepancy could be to understand text messages in love-projects as a cultural product or discourse that disrupts traditional gender -and sexuality-differentiated displays and practices. However, due to the recurrent contradictions in this analysis, I agree with Kehily’s (1999) suggestion that a gender and sexuality-ideal may exist parallel to young people’s display of non-traditional gender -and sexuality practices. Hence, love projects in text messages seem to offer a site where young men may simultaneously disrupt and fracture traditional gender and sexuality-performances, while also recomposing and maintaining the bedrock norms.

Author’s Biography

Lin Prøitz is a PhD-Student at The Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. The key subject in her study is gender and sexuality performance in text and multimedia messages.

Notes

[1] The citation describes how the launch of the telephone at the world-exhibition in Philidelphia 1876 was announced, by professor T. Sterry, the head of the jury, in a letter to the invention’s father, A.G. Bell (in Due, 2003 [Kingsbury, 1915: 32])
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[2] This indicates that the new, correct telephone etiquette was geared toward men as it apparently didn’t “take” for women.
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[3] The term ’sexual romantic negotiation’ suggests performances (here: text messages) where flirtation/ affection/ romantic/ erotic or sexual intimacy or desire are acted out or negotiated (Prøitz, 2003). Moreover, I find the term ‘love-project’ valuable as it emphasises the constructed aspects of sexual romantic negotiations. Hence my usage of the term is built upon Heidi Eng’s (2003) work, indicating an understanding of sex, gender and sexuality as acts, expressions, communication or language. The term is also fruitful as it ties this article’s questions and theoretical perspectives in a productive way.
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[4] The network-map was designed as a target where the interviewee checked out the frequency of her/his text message-partners. The closer to the centre, the more frequent were the communications. The interviewee was also asked to draw a sketch of an individual customised mobile telephone, totally uninhibited by technological limitations.
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[5] This is possible by choosing the ‘reply to multiple’ soft-ware-option that is now integrated in today’s mobile telephones. In the rest of the article, I will refer to this method by the term ‘the forward-method’.
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[6] The number of informants who agreed to join the forward-method was fewer in the second round. I suggest the drop of participants occurred due to the fall of newsworthiness in being a part of the study. Growing older may also generate a need to protect one’s privacy in a different way.
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[7] Bluetooth is a radio-wave-technology. This technology is ‘rich’ and fast as the sender and the receiver do not need to be visible to each other, which is required in an infrared transfer.
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[8] Döring, Hellwig and Klimsa, 2004, Hareide 2002, Johnsen 2000, Lee and Sohn, 2004, Ling 1998, 1999, 2002, 2004, Nordahl 2000, Prøitz 2003, 2005, Rheingold 2003, af Segerstad, 2005, Skog 2000, 2002
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[9] One suggestion is that this occurs particularly in heterosexual love-projects. Nevertheless, I would argue that cultural and social hegemonic norms are a dominant part of peoples’ lives, regardless of their sexual orientation.
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[10] The most frequent custom is to store each other’s names in the mobile phone address book. Hence, each time one of your friends in your address book sends you a text message, you would be able to see who it is – which also reveals the gender. However, here I am more interested in whether they manage to distinguish their text messages by looking at the structure and composition of the text.
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[11] Krone is the Norwegian currency. 1USD≈ 6,3 NOK (February 2005).
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[12] As yet there is only a very small amount of research done on mobile phone/gender and sexuality. I find it necessary and vital to link my study up with other related media analysis.
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[13] As male signatures are used in Heidi’s and Randi’s previous and later text message conversations, I choose to analyse the text messages according to a male performance. In spite of this, Heidi’s and Randi’s text message partners could be a physical female and not a physical male.
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[14] As I don’t find any text message-communication with Håvard, I assume that their relationship is over.
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[15] In Norway, russefeiring is a term used when graduating students celebrate the end of high school. Although this is not a compulsory practice, most of the graduating students choose to do so. The russefeiring lasts for 14 days in May, ending on the Norwegian national day, May 17th. The russ (i.e. the students participating in the celebration) are easy to distinguish as they are often gathered in large groups, wearing russe-suits and hats – in which the colours on the suit mark their studies. Red and blue russ are the most common. The knots and items one has in the string in the russe-hat illustrates the russe-dare you have passed. The russ are often criticised for their wild ongoing parties, running around raving drunk.
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[16] To ‘catch some knots’ – or ‘collect’ knots – is a part of a ritual during the russefeiring in Norway. Each knot symbolises a dare you have accomplished.
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[17] However, though the text message-frequency varied, there were clear similarities in the dramaturgic curve: beginning with a brief, yet straight forward hinting at the last meeting, before initiating a follow-up (a, b, c and h, i), followed by two long text messages in which seem to be the conversations climax (d, e and k, l), before gradually closing by shorter affirming text messages (f, g and m, n, o). Interestingly, the dramatic curve of the conversations is quite similar to the structure of the classical dramatic structure of movies and theatre-plays. I suggest this contributes to underline the excitement of the sexual romantic negotiations, however far more detailed work is needed.
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[18] The abriviation ‘DIY’ means ‘do it yourself’ and is often used in advice manuals. Here I have borrowed the ‘term’ from David Tjeder’s article about the American ideal of the self-made man in a Swedish context from 1850-1900. (Tjeder, 2002: 74)
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[19] The term ’the soft-boiled-dick’ masculinity connotes, according to Judith Kegan Gardiner (F. Pfeil’s term outlined in Gardiner, 2000:, 259, [1995:105]) both sensitivity and the ultimate resort to violence in contemporary movies, rock music, detective fiction.
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[20] Snus is a tobacco that you put under your upper lip and is frequently used instead of or in addition to smoking cigarettes in Norway and Sweeden. Snus is legal and can be bought in most grocery stores in the two countries. Until the Norwegian ’no-smoking inside public areas’-restriction was implemented in 2004, snus was in general associated with masculinity. Hence, as Knut points out, being a female and using snus is, among many, seen as ”un-feminine”.
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Introduction

Place is a much maligned notion within contemporary critical discourse. It is criticised for its lack of definitional precision; it is linked to strategies of exclusion; it is seen as marginal to modernist considerations of time and space; and with the emergence of cyberspace and virtual community, it is said to be left behind or reduced to the status of metaphor. Yet, place is a resilient notion and persists in the face of all these continuing challenges.

But what relevance, if any, does place have in the context of networked mobility? Does mobility render notions of place obsolete? Or does place persist? And if the latter, what happens to the common conception of place as a ‘proper, stable, and distinct location’ (Morse, 1999: 195) as a result of mobile practices?

This paper responds directly to these questions. It examines the notion of place in relation to networked mobility and mobile phone use, and the altered understandings of place that occur through these technologies and practices. Through this examination, two key arguments are developed. First, it is argued that place does indeed persist in and through networked mobility. A useful way of understanding this persistence is through the ‘domestication’ approach to understanding the development and uses of new technologies – as proposed by Silverstone and Haddon (1996) and extended by Morley (2003). Secondly, it is argued that networked mobility actually forces a renegotiation of place, and leads to significantly altered understandings of place and place-making. This is theorised as a shift from a traditional understanding of place as stable and fixed (stabilitas loci), to a reconceptualisation of place as formed in and through mobility (mobilitas loci). The paper concludes by sketching some of the potential, and possible wider implications, that this renewed understanding of place might have for future studies of networked mobility.

To begin this examination, what follows is a brief outline of some of the aforementioned definitional and other challenges facing the notion of place. This contextual material serves a twofold purpose. By sketching some of the widely varying understandings of place, the sense in which this term is understood in this paper will become clearer. Furthermore, understanding something of the history of place as a contested but resilient notion forms an important backdrop to, or point of departure for, examining the place of place in mobility debates.

Defining Place

Part of the difficulty in dealing with the notion of place has and continues to be its perceived lack of definitional clarity and precision. Place is often set in positive opposition to space, much as Ferdinand Tönnies (1963: 1957) positively opposes “community” (gemeinschaft) to “society” (gesellschaft). For example, Yi-Fu Tuan writes: ‘”Space” is more abstract than “place”. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (1977: 6). Beyond this already problematic demarcation little else about place is clear. Even in as compendious a study as Edward Casey’s (1993) Getting Back into Place, place is everywhere present but nowhere defined. Basic dictionary definitions do little to resolve general understanding of the term.[1] The problem with attempts at definition is that ‘place is not just the “where” of something; it is the location plus everything that occupies that location seen as an integrated and meaningful phenomenon’ (Relph, 1986; 1976: 3; see also Lukermann, 1964: 167-172). Thus, it is argued that ‘confusion about the meaning of the notion of place appears to result because it is not just a formal concept awaiting precise definition, but is also a naïve and variable expression of geographical experience’ (Relph, 1986; 1976: 4). Even so, despite its imprecision, this remains the most common and general understanding of the term. It is also how place is commonly understood for the specific discussions of networked mobility.

An even more expansive view is to suggest that difficulties of definition and experiential expression are in fact due to place being all-pervasive, structuring and shaping every facet of our lives and of our negotiation and experience of the lived world (Casey, 1993). In this respect, difficulties in grasping the notion of place are very much like the difficulties attending the category of the quotidian. As Maurice Blanchot says of the everyday, ‘whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes’ (1987: 14). Its pervasiveness renders it as platitude (13). But, as Blanchot adds, ‘this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived’ (13).

And so it is with place. The pervasiveness of place and its plurality of forms means that it allows no hold; but its ubiquity and diffuseness is also what makes place most important as it informs and shapes lived existence.[2] This is the precise conception of place that is developed here. Place is understood here as all-pervasive in the way that it informs and shapes everyday lived existence. In adopting this understanding of place in this examination of networked mobility, I take up the call to ‘explore place as a phenomenon of the geography of the lived-world of our everyday experiences’ (Relph, 1986; 1976: 3). Thus, in effect, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of place in relation to mobility. It should be stressed, however, that to acknowledge the persistence and ongoing relevance of place in relation to networked mobility is by no means to make an argument for geographical determinism;[3] nor is it an argument for place or geography over the virtual. Rather, the argument developed here in relation to mobility is for a renewed understanding of place, in which place is transformed by global telecommunications technologies and especially by technologies and practices of networked mobility.

In addition to the above, it is also important to recognise that while place is an imprecise term that can be described as a ‘naïve and variable expression of geographical experience’ (Relph, 1986; 1976: 4), understandings and applications of place are often developed in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Grasping something of this complexity and contradiction is crucial, as it forms an important context or background to the later foreground focus on networked mobility and place.

Contextualising Place

Place has long been considered a problematical notion insofar as it is associated with strategies of exclusion and domination. For example, it has been noted that ‘the desire for some simple return to authentic local roots in “place” has been shown to be enmeshed in practices of cultural domination’ (Dovey, 2002: 45).[4] These are the precise sentiments of Jean-Luc Nancy. In his critique of community, for example, Nancy argues against an understanding of community as communion because this understanding suggests ‘fusion into a body’ – a monolithic form or identity – which denies difference and otherness and promotes exclusion (Nancy, 1991: xxxviii and passim).[5] He writes:

The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader…) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. […] (Nothing indicates more clearly what the logic of this being of togetherness can imply than the role of Gemeinschaft, of community, in Nazi ideology.) (1991: xxxix)

As is clear from this passage, place is central to his critique of community, and leaving it behind is considered critical if community is to be reconceived in non-restrictive terms. As one commentator notes:

What Nancy […] deftly disconnects, although he never says so explicitly, is the assumed immanence of communal identities to demarcated geographical spaces in the form of towns, lands or nations. In its most vulgar formation, this relation appears of course as the nationalist ideology of blood and soil. (Van Den Abbeele, 1997: 15)

Philosophical deliberations on community are by no means the only arena where place is “disconnected”. There is, for instance, what Casey terms the ‘modernist myth that place can be discounted and set aside for the sake of space or time’ (Casey, 1993: 10).[6]

For the most part, however, place manifests itself and is understood in complex and often contradictory ways, as is illustrated in Manuel Castells’ writing on globalisation. To cite one example, on the one hand, Castells writes:

Localities become disembodied from their cultural, historical, geographic meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks, or into image collages, inducing a space of flows that substitutes for the space of places. (Castells, 1996: 375)[7]

On the other hand, at a later point Castells makes the following qualification to his overall argument regarding “networked society”:

The space of flows does not permeate down to the whole realm of human experience in the network society. […] The overwhelming majority of people, in advanced and traditional societies alike, live in places, and so they perceive their space as place-based. A place is a locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity. (423)

Such contradiction and ambiguity is by no means isolated, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that the term “globalisation” itself has become something of a conduit or pivot for the (re)consideration of global/local tensions (see Crane, Kawashima, and Kawasaki, 2002; Held and McGrew, 2002; Jameson and Miyoshi, 1998; Scholte, 2000; Waters, 1995). These debates argue, among other things, that ‘the new industrial system is neither global nor local but “a new articulation of global and local dynamics”‘ (Amin and Robins cited in Castells, 1996: 392).

It is in this context that “glocalisation” has emerged as an important (albeit equally contested) notion for capturing global-local tensions. For at least one critic, this notion provides:

[A] conceptually viable and empirically defensible theoretical framework [… which] recognizes and conceptualizes the technological developments, linguistic creolization, cultural hybridization, social decentralization, and political fragmentation that characterize contemporary international relations. (Kraidy, 2001: 39)

Others are less convinced. For example, Roland Robertson suggests that replacing globalisation with glocalisation is unnecessary. He maintains that the original notion is sufficiently nuanced.

Globalization – in the broadest sense, the compression of the world – has involved and increasingly involves the creation and the incorporation of locality, processes which themselves largely shape, in turn, the compression of the world as a whole. (Robertson, 1995: 40)

Terminological differences aside, both critics agree that to engage with globalisation and the “space of flows” inevitably requires an ongoing concern for singularities and particularities of place and locality. What this means in simple terms is that place, while in many respects a troublesome and contested term, is nonetheless indispensable. As Edward Casey notes, we require places in which to exist: ‘we are immersed in [place] and could not do without it’ (1997: ix).[8]

The preceding discussion provides a valuable context for situating discussions of place and mobile technologies. This is for two reasons.

First, this is because questions of mobility and local place are situated firmly within globalisation debates and address shared concerns. As Larissa Hjorth writes, ‘The dynamic interaction between globalisation and practices of locality is nowhere more apparent than in debates surrounding mobile telephony and its dissemination and appropriation at the level of the local’ (2005: 208).

Secondly, this context provides a good example of how place, while imprecise in definition, is often decidedly more complex in understanding and application. This is also the case with networked mobility. Place is an important notion in studies of networked mobility, albeit one which is employed in rather general terms as a vague expression of geographical experience. Although, how place is understood through and shaped by networked mobility can be seen to be both complex and at times contradictory. The following discussion of place and networked mobility teases out something of this complexity and contradiction.

Networked Mobility and Place

It could be argued that mobility in general and networked mobility in particular – bearing in mind that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate the two – both appear, at one level, to contribute to a dislocation of place, or what Morley refers to as the “death” of geography (2003: 439). Mobility in every form unsettles what is considered to be fundamental to conventional understandings of place: its very stability. As the Norwegian architectural critic Christian Norberg-Schulz writes, ‘human identity presupposes the identity of place, and that stabilitas loci therefore is a basic human need’ (1980: 180). Arguably, stabilitas loci or the stability of place is even more directly unsettled by networked mobility: ‘The mobile phone is often understood (and promoted) as a device for connecting us to those who are far away, thus overcoming distance – and perhaps geography itself’ (Morley, 2003: 452). In other words, mobile phones are said to operate ‘independent of place’ (Wellman, 2001: 19). And where they are not exactly independent of place they appear immune to place, serving to insulate their ‘users from the geographical place that they are actually in’ by creating, as Morley puts it, a kind of ‘psychic cocoon’ (451) around each user, much like a Walkman or an iPod does.[9] In light of these developments, it has been argued,

[That] the importance of place as a communication site will diminish even more, and the person – not the place, household or group – will become even more of an autonomous communication node. (Wellman, 2001: 19)

The result, it is claimed, is ‘the rise of networked individualism’ (29): the shift from ‘place-to-place’ communication to ‘person-to-person’ communication; or, from ‘inter-household networks to interpersonal networks’ (29-30).

But networked mobility enjoys a far more ambiguous relationship with place than is perhaps suggested by the above formulation. This is for several reasons. To begin with, ‘despite all the talk of “postmodern nomadology” […] most people’s actual experience of geographical mobility’ is still very limited (Morley, 2003: 437). That is to say, ‘global cultural forms still have to be made sense of within the context of what, for many people, are still very local forms of life’ (437). In other words, the global is filtered through the local and, increasingly, through local mobility.[10]

For example, one curiosity about mobile phone use is the “domesticity” that characterises much of the conversation that takes place via these devices. As has been remarked, ‘What the mobile phone does is to fill the space of the public sphere with the chatter of the hearth, allowing us to take our homes with us, just as a tortoise stays in its shell wherever it travels (Morley, 2003: 452-453).[11] This is a point that will be returned to later.

There are also counter-intuitive uses of the mobile phone, such as when this technology does not so much transcend distance as ‘establish parallel communications networks in the same space’ (Morley, 2003: 451). For example, studies of mobile phone use regularly report that, while it is not always considered acceptable practice, these devices are commonly used in same space settings, such as a school classroom (Ito, 2003b, 2003c; Yoon, 2003).[12]

Also contrary to the claim that networked mobility overcomes geography, is the prevalence of the question, ‘Where are you?’, by which many mobile phone conversations begin (Morley, 2003: 440).

It is in this sense that mobile telephony responds to Georges Perec’s lament that ‘we always need to know what time it is [...] but we never ask ourselves where we are’ (1999; 1997: 83). Perec’s point, of course, is that even when we provide an answer – ‘we are at home, at our office, in the Métro, in the street’ (1999; 1997: 83) – we only really ‘think we know’, and the answer betrays how very little we in fact do know about place, because the “where” of “somewhere” is tied up with the seemingly inscrutable workings of the everyday. However, the central argument of this paper is that networked mobility prompts renewed consideration of the “where” of everyday places by forcing us to reflect on our apprehension and comprehension of them in transit. More than this, networked mobility leads to transformed understandings of place.

These transformations are evident in recent empirical studies of mobile phone use, which provide a clear indication of how place is experienced through and transformed by networked mobility.

In a study of Norwegian mobile phone use, for example, Ling and Haddon (2001) point to the key role the mobile phone plays in the “micro-coordination” of everyday activities and, in particular, of basic daily travel arrangements. ‘The development of mobile telephony,’ they write, ‘”softens time” in that one does not necessarily need to agree upon an absolute point in time but rather can, to some degree negotiate, or micro-coordinate, over where and when to meet’ (2001: 2).

The “softening of time” through “micro-coordination” is also strongly evident in studies of Japanese youth and mobile phone use (Ito, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c). These studies reveal that networked mobility has transformed the way that meetings are arranged in urban space. ‘In the past, landmarks and times were the points that coordinated action and convergence in urban space. People would decide on a particular place and time to meet, and converge at that time and place’ (Ito, 2003c: 9). Now, however, it is more likely that an initial and rather loose arrangement is agreed upon, and ‘as the meeting time nears, contact via messaging and voice becomes more concentrated, eventually culminating in face-to-face contact’ (Ito, 2003c: 9). It is also common for mobile communication to continue even after physical co-presence has been achieved in the same urban space (Ito, 2003a). This elaborate series of micro-coordinations reveals a complex set of interactions and negotiations between place, physical co-presence and “virtual” presence. One result, it is suggested, is that ‘distant others are always socially co-present, and place – where you locate yourself – has become a hybrid relation between physical and wirelessly co-present context’ (Ito, 2003a). This would appear to complicate the idea of a shift from place-to-place and person-to-person communication.

Complementing these findings is Yoon’s (2003) study of mobile phone use by South Korean youth. This study reveals other counter-intuitive uses of mobile technology that serve to further reinforce rather than diminish the importance of place. This is revealed through the practice of “immobiling”. Yoon develops this term to describe certain strategies by which young mobile phones users “immobilize” their mobile phones in response to perceived sensitivities between peers concerning place, time, etiquette, and content (Yoon, 2003: 334ff). Turning off the phone also constitutes an important way of diminishing parental control by preventing parents from making contact via text or voice message. In both cases, “immobiling” serves as a key means by which to develop ‘local sociality’ (329) and, in turn, ‘retraditionalize the global’ (340).

What is interesting about these studies and their findings is that they appear to validate Boden and Molotch’s (1994) claim that we are influenced by an ongoing ‘compulsion of proximity’, and that technologies of distance do nothing to obviate the need for regular co-presence through face-to-face encounter. In fact, it has also been suggested that ‘those who make the most phone calls are also those who interact with the largest number of people face to face’ (Lévy, 1998: 32).

What also emerges from these studies is that place – especially local place – is central to the practice and understanding of networked mobility. But how place is experienced through networked mobility is quite unique. It is a heavily mediated engagement, where place is experienced via a complex filtering or imbrication of the actual with the virtual. This is a key point, and will be expanded later at length.

Mobile Privatization and the Domestication of Technology

To further appreciate the continuing importance of place to networked mobility, it is also valuable to consider ‘how “mobile” traditions incorporate new technologies as they develop’ (Morley, 2003: 443). The “domestication” model, as developed by Roger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon (1996) and extended by David Morley (2003), offers a useful frame for understanding this process.

Silverstone and Haddon develop the “domestication” approach as a way of making sense of the ‘intimate relations’ that characterise the ‘production and consumption of a new media and information technology’ (1996: 54). Their interest in the domestic emerges from a belief that it is difficult to think of domesticity without making reference to the increasing presence of media and information-communication technologies in the domestic home. But, they add, the reverse is also true: ‘No account of technological innovation can ignore the particularity of that domesticity and the processes by which it is sustained’ (61). Thus, as Silverstone and Haddon understand it, domestication takes on a double sense. It refers to the home as a techno-social site for the consumption of new technologies, as well as constituting a particular method or model for making sense of the processes by which these new technologies are consumed and “domesticated” (or naturalised) within and beyond this site. According to the second of these two understandings of this notion, they write:

Domestication is a more or less continuous process in which technologies and services are consumed […] and, through the process of consumption, are given meaning and significance. (67)

This functions according to a double process, in which the domestication of new technologies involves a ‘taming of the wild and a cultivation of the tame’. New technologies (such as computers, DVD players, and mobile phones) are considered exciting but also potentially threatening and in need of being ‘brought […] under control by and on behalf of domestic users’ (60). Yet, as soon as they are “domesticated” through ownership and appropriation into the culture, flows and routine of family, household and everyday life, these technologies are cultivated. That is to say, as they become familiar, or as they are placed alongside or replace existing technologies, the uses of these technologies change and are redefined (60 & 68).[13]

This understanding of technological domestication owes a debt to the earlier work of Raymond Williams, and especially his idea of “mobile privatisation” (1992; 1974: 20). Williams developed this concept as a way of encapsulating a complex series of technological developments, which he saw as characterised by ‘two apparently paradoxical yet deeply connected tendencies of modern urban industrial living: on the one hand mobility, on the other hand the more apparently self-sufficient family home’ (20).

In their reworking of his concept, Silverstone and Haddon focus on the second of the two tendencies that Williams describes, giving detailed consideration to the complex processes by which technological developments are integrated into and “domesticated” or “naturalised” within the domestic environment.

Nevertheless, the strength of the domestication model lies in its wider application. The authors’ investigation of new technologies and how they are incorporated into the patterns of everyday life is important in that it extends the notion of domestication beyond the confines of the traditional domestic home. This has two benefits.

First, it intersects with, or allows parallels to be drawn between, wider (non-technologically mediated) considerations of mobility and the ongoing importance of the domestic. For example, in commenting on the defamiliarising effects of telecommunications technologies and the forces of globalisation, Derrida observes that they lead to a growing and renewed desire for the “home” – in both its domestic sense and in a more threatening national sense:

The global and the dominant effect of television, the telephone, the fax machine, satellites, the accelerated circulation of images, discourse, etc., is that the here-and-now becomes uncertain, without guarantee: anchoredness, rootedness, the at-home [le chez-soi] are radically contested. Dislodged. This is nothing new. It has always been this way. The at-home has always been tormented by the other, the guest, by the threat of expropriation. It is constituted only in this threat. But today, we are witnessing such a radical expropriation, deterritorialization, delocalization, dissociation of the political and the local, of the national, of the nation-state and the local, that the response, or rather the reaction, becomes: “I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own, close to my friends and family.” […] The more powerful and violent the technological expropriation, the delocalization, the more powerful, naturally, the recourse to the at-home, the return toward home. (Derrida, 2002: 79-80)

This formulation of the “at-home” and the “return toward home”, as well as more general understandings of the “home” and the “domestic”, are both significant in understanding the complexities of the interactions between networked mobility and place. The importance of addressing in tandem both macro and micro forms of mobility and the domestic in future studies of networked mobility is a point that will be touched on at the end of this paper.

The second benefit of a more expansive understanding of the processes of technological innovation and consumption is that domestication becomes an elastic concept with wide application for understanding various forms of technological innovation and use. This includes how we might understand networked mobility and its uses.

For instance, in advancing how new technologies are domesticated, Silverstone and Haddon argue that the functions of certain technologies may, when incorporated in the home or household, be ‘somewhat different from those intended by designers or advertisers’ (1996: 64). They may also change over time (64). They also note that households are ‘conventionally and habitually quite adept at a kind of seamless shifting from one technological input and resource to another as well as being adept at their simultaneous use’ (66). Both observations are supported by empirical research into mobile phone use. Unintended use can be observed in the practices of “immobiling” observed by Yoon (2003). Shifting between and simultaneous use of various technological resources is evident in the widespread practice of incorporating both fixed or landline and mobile phone connections in the routines of everyday life (Ling and Haddon, 2001; Ito, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Yoon, 2003).

It is this wider context of the practice of everyday life that also has led to the “expansion” of the domestic home as a site. Silverstone and Haddon make this point in passing near the end of their study. They observe,

Household boundaries are extended […] by the increasing mobilization and personalization of communication and information technologies, as walkmen and mobile phones offer a new kind of nomadic access and media participation, constant availability and increasing dispersal of information consumption. (69-70)

This observation, in effect, forms the point of departure for David Morley’s (2003) examination of the uses and impacts of networked mobility. Drawing on Silverstone and Haddon’s model of domestication, Morley takes up an issue that is remarked on, but is otherwise left undeveloped by Silverstone and Haddon. This is a contradictory dynamic or tension between processes of technological domestication which occur within the family home, and other practices of everyday life by which mobile phone use “transports” or “dislocates” domesticity.

The key contribution of Morley’s work is that it takes Silverstone and Haddon’s “domestication” model and applies it to networked mobility and mobile phone use, making explicit the connection that Williams drew between domestication and mobility. However, in developing this link, Morley inverts Williams’ earlier formulation. Raymond Williams posits the idea of “mobile privatization” – an idea which arguably reaches its apotheosis with the relatively recent advent of home theatres and the digitalised “smart house”. Morley, on the other hand, inverts this formulation by considering contemporary mobile phone use as a form of “privatized mobility” (Morley, 2003: 437 ff). As such, networked mobility further extends household boundaries by ‘dislocat[ing] the idea of home, enabling its user, in the words of the Orange advertising campaign in the UK, to ‘”take your network with you, wherever you go”‘ (in Morley, 2003: 451). In so doing, networked mobility reinforces the idea of home (and with it, the appeal to what Derrida terms the “at-home”). These ties to the domestic are further reinforced by the provision included within many mobile network billing plans for the user to have reduced rates (or free calls) between a “home” landline and a mobile phone.

Mobile Home: the Dislocation of Domesticity

Complementing the domestication approach to “historicising” the ongoing relevance of place and home to networked mobility is the equally illuminating context of 1960s “experimental architecture”. For example, in Peter Cook’s study, Experimental Architecture (1970), we find the same ingredients examined by Silverstone and Haddon and also by Morley: domesticity, technology, mobility and place.

In Cook’s survey, a key point of departure is, as he describes it, the ‘turn to eclecticism’ in the architecture of the 1960s:

The word [eclecticism] had derogatory implications only a decade ago (architecture was to be pure and discriminating), but it now implies a positive openness and absorption of anything that might be useful to a project. (1970: 14)

This “bricoleur” approach to design is most strongly felt in the rapid uptake at this time of new buildings materials (due to advances in materials manufacturing technologies) and engagement with and “absorption” of telecommunications and media technologies (due in large part to the influence of the writings of Marshall McLuhan). The ‘opportunity of the material’ (Cook, 1970: 55ff) and the turn ‘towards technology as a great force for a new architecture’ (30) dovetail in two interconnected concerns that are central to Cook’s study: the first is the potential of telecommunications technologies to transform the domestic house; the second is an abiding interest in mobility (and neo-nomadism).

To address the first of these interconnected concerns, a key reason for such a strong renewal of interest in the function and operation of the house in 1960s experimental architecture, beyond developments in materials mass production, is found in Cook’s realisation (after McLuhan) that ‘communication is becoming as powerful as tactile or representational environment’ (1970: 125). And in a statement that arguably foretells the soon-to-be-reality of computer-mediated networked communications, Cook writes, ‘we shall reach a point quite soon where real time and imagined dimension can be made to interact’ (126).

Commensurate with this realisation is an acknowledgment of the effect of communication on the fabric of the traditional family unit (128). As the English architect Cedric Price writes, ‘the house is no longer acceptable as a pre-set ordering mechanism for family life’ (1984: 48). Price’s concern is in questioning the taken-for-granted function of the house in light of the aforementioned developments in mass media technologies. The domestic house becomes in Price’s terms ‘a 24-hour economic living toy’ (48) – a kind of miniature domestic “fun palace”. Price’s conception of a technologised and functionally open house of experimentation did find some form of architectural expression some time later in the House of the Century (1973) project by the Ant Farm collective of U.S. architects and media artists. This humorous experiment in future living – described as a ‘ferro-cement domicile with futuro-phallic features’ (Seid, 2004; 25) – was constructed beside Mojo Lake, Angleton, Texas, and featured an array of electronics devices and equipment for the media-savvy occupant. Price’s domestic vision of the house as a “24-hour-economic living toy” and Ant Farm’s attempt to realise such a vision both constitute early instances of the “electronic house” and of what Scott McQuire (2003: 103) describes as the ‘repositioning of the home as an interactive media centre’ – a key development in the continuing “domestication of technology”.

The second of the two interconnected realisations in Cook’s study concerns the kinds of techno-social transformations described earlier in this paper. That is, global networked telecommunications technologies, coupled with burgeoning global travel and interconnected financial markets, not only increase the sense of an increasingly shrinking planet (McLuhan’s “global village”), but also animate a shift from the traditional conception of a stabilitas loci towards a culture of mobility (mobilitas loci) (see Urry, 2000, 2002). Or as Cook puts it: ‘the future environment will be where you (yourself) may find it’ (1970: 131). Implicit in Cook’s understanding and in much of the experimental work gathered in his survey, with its emphasis on technology and mobility, is the belief that “place” is antithetical to technology, and vice versa. Yet, as Cook readily admits, what is being transported in these experiments with technologies of mass fabrication and mobility is, precisely, the house:

There have been projects for the all-metal house, the all-plastic house, the all-paper house, the all-wooden house, the all-pneumatic house, the all-glass house, the house as a total dome, the house as a total box, the house as a total capsule. These have a singularity of motive which takes them back to the traditional process in the development of architecture. (Cook, 1970: 55 & 57)

Thus, what was motivated – albeit implicitly – by a desire to dislocate place from architecture and technology results, one might say, in the dislocation of architecture in place/s. As such, I would argue, this experimental architecture represents an important – if somewhat literal – precursory stage to the more recent transformations which Silverstone and Haddon describe as the “extension” of household boundaries through ‘increasing mobilization and personalization of communication and information technologies’, such as mobile phones (1996: 69), and which Morley theorises as the ‘dislocation of domesticity’ (2003).

The further import of these experimental investigations into mobile structures lies in the fact that they can also be seen as part-and-parcel of a ‘basic dialogue between movement, structure, and the possible transfer of events and their location within the structure’ (Cook, 1970: 101). ‘The sift of these three conservations,’ Cook writes, ‘can be passed across most experimental projects’ (101). Simply put, this interest in mobility is not just for mobility’s sake. As Cook says of Archigram’s (1968) Ideas Circus project, but which might be taken as a more general summary of the motivations behind these architectural experiments in mobility, there is an underlying consideration of ‘questions of place, facility, equipment and the idiosyncrasies of the users’ running throughout most of these projects (1970: 122).

From Stabilitas Loci to Mobilitas Loci: Networked Mobility and the Renegotiation of Place

And so it is with networked mobility. These very issues – of place, facility, equipment, and the idiosyncrasies of use – are also at stake in networked mobility’s engagement with and renegotiation of place. This reiterates what is a key point: place persists and does not remain unchanged by these developments. That is to say, networked mobility in general and mobile phone use in particular, lead to altered or transformed understandings of place and place-making which warrant consideration here.

To illustrate this point, and to begin to tease out how understandings of place are transformed by networked mobility, it is valuable to return momentarily to Ant Farm. In addition to their many dalliances with portable inflatable structures (Maniaque, 2004), Ant Farm also shared a deep interest in media technologies and associated issues of media representation.[14] They explore this interest in a number of projects (including the aforementioned House of the Century), but especially in their Media Van (1971): an electronically equipped customised 1971 Chevrolet van in which the artists toured. As Ant Farm recorded at the time, the impetus for Media Van was to ‘realize our own brand of nomadism’: ‘The media van idea was one of total documentation, so that while trucking you have the capability to record via videotape, photographs, film, and mental notes what’s going on around you’ (Lord, Michels, Schreier, 2004: 100). In short, Media Van utilise networked telecommunications technologies (including TV, audio, etc.) to document as thoroughly as possible the shifting and fleeting ambiences of place as they were experienced through mobility. Such a deliberate artistic exercise in spatial and “placial” documentation has rapidly become largely routine practice for many users of networked telecommunications technologies, especially those with camera phones. Indeed, so commonplace has this process of documentation become that it has given rise to the phenomenon of “life-caching”: the use of digital cameras and picture phones and software such as Lifeblog to create digital diaries, scrapbooks and photo albums which serve as mnemonic devices for sifting through and recollecting daily experiences.[15]

The extent to which place is transformed by mobility can be further understood by considering Marc Augé’s account of “non-places”. According to Augé, the contemporary cultural landscape of globalisation is characterised by an overabundance of information and a growing tangle of interdependencies which leads to the creation of an ‘excess of space correlative with the shrinking of the planet’ (Augé, 1995). Augé coins the term “non-places” to describe this expanding excess. “Non-places” are those interstitial zones where we spend an ever-increasing proportion of our lives: in supermarkets, airports, hotels, cars, on motorways, and in front of ATMs, TVs and computers. For Augé, such “non-places” are the real measure of our time. The extent of which can be quantified, Augé writes,

By totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called “means of transport” (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself. (Augé, 1995: 79)

In short, ‘what is new in contemporary life are not these institutions of mobile privitization per se but the interpenetration of layer upon layer of built environment and representation, the formative and derivative, the imaginary and mundane’ (Morse, 1990: 210). Elsewhere this same process has been described as the overlaying of a “third nature” of information flows on the “second nature” of cities, harbours, industry, and so forth, creating an ‘information landscape which almost entirely covers the old territories’ (Wark, 1994: 120).

In response to this seemingly overwhelming “spatial excess”, Augé makes two modest yet instructive and interconnected suggestions.

The first is that such spatial relearning involves thinking about ‘space as frequentation of places rather than a place’ (85). As Augé argues, ‘It is no longer possible for a social analysis to dispense with individuals, nor for an analysis of individuals to ignore the spaces through which they are in transit’ (120).

The second is that we have to ‘relearn how to think about space’ (1995: 36). Implicit in the catalogue of “non-places” that Augé furnishes is the suggestion that this process of relearning requires an understanding of space as thoroughly technologised (or at least this understanding needs to be made explicit). Moreover, everyday engagement with these spaces, as the example of life caching illustrates, involves the ‘copresence of multiple worlds in different modes’: the screen and the geography over which individuals travel (Morse, 1990: 206). The ‘copresence of multiple worlds’, Morse argues, presents a paradox for mobile experiences of place. On the one hand, these multiple mediations are characterised by a kind of ‘detached involvement’ (203), a ‘dreamlike displacement or separation from [one's] surroundings’ (197). On the other hand, this multiple-mode of engagement holds promise. Morse writes, ‘Th[e] task of reintegrating a social world of separated, dislocated realms is accomplished by means of an internal dualism, of passage amid the segmentation of glass, screens, and thresholds’ (200).

Both sets of observations and considerations point to a significant shift in our understanding of place. To recast Norberg-Schulz’ formulation, it would seem a shift is being initiated from the notion of stabilitas loci or “stable place” to what I have been terming mobilitas loci: the difference between place experienced as stable (if not fixed), to multiple places experienced in and through mobility. This shift, I would suggest, fills out Morley’s understanding of the “dislocation of domesticity”.

To conceive of place in this way is to come almost full circle in our understanding of how place is experienced: from the “mobile gaze” of the nineteenth-century, via what Anne Friedberg terms the “virtual mobile gaze” of late-twentieth century postmodernism (1993), to what might be understood as a “re-mobilised (virtual) gaze” with the advent of mobile (particularly image-enabled) telephonic technologies.

Networked mobility does prompt a renegotiation of place, much like strolling (flânerie) and the “technologised” spaces of the grand arcades did in the nineteenth century. With networked mobility, “placial” renegotiation takes a number of forms: from individual (usually pedestrian) navigation of (largely localised) place/s, to broader perceptual considerations concerning the navigation of place via a re-mobilised, distracted (virtual) gaze, and the documentation of place through mobile phone cameras and the related practice of “life caching”. Thus, rather than “liberate” us from place, as Wellman would have us believe, these technologies arguably refocus the individual on the fluctuating and fleeting experiences of place/s and their impact on the fabric of everyday life.

Conclusion: Re. Territorialisation

Mobilitas loci – the renegotiation of place via networked mobility, and the interrogation of ‘questions of place, facility, equipment and the idiosyncrasies of the users’ that this renegotiation prompts – generates manifold questions concerning the apprehension and examination of place through networked mobility. For example, the increasingly mediated nature of our engagement with place – especially via mobile telephony – would seem to suggest the need for some kind of hybrid approach to visual perception (at very least) which bridges established understandings of landscape structure and perception, such as by Higuchi (1983), with more recent analyses drawn from VR, cinema studies, interface design, and other sources. Morse’s notion of the ‘copresence of multiple worlds in different modes’ experienced as an ‘ontology of everyday distraction’ is a productive step in this direction.[16] Indeed, what Morse’s work highlights is the very impossibility of maintaining an uncomplicated distinction between place in a strict or “pure” geographical sense and mediated experience (and construction) of it.

For this very reason it is valuable to recall Derrida’s engagement with the whole problematic of actuality and what he sees as its ‘two traits’: ‘artifactuality’ and ‘actuvirtuality’ (Derrida, 2002: 3ff). Actuality, Derrida writes, ‘is not given but actively produced, sifted, invested, performatively interpreted by numerous apparatuses which are factitious or artificial, hierarchizing and selective […]‘ (2002: 3). Derrida terms this ‘artifactuality’. The second trait of actuality, is captured in Derrida’s insistence ‘on a concept of virtuality (virtual image, virtual space, and so virtual event) that can doubtless no longer be opposed, in perfect philosophical serenity, to actual reality in the way that philosophers used to distinguish between power and act, dynamis and energeia‘, and so forth (2002: 6). Derrida coins the term ‘actuvirtuality’ to describe this second trait. The import of this insistence on the artifactuality/actuvirtuality of teletechnological experience is, as Niall Lucy explains,

[…] to show that what counts as actuality in the present can no longer be confined to the ontological opposition of the actual and the virtual, despite the ongoing necessity of this opposition to every form of politics (Lucy, 2004: 4).

Derrida’s resistance to the traditional ontological opposition of the actual and the virtual – and of the actual as the ‘undeconstructible opposite of artifice and the artefact’ (Lucy, 2004: 4) – is pertinent to many areas of critical concern, including the present interest in the experience and construction of place through networked mobility. It is also what connects this present concern for the (largely localised) impact of networked mobility on place with broader geopolitical concerns. For, as Niall Lucy suggests, not only does artifactuality and actuvirtuality necessitate a responsibility to analyse media (as Derrida argues it does), it is also a responsibility that is open to the future and open to the other. Lucy writes:

Such an understanding of the actual as what is always “actively produced” and “performatively interpreted” is not an excuse for disengaging from public life or for affecting a disinterest in real-historical events. If the condition of actuality is that it must be made, then it must be able to be made differently […]. That is why it’s possible to make another artefact of the other – as the arrivant, the absolute stranger (Lucy, 2004: 6).

This might seem to represent a significant departure from the line of consideration of networked mobility and place that has hitherto preoccupied this paper. But it does not. For, as Morley advises, any analysis such as the present one ‘must be sensitive both to [what Foucault terms] the “grand strategies of geopolitics” and the “little tactics of the habitat”‘, where the ‘interlinked processes of globalisation and domestication […] bring together micro and macro issues’ (Morley, 2003: 437). This brings me back, in conclusion, to Derrida’s account of the return toward home, the “at-home”, in both its benign domestic sense and more troubling nationalistic sense. It is the former sense which would seem to drive present interest in and uptake of mobile telephony technologies. As Morley puts it, these technologies should be seen ‘as “imperfect instruments, by which people try […] to maintain some sense of security and location” amidst a culture of flow and deterritorialization’ (2004: 453). The persistence of place in the face of networked mobility ‘seems to suggest a continuing desire to reterritorialize the uncertainty of location inherent in online worlds’ (440). But it is worth remembering that this is not unconnected from the somewhat darker nationalistic desire for the “at-home”, which, as Derrida explains, is motived (among other reasons) by the perceived threat that is posed by the “mobility” of the immigrant “other”. Future research in this area would do well to remember this and remain sensitive to both the micro-scale of (largely localised) experiences of networked mobility (Urry, 2002) and the macro-scale of global geopolitical transformations (Urry, 2000), the micro-politics of mobile, technologically equipped bodies in transit through place/s, and the macro-scale geopolitics of (voluntary and forced) migration and displacement.

Author’s Biography

Rowan Wilken is a Melbourne-based writer and researcher, and is currently completing his PhD at the University of Melbourne. His thesis examines the intersections and interactions of (virtual) community, place, and teletechnologies. Other research interests include: the convergence of media, cultural and architectural theory; aesthetics; and the practice and poetics of everyday life. He has published in Meanjin, MESH, RealTime, and UTS Review, and is a co-author of Australian Modern: the Architecture of Stephenson & Turner (Miegunyah Press, 2004).

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Karen Olsen and two anonymous referees for their constructive and insightful comments.

Notes

[1] For instance, The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary offers thirteen variations, which range from broad references to space and its occupation, to the differentiation of types or “sub-categories” of geographical space and the occupation of these spaces (including, in order of increasing expansion: a residence or dwelling; a group of houses in a town; a town square; a village, a town, a city; an area or region) (Hughes, Michell, Ramson, 1992: 863). For more detailed historical background to the notion of place – a term which can be traced back at least to early Greek philosophy – see Casey (1993 and 1997).
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[2] And this is precisely why Casey offers no concise definition of place. His suggestion seems to be that we reach an understanding of place only by taking a circuitous route: by studying ‘the perplexing phenomenon of displacement, rampant throughout human history and especially evident at the present historical moment, only in relation to an abiding implacement’ (Casey, 1993: xiv).
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[3] Such as seems to be the case in the rhetoric of the Congress of the New Urbanism, for example. For a useful introduction to the aims, projects and criticisms of the architectural and planning phenomenon known as the Congress of the New Urbanism, see Bressi (2002). For a reading of the New Urbanism’s interest in the renewal of community through place as a form of “geographical determinism”, see Harvey (1997).
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[4] For a more detailed discussion of the difficult politics of place, see Michael Keith and Steve Pile (1996).
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[5] Derrida concurs with Nancy. He, too, repudiates the word community because its etymology links it to violence and exclusion (see Derrida, 1997: 13).
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[6] For a fuller discussion of this argument concerning the supremacy of space over place, see Casey (1997: 131-193).
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[7] Castells defines the “space of places” as ‘the historically rooted spatial organization of our common experience’ (1996: 378). By way of contrast, he defines the “space of flows” as a series of transformations where ‘society is constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of the social organization: they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life’ (1996: 412; original emphasis). Or as Derrida puts it, ‘the border is no longer the border, images are coming and going through customs, the link between the political and the local, the topopolitical, is as it were dislocated‘ (2002: 57; emphasis in original).
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[8] As one critic has remarked: ‘”Place” and “place-making” in the radically imploded space of the global civilisation of the early twenty-first century remains some of the most problematical but compelling human concerns within the continuing experience of modernity’ (Scriver, 2002: 4).
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[9] The risks of this “cocooning” are apparent in the recently reported deaths of at least two pedestrians in Australia who were oblivious to the cars which hit them due to the music pumping through their headphones.
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[10] As one critic puts it, ‘cellphones and their connectivity in the world at large are the first high-tech acknowledgment of realspace in the age of cyberspace [with "realspace" taken here to mean geography or place]. Where the choice was once communication, indoors, away from the physical world, or movement and transportation out in the world with no communication, cellphones open up a third possibility – the world outdoors with full communication (Levinson, 2003: 5).
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[11] Morley draws here on Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction ‘between “conversations” (substantive talk about events and issues: a discourse of the public realm) and “chatter” (the exchange of gossip principally designed to maintain solidarity between those involved in the exchange: what Tuan calls a “discourse of the hearth”)’ (2003: 452).
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[12] To cite a filmic example, these findings bring to mind Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), where Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and her friends communicate via mobile phone in the same high school corridor space.
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[13] This concern for both medium and message – the technologies themselves and the uses to which these technologies are put – is, they argue, the point of difference which distinguishes the domestication model from other, broadly “technological determinist” understandings of how new media rework or “remediate” old media.
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[14] In an Australian context, Ant Farm are perhaps best remembered for their 1976 tour, which included a series of lectures in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane; a performance on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, CARmen … the auto opera, featuring around fifteen cars conducted by an artist kangaroo; a further performance at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Ned Telly and the Golden Spanner, with a Ned Kelly look-alike wearing a TV helmet and using a giant golden spanner to unbolt the Harbour Bridge; and, the collective’s aborted Dolphin Embassy project which was to be constructed in Surfers Paradise, Queensland (see Lewallen, 2004: 80-83).
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[15] For a journalistic account of the emergent phenomenon of “life-caching”, see Schofield (2004).
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[16] In addition to televisual considerations, there is also an argument for returning to the history of experimental urban critique and exploration, especially as practiced by the likes of Fluxus and the Situationists, in order to better understand what is at stake phenomenologically in contemporary, networked mobility. Elsewhere I have attempted to initiate such considerations. See Wilken (2000).
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Domesticating cartographies

Introduction to mobile telephonic practices and spaces

As a vehicle arguably furthering the collapsing between work and leisure distinctions, the mobile phone is a clear extension of what Raymond Williams dubbed ‘mobile privatization’ (1974). Here one can still be physically within the home and yet, simultaneously, be electronically transported to other places. According to Wajcman et al’s study of Australian mobile telephony, the transformation and diffusion of boundaries between traditional private and public spheres (2004: 9) – as signified in Williams’s prescient ‘mobile privatization’ – sees mobile telephony penetrating ‘new geographic spaces that enable the consumption and communication process to be applied in new social, cultural and psychological spaces’ (2004: 12).[1] At the heart of Williams’s notion is the extension and re-articulation of domesticity beyond simple physical place, into co-present practices of place Doreen Massey calls ‘locality’ (1993). In this there are many paradoxes. For one thing, domestication may have moved out of the home – literally, in the case of the mobile phone – but ideas of locality (Massey, 1993) and place are still, if not more, enduring (Ito, 2002). Like other domesticated technologies (Morley, 2003), the processes involved are far from simple or finalized, as each specific site locates and adapts to new cultural artifacts in a series of exchanges. We domesticate domesticating technologies (i.e. TV, phone) as much as they domesticate us. Domesticating technologies may be underscored by new modes of ‘mobile privatization’ but they are also fraught with feelings of disjuncture as one rides the practices of co-presence integral to the relationship between place and mobility – actual and electronic – found today (Urry, 2002; Ito, 2002; Morse, 1998). The “domestic” may no longer be physically located in the actual home. Yet, as we roam with our mobile phones and co-present dreams, locality is only a phone call away…

Or is it this simple? Here I will suggest that, in keeping with the endurance of the ‘post’ metaphor in the co-present practice of domestic technologies (Arnold, 2003a), locality is ‘in the post’. Locality is always in deferral, transition, translation, mediation and recontextualisation.

In the Post

As we shall see, the persistence of the post metaphor is most notable in the genre of SMS. Is SMS purely a communication application or have some users already taken it into a content-media realm?[2] To engage in this discussion on the contemporary role of SMS and its possible future in the light of paradigm and ecology shifts from 2.5 to 3 G (generation) mobile technologies, we need to examine SMS in terms of a genealogy of exchange, mediation and intimacy. I will shortly sketch out this genealogy through an exploration of a sample study of Melbourne users. First, however, I will historicize mediation and intimacy in terms of what Margaret Morse and Esther Milne acknowledge as a type of cartography of telepresence (Morse, 1998, Milne, 2004). I will suggest that mobile genres such as SMS and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) continue a tradition founded by the role of the visiting card (Milne, 2004) and can also be understood through the metaphor of the postcard. Both involved practices of telepresence/ co-presence that include gestures of both intimacy and hallmark clichés. I will view customization and its reworking of standardized gestures from genres such as the postcard to SMS/ MMS practices. Both the postcard and SMSing/ MMSing can be read as sites for contestation between vernacular and the colloquial – against a backdrop of standard sizing formats and generic customization (i.e. a cliché imaginary of icons and mass production).

Postcard from elsewhere; the semiotics of being there and “hear”

The postcard metaphor, co-presence and the endurance of posting in mobile phone customization

Whilst tabloid rhetoric may suggest the contrary, discourses within the practice of intimacy have always been mediated. As Morse notes in her discussion of virtuality: telepresence and co-presence are not just the by-products of cyberspace relations (1998). Notions of telepresence and intimacy are central to much of the ‘micro-coordination’ of mobile telephonic practices (Rich, 2004) that have been pivotal to the history of telephony and its annexing of the public within the doorway (literally and metaphorically) of the private (home). Mobile telephony extend and invert this blurring by transforming the ‘private’ into an annex of the public; ‘mobile privatization’ par excellence (Morley, 2003). The ubiquity and yet interiorized saliency of mobile telephonic practices create a dynamic of being both everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously home and away. Or, as Michael Arnold notes, mobile telephony is best understood in Martin Heidegger’s state of ‘undistance’ (ent-fernen); the abolishment of distance also, paradoxically, destroys nearness (Arnold, 2003a: 236). As Arnold remarks in his study on mobile telephony in Melbourne, the phenomenology of the mobile phone is best understood as ‘janus-faced’, whereby seemingly paradoxical concepts and practices are continuously at play – being here and there, local and global, private and yet public, free and yet always on a leash (2003a).

The postcard provides a precursor to the contemporary roles (and so-called dilemmas) of mobile phone practices such as SMS and MMS.[3] The postcard carries with it a tautological proposition – to post is to transfer and mutate; thus postcards are therefore much like metaphors (Lopez, 2003). The postcard was marked by the politics of co-presence – shifts in public and private spheres, fusions of work and “leisure” (symbolized by the flâneur), being here and yet there, being present whilst simultaneously absent. In contemporary debates, similar co-presences are perhaps found in the simultaneity of actual and virtual worlds (Morse, 1998).

There are other continuities. In the case of the mobile phone, Robert Luke has suggested a contemporary version of the flâneur in the ‘phoneur’ (cited in Morley, 2003). Symbolic of 19th century modernity and the telepresence of the wanderer, the flâneur’s surveying of new forms of the public sphere – inscribed by the birth of ‘mobile privatization’ (i.e. transport) – has transformed into the vicarious phoneur with telepresent microscope in the form of the mobile phone. The flâneur/ phoneur is a janus-faced character grappling with the paradoxes and ambivalences of modernity – most notably through the negotiation of mediated degrees of intimacy through co-presence.

Along such extensions of co-presence, another set of key characteristics extended from the postcard to the SMS/ MMS genre – that of textual and visual discourses. The generic souvenir images and format of the postcard was inscribed with the personal, customized by linguistic (vernacular, colloquial, dialect) and cultural musings, then stamped with the markings of place and migration. Paralleling the postcard’s negotiation between the generic and the specific, the generic functions of the mobile phone are personalized and customized by a collaging of SMS and MMS in a perpetual encircling of place, locality and practices of co-presence (i.e. ‘where r u now?’). Postcards re-created a presence-ness, playing into the logic of ‘being here and there’ whilst fully aware of the inherent properties of delay and deferral. Whilst the principles of exchange and reception are sped up in mobile telephonic practices, delay and deferral are fundamental to medium’s logic (in the face of so-called immediacy). Both function to send a thought or moment, oscillating between being there and here, attempting to bring desires for what is absent and present into correspondence. Both are mediated forms, both the paradoxical bearers of immediacy in their time. They both epitomize the spatial and temporal translation involved in the practice of ‘post’.

The postcard/ SSM-MMS comparison traverses a particular kind of co-presence represented by specific forms of textuality and visuality. Within each different context, linguistic and cultural (both hegemonic and subcultural) factors render the pertinence of place through particularities of visual and textual practices. Modes of customization – such as particular forms of SMS lingo – seek to further emphasize the interdependency between place and intimacy. It is the mobile phone’s mobility that, dialectically, makes place even more important (Ito, 2002). Place can be denoted by the generic “where are you now?” rhetoric common to mobile conversations or it can be connoted through phonetic and colloquial gestures. Whilst both email and SMS are about compression and abbreviation, mobile phones – by way of their movement – are fundamental to what Rich Ling dubs the ‘micro-coordination’ (2004) of the everyday. The compression and gestures of intimacy central to mobile telephonic genres such as SMS can be found reproduced in the ‘micro-coordination’ of the postcard. Both SMS/ MMS genres extend various senses/ modes (visuality, orality and texuality) akin to the postcard. So much so that I argue that the postcard was once the equivalent to the “SMS moment”. It was personal, subject to unauthorized viewing, a democraticising of writing, and a genre able to capture the fleeting moment whilst being mobile.

There are differences of course. Whilst both the postcard and SMS/ MMS practices involve often unspoken forms of obligation and reciprocity, the former (an example of co-presence rhetoric in extreme) did not entail the immediacy and simultaneity that SMS/ MMS presupposes in its “gift giving” etiquette (Taylor and Harper, 2003). The postcard was, dialectically, about being mobile and yet immobile, moving over there whilst thinking about here, it was a sandwiching between the generic image, format and cliché as the author attempted to write/speak whilst negotiating a type of co-presence (virtual/ projected/ imagined and actual). The postcard relationship between sender and receiver was a relationship between the mobile and the static. In the case of the mobile phone, sender and receiver can both be static and/or mobile simultaneously. If the postcard marked an initial form of mobile privatization (indicative of the rise of the printing press, transport and associated forms of co-presence), the mobile phone marks both an extension of these principles as well as a departure into a new mode of performing individualism and sociality (Giddens, 1991; Bauman, 2003; McVeigh, 2003).

The postcard, like SMSing and MMSing, functioned as a form of co-present mobile privatization by being both there and here (‘wishing you were here’). It extended vernaculars of individualism during the rise, and subsequential privatization, of the public space and notions of the “community”. Such vernaculars and others can be read as evolving from the earlier visiting card. In discussing the ‘semiotics of “speaking by the card”’ and its role in replicating certain class-related modes of ‘exchange’, Milne states, ‘visiting cards reproduced divisions of class by regulating the public and private’ (2004). According to Milne, the shift from visiting cards to the image and photograph genre of the carte-de-visite in 1854 was marked by gender inflection. Women were warned about the implications of being too generous in disseminating their carte-de-visite as it could be viewed as a form of flirting. It is no surprise that similar discourses about flirting and dating have erupted within SMS/MMS practices with a plethora of companies advertising to extend one’s social circles (Constable, 2003).[4] MMS, on the one hand, furthers the role of representations of self and forms of social exchange first initiated by the birth and rise of amateur, vernacular photography as symbolized by the introduction of the Kodak camera. On the other hand, the personal frame of the mobile phone means that the space between taking, editing and presenting the images becomes less mediated (i.e. no sending off to get the film processed) and more operative to the shrinking space between the doing and the viewing. These economies of the micro (micro narratives, micro temporality, micro-politics of self) demonstrate that presence in the telepresent politics of representation is a verb rather than a noun (Ito, 2002). We ‘do’ presence.

As Mizuko Ito has noted, the mobile phone helps facilitate ‘communities of presence’ (2002). What MMS lacks in the significance of place (such as the postcard’s imprints of stamps as passport for actual travel) it makes up for in its emphasis on personalisation (i.e. more bricolage, one’s own photos of place rather than the “postcard/ souvenir” version, thus symbolizing the place of the individual). Such a concurrent enhancement of mobility – from actual to electronic travel – is central to John Urry’s discussion of co-presence. Urry identifies a dialectic between the actual and virtual. In this dialectic, electronic/virtual travel further reinforces, rather than erases, the importance of actual travel (2002). This paradigm is particularly prevalent in the continual reiteration, rather than destruction, of place by mobile telephonic practices. As Ito argues in the case of Tokyo (2002), and Kyongwon Yoon in the context of Seoul (2003), mobile phone practices are contingent upon the agencies of the local. They perpetually emphasise the role of place in maintaining intimacy. As Massey notes, locality – as a particular practice of place – emerges through a combination of electronic co-presence and face-to-face actions (Massey, 1993).

Let us now briefly turn to the relation between another precursor – photography – and texting. For Matt Locke, (in ‘Light touches – text messaging, intimacy and photography’), one can make many parallels between the representational act of photographing and texting (2004). Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes and Geoffrey Batchen, Locke argues that the tactile quality, intimacy and ‘light touches’ of vernacular photography are akin to the practices of texting. Of course, the notions of tactility, intimacy and scale have been central to the design of both the postcard and the mobile phone; indicative of Marshall McLuhan’s argument that technologies are an extension of the human body (1964). With the “handy” format of both the postcard and mobile phone we momentarily feel the “light touches” from intimates. Via these mediations, our intimates hold our hands in a co-present gesture of lightness that both reinforces their presence and absence simultaneously.[5] The interdependent roles of intimacy and tactile representations can be found throughout many “posting” genres, as argued in Milne’s cartography of 18th to 20th century epistolary genres.

In ‘Magic bits of Paste-board’, Milne suggests that SMS should be seen as an extension of modes of ‘telepresence’. Telepresence, for Milne is, ‘the degree to which geographically dispersed agents experience a sense of physical and/ or psychology proximity through the use of particular communication technologies’ (2004). Milne thus suggests the need to acknowledge the long history of telepresence in definitions of corporeality. Extending from the work conducted by feminists on conceptions of cyberspace and corporeality (Stone, 1994; Brook, 1999; Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 1999; Waldby, 2000; Nakamura, 2002), Milne succinctly argues that ‘text’s uncanny power to stand in for the corporeal body’ has a ‘long’, and often ‘overlooked’ history. By sketching the history and social functions of the tradition of British eighteenth-century visiting cards and their evolution – through the introduction of photography – into the carte-de-visite (a visiting card with photograph, similar to MMS), Milne argues that these genres are ‘conceptually, culturally and materially’ precursors of ‘a range of contemporary technologies of propinquity’ (2004). Milne argues that –

… acting as complex cultural avatars, these visiting cards conveyed the desires of class and gender in the construction of identity… Visiting cards functioned as avatars of presence and identity, a complex language system which allowed the discursive agents to mediate social relations according to the varying degrees of intimacy that were desired. (2004)

In all these message forms, this intimacy can be compromised. Anonymous readers can view the postcard (whilst in the post) just as saved text messages can be read if the mobile phone is left unattended. The suspended feeling of potential unintended readers makes the inscriptions on both postcards and SMS subject to a play between the generic, formulaic sentiments and particular customizing codes that are only understood between the sender and the intended reader. A related issue is that both mobile phones and postcards serve as tracking devices – being used to legitimate absences, to operate as an alibi, the traces of moving moments. Mobile phones have been subject to both the embellishing of the micro-coordinations of affairs as well as instrumental in “catching out” infidelities, as have postcards, with intimate exchanges caught in the wrong hands. At a more general level, postcards and MMS/ SMS operate as bookends to the simultaneous rise of ‘mobile privatization’ and what Benedict Anderson dubs as ‘imagined communities’ (1983) – the rise of the nation through geographic demarcations and linguistic homogenization by inventions such as the printing press. This is not just a chronological book ending – the postcard heralded the printing press and the mobile phone being symbolic of the immersion into digital – but also a socio-spatial epoch marked by reframing gestures of intimacy through revisions of what constitute place and thus the practice of co-presence. Postcards illustrate that a dialectical tension between virtual and actual was traversed long before the rise of the digital, and significantly the Internet. These “bookends” highlight the continue antagonisms between mobility and immobility, here and yet there, public and yet private discourses through three main on-going characteristics – co-presence, visuality and textuality. I can only gesture here towards how the “virtuality” of the Internet is experienced through the tactility, “lightness” and mobility of the 3G mobile phenomenon and associated emerging genres.

This is not to say that there is nothing particular about SMS. As Gerard Goggin notes in ‘mobile text’ (2004), SMS is a burgeoning area of expression that needs to be understood as, not just a remediated form of expression, but also a media/ genre in its own right with its own conventions and codes. SMS, according to Goggin, needs to be understood as an emerging genre, ‘forming a new culture of media use’. Like other types of media and cultural forms, SMS needs to be analyzed in terms of its ‘specific textual modes’ (2004). So whilst I have made parallels between emailing, texting and the visiting card, drawing on both the work of Milne and Arnold’s observation of the persistence of the “post” metaphor, one also needs to acknowledge that new forms of visual and textual practices are always emerging.

A relevant example can be found via a quick detour through the uses of the camera phone. In the work of Anita Wilhelm, Nancy Van House and Marc Davis (and the Garage Cinema Research) (2004) users are denoted as ‘producers’. Camera phones are seen to work with a ‘power of now’ quality. Whilst the earlier rise of vernacular photography also exhibited this power of immediacy, there are some marked differences. As Wilhelm et al. note, the ‘power of now’ quality has resulted in a speeding up of self-regulation, self-editing and self-disclosure. Many of the happy accidents associated with analogue photography (and the severing of time between the taking, processing and final viewing of the image) are deleted in rash and fleeting moments and ‘instant’ editing decisions. In addition, unlike the digital camera that is not taken everywhere, the converging of the camera with the mobile phone sees the practice of photography being liberated and made an integral part of the everyday. The context of the mobile phone frame provides emerging forms of photographic content. Here, content becomes contingent to mobile contexts. For Mizuko Ito and Daiske Okabe in their seminal MMS ethnographies in Japan, “camophone” practices are creating new genres in representing and exchanging amongst intimacies (2003).

So the questions of remediation between media forms are complex. Locke, for example, finds more parallels between vernacular photography and texting than between analogue and digital photography (2004). It is now to texting in its Melbourne context that I shall turn.

Locating the mobile

Understanding the contexts of Melbourne mobile telephony

From the plethora of printed matter linked intertextually, via texting, to TV programs such as Australian Idol and Big Brother, to the cacophony of mobile ads and chat services flooding late night TV and weekly magazines and daily newspapers, one could be mistaken for thinking that everyone in Melbourne is connected. On the streets one is greeted by the autistic behaviour of one-sided mobile phone conversations conducted as people walk, bike, catch public transport and drive. Supermarkets and video stores are brimming with mobile phone users asking their invisible friend/ partner about appropriate choices. In particular, the omnipresence of SMSing – and now MMSing – is patent. Is it just the case of a severe case of what Ling dubs the ‘micro-coordinating’ of everyday practices? These souvenirs of mobility – the post-postcard practices of SMS/ MMS practices – are complex, marked by different types of co-presence (seen, for example by gendered usage of visual and textual customization).

The commercial context is also complex – and perhaps partly responsible for some of the customization. With four main service providers (Telstra, Hutchison, Optus and Vodafone) and ten minor service providers – all vying for the Australian market – there seems a massive amount of choice.[6] However, this choice is underscored by what James Fergusson (a specialist in new market trends in the Asia-Pacific region working for the third largest information research company in the world, TNS global) sees as a market in which service providers do not yet cater well to niche demographics. In an interview with Fergusson I inquired about the role of customization – that is, the hanging of characters from the phone, face plates, personalized screen savers and ring tones – and whether it was just a fleeting trend (2004). He believed that user’s customization of phones was a way of completing what the service providers had overlooked – the need for specific applications for particular niche groups. This is particularly the case in the introduction of so-called 3G mobile phones such as Hutchison’s 3 whereby the phones are crammed with applications – applications not necessarily relevant to users.

Fergusson believes that current 3G devices available in Australia are gimmicky – jam-packed with various applications most users will only use once or twice. The applications that are important, Fergusson argues, are those that make a difference to people’s lives. MMS applications such as camera phones are mainly adopted by youth markets, and, due to the lack of picture quality and resolution, Fergusson believes that professional (work-related) usage will defect to the digital camera.

Fergusson also sees that 3′s hybridization of 3G technologies – the first example of 3G in Australia – has resulted in resistance from consumers.[7] Unlike markets such as Japan and South Korea where government infrastructure and financial support helped to fully implement ‘broadband’ mobile phone technologies, Australia’s up-take of the hybridized 3G technologies is much slower, uneven and cautious. This has perhaps become an important factor in the dominance and maintenance of SMS genres and the shift of SMS from a “making-do” application to a pivotal semiotic exchange in everyday micro-coordinations. According to Steve Watson (from Legion Interactive), Stuart Tucker (from Optus) had claimed in 2004 that 90 per cent of all revenue was generated from peer to peer SMS.[8]

Beyond SMS and basic services the market is perhaps not well understood. Watson notes that in one year the market had shifted and that whilst MMS was yet to take off in Australia, digital content and services had changed dramatically (2005). He claimed that the “future” of mobile telephony, and its convergence with the net, would see multiplayer games dominating the content and applications industry. Currently, the key sources for downloading revenue are ring tones (50 per cent) and games (35 per cent). However, such statements and figures perhaps belie some uncertainty. For example, one of the main underlying issues that became apparent in Watson’s discussion of mobile telephony was that the relationship between users and the industry was clearly conceived within a hypodermic model in which Watson seemed – visibly and verbally – unable to grapple with the strange phenomenon of female users. Watson is not alone. Yet the Australian mobile games industry must acknowledge, as the Japanese market did when it shifted in broadband mobile technologies in 1999, the importance and power of female users as ‘producers’.[9] It is true that companies such as Adelaide’s Kukan are designing and producing mobile games that address both males and females in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region (most especially China, Taiwan and Hong Kong). Yet much more research needs to be conducted into the specificities of the Australian market, for example into specific aspects of the market such as gender, and how this fits into its relationships in the region. Wajcman et al. (2004) note, as does Arnold (2003b), that the relatively small and under-researched Australian market is in need of more qualitative and quantitative studies especially beyond just youth-orientated studies.

Thus the contribution here is to seek to gauge some of the correspondences between intimacy and customization – looking at the how and why rather than just the quantitative what.

Pixoleur: the art of being mobile

Case study of a sample group of Melbourne users

Much of the advertising for mobile phones in Australia – from service providers such as Optus, 3 (Hutchison), Vodafone and Telstra, and from device providers such as Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, LG and Samsung – reiterates the importance of being connected both literally and metaphorically. Moreover, in advertising on TV and printed matter the mobile phone signifies status, and increasingly this identification is marked by the so-called “choices” offered to users to customize and personalize the device. These choices range from faceplates to wallpapers of their favourite pop stars, with associated polyphonic ring tones. More and more, different device providers are selling identity and status – from prestigious Nokia limited edition designer phones (such as models 7260 and 7280) to Motorola’s fun play on the currency of Japanese popular culture in Australia.

In order to gain insight into some current modes of customization in Melbourne I conducted a small sample study across a group of twenty University of Melbourne staff, students and administrators, aged between 15 and 50. The group consisted of an equal number of male and female users. The aim of this sample study – which consisted of twenty surveys and then six follow up in-depth interviews – was to gain a window onto some of the different ways the mobile phone was customized and what this said about representation, identification and co-presence. I was particularly motivated by a curiosity about prevailing gendered codes of intimacy, and the way in which the mobile phone helped maintain or transgress these codes.

This study is just that – a sample study. It did not seek to address all practices and attitudes of the Australian population but rather grab a sound byte/ freeze frame/ SMS of some relationships towards mobile phones and the attendant paradoxes of mobile privatization. As the demographic was clearly marked by particular types of cultural capital – tertiary educated respondents linked to an established university (The University of Melbourne) – one can see specific modes of identification and performativity attached to their SMS and MMS practices. Just as postcard inscriptions denoted types of cultural capital (particularly shaped by middle class attitudes or aspirations) by way of textual and visual conventions, so too is this continued in mobile phone practices. The importance of class (especially the middle-class) in the rise and adoption of mobile phones into the general community (particularly as mobile phone use is hijacked by youth cultures) is integral to mobile telephony’s history (Agar, 2003; Goggin, 2004). Class stratification has been central to the historical passages of both the mobile phone and postcard; and central to these class formations has been the role of gender (Haddon, 1997).[10]

In the sample study, gender featured both in the practices, and in attitudes to the role of mobile telephony in the everyday. In particular, stereotypes about gender and technology were continuously contested within individual user’s responses. On the one hand, the stereotype of females not being apt and fluent in the use of various applications was not true. Often the females seemed more curious and adventurous in exploring and mastering genres than their male counterparts. However, female users tended to spend most of their mobile phone time (unlike the male users) contemplating, re-reading and editing text messages. Moreover, whilst female users tended towards regular usage of their mobile phones, spoke eloquently about the importance of customization, and tended to view the mobile phone as a predominantly communication-based device, male users tended to view it as both a data/content transferring technology and a communication device. The usage of games on mobiles was overtly gendered – none of the female respondents had ever played the games, in comparison to most of the male respondents who had not only played the games once, but did so regularly. Apart from the obvious male-orientation towards mobile games, however, female users seemed more apt in knowing and using the various applications, although the dominant mode of female usage was still SMS.

The younger the user, the less gendered differences were noted in customizing of applications such as SMS. Having said that, most of the older male respondents denied the use of any customization despite the fact of it actually being used! For many of the female respondents the functions of the SMS genre seemed much more open to possibilities; many female users were able to articulate different forms of SMS customization comparable to corresponding degrees of intimacy. When asked about the chosen screen savers, ring tones and abbreviations for SMSing, the male users seemed indifferent to their customization, often stating that it ‘just came with the phone’. In contrast, female users seemed much more attached to the customization modes, discussing the role of the phone as a diary and a very important mode of everyday communication and maintaining intimacy. In addition, female users seemed much more aware of the janus-faced role of customizing mobile phones as a grappling between modes of individualism and self-identification and the ways in which they were judged by these modes (most prevalent in such public ‘space invading’ modes as ring tones).

When asked to provide adjectives to describe their relationships to mobile phones, some of the responses were: easy going, casual, evolving, distanced, frustrating, resistant, obsessive, attentive, fun, easy, takes over my life, happy, sad and pathetic. Many saw the mobile phone as beneficial in maintaining relationships, especially in terms of being available anytime for friends and to the contingencies of last minute face-to-face meetings. One respondent was ambivalent towards the medium, acknowledging its ability to ‘establish intimacy with new people’ but, paradoxically, ‘creating distance with already established friends’. This is a clear example of another janus-faced feature of mobile telephonic practices to both reinforce and yet fragment social capital. Many mobile phone researchers have noted such fragmentation – what Robert Putnam sees as a ‘balkanization’ (2000) – of communities (or ‘tele-cocooning’) (Ling, 2004; Ito et al., 2005). However it is important to problematise Putnam’s technological determinist model. It laments and romanticises a so-called ideal time when supposedly intimate relationships were not mediated. As Rich Ling suggests (via his domestic technologies approach) one must not isolate or scapegoat the mobile phone but instead understand the remediating role in terms of a genealogy of domestication (2004). This is where the peripatetic cartography of co-presence is useful. Present within such an enduring phenomenon is the grappling between desiring to overcome distance and, thus, like the very force of desire (as defined by psychoanalysis), the actual inability to meet the object (closeness). Again, this is a dialectic, as Arnold argues, that is best encapsulated by Heidegger’s ‘un-distance” (Arnold, 2003a).

Un-distance is further complicated by the fact that the role of the mobile phone as social tool – arguably now THE social glue – is subject to local nuances.[11] Whilst still not fully immersed in the world of 3G mobility, Melbourne has a burgeoning industry for convergent mobile media aimed at facilitating socialization – especially the establishment of new relationships through the mode of mobile net telephony. Dating services, chat lines and after-production customizing services (downloading specialized ring tones and screensaver animations) fill the TV airwaves (after 10pm) and tabloid newspapers and magazines. When people are not actually customizing and SMSing/ MMSing, they are perpetually bombarded by a plethora of possibilities in these regards. Or so it seems. In fact, in the sample survey, very few respondents used the relationship services, arguing that mobiles were more important in reinforcing already existing relations rather than establishing new relationships. In addition, of the sample study, only two out of the 20 respondents had downloaded their customizations from post-production mobile phone companies. Many preferred to either use their own images (mostly taken by camera phones) or choose from the images provided with the phone. Images used included places visited, Asian animations of cute characters, Betty Boop, the user’s name and a flower. Some had tried the downloading services but had found them unsatisfying – too costly and often frustrating to use. While most respondents (70 per cent) selected ring tones and screensavers supplied with the mobile phone, many claimed that they would do their own customization if the phone had the capabilities (i.e. camera phone, Bluetooth).

Gender featured predominantly in discussions about customization, with female respondents tending to be more decisive and opinionated about their selections, often downloading different screensavers (wallpapers) and ring tones rather than using the generic (and unsatisfying) ones supplied by the manufacturer. In addition, female respondents spoke reflexively about the ways in which people judged others by the types of mobile phone used and such features as ring tones. Key features for ring tones were factors such as being ‘distinctive but not annoying’. As one female respondent noted:

I have chosen Betty Boop (screen saver, face plate and doll hanging from the phone) because she is a bit of a role model of mine – she operates like a type of avatar or alter ego. There are some physical similarities such as we both have black curly hair. My ring tone is one of the Nokia ring tones supplied with the phone. It was chosen because it suits another alter ego of mine – so I felt it correspond with that identity; it’s like playing dress-ups.

When asked whether she saw customization as an extension of the user’s personality/ identity she replied:

I think so because I think you get judged by your ring tone when you are in public. When you hear someone’s ring tone that is the same as yours you expect to find your doppelganger… It (customizing) does become a fashion thing that you do get judged on.

Here, the respondent’s discussion about the role of mobile phones’ function as a form of identity and cultural capital is significant. Her discussion of the ring tone as a signifier of her own identity – the role of mobile phone customization in the construction and maintenance of the illusionism of individualism – was exemplified by the potential threat to individuality just by someone else having the same ring tone Whilst the respondent was being humorous, this point did signpost the performative elements involved in customizing the phone as both a playful and thoughtful exercise. This is not only in regard to self-presentation but, in this case more importantly, self-identification. Here we see a good example of the individualising process associated with mobile phone customization – and its specific localising qualities (see also Brian McVeigh’s study of Japanese university students [2003]).

For this respondent – perhaps not incidentally the youngest of the sample study – the performativity associated with mobile phone customization was very significant in her everyday practices. She not only gave great consideration to the way in which she customized inside and outside her phone but also, as a fairly regular SMSer (i.e. more than 5 times a day), she spent much time personalising her text messages. As an important essential everyday item, the mobile phone for this respondent was embroiled in paradoxes associated with identification and identity. On the one hand, she was aware of the ways in which she was judged in public by her phone’s attire – from the hanging betty boop wearing a flashing light to the distinctive polyphonic ring tone – which she thought was often misread (i.e. the people didn’t “get” her sense of humour). On the other hand, customizing the mobile phone – from attachments to personalising SMS – was a site for meaningful play and gestures of intimacy amongst already established friends. Here we see that Arnold’s comment on mobile phone practices being janus-faced, in the case of this respondent customization created a bifurcation of effects and affects – some intended and others unintended/ unavoidable.

The so-called divide between those that have mobiles and those that do not was broached with the respondents. Female respondents believed there was a difference, whilst male respondents did not. The gendering of attitudes was also noted in the respondent’s comments about mobile etiquette in public. For James Fergusson, Australia is relatively unfazed by public mobile performativity in comparison to the US or Japan. However, the female respondents felt otherwise to Fergusson. Female respondents were more articulate about the possible readings and interpretations of particular ring tones and what Sadie Plant calls ‘phone staging’ whereby people stage calls in public and exploit the possibility of an audience for extroverted performativity (2002). The female respondents seemed more aware of the power of aural customisation (‘being heard’), most notably ring tones. Many of the female respondents identified the insidious nature of some ring tones and thus their choice not to use certain popular/ generic types. However, for the males, they tended to download favourite songs and seemed less aware of the level of public judgement operating around ring tone customisation.

Whilst both male and female respondents tended not to use the silent mode in public, they would often lower the volume of the ring tone and would answer calls briefly and quietly. Of the male and female respondents, only a couple of female respondents put their mobile on silent mode in public spaces such as transport. Female users, however, tended not to initiate phone calls on public transport, unless imperative. One female respondent stated:

I think the correct mobile etiquette in public is brief and discrete. I use silence mode when I am in private, more than public. I usually don’t have my phone on a loud ring mainly out of respect for other people’s personal spaces. I don’t think it should be banned; you should just act as you would normally – not talking loudly and making it brief… I don’t think it is frowned upon to use your mobile in public but people do seem weary and self-conscious to use mobiles in public because – unless you’re an extrovert – it is quite a self-conscious process as everyone can hear what you are saying and find out quite a bit about you (i.e. where you are going, where you have been).

Whilst both male and female respondents predominantly used the mobile phone to contact friends (rather than family or work colleagues), many of the female respondents preferred SMS as a means of communication. Over half of the respondents (70 per cent) SMSed more than 80 per cent of the time, with only 20 per cent mobile phone usage being voice calling. Both male and female respondents claimed that at least 80 per cent of their friends had mobiles; the only respondent (female) who did not SMS used her mobile phone mainly to contact family. Only 10 per cent of her friends had mobile phones, hence the irrelevance (in terms of her social network) of SMS for this respondent.

It would be easy to surmise that the rationale for using SMSing over voice calling and MMSing would be the cost factor; and while this was acknowledged, it was not the only reason. One male respondent stated: ‘Most of my communication is SMS because it is cheaper. But I don’t like telephone conversations; I think they are often misleading – there is not enough eye contact or body language to determine what they are really saying. So hence I prefer SMSing’. The same respondent noted a difference in his frequency of contact with the acquisition of a mobile only one year ago. He noted:

Probably in a space of a week I keep in contact with just over a dozen people. It’s very important – particularly with people I am close to – that I can communicate with them immediately when necessary. The mobile does reinforce relationships. I would take calls/ messages from people at 2am; it is very unlikely that I would with the landline.

For one female respondent, SMSing was a new form of expression that she saw as an ‘art form’. In weaving the spoken into the written, she viewed SMS as a very particular mode of communication that was not confronting (as in face-to-face) and operated as a form of reassurance. She stated:

I see texting as a new form of expression; it’s not necessarily destroying but a borrowing and reappropriation – not the same as. It has a lot to do with compression, speed, and efficiency. The main form of writing I do is texting; I do see it as an art form. I enjoy making a funny message; and I appreciate receiving ones where the sender has put in time and thought by personalising and individualising it… A text message is like a book, each sentence can be compressed to become a chapter. If you have four different thoughts you can have four different sentences. I spend time editing texts, I really consider ‘what is important’…’what has to stay‘. Often the initial original message is quite different from the one I end up sending; for example, if I am sending a long text message that goes over into two messages I will edit into one message. This is not because of the cost but more about the flow of the message; often if it gets sent as two separate messages, this hinders the message and its intentions. Recently I got a message from someone who sent six messages in a row; they were obviously not use to writing texts! She wasn’t concise, it was literally as if she were talking!

Here the respondent identifies the role of customisation in the act of writing SMS as signifying a type of performativity and self-presentation. As the respondent described the process of creating an SMS, there was nothing immediate about it. The editing and regulatory process was, as she stated, not just a matter of cost. Rather, it was about a type of conversion within a different genre – one that moulded the language of the user (just as writing a postcard moulds the language of the user). It was about flow and individualisation, not just efficiency and speed. Like all media and genres SMSing comes with often unspoken conventions and etiquette. As the female respondent conveys the story of her friend’s long-winded messages – overlooking the medium’s convention of word compression and conservation – we can see the importance of such techniques in the experience or, to borrow from McLuhan, in the “massaging” of the medium (1964). Here, the medium’s message/ massage is a hybridising of phonetics, vernacular, spoken and the visual – something about which many of the surveyed female respondents seemed to be more aware than their male counterparts.. When the above female respondent was asked about SMS and the function of language, she answered, ‘It is a compressed form of writing and it does make you revalue words. Although it can be instant, it can also be very deliberate and premeditated’. Here the respondent’s views seem in direct conflict with the convention of SMS taken as a spontaneous genre that erodes “proper” language. In particular, the very mediatory and co-present quality of language (as noted by poststructuralists) is highlighted in the role of SMS. This attests to the fact that language is continuously negotiated and “butchered” through the specific practices of culture and place as denoted in Massey’s notion of locality (1993).

Another female respondent spoke of the gender divide in terms of the previously noted male users opting towards predictive text and more direct conveying of data (rather than opting for SMS an expressive form of communication). Often certain terms were used for specific people – a type of intimacy in the text that would be lost on the outsider. Yet it has to be admitted that at times predictive text becomes part of the expressive form. One male respondent played with the predictive function that converted his name ‘brian’ as ‘asian’ and he now uses ‘asian’ as his sign name with specific friends. Another female respondent commented:

I’m not big on smiling faces; it’s too generic. You want people to read the text like you would hear it – incorporating both the written and the spoken. When I read a text I read it in their voice. I try to make it a bit more personalised. Sometimes I put the generic kiss thing; I like it when people make strange faces or symbols. I don’t like when people use predictive text; I never use that (predictive text tends to choose wrongly)… For example, ‘go’ becomes ‘in’. I notice with my male texters there tends to a usage of ‘in’ when I think they mean, ‘go’. I don’t like it because I like people’s personalities to come across, to express their sense of humour.

Most respondents noted the gendered inflections of mobile phone behaviour. However most also noted the influence of age and class in the equation. One male respondent stated, ‘I don’t know the difference. It seems as if women take more phone calls and text messages than men. That’s something I have just noticed but I don’t know if it’s true’. Another female respondent stated:

I do think gender has a role. I could agree with the myth that males use more voice calls and tend to be more to the point in their text messaging. I suppose young females text a lot, males tend to be more familiar with the games on the phone, whilst females don’t care about the games. If I were to generalise I would say that males use the calling phone function more often, females send and receive more SMS. However, I do think it is subjective – it depends on the person.

One can’t help but wonder, with the shift into 3G mobility and the change over from being a communication tool to a “content-media” driven device, whether this will affect the current gender divide between female communication-driven usage (both symbolically through fashion accessories signifying types of cultural capital and literally through SMS and voice calling) and male focus on content-media/ data-transference.

The respondents noted the function of the mobile as a type of souvenir, caching of moments or electronic diary, similar to that which the postcard once signified. Many stored SMS and MMS that had personal significance. One female respondent stated:

Yes, definitely, I do use my mobile as a form of electronic diary. But it’s not quite stable because you can delete it; I know it’s not that safe but because it is easy – it’s with me all the time. I do use it as a way of remembering events and certain messages people have sent to me are kept for sentimental reasons. But I am aware that they could all just go very quickly and I wouldn’t have a way of retrieving them.

Another respondent, this time male, stated that he kept specific messages from each one of his close pool of frequent contacts. He said, ‘I don’t remember people’s phone numbers anymore. I have no idea, no recognition of people’s numbers anymore. If I don’t have my mobile with me I couldn’t communicate with anyone via a landline’. When asked how he determines which messages to save and which to delete he responded, ‘If someone has text me about a dozen times I will always communicate with them via one of the saved SMS. I always use one to reply to, not necessarily the most recent one. I choose carefully which ones I save and which ones I delete’.

Wish you were hear

Conclusion

As I have argued above, via the use of different and subtle forms of SMS and so on, mobile phone users in Melbourne are customizing as much as in other parts of the Asia-Pacific. It is just that this is occurring in more internalised forms.
Customizing is also clearly occurring in different forms among different groups. In this regard, issues such as age, class and ethnicity underscored the role of gender in defining modes of mobile telephony in Melbourne. The fact that younger users are less gender differentiated in their customization codes suggests that the future of mobile telephony will be gendered but not in the way Haddon has described previously (1997). Female users are becoming more adventurous in mastering the applications, integrating the technology into everyday practices, and further demonstrating their “user as producer” techniques whilst also becoming more active in the actual creative production of the industry.[12] However whilst the female respondents seemed more articulate, self-reflexive and creative in their customizing of mobile applications, one could argue this is indicative of the pervasive stereotype of female proclivity towards communicative aspects, in contrast to male inclination towards technology. This conundrum of both reinforcement and yet transgression of gendered types is central to the janus-faced logic of the mobile phone, highlighting that the mediation of intimacy isn’t just a product of technological intervention. The other side of this is found in Steve Watson’s comments concerning “female users” as a type of primitive tribe that he “can’t get his head” around how to explain – let alone conquer (2005). One cannot help but wonder if he is aware of his own gendered customization that, like the so-called democracy Legion Interactive claims to facilitate, has to engage a “profiling” approach that cannot comprehend the contradictions and janus-faced forces underlying the dialectic between our domestication of technologies (i.e. through customization) and technology’s domestication of us.

The comprehension of such contradictions and paradoxes – and their particular workouts in specific localities – could be crucial to understanding mobile telephony. The Asia-Pacific region is marked by diverse penetration rates and modes of mobile telephony performativity (Bell, 2004; Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Plant, 2002). In areas of high penetration rates one can notice exponentially large usage of after-production customization. In 3G centres such as Tokyo and Seoul one notices a cornucopia of mobile phone fashioning inside and outside the phone as users attempt to personalize the device – operating as both a site for self-identification and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984[1979]) for on-lookers. In contrast to such data savvy locations such as Tokyo, 3G is yet to be fully implemented into Melbournians everyday life with only 2 out of 20 respondents in the survey having camera phones (although many stated that they were ‘upgrading’ soon to camera phones) and only 6 having part MMS functions. This is not to suggest that Melbourne users – with their residual use of 2.5 G technologies – are technophobes in comparison to the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. Rather this is an indicative example of how global ICTs are subject to local nuances. In the case of Melbourne and Australian urban areas in general, the use of SMS will not just die away because of a technological paradigm shift – by way of 3G broadband devices – as a technological determinist would argue. Rather, as I have suggested – through the discussion of previous “post” genres and the postcard metaphor in general – the legacy of mediation and remediation will be intertwined with the roles of intimacy and locality.

I have argued throughout that one of the features of mobile privatisation is the persistence of the post/postal – and associated forms of representation and exchange – in mediations of intimacy. From the 18th century visiting card to contemporary forms of mobile telephony, the metaphor and co-present practice of post endures. In this paper I have contextualised the dominance of SMS practices in terms of previous cartographies of co-presence and evolving modes of mobile privatisation. As a domestic “global” technology, the mobile phone is localised in diverse ways through user customisation. By exploring some of the local modes of customisation, we can gain insight into forms of identification and performativity that have a long history in the very mediation that is the act of practicing and imagining culture. In this way, we are always sending postcards that simultaneously enact our subjectivity as well as regulate it in accordance with localised rituals of exchange; intimacy always involves both being here and there. Thus locating contemporary forms of mobile privatized intimacy and co-presence may well be – as is the case of SMS customisation evoking a creolisation between text, aurality and visuality – the art of ‘being hear’…

In the context of SMS’s hybrid phonetic textuality, the familiar postcard greeting might become, more aptly, ‘wish you were hear’!

Author’s Biography

Larissa Hjorth is a lecturer in Digital Art in the Games Program at RMIT University. Hjorth is an artist and lecturer researching gendered mobile phone customisation in the Asia-Pacific.

Notes

[1] According to Arnold, the story of the first mobile phone in Australia was similar to the story of the first mobile phone invented by Ericsson. As with Ericsson model, this one was a large bakelite telephone located in the car. This first phone was a one-off construction at huge cost by the Post Master General’s Department for Reg Ansett in the 1960s. See Michael Arnold’s (co-authored by Matthew Klugman), Mobile phone uptake: a review of the literature and a framework for research (Heidelberg, Vic: Heidelberg Press, 2003).
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[2] As mobile technologies shift from 2.5 G to 3G technologies and we move into a new broadbanded form of mobile privatization, mobile devices supposedly shift from communication to media-content driven tools (Padden, 2005). With this shift, the role of customization moves from a predominantly user as producer (Wilhelm et al., 2004) model – indicative of the disjuncture between pre-production and post-production markets – to a predominantly industry regulated/ filtered exercise (i.e. increasing emphasis on profiling). This is not to say that 3G close down user options – this seems to go directly against the evidence supporting the contrary with the opening up of networks through broadband facilities. Rather, this “opening” up is also a process of orientating and ushering users into “preferred” choices and associated profiling. Most of us have experienced the slightly disorientating – but undeniably useful – profiling of Amazon books where one goes in as a personalized/ customized consumer. Unlike the simultaneous anonymity and personalization of the ubiquitous “you” in 20th century advertisements, in Amazon, they select “other” books that maybe of your interest according to your previous choices. So too has iPod realized the importance of intertextuality in the identity of the consumer, with a service that will download “appropriate” profiled music that they believe will interest you according to your history of music downloads. In both examples one is reminded of Tom Cruise’s character in Minority Report, in which the advertisements no longer metaphorically interpellate consumers but now literally call the individual’s name. This example is indicative of the popular dystopian view of customization based on a trickle down, industry-enforced scenario commonly articulated as “profiling”. However, it is important to realize that many forms of customization are at play, not just the vertical imposition (Frankfurt School) model. Whilst “profiling” analysis and the associated corporate surveillance of individuals is an important area for critique and analysis (Lyon, 1994), this paper is concerned with forms of micro-customization whereby users – despite the industry push towards profiling – become active producers subject to forces of locality.
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[3] As Taylor and Harper (2003) noted in their study of youth usage of mobile phones, the practices of phone sharing and text messaging create a level of reciprocity best understood as an extension of gift-giving practices. So too, Kyongwon Yoon (2003), in his study of youth usage in Seoul, observes that mobile telephonic practices act as a form of gift-giving whereby traditional Korean relationships – as symbolized by the notion/ noun of Cheong (an expression used to denote affective/ attached relationships between people) – are re-enacted in order for users to share feelings of intimacy. Both studies convincingly argue that mobile telephony is not eroding tradition and sociality in the face of rampant individuality.

Moreover, gift-giving evokes gestures of intimacy and affect experienced in modes of co-presence of mobile telephony. However, the contradictory logic of mobile telephony and its playing party to (not the cause of) particular everyday rituals and what Ling (2004) dubs as ‘softening micro-coordination’ (i.e. suspending time by calling so one is never being late but always stretching time) means that often individuals are, by the very obligatory nature of gift-giving, having to participant in such practices whether they want to or not.
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[4] Critics such as Zygmunt Bauman have argued that such industries are capitalizing on the fact that our heavily technological mediated environment has caused a fracture between ‘virtual proximity’ and ‘actual contact’ (2003). Although such an argument negates the long history of co-presence and telepresence that Milne and Urry acknowledge. This leads us to a politics of intimacy that is, as Bauman himself notes, articulated through the ambivalent condition of modernity in forming networks, instead of relationships, founded on liquid love. Whilst Bauman’s argument is certainly as seductive as it is reactionary, his liquid love seems to be scented with an underlying romanticism that presupposes that intimacy was once not mediated.
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[5] An interesting side note to the cultural specificity of light touches is the case of Germany, where the mobile phone is called “handy”, and voice calling far outweighs texting. According to Stephanie Broege this is due to the incompatibility of German with translation into conventional SMS abbreviations. See Broege’s ‘CU in IM: The Instant Messaging Generation’, 2004.
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[6] Australia has many service providers in addition to the aforementioned, such as AAPT and Virgin mobile to name but a few. For details on the various providers see: http://toolkit.gov.au/mobile.csp.html
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[7] Telstra was set to adopt the Black Berry phone – successful in UK and US markets – when the deal subsequently fell through. Now Telstra has signed with NTT DoCoMo to take up i-mode; six years after it was implemented in Japan in 1999. According to Telstra press releases, it is believed that 1 in 20 Australians will have i-mode in the next 3 years. Already established i-mode content service providers include Optus zoo and Vodafone Live. In Optus’s zoo arcade we are greeted with a space not unlike a department store where commodities (such as ring tones and games) can be bought to create a co-present identity between the user in the actual and net/ virtual spaces. According to Fergusson, for 3G technologies to take off in Australia, the carriers and device manufacturers need to consider niche applications for corresponding niche demographics. In other words, the manufacturers need to identify the specific forms of SSM/ MMS genres applicable to particular demographics and attendant forms of cultural capital.
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[8] Legion Interactive is a mobile aggregator that has been instrumental in oiling the intertextuality of Interactive TV and SMS voting for such programs as Big Brother and Australian Idol whereby democracy is denoted by consumers – rather than citizens – having to pay (per SMS) for the right to vote. Whilst Watson identifies the dominance of female voters (concurrent with the fact the female consumers do use more regularly SMS) he seems mystified as to why… apart from perpetuating the disproved stereotype that females shop and males don’t.
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[9] This is, in part, due to the lack of diversity in mobile games. The stereotype of males being gamers is being dismantled, particularly in places of 3G technologies such as South Korean and Japan. With video games such as Will Wright’s The Sims and mobile games such as Kukan’s Miki and Jojo, the female market is starting to be addressed. It is a market full of potential – as is the case in Japan whereby some argue that the yen is pretty much controlled by the fashions/ whims of the high school girl as noted by ‘high-school girl pager revolution’ (Ito et al., 2005). In Japan there has been much research into the ways in which the uptake of mobile technologies – from the pager, PHS to keitai (mobile phone) – by female users has continued to subvert industry expectations. Japan provides a great example of how mobile technologies are ‘user-driven’; the applications that are adopted or fail (dubbed ‘discontinuous innovation’) are subject to the specific cultural factors at play.
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[10] In choosing to limit this sample to the University of Melbourne, this study is marked by particular forms of cultural capital that, in turn, inform the experiences and relationships to mobile phones. In particular, as a demographic encompassing all tertiary users, there were certain forms of class that were not explored. Factors such as class produce specific practices that have been noted in studies of the rise of mobile consumption from yuppies to youth cultures (Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Agar, 2003). However, for the practicalities of this sample survey a particular demographic was limited (i.e. cultural capital) in order to address issues such as gender. With half the respondents being male and the other half being female, encompassing a broad cross-section of age, occupation (current and ex-students, lecturers, administrators) and ethnicity (40 per cent of the respondents came from non-English speaking backgrounds or were not born in Australia), this study found gender to be a determining factor in specific customizing practices from mobile phone fashioning (adorning inside and outside the phone with particular face-plate, ring tones, screen savers) to performativity (from public etiquette to SMS/ MMS forms of textuality and visuality). Whilst age could be noted as a factor – the younger respondents were more active and articulate in their modes of customizing – gender was the dominating distinguishing factor. The notion of young users being ‘pioneers’ was not necessarily the case; rather, as an indicator of one’s lifestyle, innovative use of mobile phone was often found to be associated with users with ‘young’ attitudes (not necessarily young age-wise) and relatively high disposable income levels.
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[11] This is, of course, a contentious argument but the point being made is that much of the ‘micro-coordination’ of meeting up with friends spontaneously or the fleeting postcard-like texts that inject a type of co-present intimacy is missed. I remember getting a mobile phone only a couple of years ago – I resisted for so long to be different – and realizing just how many possible connections I was missing when I didn’t have a mobile. Ignorance is bliss (and encased in a ring tone free silence whereby one is ignorant to how much fun one’s friends are really having!)
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[12] With the burgeoning of new industries such as mobile games (the video games revenue has already outstripped the film industry revenue), there is also a growing number of women producers as well as initiatives to actively promote women in the industry (as both users and producers) such as the women in games mentorship.Studies in the UK and US have noted many mobile phone users are completely unaware of the games available on their devices.
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Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974).

Yoon, Kyongwon. ‘Retraditionalizing the mobile: Young people’s sociality and mobile phone use in Seoul, South Korea’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 327-343

If a network forms a social relation between gestural beings, then that same network must also connect our dissatisfactions of broken relations and our hopes for their renewal. The elliptical gap that generates this frustration is encircled by clusters of geo-gestural behaviour. The framing of the question “network?” does not account for these movements and gestures, but how they come to form a pattern around the communicative material that can produce both satisfying and sad affections.

The network is a maze; it has designated fissures and portals. Using the neologism of the digital maypole provides us with a conceptual tool for thinking through the various indices of cultural life; the digital maypole is a measure of the degrees of gesticulated manifold twists. In the sense of Deleuzean multiplicité, the maypole expresses the network’s torsion balance chart of power. The maypole topology is order through rhythmic tension and torsion, and in this sense its continuous binding of power makes the concept the paradoxical apostate of the network’s labyrinthine structure. The instinctual and biological ties of the etymological maypole enable us to focus upon specific power combinations of the network’s prescience.

A network is formed through relations of various radius vectors. Those vectors, we propose, can be explored using the conceptual paradigm of the maypole. The physical relation from computer-to-ISP, phone-to-tower is often adapted into a digital hierarchy in order to map systems of power, but that abstraction in turn alerts us to the physical shadow of a not always visible referent object, and to the ribboned-string of information that bind us not only to a network (a system for configuring and comprehending syntax) but also to a transitory axis of movement and gesture. What follows are elliptical notes on the gravity of these movements – the digital maypole.

Although it was formed around the idea of economies of affect, our discussion is interested in the gestures of communication. In the context of the network, a vector indicates the direction, transference, and control of quantities of things (information, emotion, affect). The vector was articulated by McKenzie Wark in his book Virtual Geography, where he identified the media ‘conjunctures’ and ‘contours’ of the affective powers of the media images of events surrounding the first Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) (Wark, 1994: ix). Those same contours have engendered a radial thinking of the forces of the controlling powers of affective spaces and objects. We can make glib observations such as Ericsson and Nokia being companies that draw their heritage from countries still ritualistically invested in maypoles, and naturally part of any dialogue on gesture requires such provocative slips to be as gestural as possible, but the network’s traversal of subjective ground determines our radial pursuit. In that spirit, we begin this circular dance with a gesture more familiar; a finger pointing to the nearest pole, and a spoken question: “What is that?” In this identification alone, faith in the symbolic value of the network suffers tremendous pressure from the inchoate flurry of ribbons and leaves that make up the temporal and affective dimensions of life.

May

Consider a maypole firstly as a sacred site, a home to ritual movement; any geophysical configuration of ritual and memory that activates passage and mobilizes movements of human thought in relation to the elements, the seasons, their bodies, their age; that is – each other body.

According to Robert Graves’ maddening and lysergic exegesis on the figuring of languages and histories in Europe, The White Goddess (1947) the function of the maypole was the re-establishment of order through a chaotic, wild ceremony. What makes the maypole a paradigmatic site of radical social renewal is transience and impermanence, tied forever into the Bacchanalian rites of spring. Great artificial hill forts and mounds were constructed, especially in England’s bronze and iron ages, to oversee valleys and form authority by sheer ability of sight. Maypoles were often forms at these sites, such as Avesbury, Silbury Hill, and Stonehenge, to mark the movement into spring. Manifold ceremonies developed across Europe in the centuries since throughout the month of May, symbolically connecting the maypole to ritual waste, abundance. The maypole, then, is the ur-pole, an unsubtle precursor to the microwave reception stations, relay towers and clustered satellite dishes perched atop our lived-in monuments. The radius vectors of signals, images, calls, videos, GPS searches, wireless connections fan out and fold over each other in arcane systems and patterns, different coloured ribbons connecting the dancers to the movable-and-moving centre. In the modern maypole dances, where flowers are gifted and grafted to the pole each May, we would find an analogue of our wasteful bills, ritualistically sent to us each season and symbolically returned.

The maypole dances were part of ritual life over much of Western and Northern Europe, regenerating the usefulness of the community after the winter, providing a place for the first dance of spring. Whether it was the ancient Swedish idea of Irminsul (connecting heaven and earth – elsewhere, the world-tree Yggdrasil), an indigenous Australian initiation-sited dance, or the Ruskin-era ribbon dances, the maypole symbolises social orders: rebirth, regrowth, community formation and the re-establishment of law. Yet this law remains sensory in its ritual-seriousness, playful in its boundaries, and lived in its communicative comfort. The maypole regulates and is regulated around.

Just as ‘space is a practiced place’ (de Certeau, 1984: 117, emphasis in original), gestures require practice and repetition for them to become meaningful. The maypole is a spatial concept, defying the surfaces of meaning. We can think of these gestures of radius vectors through any number of paradigms of thought and everyday practices, for example: speech, construction, organic functions, reactionary or subversive practices, acts of violence, compassion, or love, and movements. The gestural lines attaching themselves to any maypole ‘contain noise’ (Kahn, 1999: 72); they are affectively resonant. This noise has often coagulated history within them, inside, within their containment of practiced place-growth: ‘Occasionally I would put my ear against the bunkers’ hardened shell to catch the roar of war still trapped inside.’ (Lotringer, 2002: 10) We must not forget that the fecundity of men’s wars has nurtured our digital maypoles. The ecology of war has created many radius vectors that cast an ashen pallor over the sunshine implicit in the maypole’s ribbon paradigm. The power lines of communication request human beings be made cripple through a short chain too close to their prison walls. The vectors engendered by torture will resonate in their bones many years later if they still have consciousness of the radiants of nerve endings. Lines of recordings transmit lines of violent sound, molecular disturbances, colonized perceptions of behaviour. Lines of digital sound are sedimentary testimonials to symptoms of communication; the line contains the compound of previous relations, it is intensive time. (Virilio, [1990] 2000:20) The cultural form of the digital maypole enables us to see these connective paradigms more clearly, to be attuned to the screams and bleeding edges of history, to be receptive to the affective encodings of experience compressed into space-time cultural curvatures. We know that the current ecology of the maypole is funded by those self-same bearers of the short chains of hatred and fear.

The invocation of the maypole here is as an absolute law. The maypole is topologically organising; a law-inscribing movement of hierarchical formation. The maypole seems unsolicited for the comprehension of self-organised networks and socially self-regulating information technologies. We take networks to be developmentally asystematic. The maypole greets, and beckons by a simple gesture of familiarity, to an embrace. Maypoles configure organising law, drawing power from already established regulations. Groups may swell and accommodate newcomers, but societal harmonies are maintained by maypole regulations.

Formal and public acknowledgement of social orders and alliance-groups enable reconciliation of multiple events of every conceivable scale because they symbolically enable the paradigmatical power of each established alliance-group. The maypole maintains the haptic siting, and binding, of each group. The maypole is a motion that is invoked to deepen the discussion of the nature and scale of ‘the network’ of communication theory.

Digital Digits

The services of short messages are playful, they engage us in a game of describing what else is said. Using an SMS to locate yourself in time-space is the first engagement, beyond that is something like communication, a game of interpretation. By ‘game’ we can mean a system of simulations (of languages and loves) which reaches a conclusion (the last message). De Certeau spoke of games as disjunctive operations, ‘because they produce differentiating events’, a term borrowed from Freud’s discussion of wit. An exchange of SMS is a game between our agencies; it produces events (conversations) that differentiate us with disjunctive operations. How you read me, how you want to read me, these are the rules which govern the game between us.
The gesture – the movement of thumb to forefinger, the digital digit which permutates into different meanings depending on the technik in the hand – has remained the centre of the social dynamic. A depression is both number and letter; like Hebrew, it enunciates both sequences and names at once. The gesture from one button to other is at once indexical search and flirtation. 160 characters is more than enough to tell a lie or to fall in love; is it enough to speak of truth, or of a movement. The printing of my thumb on my keypad is a gesture which means primarily “I can communicate.” before a thought is sent in masquerading as content, and naturally “I could not” – the prior state. Use of entertainment/communication technology speaks first of the prior inability.

When the opening of a realm is ritualised, it signifies only its prior absence – and what could be more ritualized, arcane, more steeped in magic and prophecy than the screens, tones, sounds, pad layouts, call charges, bills, advertisements and thefts of phones, PDAs and portable game systems? Where else can we practice all the weird combinations of number-letter substitution (4663 = “good”), once the province of academic-religious scholars, on the way to organizing a night at the movies?

Hieroglyphic Breath

The maypole’s theoretical precedents are very much invested in the ritualistic rejuvenation of the acts of speech, writing and reading. In Derrida’s essay ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, reproduced in the volume Writing and Difference, the gyre is widened past what Derrida introduces as ‘theatrical writing’ into Artaud’s “hieroglyphic speech”, the revitalised magical breath of multi-modal expenditures of speech and gesture. Derrida quotes Artaud extensively in order to form ideas of writings-to-come, speeches-to-come and readings-to-come that are birthed in eggs of self-awareness. To do this, the essay takes on the quality of a manifesto by the gesture of excitation. Derrida’s thoughts become excited by Artaud’s, they extend and converse, not agreeing but extending, forming a conspiracy of movement.

Derrida’s speech-to-come is first reunited with gestures; the ‘logical and discursive intentions which speech ordinary uses to ensure its rational transparency, and in order to purloin its body in the direction of meaning, will be reduced or subordinated.’ (Derrida, 1978: 302) This calls to mind Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysical clinamen’, the acts of language that swerve around and away from meanings and logics, leaving the maypole of pure potentiality ensorcelled with affective motion. Most importantly, the clinamen reminds us of the accumulation of meaning through the ‘affective energy’ engendered by movement, as José Gil has noted of the movement of bodies, wherein the previously written continuously reorganises the system of signs. (Gil, 1998:143) We add to the ability-to-speak, alter it forever, every time we act.

More explicitly, Derrida expands Artaud’s hieroglyphic writing as recombining speech with the mythic and magical; ‘the writing in which phonetic elements are coordinated to visual, pictorial and plastic elements.’ (Derrida, 1978:303) An SMS is, strictly speaking, coded and recoded in these hieroglyphic structures, but above this, what concerns both the Theatre of Cruelty and the maypole milieus we form between our technologies is the potentiality in movements like the SMS of a speech before language – accessed not by stripping away codes but by alchemically assembling them into puzzles, allegories, collages, myths, spells, balms, manifestos and so forth.

No wonder that manifestos such as Artaud’s and Derrida’s, seeking to recombine the language-acts with gestural forms, continually reference the rejuvenation of speech. This focus on renewal acts as if logical expression is apologetically historicised as a necessary evil before the coming return to magical culture: ‘We have seen the reasons why hieroglyphs had to be substituted for purely phonic signs. It must be added that the latter communicate less than the former with the imagination of the sacred.’ (Derrida, 1978: 307) Derrida goes on to quote the most intense moment of Artaud’s fraught utopia, where the writing-to-come also re-consists the hieroglyphic act of hopeful writing: ‘And through the hieroglyph of a breath, I am able to recover an idea of the sacred theatre.’ (Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, quoted in Derrida, 1978: 11, emphasis added) The manifesto that Derrida combines with Artaud speaks not about this rejuvenation of speech, but proves to be an example of its process. The conspiratorial velocity of their hope and analysis is meant to foreground a return to hieroglyphic speech that in all the worry about the loss of linguistic meaning in networked culture, we may have forgotten to celebrate. Extending Artaud’s thought, there is no longer a spectacle or spectator, but a festival of language – and any writing which explores it, as their essays did and these notes do, must also engage in its elliptical, resolutely irresolute intuitions.

The maypole’s insinuations towards the seasonal rejuvenation of law and language through a festival are not merely adrift elements of its agrarian and communal past, but the very axis of what we are beginning to understand as a maypole logic. A digital relay station, mobile phone tower or satellite is our contemporary seasonal celebration of the potential return to hieroglyphic speech. The seasons of language are linguistic microclimates; between friends exist atomic conspiracies of meaning that can be reconstituted and deployed in an SMS, the winters from which we emerge bearing our rituals and planning our festival are the silences we unlock our keypads to break.

Once aware of this language in space, language of sounds, cries, lights, onomatopoeia, the theatre must organise it into veritable hieroglyphs, with the help of characters and objects, and make use of all their symbolism and interconnections in relation to all organs and on all levels. (Artaud, quoted in Derrida, 1978: 90) [1]

Clusters Form

Groups are not an expression of democratic spontaneity. Their origin is much older. Groups always form around a corpse. When there is no corpse, that empty place evokes the many corpses that have been there and the many yet to appear. It is the last rite that holds civil society together. The group is a crowd crystal. Those who form it obey a calling, suddenly revealing their adherence to a vast sect: devotees of an official innocuous, essentially persecutory power: Opinion. They throng together and jostle each other without realizing it; they all converge toward one point, which is the empty circle at the centre of the group. There, as Rene Girard has pointed out, they were once able to see the mangled body of the victim of the original lynching. (Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, 1980)

Calasso describes Karl Kraus’ bible of war The Last Days of Mankind as a magical practice, and suggests that if we able to publish with it the second part of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet, some 2100 pages, we would have a “Great Hybrid” for our age; The Age of the Perpetual War, which we call late-cycle capitalism. The moral of this story is entirely too simple. When even mass graves and concentration camps can be brought under the sensibility of public opinion – so that we allow ourselves the temerity to even form ‘ideas’ about what it means for people to be killed en masse in our name, when we even bring it to the realm of argument – we have paved over the varied possibilities of our peaces with the hard, venal sludge of Final Industry.

The maypole is that first, “ur-victim” of winter. The question is not who murdered the victim, but who will clean up the mess. The cluster forms around the possibility of something final happening. When we use a phone, we are jostling around a circle, and a body is nearby. Imagine all the uses of phones; videos, photographs, all capture figments and pigments at the inner edge of the circle – look what I found, look where I am, be impressed with my gestell, and finally, where am I? Or perhaps, more obviously, why am I in the middle of a circle?

Maypole Milieus

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980 [1987:40])

A maypole is a self-organising communication of regional contexts. Once the province of agrarian societies, today it exists as mobile towers/ satellites (of love, of determining ratios of correspondence, of choice elimination), remembered, and re-enacted ritual and monumental sites. The maypole has a mayflowering lineage, wherein a migratory blossoming of communicative abilities nurtures microclimates of ideas. The maypole, as ritual, as performance, as gesture, is a growth movement of seasonal potential. Spring is a form of opportunity – of a qualitative invention-production of a prophetic milieu. The mobile as maypole has a distinctive set of topological translation practices. Pretends to democracy and egalitarianism, but the maypoles are the stakes of every network – grounding powers that are as binding as they are libratory.

If we can take any part of the infinite hype around mobile telephonics to heart, then it has to be the overwhelming sense of ‘festival’ that affects us first. We were sold generation after generation of telephone toys not on productivity, not on convenience or safety, but play. Images of more free time, more connected time with things that really mattered; instant gratification and organization. A networked carnival, a capital free play is enabled by the feedback, the maypole experiential circularity of the double bind of communication – feedback and gesture. As Bateson reminds us, ‘The cat does not say “milk”; she simply acts out (or is) her end of an exchange, the pattern of which we in language would call “dependency”’([1969] 1987: 275). A ‘network’ implies a behavioural pattern, a system of qualifications and qualifiers that belong to no-one, yet belong to the economy of the particular system. A network implies an illusory sense of communicative practices, an establishment of aesthetic commonalities, political boundaries. A network is formed through relations of different maypole radiant vectors. There is no one centre, rather multiple centres, these may shift, move, be erected where necessary. Often the maypole centre may be forgotten, or bulldozed, blown up, decayed beyond recognition, but the genetic remembrance of the performative gesture may resurrect, reinvent a maypole form: an affective energy of the body blossoming forth.

The maypole milieu acts as a translator of the clustered communications that may share an effective economy of behaviour, but not the affective economy of gesture. We don’t need to move to communicate – our gestures are but spirit marks of past mobility. An identifiable site of belonging grounds the maypole. The maypole may partake of other networks, but the ritual power of the maypole over the ur-mobileuse is such that the mimetic milieu is binding. Gestural marks of the maypole’s binding are evident on recipients. Networks forms clusters of individual economies of identifiable behaviour. The maypole has the magnetic potential of a mutable cluster with a past, ever-engaged in a process of reworking, redefinition, refining, testing, reusing, continually doing, becoming. The maypole can provide a non-static communicative basis for this activity; utilising a skater-logic that affects established networks of duration and space, through a continual re-imagining, and re-creation of utility – today’s hand rail is tomorrow’s surface, and yesterday’s confidence provider for the chaining of transport. (cf Borden, 2001; Bauman, 2000)

Dialling history by stepping into the maypole energy means traversing a different modality of Being; one that belongs to the creative code of ideogrammatic communication, a code of hieroglyphs, painting, and mud pies. It’s a modality of play-dough language, porous, and easily transversible across media – thought, text, screen, sound, image, movement (vibration), recognition, affect – and transversal engagement begins anew. Maypole logic is the intensity of affective processes of communication – not just the message, the activity, not just the action, the need. As De Certeau wrote: ‘The most obvious trait of communication is its extreme necessity’. (1997 [1994] 97) But beyond the co-modified temporal modality of the needful play-phone is the potential of the maypole – the power of the middle ground of language marks extending their scale, changing the direction of the vernacular by their affective economies of speed, possibility, and summary. Second-hand sacrifices at the micropolitical, every second the capital clock does not tick, you send me the recording of an affective moment, a careless gesture that blows itself into techno-transferable importance, a tableau vivant.

Somatosensory (body sensations) affects of the mobile communication include a social presence within a public space, a relational thought produced chain of touch and fine motor skills engaging body, hand, eye. These three work tangentially to the neural-psychological configurations of the message, of the communication, of the compression of thought translated into the outgoing semiology of extreme characters, images, and sounds. The SMS effects a colonialism of communication, less about communicating, than about an activity of moving gestures into meanings. The concept of a communication network is a primordialist movement, Appudurai agues – a relational aesthetic that takes a macro event and disseminates it at the level of the local. In doing so, the localized group creates sentiments, learns affective relations – the ‘paradox of constructed primordalism’. (Appadurai, 2003: 28)

The primordial nature of maypole logic redistributes the network, re-learning relations, yet also engendering notions and imaginative responses. A predistributed aesthetics remains – the network is about shifting, the maypole is about gravity. The maypole isn’t centralising time, but topos. We gather, but we remain apart – a network as total concept doesn’t explain this. Memory can drop into the duration of the maypole connection and enable a transversal leap onto another pole, another place. The maypole is not in time, it is time. This is the paradox generated by and in the small group behaviour of mobile networks, affected by maypole energies.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks of how affective thought can alter a field without even touching it, entering it; thought can oblige us to,

…seek the being of the essence in the form of a second positivity beyond the order of the “facts”, to dream of a variation of the thing that would eliminate from it all that is not authentically itself and would make it appear all naked whereas it is always clothed-to dream of an impossible labour of experience on experience that would strip it of its facticity as if it were an impurity’. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968 [1964]:112)

Why Are Less

It is the contract that binds, not the ribbon. Expansive economies compel by paradigmatic ritual; through implicit cultures of management and influence.

The maypole project sketched in these notes is not a metaphorical construct substituted for the network, or a sense of the mobile. In the first instance, these remarks formulate a diagnostic hypothesis of affective regimes under the systems of communication, elsewhere called ‘networked’. Further maypole phenomena and practice include the affective telephonics of war; the alchemical processes of call-and-response under information technology, and the affective oblivion of public writing in the blogosphere. The radius vectors of the maypole have absolutes, and these are to be found within localized and specific communicative movements of the incantory bind of tonal feedback. The maypole is a set of material activities of memory that will recall the retention of the hieroglyphic breath. The maypole’s body politic will take on its contemporary front line, alluding to the primitive movements and ritual gestures that leave their marks and traces on the screens and hard drives of our communication culture.

What can be said about the increasing waves and radiations that pass through us, searching for a receptive signal? What are they, before they reach their destination, if not vibrationary milieus? In one, familiar sense, all milieus are set to vibrate (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 313). Can we really wonder anymore that when these milieus are not met by rhythm, as they search the biospheres for a home, that cancer must result? Cancers developed by the atomic specificity of a vibrationary milieu are related by blood to the ‘critical moments’ that lie on the opposite end of the scale of vibration.

Authors’ Biographies

Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea currently teach in the cinema program at the University of Melbourne, Australia. They are working on a book of Digital Maypole theories that engage the non-textual maypole life and pursue the trails of sugar, copy the hieroglyphic gestures, and participate in the seasonal dances that make up digital life. Contact: digitalmaypole@gmail.com

Notes

[1] A natural extension to the hieroglyph, considering the context of this historicisation, would be the hologram. As a hieroglyph represents many linguistic acts pictorially, the hologram is naturally extendible as it represents itself only when perceived – a natural enough logic to systems of digital communication. The notes here stop at the hieroglyphic and only partially complete the logical circle.
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References

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double (London: Grove Press, 1966).

Appardurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

Bateson, Gregory. ‘Double Bind Theory’ Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, New Jersey & London: Jason Aronson [1969] 1987), 271-278.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

Bök, Christian. Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science (New York: Northwestern Press, 2001).

Borden, Iain. ‘Performing the City: Commodity Critique’ Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001).

Calasso, Roberto. The Forty-Nine Steps trans. John Shepley. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c2001).

De Certeau, Michel. The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings trans. Tom Conley, ed. Luce Girade (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, [1994] 1997).

____. The Practice of Everyday Life trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The University of California Press, 1984).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. (London and New York: Continuum, [1980] 1987).

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference (London and New York, Routledge, 1978).

Driver, Tom F. The Magic of Ritual (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).

Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet trans. T.W. Earp and G.W. Stoner. (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954).

Gil, José. Metamorphoses of the Body trans. by Stephen Muecke. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Girard, René Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Althone, [1978] 1987).

Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1999).

Kraus, Karl, In These Great Times: a Karl Kraus reader; trans. Joseph Fabry…et al., ed. Harry Zohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984).

Lotringer, Sylvere, and Paul Virilio. Crepuscular Dawn (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible trans. Alphonso Lingis, (New York: Northwestern University Press,[1964] 1968).

Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

While the term ‘information super-highway’ might be making a bit of a comeback in a sort of retro-camp lexicon, those who place faith in the internet’s radicalising potential are a little more subdued in their claims, than were its early champions. The idea of the internet as a novel means of making political causes noticeable has been undermined in part by the very success of the network itself. While cheap and ready access makes the internet a plausible way of bringing political discourses and actions into the public domain, the sheer proliferation of information threatens the conditions by which noticeability might be obtained. This is not a ‘version of the overload of information syndrome’ (Ribeiro, 1998: 110) but rather the claim that the conditions under which something might rise above our threshold of perception are both promised and frustrated by the very effectiveness of the internet. For noticeability in the public domain, we argue, depends upon there being a contrast between that which is notable and that which is unremarkable or ordinary.

To the extent that they seek in the internet a means of drawing attention to the adverse effects of globalising processes, critics of globalisation maintain a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the net. While the technologically determinist stance that identifies global technologies ‘as the physical and organizational enabler’ of globalisation (McMahon, 2001: 211) clearly overstates the causal relationship between technology and globalisation, any use of the net for the purposes of criticising global processes necessarily acknowledges its participation in these very processes. The question is, what is the nature of such participation? To the extent that critics of globalisation espy in the internet a means of making a difference, precisely what kind of difference is this?

The political significance of the internet is clearly irreducible to this problem of gaining publicity in order to make a difference. Equally notably, the internet has had a profound impact on the organisational dimension of political practice, enabling speed and extent of information dissemination unimaginable in a pre-network era (Klein, 2000). This paper, however, focuses on the problem of publicity, with the conviction that the organisational aspect of internet use is a necessarily less experimental realm. Use of the internet for large scale and often complex organisational tasks requires maximal efficiency and a minimum of ambiguity. It requires ‘a reasonably straightforward establishment of ethos’ (Gurak and Logie, 2003: 43) among participants and the reduction of noise in message transmission. According to Vegh (2003: 71) ‘(t)he scenario is fairly simple: (a)ctivists now take advantage of the technologies and techniques offered by the Internet to achieve their traditional goals.’ As such, the mobilisation of the net for organizational purposes tends to operate within the dominant economy of truth and its correlative politics.

In contrast, the attempt to gain publicity through the internet has the potential to open up to a certain experimentalism. The stress here is on the word potential, for certainly the use of the internet to gain publicity may remain within much the same economy as the organizational dimension. Again, Vegh (2003: 71-2) speaks of complementary activities in the attempt to mobilise the net ‘as an additional communication channel, by raising awareness beyond the scope possible before the Internet, or by coordinating action more efficiently.’ To the extent, then, that the net is used as a means of bringing into the light already existing truths, and thus enlightening an otherwise ignorant public, it may enact a merely quantitative, but not qualitative transformation. There is an important distinction here between publicity and noticeability. For we will argue that what makes something noticeable, as opposed to merely public, is its capacity to rise above the threshold of the ordinary and enter perception. This entails an experimental attitude, since it is not a question of revealing what is already given but of creating. In an increasingly oversaturated information environment, then, it matters how one conceives of the political potential of the internet.

It is the success of varying strategic uses of the internet that is at stake here, for the way in which the dynamic of globalisation and its resistance plays out is tied up with the attitude one adopts toward the specific context of the internet. It is a question of how one positions oneself with respect to the opponent at hand, but also of how the opponent is positioned or, more accurately, created. And it is a question of the difference between a positing-of-what-is-given and a creation, in the fullest sense of that term. The point is that a different kind of difference can be made when the internet is put to the service of the creation of an event in thought, rather than conceived as a means of changing a given state of affairs.

This argument is given substance through the consideration of two distinct strategic uses of the internet made for the purpose of resisting certain forms and outcomes of globalising processes. We briefly examine the attempts of the superunion, the International Union of Food, Agriculture, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) to use the internet to increase publicity for their counter-arguments to the ideology of world trade. The IUF’s use of the internet is instructive insofar as it typifies the rather didactic use of the net made by many of the new superunions who are keen to maximise their audience and power. We argue that the didactic impulse clearly discernable in the IUF’s use of the net betrays a certain political idealism, and points the way toward some of the limitations of the IUF’s strategies. Where, for the IUF, the internet functions as a means of increasing the spread of a message, in the case of culture-jammmers’ use of the net it has been said that ‘the mayhem is the message’ (Whalen, 1995). This is no simple obscurantism, but a recognition that a play with appearances, rather than the revelation of deep truths, may be necessary to create something unexpected and thus grab public attention. The loose affiliation of culture jammers known as the Yes Men are examined to illustrate this strategy.

It should be noted that the seeming didacticism of our own argument is tempered by a recognition that the claims we make are pretensions, in the strictly degraded sense that word assumes in a representational metaphysics. That is to say, it is not a question of measuring the extent to which appearances pretend to the idea or participate in its truth. Rather, it is a matter of pretending in a more simulacrul sense and thus of bypassing the idea, shifting truth to the surface in order to operate at the level of (no-longer ‘mere’) appearances (Deleuze, 1990). Accordingly, in presenting two different uses of the internet for the purpose of resistance to globalisation we do not seek to provide a judgment based on their appropriateness to their object, nor to measure them against the yardstick of truth. Rather, our evaluations are based on the more superficial criteria of productivity: are they productive of something new and politically significant?

Taking it to the web: the educative enterprise and the dialectical imagination

In suggesting that the use of the internet for organizational purposes and as a means of revealing truths belong to the same economy, we are, of course, referring to the economy of representation. As much poststructuralist and post-representationalist thought has sought to demonstrate, a commitment to representation is simultaneously a commitment to a certain metaphysical distribution of identity and difference. Significantly, those strategic uses of the internet that emphasise its capacity to enlighten a maximally broad audience about the ills of global capitalism tend to fall into a certain repetition. In his seminal work on the metaphysics of representation, Gilles Deleuze (1994) distinguishes between two modes of repetition. In this context we refer to that mode of repetition that reiterates a metaphysics of identity. Put into terms of global resistance, we are speaking here of a dynamic that reiterates the very relation that resistance supposedly seeks to escape. There is a sense in which the act of describing global capitalism as the master of cruelty and the concomitant attempt to educate both the public and capitalism itself recreates a certain dynamic of power and resistance.

In the battle with an increasingly global capitalism, the internet has been embraced by many on the side of labour as a way of educating the public, and thus responding to the imperative to meet global capital with equally global opposition. For the IUF, for example, the internet serves as a means of demystifying the global capitalist machine, so to garner maximal support and strengthen the negotiating position of labour with respect to capital. Seeking to represent the interests of workers in food, agricultural, hotel and catering industries, the IUF has, since the 1990s, been one of the more active global unions. It has attempted, firstly, to negotiate labour agreements with transnational corporations to protect the rights of workers.[1] In addition to campaigns to encourage the formation of unions among food workers in newly-industrializing countries of the Asia-Pacific Region, the IUF has engaged in research projects and the subsequent dissemination of accurate information about the activities and strategies of major global food corporations. Finally, the IUF has maintained an active web-site, which serves as a source of information and campaign strategy material for national unions of food, agricultural, hotel and catering workers around the world.

The IUF website (http://www.iuf.org/) is one of a large group of Internet trade union sites emerging in the 1990s to ‘counter neoliberalism with well thought out argument’. The explicit aim of the website is didactic, seeking to provide information to members of affiliated food unions and the wider community and exposing the actions of multinational corporations to public scrutiny. The links provided from the main homepage are to a series of articles outlining struggles of working class people throughout the world and detailing the recent manoeuvrings of capital. The titles of some of these links are telling: ‘Nestlé: Global Profits but No Global Rights for Workers’; ‘The MAI: Alive and Well at the WTO’; ‘Globalisation and the Challenge to Unions: A Union View from Unilever India.’[2]

The website seeks to counter commonsense, neoliberal justifications of trade organisations such as the WTO and, in particular, their agendas for trade liberalisation in food commodities.[3] Its recent focus on the WTO has aimed to provide accurate, trustworthy information to the labour movement and wider community in view of the remarkable power of the WTO but also because ‘…. the history of the WTO is a history of deception’ (IUF 1). The didacticism and tenor of the expose is illustrated by articles such as ‘Lessons and Lobster from Cancun,’ in which the exposure of the indulgences of the WTO delegates at the Cancun summit inspires a lesson about the audacity of global capital.

Against the myths of the free market the IUF website thus presents the hard facts with which the victims of global capital are all too familiar. It also puts forward a program for global strategies capable of countering the effects of neoliberal ideology and the tactics of its proponents. In particular, the website argues the importance of the international labour movement forming alliances and coalitions with other non-government organisations.[4] ‘Social partnerships’ at various points along food commodity chains are envisaged, which will increase corporate social responsibility in various jurisdictions, perhaps in partnership with consumer organisations (such as ‘Clean Clothes’ and ‘Nike Watch’ campaigns based on the Internet) and campaigns among corporate shareholders (such as that explored for Rio Tinto shareholders by Sadler, 2004).

In many ways the site bears witness to the strategic ambition common to most superunions, by evoking an image of workers empowered to meet the manouevres of global capital point to point. In one article the site informs its audience about the WTO’s ambitions of reviving thus far unsuccessful plans to create a charter of the rights of transnational investors. Such plans are denounced by the IUF as an expression of ‘the drive by transnational capital to free itself of all regulatory limitations, actual and potential’ (IUF 2).[5] Another article serves as a kind of counter to the deployment of rights-based discourse on the side of capital by calling for ‘rights-based multilateralism for the world food system,’ which would include ‘the creation and enforcement of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) as part of the struggle for a just and sustainable world food system’ (IUF 3). The impression that the ideal audience would gain is not only that workers’ rights vie with those of capitalism, but also that the forces and means of the international workforce are of an equivalent power. Countering the evils of globalised capital and demonstrating the equality of opposing sides in the capital/labour war requires a good dose of anti-ideological realism, and the sheer reach of the internet makes it an especially valuable tool.

On the whole, the material on the IUF website adds up to a strong argument about the continuing power of corporate capital to dominate, and be the principal beneficiaries of, a singular neoliberal political agenda and to exert powerful influence over the WTO in its decisions about trade. Yet the conceptualisation of the WTO as playing a paramount role in globalisation is normalised not only by the neoliberal economic think-tanks and the WTO itself, but also by the oppositional discourses in which the IUF is embedded.[6] These help reinforce the neoliberal conflation of globalisation with trade liberalisation and the apparent significance of the flattening of differences between national regulatory regimes which control flows of direct foreign investment. The content and tenor of the site is thus to some extent dated by research indicating that, since the mid 1980s at least, neoliberalism has developed very unevenly at the scale of the nation-state so there is now a variety of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002).

Laudable as their didactic goals seem to be, then, the strategies played out on the IUF website serve to reinforce the idea of the global scale as the primary action space for labour movement campaigns around issues of trade liberalisation, but also perpetuate globalist notions about the key role of global bodies such as the WTO.[7]

The way that the internet figures as a tool for enhancing the strategies of a superunion such as the IUF is both symptom and cause of the framework within which the struggles of labour and capital in the global age are conceived. In the first place, the internet is viewed by the IUF as a medium, in the most simple use of that term. It is a means by which a communication is affected, with its only specificity as a medium being its seemingly global reach. The instrumentality of this conception of the internet rests on a belief in the transparency of the medium. The internet serves as the means by which the IUF can publicise their frank and non-ideological reflections on the current state of affairs and reveal the facts that the ideology of global capital covers over. A belief in the singular nature of the true state of affairs is matched by a certain dogmatism of style. To the extent that the articles included on the site acknowledge viewpoints that diverge from their own, such views are invariably constructed as so self-interested as to be parochial and necessarily partial.

The point here is not so much to relativise the truth claims presented on the IUF site as to question the political significance of the use of the internet the site represents. Even if the IUF are right – and they are probably correct in many of the issues they raise – they are nonetheless confronted with the dual problem of a constantly dwindling membership and an increasing marginalisation from many previously attended decision-making fora. From a political perspective, being right may be of limited value. The point is not to negate the importance of issues raised by a superunion such as the IUF but to consider how the internet might be mobilised to deal with a problem specific to the age of global media; namely, how is it possible to grab the attention of an audience not only saturated with information but to some extent exhausted by the hard-fact strategy? For its part, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM) gives some credence to the notion that politicising serious issues might require other-than-serious means, such as the online comic strip, ‘Globot’ (ICEM). Yet the ICEM remain committed to the program of educating its audience to the gap between the myths of globalisation and the reality of the dehumanised worker at the behest of global capital and its seemingly limitless insolence.

What is the character of the didactic impulse espied in such uses of the internet? At the outset, such didacticism betrays a commitment to a representational image of truth. This means, in the first instance, that truth is regarded as something that is pre-existent, merely waiting to be recovered or uncovered. Trade unions such as the IUF and the ICEM have truth on their side to the extent that the truth of their statements is determined by what such statements designate (the objective reality to which they refer). And the disclosure of truth is made possible by an assumed correspondence between the statements made in the name of truth and their object. Conversely, the discourse of global capital (clothed as it is in neo-liberal rhetoric about the promise of the global market) deals in falsehood to the extent that its claims disguise or cover over reality.

Importantly for politics, the possibility of action arises from this idea of truth as pre-existent, objective, relatively stable and able, eventually, to be brought into the public light. The operative idea of politicisation here involves a familiarly Platonic distribution of lightness and darkness. To politicise is to remove the layers of falsehood produced by mere appearances in order to subject claims to the light of day; to this end it is entirely consistent that Plato’s famous parable of the cave should be found in his explicitly political work, The Republic (Arendt, 1958).

To the extent that the political potential of the internet is tied up with a representational image or economy of truth, the manner in which resistance plays out may be, at least in part, metaphysically predetermined. The seeming contingency (though predictability) of the torturous relation between labour and capital may obscure the metaphysical mechanisms that reiterate this relation of cruelty. It is in Deleuze’s (1991) work on the literary writings of von Sacher-Masoch that the repetition of a relation structured by cruelty is linked most explicitly to the educative process and to the dialectical imagination it necessarily entails. We are already familiar with the application of the concept of masochism to realms outside the directly or explicitly sexual. Yet where the commonplace use of the term to imply a morbid gratification in receiving pain tends to conceive of masochism in terms of an individual pathology or perversion, Deleuze’s analysis underscores the limits of such a conceptualisation.

In the first place, this individualistic account of masochism fails to appreciate that masochism concerns a relation. Yet this is not to imply that the identity of the masochist is dependent upon that of the sadist, as conventional wisdom would have it. Deleuze stringently rejects the conceptual pairing by which masochism is understood as sadism’s complementary opposite, arguing that the other of the masochist relationship is not the sadist who derives pleasure from the other’s pain and is necessarily happy to have a worthy victim. This is partly because the sadist requires an unconsenting victim for his pleasures. But it is also because the sadomasochistic complex misconstrues the masochist as victim. Or rather, it fails to capture the particularity of the masochistic position.

Secondly, then, an overly subjectivist approach tends to miss the complexity of the power relations at hand. In his analysis of the personnel of the masochistic relationship Deleuze (1991) points out that the power relationship between the victim and torturer is not what it seems at first glance. While appearances would suggest that the masochist is an ultimately powerless victim, Deleuze focuses on the complexities involved in the didactic and persuasive endeavour. For while the masochist appears superficially to be at the mercy of the other, it is he who fashions the torturer, persuading them to partake in an alliance, devising the contract that will regulate that alliance and inventing the rituals through which the contract will be actualised. Deleuze (1991: 20) writes that in masochism we are dealing ‘with a victim…who needs to educate, persuade and conclude an alliance with the torturer…’ This educative task appears as something of an imperative in much trade union rhetoric in light of the copious instances recounted of the sufferings inflicted at the hands of global capital. But a site such as that of the IUF certainly does not intend to stand as a testament to the acceptance of the victim status. Rather, it conveys the image of the educator who faces at once the torturous machinations of capital and a public insufficiently informed to act, with a sense that the process of education undertaken is also a process of empowerment. An arduous struggle though it may be, the battle with an ill-informed public and an indifferent or actively cruel adversary is at least underway.

But here Deleuze’s analysis of the masochistic relationship is again instructive, for he stresses that the task of education is an inherently risky and often frustrating one. This is because the educative task is an essentially idealist one. Deleuze argues that the personal element denoted by the positions of victim and torturer is always secondary to an impersonal, ideal or supra-sensual element. In Masoch’s writings the machinations of the central relationships are impelled by the masochist’s attachment to an Ideal (the idea of the torturer). Here the incidental features of the ideal torturer (the fur-clad, whip brandishing woman) are subservient to the two indispensable characteristics that the masochist’s torturer must embody: a coldness or indifference and a capacity for cruelty. What is important is that the educative endeavour is, strictly speaking, an impossible task, for the malevolent party is ultimately an ideal identity created by the masochist. This is an education in which the educatee is not worthy of (not up to) the lesson, because their very identity is that of the ideal – as opposed to actual – torturer.

The profoundly frustrating character of the task of education is readily acknowledged in the discourse characteristic of many trade union websites. Formation of alliances are seen as turning points or as the ‘first round victory’ (http://www.iuf.org/) in a long and continuing struggle. But perhaps the relative and partial nature of success is not because the command of the torturer is so absolute and total but in part because of the representational structure in which the identities of labour and capital exist. It may also be because the operative idea of politicisation – making public as a revelation of the given – necessarily denies the ‘creative’ element involved, which is to say that it overlooks the fact that the state of affairs that appears to be given is in fact the product of a positing. Labour posits, or rather creates, capital as the hostile party, then seeks to enter into contractual relationships through which it, as educator, might derive a certain power. As the scare quotes around ‘creative’ suggest, the risk is always that this is a more reactive than genuinely creative understanding of political action. So the impression of empowerment associated with the education may be somewhat illusory. While ‘it is the victim who speaks through the mouth of his torturer’ he does so ‘without sparing himself’ (Deleuze, 1991: 22). Moreover, the malevolent other can hardly behave otherwise; as Masoch’s Wanda puts it, ‘(Y)ou made me what I am and now you blame me’ (von Masoch 1991: 260).

The strategies employed by an organisation such as the IUF, exemplified in their recent uptake of the internet, certainly have their place. Yet it is important to challenge the seeming necessity with which a particular mode of action becomes a political imperative. It appears to be unavoidable that resistance become global and the political process seems invariably adversarial. The position of labour with respect to capital also assumes the weightiness of something inevitable, as does the need to enter into agreements with capital. As one advocate of so-called win-win agreements puts it, ‘collaboration or die’ is ‘the biggest governance issue of our times’ (Macrae, 2004). Win-win strategies have indeed produced positive outcomes with respect to workers’ conditions and rights, but they have done little to challenge the conceptual, or rather, representational, space in which the dynamic of globalisation/ resistance is played out. This is repetition in the banal (and this word can no longer be seen as innocent) sense, a repetition that distorts difference through its recognition of the same old story, a story in which the identities of labour and capital remain intact (albeit globalised).

It is not merely the repetition of familiar relations that is at issue here but the failure to see in the internet new potentials for resistance. Indeed for some there is nothing inherently new or promising about the internet. As Marshall (2003: 1) writes of the new internet politics, ‘(t)here is no reason to assume the old order has lost or will lose – even if it may be slightly transformed.’ But while Marshall (2003: 13) suggests that the internet ‘is not inherently, of itself, radical’ it is perhaps more accurate to say, at least in the case of trade union approaches, that there is nothing specific about the internet as a medium per se. Certainly it is no accident that a hard-fact style of didacticism would be effected through a representational approach to the internet. The idealism that underpins the educative enterprise is animated by the a dialectical spirit that is Platonic in nature (Deleuze, 1991). In the task of educating, the internet may well reach a broader audience than previously possible. But in assessing the potential of the internet to make a difference in merely quantitative terms there remains the problem of gaining the visibility necessary to give issues political significance in the eyes of others. How might a qualitative difference be made, such that something which was previously ordinary and unremarkable is perceived to be singular and noteworthy?

Working at the surface: playing with appearances

According to Adler and Mittelman (2004: 195), resistance is never merely negative, since it ‘involves new ideas, organisations and institutions, daily practices, and a plurality of dispersed, local, and personal points of counter-power.’ Yet it is certainly the case that some resistance is more easily defined in terms of an act of negation and by the negativity involved in the dialectic of political progress. How might resistance become at once more affirmative and novel? According to Roe (2004: 1) the capacity of the internet to open up to new conceptual and political possibilities hangs on its ability to shake off ‘a particular idea of the interface,’ namely, the textual model. Roe tends to be in agreement with Poster’s (2001: 15) claim that printed texts elicit a certain (for him, modern) way of thinking; they tend to appear as ‘representations of an outside world, nurturing the reader to reflect upon the representation as correspondence or contradiction.’ For our purposes it is not so much the difference between a textual and what Roe (2004) calls a post-textual model that is important, but rather the link he makes between a representational approach to the internet and a particular idea of the surface that is the interface. Roe (2004: 1) suggests that the representational model ‘has always presented an infrastructure that consists of a two-dimensional surface to which it sutures a subject in a face-to-face relationship.’ We have suggested that the representational model presumes to hold the subject’s fascination precisely because, in line with the being/appearance metaphysic it inherits, the subject is drawn to the truth that exists always beneath the surface. The kind of strategic use of the net exemplified by the IUF website hopes to suture the subject to the two-dimensional surface by enthralling them with the unfolding and revealing that will take place there. In what follows we elaborate an alternative approach to the potentials of the internet for resistance, which goes beyond the idea of politicisation as a process of bringing a given truth to the surface.

The phenomenon of cultural jamming is born of a perceived need for novel approaches to the criticism of dominant cultural and social conventions, in light of the specific character of global power and the potentials for resistance offered by global technologies. A group of culture jammers such as The Yes Men are a good example of this form of resistance. They utilise internet technologies in order to parody institutions of global governance, such as the WTO. Colonisation of the domain names of such institutions has been a key strategy here, the Yes Men making optimal use of legal lacunae in domain name arbitration and the cost in time and money (even for the WTO) of prosecuting perceived offenders. The Yes Men (Theyesmen 1) claim to be:

an international group of men and women who use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business.

This characterisation of their ambitions and activities forms the (very) small print included at the end of a page of one of the websites (http://www.gatt.org) surreptitiously colonised by the Yes Men. The website mimics that of the WTO (http://www.wto.org/), enabling The Yesmen to ‘borrow’ the WTO’s identity and authority, or, as the WTO angrily put it, the Yes Men’s site ‘literally steals’ the look of the WTO (Sayer, 2001). In addition to replicating the WTO site, the Yes Men’s site enables them to harvest the email addresses of visitors to the official site. The copious references to the WTO made on the gatt.org page mean that some search engines direct users to it rather than to the official WTO site. Unsurprisingly, the Yes Men’s stunt has given rise to some irritation on the part of the WTO, who claim to be encouraging of criticism of its role, but within reasonable limits. As WTO spokesman Jean Guy Carrier puts it, the Yes Men may have a ‘serious argument to make for or against the WTO and we encourage that…. But not masquerading as the WTO… It’s very deceptive’ (Sayer, 2001).

The effectiveness of the Yes Men’s online mimicry and their colonisation of the name of GATT (the precursor to the WTO) has, most famously, allowed the Yes Men to create havoc when, in 2001, an organiser of a conference on international trade law in Salzburg wrote to GATT.org to request a WTO representative at the conference. The Yes Men sent a speaker who delivered ‘an alarming Powerpoint lecture about removing hindrances to free trade’ (Theyesmen 2). Among other things, the supposed representative of the WTO argued ‘that violence is acceptable in banana trade so long as prices stay low and trade is free.’ To the dismay of the Yes Men, the audience showed no sign of reacting to their ‘radical’ claims, nor to the tenor of the presentation on the whole, which elicited little more than interested questions from the audience.[8] Significantly, however, this did not affect the Yes Men’s assessment of the success of the event, which never proposed to be a mere counter-critique. After all, as the WTO themselves register, it is deception, rather than argument, that does the greatest damage (Sayer, 2001). The event – and its spin-offs – did generate a good deal of attention (Theyesmen 2).

In its most recent stunt, the Yes Men mis-represented the Dow Corporation on BBC World Television after an email came to their parody Dow site (Theyesmen 3). The email sought a representative of Dow to discuss the position of the company on the 20th Anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy (December 3, 2004) and the Yes Men subsequently obliged. Their announcement that Dow would take full responsibility for 20 years of suffering endured by victims of the tragedy because of Dow and Union Carbide gained a high degree of public attention (it was aired twice before the real Dow Corporation discovered it). It remains to be seen whether the Yes Men have gone too far with this stunt.[9] There are speculations that they might well face prosecution at the hands of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission due to the 4.24% drop in Dow shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the 0.6% drop on the New York stock exchange that immediately followed the announcement (Paterson and Bindra, 2004; Goldfarb, 2004). Though perhaps, in a sense, it is all publicity.

In what ways do such strategies go beyond the strategic uses of the net considered above? It can be said that the refusal of a didactic use of the internet enables the Yes Men to make a difference in thought because they operate in a register other than that of representation, which would invariably subjugate difference within the economy of identity (Deleuze, 1994). Difference moves not in the space between (real and imposter) identities but in the surface effects that constitute the event. And, though the Yes Men (Theyesmen 2) claim ‘to provide a public glimpse of the behind-the-scenes world of business,’ the political significance of their use of the internet is irreducible to the public revelation of otherwise hidden truths. The enabling distinction here is between the use of the internet as a medium for an ultimately suprasensual project and a sensitivity to the sensual and sensuous qualities of the internet. To suggest that the type of strategy employed by the Yes Men involves a degree of receptiveness to the material qualities of the medium is not to reduce such qualities to the level of symbolic content (compare to Brügger, 2002) but to focus on the capacity of the internet to effect a disguise or displacement.

The motif of disguise has been particularly germane to discourses on the character and implications of cyberspace. The idea that one of the defining features of the internet is ‘the absence of physical presence’ has led to copious ‘revolutionary claims for the kinds of identities available on-line’ (Slater, 1998: 91). The difference between offline and online existence is often posited in terms of the difference between an embodied and disembodied experience: ‘Would i exchange this body for a life in wires?’ writes a participant of the mailing list, Cybermind (cited by Marshall, 2003). Of course, much has been written to critique the notion that the internet is an ideal medium of disguise because of the transcendence enabled by cyberspace. As Plant (cited by Ribeiro, 1998: 60) classically puts it:

There is no escape from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing transcendent. These are simply the disguises that pander to man’s projections of his own rear-view illusions; reproductions of the same desires which have guided his dream of technological authority and now become the collective nightmare of a soulless integration.

Yet discourse about the potential of the internet to effect a disguise is poorly represented as a debate between advocates of the idea that the internet enables a certain transcendence of embodied identity and its detractors. Nor is it merely a question of an opposition between those unable to escape the moral demands of authenticity and those who wholeheartedly celebrate the possibility of new identities enabled by the internet. Rather, as Slater’s (1998) study of the online trading of sexpics demonstrates well, those engaged in the attempt to perform new identities online may themselves remain highly precoccupied with the difference between real and projected identities and with the dangers associated with the identity of the impostor.

The novelty of the Yes Men’s actions is diminished to the extent that a play on identity is seen as their central feature. It is not merely that this is not the most interesting dimension of their use of the internet but that it may constitute a false problem. It would be to remain too tied to the kind of dialectical imaginary that characterises the masochist relationship, whereby the masochist is ‘a true dialectician, who knows the opportune moment and seizes it’ (Deleuze, 1991: 22). Reducing the Yes Men’s actions to a play on identity also applies inappropriate criteria to the judgement of the success of their actions; after all, the deception is invariably short-lived. It is more a question of the unpredictable effects generated by their actions, and these will best be discerned when our focus moves from the depths of ideal identities toward the surface. It is through the operations of disguise and displacement at the surface level that a difference is able to be produced in thought.

The role of humour is important here. In the first place, the Yes Men have a certain freedom because they do not take seriously their own identity as opponents of globalisation, or at least appear not to be constituted through any strong identification on the side of resistance nor any positing of an identity that they would oppose. Their actions and self-representations tend, in fact, to be characterised by a marked lack of gravity all round and humour in its various forms is key to their critique of global institutional authority. Critchley (2002) points out that the modus operandi of humour is displacement; it creates something new because it defies our expectations. Critchley suggests that this capacity enables humour to open up a gap between things as they are and things as they might be, thus working fundamentally at the level of the imagination. Yet a humourous mode of discourse is at its most interesting when it does not posit, nor refer back to, a given state of affairs. Put another way, humour is most capable of producing something new when it is not understood through a possible/real opposition, which would reduce reality to an ideal that pre-existed and conditioned it (Bergson, 1968). Rather, the kind of critique that a light-hearted relationship to the internet might enable takes thinking onto another register; namely that of the virtual and the actual.

Much has been written on the relationship between Deleuze’s recuperation of the virtual and the medium of the internet. For us it is through Deleuze’s (1993) reading of Leibniz that the concept of the virtual can be brought to bear most profitably on political uses of the internet. In Deleuze’s The Fold the virtual can be seen as that reality that lies below the threshold of conscious perception, or ‘macroperception.’ To put it another way, the virtual is the realm of ordinary, obscure and yet public ‘microperceptions.’ The process whereby something becomes singular or noticeable is that in which a differential relation changes the direction of habitual perception. To return to the Yes Men, the Yes Men’s site GATT.org, has a virtual potential as it ‘lies in wait,’ barely distinguishable from the official WTO site that it repeats. What makes the Yes Men’s site noticeable is the relation established by the mistaken chance encounters and mistaken chance invitations that the Yes Men duly accept. But even here we might not have reached the stage of noticeability. What is important, however, is that a series of relations and events is established and these give rise to something remarkable. Certainly it may be the event of the press release – in which the Yes Men own up to the hoax – that constitutes the threshold of noticeability (what Deleuze terms, after Leibniz, the vinculum). Yet it is in the obscurely perceived steps and relations prior to the announcement that divergence proliferates and the potential of the virtual is most powerful.

As Murphie (2002) notes, there is a sense in which the virtual has always been with us, and yet certain technologies and events allow its operations greater play. We have suggested that the sheer quantity of information on the internet may frustrate the attempt to act in a politically significant manner. But it is the publicity of the internet – and the proliferation of information that generates – that also provides the conditions of possibility for something to become remarkable. Note here that the condition of publicity is in a sense already met when the public is understood in the virtual sense outlined above, as that which is obscurely perceived. Here the virtual may be seen to challenge the distribution of lightness and darkness attendant upon representation, where publicity is achieved only after the hidden and obscure are brought into the light of day.

Understood from the point of view of the virtual, the internet’s mass of information can be seen as so many obscurely perceived, public perceptions. As Kellner and Thomas (n.d.: 3, original emphasis) note, each time a user clicks onto an internet site or digital image ‘the computer performs an operation on the data that transforms it into an actualized image.’ Each click represents the actualisation of a new, qualitatively different relation. Nunes (1999) is right to register that the ‘interface encourages users to navigate…primarily by way of drift: “browsing from link to link, rather than moving from destination to destination.’ But it would be premature to see ‘surfing the net’ as necessarily more liberatory than travelling the ‘Information Superhighway’ (Nunes, 1999), when the attempts of the Yes Men to direct users to a destination is taken into account.

Clearly there is a qualitative difference between the event in thought generated when we, as authors, access the Yes Men’s site and when a seeker of a WTO representative unwittingly initiates a series of displacements and a chain of events. The Yes Men’s particular mode of playing with disguise and displacement, with lightness and darkness emphasises the internet’s capacities in this respect. For what is exposed is never something given (a previously hidden truth) but the ‘previously unthought’ (Keller, 1995: 2).

This is possible because the internet is always more than a ‘tool of representation’ able to be more or less resourcefully used and manipulated. To suggest, then, that the internet enables the Yes Men to make disguise and displacement central to their operations is to evoke an alternative economy to that of representation. While the Yes Men’s websites are involved in a reproduction of appearances they do not, in any metaphysical sense, refer back to the model. They function as simulacra, to the extent that that concept is understood not as a copy of the copy but as a challenge to the very logic of model and copy (Patton, 1994).[10] If the displacement affected in the Yes Men’s gestures works at the surface, similarly, their disguise may be at its most fruitful when it is seen in other than representational terms. Disguise and displacement gain an autonomy from the thing or event that would be repeated or displaced and highlight the differential mechanisms by which something new might come about. Where a representational approach to the use of the internet (and the gravity that appears to necessitate it) risk reiterating familiar relations and structures of cruelty, disguise and displacement freed from the model may open up to the repetition of difference. Again, it is because the Yes Men do not subject the internet to the demands of idealism that a shift in political strategy is affected, such that it is no longer a question of attempting to change a situation given to us but of generating an event in thought.

Conclusion

As always, there is the task of finding a way of speaking about the political potentials of the internet without becoming caught in the utopia/dystopia conceptual trap. In a sense, resistance that does not seek to reveal the truth of a state of affairs so much as to create an effect (perhaps through a proliferation of lies) bypasses the kind of criteria that tends to govern both utopic and dystopic assessments of the web. The projection of future possibilities or dangers is more the business of the idealist. For the IUF, for example, the essential identity of global capital is not in question, though political action may affect a change for the better. To the extent that the internet holds out the promise of increasing public support, it might have a role to play in making the unions big enough to take on global capital. And to the extent that strategic alliances might be made with capital, business between labour and capital might be carried out with fewer ill effects.

A less idealist mobilisation of the net has the potential to actualise the capacity of post-representational media to give rise to changes in kind rather than mere changes in degree. A mode of resistance that does not primarily concern itself with revealing the reality of things, nor with educating in order to produce a change, may be capable of bringing transformation about because it works with a different logic of truth. Truth is neither deep nor hidden but far more superficial, and thus effects a different kind of politicisation that, under the current conditions of globalised media, may have a greater capacity to cause a ripple, gain visibility and grab public attention. Boyd (2002) suggests that the ‘infectious’ axiom ‘truth is a virus’ might serve as a sort of mantra for political activity and, in his case, as a guide to his strange “career” in culture jamming and guerrilla media productions. He cites Rushkoff’s analogy between ‘media viruses that spread through the datasphere’ and biological viruses that ‘spread through the body or community.’ Rushkoff (cited by Boyd, 2002: 1) writes:

The ‘protein shell’ of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero – as long as it catches our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed.

To suggest that political strategy in the age of global media might function in such a way is not to condemn action to the whims of fashion. It is, rather, to actualise the specifically political character of human action, which, after Arendt (1958), involves the capacity for initiating something that is fundamentally new and unpredictable. Beyond the masochism of beating one’s head against the real, there may lie the production of new possibilities.

Authors’ Biographies

Scott Sharpe is a lecturer in the School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences at UNSW@ADFA, Canberra. He teaches cultural geography and his research interests converge around the spatial relationship of thought and politics. He is the co-holder (with Bob Fagan) of a large ARC Discovery Project Grant Geographies of Global Resistance of which this work is a part.

Maria Hynes is currently an associate lecturer in the Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her research interests include the political and cultural critiques of globalisation, the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and biological science, and the relationship between art and terror..

Bob Fagan is Professor of Human Geography at Macquarie University, Sydney and co-holder of a large ARC Grant Geographies of Global Resistance. He has had a long-standing interest in globalisation and his diverse research interests include the geo-politics of the food industry, the geography of labour and industrial relations and the economic georgaphies of cultural industries. His book Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience (Oxford UP: co-authored with Michael Webber) is in its second edition.

Notes

[1] See for example agreements with banana corporations in Central and South America – agreements with Chiquita International were signed in 2001(see Fagan, 2002).
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[2] MAI – Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
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[3] A sample survey of the IUF web-page in April 2004, showed information pieces around issues such as industrial safety, GM foods, shift-work conditions for supermarket workers and the imminent collapse of leading Italian food manufacturer Parmalat.
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[4] For example The Rainforest Alliance in environmental agreements brokered in Costa Rica with Chiquita International over environmental standards in its banana plantations (see Bendell, 2001).\
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[5] The MAI was effectively shelved in the late 1990s after successful political campaigns against it within and by the European Union and ultimate failure of the OECD to ratify it.
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[6] Recent research findings present a rather different story about the role of the WTO in neoliberal agendas. In relation to recent trade wars involving bananas, for example, research shows the continued importance of the United States’ Government and European Union in controlling trade outcomes. Market shares by the ‘big three’ TNCs, between them controlling two-thirds of the global banana trade, remain political constructions despite intervention of the WTO in a dispute between the USA and EU (1995-2001) (see Fagan, 2005 forthcoming). Far from acting as the ‘high court of globalisation’, the WTO since its formation in 1995 has been toothless in enforcing its trade rules, especially in relation to the United States and European Union (see Brimeyer, 2001; and Fagan, 2005 forthcoming). Further, despite the central role of banana TNCs in the trade war between the USA and the European Union, their role has been quite different in other parts of the world banana market, for example in the Asia-Pacific region (see Fagan, 2005 forthcoming).
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[7] This has been echoed by the anti-globalisation protests in recent years focused on the symbolism of WTO meetings.
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[8] The only exception taken to the speech related to the ‘WTO’s’ perceived insults to Italians, when the Yes Men claimed that the Italian practice of taking long lunches was evidence of the laziness of Italians. Such practices, it was claimed, were deleterious to the functioning of the free market and ‘should be outlawed in the name of standardized business hours’ (http://www.theyesmen.org/).
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[9] Certainly the Yes Men raised misgivings about raising the hopes of the victims of the Bhopal disaster but concluded that this risk was worth running given the publicity potential and the 20 years of false hopes and disappointment the victims had endured at the hands of union carbide.
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[10] Patton (1994) notes that the difference between a more Derridean and a Deleuzian understanding of the simulacrum hangs on the question of whether one identifies its logic with representation or finds in it the possibility of an alternative economy. For Derrida, the simulacrum still has a degree of participation in the idea, as a further removed copy.
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Portable media devices and ‘wearable’ communications technologies are becoming both increasingly ubiquitous and personalised, penetrating and transforming everyday cultural practices and spaces, and further disrupting distinctions between private and public, ready-to-hand and telepresent interaction, actual and virtual environments. Such devices range from the standard mobile phone – which itself is exceeding its role as a communication device – to highly sophisticated multimedia hybrids, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players, personal media centres and handheld networkable game consoles. This article presents some initial thoughts pre-empting a bigger research project on mobile connectivity and media, and their emergence as portable microworlds or pocket technospaces. The project en large aims to investigate the emerging socio-cultural and techno-corporeal effects of mobile interactive media, and how they are changing the ways people interact with both their digital interfaces and each other, altering the shape and meaning of community and spatial location, and our embodied and agentic placement within metropolitan, pedestrian (i.e. literally ‘walkable’) and urban environments.

Much of the research and analysis in this project will focus on the mobile phone itself and its ostensible mutability into digital video camera, email and web interface, MP3 player, personal organiser, wireless broadband laptop-link, data storage and game device. In her study on mobile phone use in the global context, Sadie Plant observes that the mobile phone is often used as the primary means of Internet access (Plant, 2003).[1] The multi-functionality of the mobile phone, together with high-speed wireless third generation (3G) and Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) networks, and the adoption of Internet protocol technology, means that both mobile phone carriers and makers of handheld phones are poised to move beyond the voice market and into that of mobile media and data communication (strategy+business magazine, May 10, 2004). Moreover, today’s advanced handsets ‘are disrupting many industries simultaneously, including photography, music and games’ (The Australian, September 7, 2004).

Yet while the mobile phone is perhaps the most significant technology in the context of this project, and will be the focus of much of this article, it is part of a more general telematic trend towards wearable, handheld and pocket communications and entertainment media. Aside from the multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player and PDA, there exist a number of handheld interactive media devices including Nintendo’s GameBoy and DS (dual screen), Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), phone-game hybrids such as Nokia’s N-Gage QD and Samsung’s recent rival (the SCH-V450), and the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) handset which can receive TV broadcasts over the cellular network. The PSP, for example, has been launched as an all-in-one multimedia entertainment platform targeted for the adult market, with a USB 2.0 port for further expandability and connectivity to other devices, and the capability for wireless multiplayer interaction, network applications and data transfer. Thus, such handheld games and portable multimedia devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and should be examined both in terms of their potential merger with mobile phone functionality, and in their own right as nascent new media forms. Significantly, over the past two decades many of the distinctions between mass media and communications technologies have converged to become – as suggested at a recent symposium – “network media” (‘Network Media: Code Culture, Convention’ Symposium, University of Western Australia, September 9-11, 2004). As services based upon telecommunications – mobile telephony, the internet, video-on-demand, personal video recorders (PVRs), interactive television (iTV) – become progressively experienced as everyday media content, the environments of information and communication merge. Such a shift means that ‘audiences’ become ‘users’ (or agents), effecting changing relationships between individuals and society, private and public domains, temporal and spatial perception, location and presence, embodiment and interface.

The traditional logic underlying media theory considered every media object to be assembled in some kind of media factory (like a Hollywood studio), such that multiple identical copies produced from a master could be distributed to those with access to the medium; broadcasting, film distribution, and print technologies all follow this logic (Manovich, 2001). In a new media environment – via programmable, personalisable, interactive, hybridised, convergent and networkable technologies – rather than media objects being made available to mass audiences, individuals are increasingly micro-targeted: film and TV productions now engender multiple media manifestations (value-added websites, interactive DVDs with extras and games, customised mobile content); every visitor to a website can view their own custom version created on-the-fly from a database; personal digital video recorders enable television consumers to pre-programme their own ‘niche-TV’. The mobile handset and portable console are also devices residing in this nexus between communication and information: one’s child can be kept busy during a long drive watching the Garfield movie or playing games on Mum’s Nokia; video and image content can be captured by the mobile’s inbuilt digital camera and transmitted to friends via email, downloaded onto a computer or viewed on a domestic TV set or home theatre.

Clearly the cultural impact of digital telecommunications, ‘narrowcast’ and network media are impossible to apprehend with models that assume mass audiences and mass distributed messages. Over the past decade, the conceptual development of what has been termed ‘new media theory’ has sought to effectively grasp this imbrication of media and communications, and the changes wrought by the interactive and manipulable potential of digital technologies (Lunenfeld, 1999; Bolter and Grusin, 2000; Manovich, 2001; Munt, 2001; Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 2003; Lister et al, 2003; Everett and Caldwell, 2003; Hansen, 2004). To date key new media texts such as these have not engaged explicitly with the mobile phone, pocket computer or game console as ‘new media’ with their own specificity. In texts which do include chapters on mobile phone use (Munt, 2001), the mobile is considered primarily as a voice or text transmission device, with no account of its emergence as an interactive digital medium. Yet clearly the current mobile media environment is evolving beyond the basic provision of information and voice/text transmission services. Today’s handhelds are becoming increasingly multifunctional sociotechnical devices, portable and interactive technospaces which enfold (and unfold) an assortment of media forms. This transformation requires a critical approach that considers mobile media as more than telecommunications tools, but also as hybrid interfaces within a multi-platform or trans-mediascape, as ‘containers’ of discrete and connected virtual worlds (Sofia, 2000), as occasional or dedicated consoles of ludic and narrative connectivity, and as emergent nodes of creativity and digital art. Although mobile media forms have not yet undergone sustained analysis in the new media texts mentioned above, it is important that they be considered both as communication tools and info-mediatic assemblages within which the technologies and practices of communication, information and media come together.[2] Thus while communication-based analyses of mobile phones and devices will provide a useful context and framework for understanding some of the complex effects, perceptions and patterns-of-use, I aim to approach the mobile phone and portable interface as a new and interactive media form.

Existing research on the mobile phone itself resides mainly in the areas of sociology, cultural studies, communications theory, urban design, social psychology, anthropology and usability (Townsend, 2000; Sussex Technology Group, 2001; Bautsch et al, 2001; Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Mitchell, 2003; Plant, 2003; Lindholm and Keinonen, 2003; Kasesniemi, 2003; Rheingold, 2003; Geser, 2004, Goggin and Newell, 2004; Ling, 2004). Such studies have considered the mobile primarily in its capacity as voice-carrier and text-messager, and (for example) how it has changed the way we work and communicate (Katz and Aakhus), the various mobile-user types with which we identify (Plant), the increased decentralisation and ‘nomadic intimacy’ of mobile interaction (Geser), public perception and safety issues (Bautsch et al), disability and the digital mobility of text (Goggin and Newell), effects on teenage social behaviour (Kasesniemi), the emergence of ‘flashmobs’ or ‘smartmobs’ facilitated by mobile telephony (Rheingold), and its impact on urban society (Townsend, Mitchell, Ling). Not surprisingly, theorists have recently coined the term ‘m-communication’ to refer to the increasing dispersal of community and person-to-person relations by way of such devices, and the ‘culture of interruptions’ wrought by mobile telephony (Mitchell, 2003).

While these studies treat the mobile phone largely as a device for interpersonal and business communication, rather than as a medium for screen and sound media content, information or gameplay, there are some notable exceptions. These include Goggin’s (2004) discussion of ‘the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones’ within contemporary soundscapes, Plant’s (2003) various references to mobile-based artwork and the staging of an orchestrated collective ringtone symphony in London, and the trajectory Levinson (2004) traces between the mobile camera and mobile phone.[3] In her paper ‘Mobile Art’ presented at the Biennale of Electronic Art Perth in Australia (http://beap.org), Lisa Gye (2004) describes the supercession of wireless application protocol (WAP) with I-Mode technology (an always-on wireless internet platform recently launched by DoCoMo in Japan), which enables individual users to participate in a ‘distributed aesthetics’ by xml-coding their own mobile phone content, rather than simply downloading existing content/services; she reports on the creative media agency the-phone-book limited (http://the-phone-book.ltd.uk/) which provides workshops, downloadable freeware/shareware and code generators for mobile phone content. In contributing to these analyses of mobile telephony as both mediatic and communicative, in my own project I aim to elaborate on the corporeal and spatial effects of such mobile media forms.

Contemporary theorists of media and technology are currently grappling with the (non)corporeality and constitution of techno- and telespaces, and the way they are disturbing our commonplace notions of presence and location. In this context, the effects of miniaturised mobility on our experience of existing new and old media raises some interesting questions: How is the network literacy and ecology of the internet ‘remediated’ by mobile handset microbrowsers? Do our perceptions of media space, cyberspace and ‘technospace’ become transformed by the physical and vehicular mobility enabled by portable media? How does this portability impact upon the body-technology relation? What is the gender and cultural specificity of mobile media use and perception? How is mobility and networkability transforming our relation to screen and sound media? Does our experience of television and video change once viewed on mini-screens and out of familiar domestic contexts? When we carry mobile devices not just to maintain perpetual contact, but to watch TV, surf the web, or enter the virtual realtime space of SMS or MMS interactive narrative, what effect does this have on our relation to both the pedestrian and telepresent environment? Although many of these questions can’t be answered in the scope of this article, they nevertheless highlight a field of enquiry that is focused on the medium specificity of mobile media and what could be termed their techno-corporeal or technosomatic attributes.

Medium Specificity Revisited

My approach is largely phenomenological, and framed within the broad premise that every human-technology relation produces certain kinds of being-in-the-world, and particular ways of knowing and making that world. The location of mobile phones and handheld media within this premise, and in terms of their own determining effects, implicitly realises the much-used media theory concept of medium specificity, and it is worth commenting briefly on the continuing salience of this term. Although some might question whether medium specificity is still a central concept at a time of digital convergence, I would argue that it remains critical to our understanding of contemporary media. At a seminar on interactive TV (iTV), Jane Roscoe and Fat Cow Motel developers Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield claimed that media will not converge; rather, they will become increasingly multi-platform, such that each platform delivers appropriate and unique content, and with the mobile phone as an integral component of delivery.[4] This would suggest that medium specificity remains an important and viable conceptual tool, one that can continue to discern between proliferating digital media. Thus, for example, by organising data in particular ways, various interfaces may appear simultaneously or separately within the mobile screen or as audio content, but each mode of engagement (talk, text, email, micro-browsing, gaming, photography, word processing, etc.) will nevertheless still privilege particular corporeal attitudes, social agencies, and modes of (dis)engaging from both telepresent and immediate environments.

The application of medium specificity to new and supposedly convergent mobile media is also sustained by Bolter’s and Grusin’s (2000) new media concept of remediation, which in some respects is an effective reworking of McLuhan’s ‘laws of media’ (McLuhan, 1964). McLuhan argued that each communication medium works to orchestrate the structure of perception, by preferencing certain sensory ratios over others in medium-specific ways; televisual media, for example, prioritise the visual and aural senses, and at least partially bracket out tactile, motile and olfactory modes of perception. In their collaborative work Remediation: Understanding New Media Bolter and Grusin (2000) suggest that this process is complicated by the way that contemporary digital media ‘remediate’ already mature cultural forms and vice versa, either by appropriating and integrating aspects of older media, or incorporating new media developments. For example, the mobile phone ‘remediates’ both photography and home video by rendering their transmission between geographically distant places all but immediate. The idea of technological trajectories is also central to remediation, questioning the notion that the latest technologies are ‘new’ by showing how their technical and cultural trajectories are partially set in place by previous technologies. Thus the telegraph, in severing communication from physical transportation, opened the way for our experience of — and foregrounded our familiarity with — today’s more sophisticated telepresencing media. More recently, icon-based navigation on the mobile or PDA screen remediates the user-friendly desktop interface.

Following this trajectory of screen-to-screen remediation between mobile media and other larger screen media for a moment, it would seem that the complexity of the recursive relation between computer or TV screen and mobile screen confounds a number of assumptions made about our embodied and largely non-mobile engagement with televisual media. Manovich, for example, insists that despite numerous innovations in televisual media, the window remains as the archetypal interface:

Dynamic, real-time, interactive, a screen is still a screen. Interactivity, simulation, and telepresence: as was the case centuries ago, we are still looking at a flat, rectangular surface, existing in the space of our body and acting as a window into another space. We still have not left the era of the screen (Manovich, 2001: 115).

Within this metaphor the eyes alone must remain mobile, to traverse and visually ‘handle’ the surface space of the screen, while the body is held captive by the eyes’ attachment. This front-to-front relationship, it is often argued, is one that we have with screens in general. In most cases the screen is a frame of limited dimensions within our own physical space, while the body’s frontal relationship with the apparatus varies between media depending on what Manovich, pace Jonathan Crary, calls “viewing regimes” (2001: 96; Crary 1992, 1999). With cinema, for example, the viewer is at the outset fully frontal to the exclusion of all diversions, focusing entirely on the screen. In the optimum situation the boundary or interface between body and cinematic apparatus dissolves, a merger which manifests a change in orientation from being ‘in front of’ to being ‘within,’ an effect which is achieved by several factors: the size of the screen, the darkness of the theatre, and surround sound. In the case of television — with perhaps the home theatre an exception — the face-to-face relationship between the body and the set is somewhat more informal and less disciplined; viewers can look away to the familiarity of their domestic surroundings, move about or leave the room, or they can be visually and aurally attentive or inattentive to varying degrees, by muting the sound, zapping through channels, talking on the phone or conversing with co-watchers, and reading or engaging in other activities. This vacillating degree of attention and distraction clearly contravenes the perceived conventions of eye-body behaviour considered proper to screen-viewing. The ‘eyes’ of the mobile media device are even further distracted, by the surrounding clamour and moving objects on the street or sidewalk, by the latent lateral but ever-ready possibilities of incoming messages, and by the mobility of one’s own body. Laura Singer suggests that screens function as areas of focus only when they are ‘surrounded by a zone of inattention’ (Singer, 1990: 55). This is almost always not the case with mobile communication; in fact rarely is mobile connectivity a ‘dedicated’ practice — it is always-already surrounded by other objects and activities within the spatial topography of the built environment. Thus even with this brief example of the mobile phone’s particular modes of embodied use, it is apparent that mobile devices demand their own body-technology relations, and thus a medium specific phenomenological approach.

Phenomenology of Mobile Media

The work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968), Don Ihde (1993), and later feminist accounts of ‘intercorporeality’ by Gail Weiss (1999) and Moira Gatens (1996) provide effective tools for interpreting the somatic intimacy of wearable and handheld media, their disruption to the spatial boundaries of everyday communicative practices, the communal effects of mobile connectivity, and the collective mobile-user habits of the wider cultural milieu. Through these theorists embodiment is considered to be under continuous modification by artifacts, somewhat reminiscent of Leibniz’s monadology: all bodies are in perpetual flux, with ‘parts… entering into them and passing out of them continually’ (Leibniz, 1698). As Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out, the world is an agentic environment that also changes in common relation to our own flexible corporeality. Ihde’s ‘postphenomenology’ adds to this interpretation by accounting for both the ontic and epistemic inclinations or biases of tools themselves (Ihde, 1993). Finally, in attending to both the equipmental and cultural specificity of our morphology, Weiss and Gatens argue that ‘as-bodies’ we are embedded within cultural and technical contexts where some kinds of endo- and exosomatic body forms and habits are privileged over others (Weiss, 1999: 66-67; Gatens, 1996). With these insights, and in the context of mobile media, I suggest that both tool and body are covalent participants – and coalesce as various technosoma – in the making of meaning and environment. It is our openness to the spatially non-coincident flesh of the world — not only bodily flesh but the ‘stuff’ of our environment — that allows us to incorporate technologies and equipment into our own corporeal organisation. In this understanding, then, the specificity of media forms can be documented and acknowledged as deeply integral to our culturally specific and collectively realised corporeal schemas. The insights of media theory and phenomenology have partly inspired my critical application the term soma, which when prefixed by such descriptors as techno, info, tele, endo and exo, among many others, can be used as a way of discerning medium and techno-specific effects on the lived body (Richardson, 2003). Each –soma blending can work to describe a way of being rather than a what of being; any soma is not an entity – as ‘the body’ might sometimes be understood – but a process/network or ontological schematic. This terminology aims to effectively combine the concepts of intercorporeality and medium specificity, and also to grasp the way in which individual bodies digest the collective embodiments or shared habits of the wider cultural milieu.

Today, our increasing remote interaction with the world — the possibility of extended intervals of telepresence or telematic perception — indicates a need to rearticulate our collective embodiments, our experience and understanding of materiality, corporeality and actuality, and to think through other ontologies, other ways of being-in-the-world, and in a Heideggerian sense, of being-with-equipment. In a number of discussions on new, online and cyberspatial media, it is assumed that such interaction facilitates a mode of disembodiment, such that we can leave the body behind. Against the notion that one can be even intermittently ‘without a body’ when using the internet, the telephone, or watching TV, telepresent media work on and modify the body, affording an altered sensorial engagement with the world. The specificity of this engagement can also be seen in our use of mobile media forms. The idea that disembodiment is possible relies largely on the supposition that our engagement with screen media requires a stationary body, such that one’s awareness of the corporeal recedes. Yet as I have suggested mobile media complicate this relation, and facilitate a physical mobility of the body, whether pedestrian or vehicular, partially returning one’s attention to physical location and the navigation within and around material environments.

In what follows I offer some preliminary observations of mobile media qua the body-technology relation. Just as we are familiar with the notion that sociocultural specificity is inherent to our embodiments and body-images, technological specificity itself is also — equally and collaboratively — an aspect of embodiment and agency. In other work Carly Harper and I have suggested that the notion of variable ontology can describe how being emerges through a network of extended relations between the body-subject and the equipmental environment (Richardson and Harper, 2002; 2003). Don Ihde’s inventory of human-technology relations is particularly useful here; the body-technology relation peculiar to mobile phones and devices involves taking the technology into one’s way of perceiving, ‘through the reflexive transformation’ of perceptual and body sense (Ihde, 1990: 72). In the case of wearable technologies and their transformative effects upon our sensorium and felt corporeal limits, the body and instrument form a temporary collusive entity — symbolically designated by Ihde as an [I-artifact] world relation— which then apprehends or handles the world in specific ways. Thus, in a general sense the body-telemedia gathering modifies spatial and sensory perception, by changing what is ‘proximal’, or the relation between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Concepts such as telepresence, non-space, virtuality, and telepistemology (Goldberg, 2000) are all attempts to describe and explain the spatial and ontic effects of such telemedia on our being-in-the-world.

The term telepresence, for example — which refers to the kind of ‘distant presence’ enabled by telecommunication devices — is a seemingly oxymoronic concept which demands we comprehend alternative modalities of embodiment not necessarily based on our ‘normalised’ tropes of the physical entity, body, substance or containment. Yet the ability to experience telepresence as part of our mundane and everyday practices is but one instance of our ready incorporation of tools and media into our corporeal schematics, and as extensions of our bodies and our perception. That we can oscillate between, conflate and adapt to ostensibly disparate modes of being and perceiving – i.e. to being simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there’ – is precisely why telepresence and virtual space are ontologically tolerable. That is, the very condition of telepresence – as ‘presence at a distance’ speaks of our capacity for ontic dispersion beyond the neat physical limits of the body, and our open-ness to the embodied distraction of televisual and telephonic spaces. Thus although on one level it might be said that telepresence is troubling to our common experience of spatial perception and corporeality, we might wonder at how rapidly our reaction to radio, telephony, TV, online and mobile technologies becomes rather ho-hum and habitual. Telemedia may elicit an ambiguous nonspace, but we clearly integrate this ontological blurring quite unproblematically into our adaptive technosomas.

Nevertheless, from a phenomenological perspective it is intriguing to examine the characteristics of telepresence more closely, and the way in which a sense of presence can be felt beyond the location of the physical body. Both telephonic and televisual technologies have problematised the viability of distinctions between interiority and exteriority; in tactile face-to-face contact, or mechanised travel, distance is felt, timely, knowable, but in our use of televisual and telephonic technologies the distance traversed is simultaneously both so far and so close (phone to ear, remote in hand), that the space has been described as virtual – or in Heidegger’s sense, part of the ‘as if’ structure of our awareness. The term distraction – originating from distrahere, or to pull in different directions – aptly describes how our attention becomes divided when we speak or text on the phone. It suggests that the locus of our perception is divided between the ‘here’ and ‘there,’ such that we can know different times and spaces simultaneously, an effect which shifts the boundaries of what ‘immediacy’ is, and how it is defined and experienced.

As Sadie Plant suggests, in mobile phone use this often results in a sense of incompatibility or inappropriateness between the conversation-context and the very public spaces (buses, trains, sidewalks, etc.) wherein we frequently find ourselves answering the mobile:

Certain conversations can induce emotional and bodily responses which may be quite incompatible with [mobile users'] perceptions of their physical location. Their participants often look as though they don’t quite know what to do with themselves, how to reconfigure the tones of voice and postures which would normally accompany such conversations. The mobile requires its users to manage the intersection of the real present and the conversational present in a manner that is mindful of both (Plant, 2004: 50).

This interpretation of distraction, to describe a fragmenting or pulling apart of one’s attention and spatial focus, also resonates with Sam Weber’s (1996) insightful critique of Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s use of the comparable German terminology Zerstreuung or Zerstreutheit. Zerstreuung literally translates as ‘distraction’ but ‘the root of the German words — the verb streuen — is cognate to the English “strew, strewn” and carries with it a strong spatial overtone’ (Weber, 1996: 92). Benjamin employs Zerstreuung to refer to medium-specific features of mobile camera production and reception which involve the physical cutting and editing of film and the apprehension of these reconstituted fragments by the viewing public. Weber notes that the term Zerstreuung in Heidegger’s usage describes the way Dasein constitutes itself by/as being scattered, establishing ‘a link between Dasein‘s physicality — or more exactly, its ‘fleshiness’, its Leiblichkeit — and its fragmented, dispersed ways of being’ (Weber, 1996: 92). In the experience of mobile connectivity, when this dispersion involves pedestrian, commuting, cycling or ‘public’ modes of embodiment – that is, of bodies-in-motion – the link between one’s physical and distracted being becomes quite explicitly an issue for the caller. Thus when ‘on the mobile’, we have both the easy capacity for ontic dispersion beyond the physical limits of the body that enables telephonic and televisual interactivity on-the-move, yet also the penchant to locate ourselves and each other both temporally and spatially – by identifying our physical situation (‘I’m on the bus’) and our temporal context (I’ll be there in 5 minutes’).

Any discussion of pedestrian embodiment and mobile media use cannot go without at least a brief reference to de Certeau’s (1984) interpretation of the way in which a pedestrian makes possible the space of the city in collusion with the built environment. The steps one takes – the act of walking through the city – is surely altered by mobile phones and other portable devices. De Certeau argues that ‘a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities’, places where one can go and objects blocking or redirecting one’s path; at the same time the pedestrian trajectory actualises and creates some of these possibilities simply through the ‘improvisation of walking’ (1984: 98). Yet potentially, this trajectory can be quite radically revised and re-possibilised by the interruption of a mobile phone call or text message, by listening to and downloading music, by the beep of one’s PDA warning of an impending meeting or deadline, by changes in the immediate soundscape, or by those telepresent on the other end of the phone becoming ‘virtually’ integrated into one’s route. Moreover, mobile media elicit variable levels attention and inattention that shift between actual and telepresent space, partially depending on the demands of the immediate environment and the extent to which the interface becomes ready-to-hand in a Heideggerian sense (i.e. its function and usability recede from explicit awareness). Thus one’s own technosoma may ‘behave’ in ways that accord with (or deviate from) consensual and recognised modes of being-on-the-phone, such as stopping, bowing the head, shielding one’s mouth or face with the hand to define a provisional private space, or deliberately not altering one’s trajectory or visual orientation, as is the case with the more blatant Bluetooth® pedestrian. In such responses the various postures and embodied actions, and the dynamics of attention-inattention, are quite specific to the body-mobile relation which has emerged throughout the last decade. The body becomes quite literally a mobile-specific mediatrope – inclined metaphorically, corporeally, communicatively and gesturally towards the mobile media device.

Indeed, the notion of a relational and variable ontology understands the body – pace Haraway (1991) – as a material-semiotic assemblage with mediatropic tendencies, disposed both figuratively and materially towards media. As theorists such as Henri Lefebvre (1974) and Norman O. Brown (1966) have argued, tropes and metaphors have an essential role in our understanding and experience of both the world and our own bodies/selves. Telemedia offer a range of corporealist tropes, such as the synechdochal ‘all-hands-and-eyes’ experience of interactive screens and games, or the way in which the mobile phone-body becomes — metonymically — a pedestrian or vehicular node of networked communication (Martin, 2002). If we remember that the combining form –trope indicates an affinitive turn towards something, then telemedia have had significant tropological effects on our corporeal schematics; our modes of embodiment ‘turn towards’ specific technologies and media interfaces. For example, as is most often the case with our use of contemporary media, the hand-eye-screen interface or the hand-eye-remote control arrangement works as the preferred default, and various body-postures and communicative attitudes become prioritised. Thus, we perceptually ‘attend’ to the world in ways that are ‘allowed’ by the medium’s inclination or trajectory in Ihde’s sense, a phenomenological understanding of technosoma that is also consonant with the concept of medium specificity.

As I have suggested, the phenomenological approach offers a way to begin a theorisation of telesomatic involvements by apprehending mobile device usage as quite literally a mode of embodiment, a way of ‘having a body’. Such a perspective considers mobile media as aspects of the body-subject’s corporeal schema, both transforming and transformative: specific media are conducive to specific body-media comportments. As Drew Leder comments:

[I]ncorporation is the result of a rich dialectic wherein the world transforms my body, even as my body transforms its world… The demands and solicitations of the world gradually lead me to reshape the ability structure of my body… [The] dialectical body-world relation is concretized even in the simplest of instruments. Ordinarily, any tool will have one end specifically adapted to our human anatomy; the handle of the saw is designed to fit the hand. However, the other end is adapted to the world upon which we act… To incorporate a tool is to redesign one’s extended body until its extremities expressly mesh with the world (Leder, 1990: 34).

Phenomenologically, the handset or portable console becomes an incorporative aspect of the hand, a body-part in itself of some consequence as a mutable and world-shaping device. The techno-corporeality of handset use is of particular interest in the relational ontology of mobile media and body, as the relationship between corporeal schematics and networkable devices quite literally embodies telepresence. In this context the technical and ergonomic configuration of the mobile media device is significant. Handsets and portable game consoles are designed with the specificities of particular interfaces, hybrid devices, and user-bodies in mind. In the optimal embodiment relation, the device should become transparent; the ‘best’ usability is one which recedes from the user’s awareness, such that the liminal gap between hand and instrument goes all but unnoticed. An almost universal experience of handset use is of the numbered buttons arranged in a pattern familiar to many other devices (e.g. calculators and automatic teller machines), that is, the 1 to 9 matrix. We use both our sense of touch and, at least initially, visual recognition to coordinate the position of the numbers in relation to each other, and since human hands are in general anatomically similar, we might expect a common technosomatic relation between hand and mobile phone device. Yet even a preliminary investigation of the phenomenology of mobile phone use suggests that a diversity of problematics and relations have surfaced according to the specificities of culture and sociotechnical context (Richardson, 2005; Plant, 2003). For example, SMS use is widespread only in some (sub)cultures and age groups in Australia, South-East Asia and Japan, and has been deemed particularly vital to networking groups that depend on near-instant distributed information such as smart mobs (Rheingold, 2003). Such emergent habits and practices indicate the need for a detailed phenomenological study into the peculiarities of text messaging.

Our corporeal intimacy with the handset or portable console renders it an object of tactile and kinaesthetic familiarity, although it is salient to mention here that the growing complexity of mobile devices can also bewilder the non-expert user. In such cases there is a conflicting ‘disincorporation’ between the device and the hand-body. While a reciprocity between tool and body drives the technical specifications and ergonomic development of every apparatus, there is often resistance, in the interstices of our many technosomatic assemblages. The materialities of human bodies and nonhuman bodies are often in ontic conflict, and ensuing material-semiotic compromises are deeply embedded in the trajectories of body-tool relations. Keyboards and keypads must remain of certain proportion in order to fit the somatic specificity of human hands, despite the technology surpassing the need for such bulk. When keypads are repurposed for text messaging, however, the containment of the phonetic alphabet (and punctuation/symbols) to nine buttons renders the interface overly compact and awkward, which would seem to discourage prolific use. But SMS communication demands less, or differently, than traditional voice conversation – a sensory and somatic commitment that is suitable for some situations (such a public lecture), but not for others (such as driving). It is also flexibly either more immediate or deferred that a letter or email, and it is these enablements that encourage frequent use and thus practised dexterity, and vitiate against mobile-body ‘disincorporation’ and issues of poor usability. Nevertheless, the teleology of technological design is always towards the reconciliation and eradication of perceptual and ergonomic incompatibilities. The contrivances of the body are quite literally built into the blueprints and specifications of any technical device or assemblage (the arrangement of keys, hands-free usability), just as the body is manoeuvred and disciplined by the procedures of the apparatus (‘typing’ with the thumb, the ‘space-making’ or ‘blue-toothing’ on-the-mobile pedestrian). Of medium specific and phenomenological interest here is the extent to which ergonomic and stylistic differences in the design of handsets and mobile devices – the material ‘contours’ of the mobile medium itself – impact upon the body-tool relation, and thus upon our apprehension and experience of (tele)presence, (techno)space, intercorporeality and sociotechnical agency.

There seems little doubt that the mobile device’s delivery of peripatetic yet present-at-hand communication and interactive media content has evoked a number of altered medium-specific ways of being-in-the-world. The dual consequences of ubiquitous wireless connectivity and media rendered miniaturised and portable impacts directly on our experience of the everyday, and transforms urban and city environments as media- or technospaces, reworking our agency, (inter)activity and bodily movement within and through them. The ‘sensing’ of mobile communication and interactive media elicits an intimately audio, visual, sometimes haptic, ‘handy’ and visceral awareness, a mode of embodiment which demands the ontological coincidence of distance and closeness, presence and telepresence, actual and virtual. In this article I have offered some initial ideas prefiguring a more complex somatics of mobile media, primarily in the context of the mobile phone, but there is much more to be done in the larger project on the techno-corporeal effects of various pocket media and portable devices in their specificity. In addition to mobile phones, this research will conduct an ethno-phenomenology of mobile media use in urban Western Australia, including sophisticated multimedia hybrids, personal digital assistants and entertainment devices, and handheld networkable game consoles. Yet as I have suggested, the emergent agencies and relations will not be considered the remarkable consequences of a brand new merger with high technology ex nihilo; rather, they will be interpreted as remediational ‘gatherings’ amidst numerous other technosoma, and as further instances of our inherently mutable ontologies.

Author’s Biography

Ingrid Richardson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media Communication and Culture at Murdoch University. Her research interests include philosophy of technology and science, phenomenology of new media, and corporeal feminism.

Notes

[1] Sadie Plant was commissioned by Motorola in 2003 to carry out a study on the global use of mobile phone and the user-habits to emerge from increased mobile phone uptake.
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[2] An important area of inquiry which will not be discussed here is the field of game studies, which to date has largely focused on the generation of avatars, the player-character relation, multi-player platforms, narrative content and interactive environments within the virtual microworlds of computer and TV-console games (Aarseth, 2003; Wolf and Perron, 2003). That is, there has been little attention paid to the phenomenology of mobile handheld games, the impact of physical mobility on gaming in offline and online modes, and the particular sense of transmediatic space, place and community that they generate. This is an important area of study given the proliferation of handheld games and hybrid game-phone handsets for the adult market. As such, the larger project aims to critically examine the ludic, embodied and technospatial specificity of portable and handheld game decks which has thus far escaped sustained analysis.
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[3] Plant notes that ‘artists have explored the creative possibilities of mobile speech. In the UK, Robin Rimbaud, known as Scanner and sometimes referred to as the “telephone terrorist,” has produced soundscapes featuring snippets of mobile conversations. In the US, Chicago-based poet William Gillespie has composed poetry based on eavesdropped mobile transmissions, and another artist, Spacewurm, has made music from scanned mobiles and used them as the basis of a book’ (Plant, 2003: 48).
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[4] ‘Producing Interactive TV’, Australian Film Television and Radio School Seminar, Sydney, Australia, August 2002. Robertson and Mayfield produced Fat Cow Motel as an Australia-based ‘multimedium platform space’. Comprised as a whodunit in thirteen half-hour episodes, FCM allowed its viewers or ‘players’ to interact with the narrative by participating in games and following clues in order to solve a series of mysteries. These clues were distributed through multiple platforms such as interactive TV via Austar, dedicated websites, SMS, voicemail and email, and viewers could follow the narrative either on broadcast TV or online. In the particular context of the mobile phone, viewers could enter coded passwords in order to ‘eavesdrop’ on the phone conversations of key characters in the series.
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Mobile text messaging—variously known as SMS (short message service), text messaging, mobile e-mail, or texting—has become a common means of keeping in constant touch, especially among young people, in many parts of the world today. The research literature abounds with studies on the social, cultural, and communicative aspects of mobile text messaging in different sociocultural contexts in the world. In the following sections, current theoretical positions in the research literature on mobile communication will be summarised and then findings of a pilot study on the mobile text-messaging practices of university students in Hong Kong will be reported. Implications for emerging bilingual and bicultural identities and gendered sociality practices among Hong Kong young people will be discussed.

Major Theoretical Positions on the Impact of Mobile Communication Technologies: Optimism or Pessimism on Human Connectivity?

In contrast to the general celebratory optimistic tone of the promotional/advertising discourses of mobile communication companies (e.g., ‘ever closer human relationships’, ‘closer family ties’, ‘constant touch’, ‘instant and perpetual human connectivity’, and so on), cultural studies researchers generally tend to stay with a much more cautious and perhaps even pessimistic tone in their theorising of the social and cultural implications of new technologies. Although Raymond Williams was commenting on the effect of the Sony Walkman when he wrote his essay on ‘mobile privatization’ (1983), what he wrote there seems also relevant to our discussion of the potential impact of new mobile communication technologies:

There is then a unique modern condition, which I defined in an earlier book (Television: technology and cultural form, 1974) as ‘mobile privatization’. It is an ugly phrase for an unprecedented condition. What it means is that at most active social levels people are increasingly living as private small-family units, or, disrupting even that, as private and deliberately self-enclosed individuals, while at the same time there is a quite unprecedented mobility of such restricted privacies. (Williams, 1983: 129)

For Williams the new technologies only serve to further aggravate the modern human condition of ‘mobile-privatized social relations’. To illustrate what he meant, Williams used the visual image of car traffic: people insulated in their own moving (mobile) ‘shells’ (cars) communicate only with their own social networks of acquaintances (people traveling in the private car) in their own mobile ‘shells’ without any concern for other fellow human beings in other ‘shells’. There is an old Chinese saying which captures well this concern of Williams: ‘Each family only sweep the snow on their own doorway and nobody cares about the frost on other people’s roofs’. The modern and late modern condition of a diminishing sense of community and the increasing insulation of people into their own small ‘shells’ (or insulated units: houses, apartments, private cars, or nowadays private mobile phone networks) seems to be a concern that is aggravated further by new mobile communication technologies. People talk of ‘detached presence’—i.e., one can insulate oneself from other people in the surroundings and withdraw into one’s own private world by immersing oneself in the walkman world, or by talking or texting via the mobile phone.

This pessimism is echoed in a recent article on social theory in the wireless world by Cooper (2001). Quoting Heidegger’s notion of modern technology as something which ‘enframes’ or converts the world into a resource to be utilised, Cooper concluded that perpetual availability is both an advantage and disadvantage—‘You can run but you can’t hide’: the new mobile communication technologies convert people into resources—to be constantly on call/in touch is to be constantly instrumentalised by others (e.g., employees have no excuse of not answering mobile phone calls or not responding to text messages from their boss).

This pessimism is also found in youth mobile communication studies, though expressed in a slightly different way: young people’s constant use of mobile communication (e.g., mobile phoning or texting) can be seen as a symptom of a general loss of human connectivity in the modern condition, especially in highly urbanised cities. On this Lobet-Maris (2003) wrote:

For beneath the surface of this mobile phone usage there is first and foremost a rather desperate search for social existence, for a social connection in a world that appears less and less communicative to youth. For such reasons, as the research shows, about half of young people apparently would be willing to receive wireless advertising messages. These are all indications… of the need for communication that some young people feel today. The rise in importance of mobile phones and pagers among young people is perhaps the most convincing sign of a ‘disconnected’ society. (Lobet-Maris, 2003: 91)

Still others in Finland are concerned about their traditional speech culture being increasingly replaced by a new ‘shallow’ mobile communication culture. For instance, Puro (2002) expressed worries that traditional Finnish speech culture which values silence and direct, informative, matter-of-fact talk in phone conversations is now being replaced by new speech cultural practices that characterise mobile phone usage: shallow, small talk. Puro lamented ‘nokialization’ and warned of the gradual loss of the traditional Finnish way of life.

Poststructuralist researchers might be cautious about Puro’s (2002) largely structuralist, static construction of a binary, reductionist, 2-culture theory: old and new cultures, with new mobile communication technologies seen as bringing in the new culture (way of life) which replaces the old culture (way of life).

In light of the above discussion, it seems that a situated approach to the study of the impact of new communication technologies might be more useful. It might be a good idea to stay away from some general, grand narratives (whether in a pessimistic or optimistic tone) about modernity and late modernity, and to take each specific context in its own right to describe the multifarious ways in which new communication technologies interact with existing social practices. One might not want to fall into the dichotomous trap of either celebratory optimism or cautious pessimism—both are grand narratives which seem to focus mainly on some form of technological determinism, and which are likely to miss out the diverse, local, and often contradictory ways in which the impact of mobile communication technologies is played out in different sociocultural contexts of the world. For instance, recent studies on Asian youth text-messaging practices seem to end on an optimistic note about the positive uses of SMS by young people.

Studies on Youth Text-Messaging Practices in Asian societies

Few studies can be found on youth SMS practices in Asian societies. Here I shall summarise two recent studies on this topic. A recent study in Japan (Ito and Daisuke, 2003) studied the kind of social structural factors that relate to unique patterns of mobile phone usage, particularly text messaging of teenagers in Japan. It is found that Japanese teens’ penchant for text messaging is an outcome of a wide range of factors. These include the unique expressive functions and styles of this form of communication but also most importantly factors that relate to adults’ control and surveillance in particular places. Japanese youth, particularly high school students, move between the places of home, school, and urban space that are all subject to a high degree of regulation and surveillance by adults. Even public urban space is highly regulated by certain codes of social conduct and a whole range of regulatory efforts that limit or constrain young people’s ways of communication on public transport. Youth peer groups and couples lack ownership and control of place and couples and friends have few opportunities for private conversation. Mobile text-messaging has thus fulfilled an important function which provides a sense of co-presence for young people who lack the means to share some private physical space free from adults’ surveillance. The SMS communication technology thus provides an infrastructure or a tool for young Japanese teens to open up a space for safe private communication and sociality that escapes the traditional disciplining and surveillance structures and apparatus controlled by adults. Given the relative cultural proximity between Japanese sociocultural norms governing youth behaviour and those of the Hong Kong society, where it is equally crowded and difficult for young people to find their own private space free from adult surveillance, it will be interesting to see whether similar or different patterns of youth SMS practices can be found in Hong Kong.

Another recent study in Taiwan (Yeh, 2004) consisted of in-depth interviews with 11 young people, 7 male, 4 female, aged 20-25 and their phone messages were also collected for textual analysis. It is found that SMS is used to negotiate subtle gender relations, especially among couples (e.g., after quarrelling, the other does not want to hear one’s voice; avoiding embarrassment when making romantic advances or when saying ‘no’ to such advances). The informants also expressed that those messages that they will keep are usually messages that are highly private or messages that are highly meaningful.

Thus, both recent studies on Asian youth text-messaging end on an optimistic note about the positive uses of SMS by young people for gaining freedom from surveillance by adults or for negotiating subtle gender relations. This is in line with Goggin’s (2004) observation that young people took to text-messaging as a tactic of consolidating their shared culture, in distinction from the general culture dominated by their parents and other adults.

No studies on Hong Kong young people’s SMS practices, however, can be found in the literature. It is thus in the spirit of preliminary, situated exploration that a pilot study on the SMS practices of Hong Kong college students was conducted in September 2004, to take an initial look at what roles SMS might play in the everyday life of some young educated people in Hong Kong. Details of the study are presented in the next section and implications will be discussed in the final section.

Mobile Text-messaging (SMS) in Hong Kong: A Pilot Survey among College Students

Hong Kong has been one of the places with the highest penetration of mobile phone service in the world for many years. From 1998 to 2003 the number of mobile service subscribers had increased 1.5 times. The number reached 7.19 million by the end of 2003, representing a penetration rate of 106% (Source: www.info.gov.hk). Despite this high mobile phone penetration, SMS is not as widespread as in other economically developed Asian societies such as Singapore, the Philippines or South Korea. The TNS Asia Telecoms Index shows that only 43% of Hong Kong cellphone users use SMS and the average number of messages sent per user per month is only 23. This is perhaps due to the fact that Hong Kong was relatively late in introducing inter-operator SMS. There has also been little promotion of SMS by the service providers in Hong Kong. Another possible reason is that mobile phone calling is relatively cheap in Hong Kong compared with other Asian cities and so people do not need to use SMS to save on phone bills. One sociocultural reason might also be the fact that unlike other Asian societies such as Japan (Ito and Daisuke, 2003) and Korea (Kim, 2002), talking loudly (especially by adults) over the mobile phone in Hong Kong public areas seems to be a common habit among many Hong Kong people and there does not seem to be great sociocultural pressure on Hong Kongers to switch their loud mobile phone talking mode to SMS mode so as not to disturb other people in public places such as the subway or the bus. SMS can thus be said to be a still largely under-developed area in Hong Kong.

A pilot study was conducted in September 2004 to collect questionnaire responses from 455 students from three different departments (English and Communication, Business, Computer Engineering) from the City University of Hong Kong. The study aims at getting some preliminary information about: who uses SMS, how often, with whom, for what purposes, and in what language(s)? The pilot study was conducted to provide some initial data on SMS practices to inform the design of a subsequent larger-scale study including both survey and ethnographic components.

Major Findings:

Below we shall report major findings of the questionnaire survey in two sections. The first section reports findings from the descriptive statistical analysis. The second section reports findings from the inferential statistical analysis.

(1) Findings from Descriptive Statistical Analysis:

The descriptive statistics will provide us with some basic information on the common patterns of the reasons for use or non-use of SMS. The findings are elaborated in the following paragraphs.

a. Reasons for non-use of SMS:

While all of the respondents are mobile phone users, not all of them are also SMS users. Out of the 455 respondents, 110 respondents (24.2%) report that they do not use SMS. Their reasons for not using SMS are (respondents can choose multiple reasons): it is expensive (24.3%), calling is more convenient (48.6%), do not have the habit of using SMS (55%). Thus it seems that many of these non-users prefer calling than texting.

b. Heavy/Light Users:

Not all of the respondents are frequent or heavy users. 48.2% of the sample can be classified as light users and 51.8% as heavy users respectively. Light users are defined as using SMS from 5-10 times a month to 5-10 times a week and heavy users are defined as using SMS from 5-10 times a day to more than 10 times a day. It can be seen that slightly less than half of the respondents are light users and slightly more than half are heavy users.

c. Frequent recipients of text messages:

One interesting question is: When one sends an SMS message, most usually whom does she/he send it to? The frequent recipients reported are (respondents can choose multiple choices): good friends (86.1%), classmates (56.8%), boy/girl-friends (43.2%), family members (23.8%), and ordinary friends (13%). It can be seen that these college students send SMS mostly to their good friends, classmates and boy/girl friends.

d. The sex of frequent recipients:

It is interesting to note that 60.5% of these college students say they most frequently send SMS to both sexes. Only 17.4% of them say that they send SMS most frequently to recipients of the same sex and 22.1% say they send SMS most frequently to recipients of the opposite sex.

e. Frequent language(s) used in writing messages (can choose multiple choices):

As for the language they frequently use to write their messages, interestingly, the majority of them (60.6%) say they write bilingually (i.e., using both Chinese characters and English words). A large proportion of them say they write in English (40.6%) and only a small proportion of them say they write in Chinese characters (17.7%). An even smaller number of them say they use phonetic writing (i.e., using the Roman letters to write Cantonese phonetically) (11.3%).

f. Perceived impact of SMS on one’s own Chinese proficiency:

Do these college students feel that SMS has an impact on their Chinese proficiency? The majority of them report no impact (80.5%). Very few report a highly positive impact (2.2%) or a positive impact (5.7%) and slightly more of them report a negative impact (11.3%). Lastly extremely few of them report a highly negative impact (0.3%).

g. Perceived impact of SMS on one’s own English proficiency:

Likewise, the majority of the respondents report that SMS has no impact (77.7%) on their English proficiency (77.7%). Very few report a highly positive impact (0.9 %); some report a positive impact (8.9%); slightly more of them report a negative impact (11.3%), and very few report a highly negative impact (1.2%).

h. Use of built-in/downloaded graphics:

Do they use built-in or downloaded graphics when they write their messages? The majority say ‘never’ (52.9%), Some say ‘seldom’ (26.7%); slightly less say ‘sometimes’ (17.2%) and very few say ‘often’ (3.2%). Thus very few of these college students use graphics often.

i. Use of emoticons:

A related question is whether they use emoticons. 26.2% of them say ‘never’; a similar number of them (27.6%) say ‘seldom’. A slightly larger number of them say ‘sometimes’ (33.4%) but a much lower number of them say ‘often’ (12.8%) . Thus not many of them often use emoticons.

j. Which language is perceived as easier to input:

When asked what language is perceived to be easier to input, the majority of respondents say that English (74.3%) is easier to input and only 25.7% of them say Chinese is easier to input.

k. Whether one reads the message as soon as one receives it:

Do they read the message as soon as they receive it? The majority of them say ‘immediately’ (52.9%). 40.1% of them say ‘immediately most of the time’. Only 2.6% of them say ‘not immediately most of the time’. Extremely few of them say ‘not immediately’ (0.3%). A small number of them say ‘it depends on the situation’ (4.1%). Thus over 90% of the respondents read their messages always immediately or immediately most of the time.

l. Whether one replies to the message as soon as one receives it:

If they mostly read the messages immediately, do they also respond immediately? This time only 14.2 % of them say ‘immediately’. Close to half of them say ‘immediately most of the time’ (45.5%). A small number of them say ‘‘not immediately most of the time’ (8.4%) and ‘not immediately’ (3.8%). A large number of them say ‘it depends on the situation’ (28.1%). Thus close to 60% of the respondents reply always immediately or immediately most of the time.

m. Whether one has sent messages to multiple recipients:

Do they send messages to multiple recipients? The majority of them say ‘no’ (61.3%) and only 38.7% of them say ‘yes’.

n. If one has sent messages to multiple recipients, what is the nature of the message (can choose multiple options):

For those who have sent messages to multiple recipients,what is the nature of their messages? Season’s greetings/birthday greetings seem to be the popular themes (46.2%) while information messages come next (39.4%). Jokes also seem to be an option (22.7%), followed by ‘asking after’ (18.2%).

o. Whether one keeps some of the messages:

Do they keep some of the messages? The majority of them say ‘yes’ (88.1%) and only a few of them say ‘no’ (11.9%). Thus, most of them do seem to have the habit of saving some messages.

p. If one keeps some messages, what is the nature of the messages kept (can choose multiple options):

For those who report that they save some messages, what kind of messages do they usually save? Again, season’s greetings/birthday greetings seem to be the popular themes (52.5%) while romantic messages come next (43.6%). ‘Asking after’ also seem to be a popular theme (26.1%), followed by ‘jokes’ (20.1%). Only very few of them say they will save information messages (3%). Thus, it seems that those messages that they will save are largely messages with some sentimental value.

q. What kinds of purposes are SMS usually used for (can choose multiple options):

Related to the previous question is the question of what are the kinds of purposes for which they usually use SMS. Again, the majority of them report season’s greetings/birthday greetings (70.3%), followed by ‘asking after’ (62.7%), ‘giving encouragement’ (56.4%), and ‘giving thanks’ (43.9%). Some also put SMS to romantic purposes: for dating (28.5%) and for showing love (27.3%). Some also use SMS for sharing information (29.4%), and ‘jokes’ (24.4%). A few of them use SMS for making new friends (7.8%) and very few of them use SMS to join games (3.5%), for recommending a TV programme/movie/song (3.8%). Even fewer of them use SMS for business transaction or investment (0.3%), for gambling (0.9%), for calling others to vote ( 1.7%), for persuading others to vote for a certain political candidate (0.9%), for persuading others not to vote for a certain political candidate (0.6%).

r. Reasons for using SMS instead of other means of communication (can choose multiple options):

What are their reasons for using SMS instead of other means of communication such as the mobile phone? Many of them say it is more indirect and will reduce embarrassment: 33.6%; less disturbing than phone calls (72.5%); there is no need to make a call for trivial things (43.5%); it is fun (22.9%); it is romantic (21.4%); it leaves something for future pleasurable remembrance (26.1%); one can be more certain that the other party will receive the message (29.9%); one can ask the other party to send information to you to note down (e.g., when you do not have a pen to note down some information during a call) (18%); one can reach the other party around the clock (30.4%).

s. Perceived impact of SMS on relationships with your SMS interactants:

What kind of impact do they think SMS has on their relationships with their SMS interactants? The majority of them say SMS helps them to get a little closer (54.8%). 34.3% of them say SMS helps them to get closer to their interactants and only 10.9% of them say SMS has no impact on their relationships.

(2) Findings from Inferential Statistical Analysis:

In this section we shall look at the findings of the inferential statistical tests to infer the effect of the variables of (i) Gender, (ii) Age, (iii)Department, and (iv) Frequency of Use on other variables. Chi Square statistics (p < .05) show the following significant effects of Gender, Age, Academic Department and Frequency of Use. In the following sections I shall first present the numerical findings of the tests and then I shall elaborate in extended paragraphs the meanings inferred from the statistical findings.

a. Effect of Gender:

1. Use/Non-use: there is a significant effect of gender on use/non-use of SMS, with significantly more females (85.4%) than males (62.9%) using SMS.
2. Kind of recipients: significantly more males (65.6%) than females (52.3%) send SMS to their classmates whereas significantly more females (89.4%) than males (80.3%) send SMS to their good friends.
3. Gender of frequent recipients: significantly more males (33.6%) than females (15.3%) send messages to members of the opposite sex. Significantly more females (23.7%) than males (7.4%) send messages to members of the same sex. Similar proportions of males (59%) and females (60.9%) report sending messages equally frequently to members of both sexes.
4. Keeping messages: significantly more females (93.5%) than males (80.3%) report keeping some messages.
5. Sending season’s greetings / birthday greetings: significantly more females (75.3%) than males (63.9%) report sending this type of messages.
6. To make new friends: significantly more males (14.8%) than females (3.3%) report this as a purpose of using SMS.
7. Keeping some messages for future pleasurable remembrance: significantly more females (30.6%) than males (18.9%) report having this practice.

b. Effect of Age:

1. Use of SMS: a significantly greater proportion of older (defined as age 23 or above) students (90.6%) than younger (defined as age 18-22) students (73.4%) use SMS.
2. Kind of recipients: a significantly greater proportion of older students (58.3%) than younger students (41.7%) send messages to boyfriends/girlfriends, and a significantly greater proportion of older students (35.4%) than younger students (20.8%) send messages to family members.
3. Language used in writing the message: a significantly greater proportion of older students (64.6%) than younger students (37%) send messages in English. In contrast, a significantly greater proportion of younger students (64.1%) than older students (41.7%) send bilingual messages.
4. Which language is perceived as easier to input: a significantly greater proportion of older students (87.5%) than younger students (72.7%) perceive English to be easier to input. In contrast, a significantly greater proportion of younger students (27.3%) than older students (12.6%) perceive Chinese to be easier to input.
5. Kinds of messages to send: a significantly greater proportion of younger students (27.5%) than older students (10.6%) send jokes to others. In contrast, a significantly greater proportion of older students (33.3%) than younger students (20.4%) send romantic messages to others.

c. Effect of Academic Department:

1. Use/non-use of SMS: the proportion of students who are SMS users in the English and Communication (EC) Department (86.8%) is significantly higher than that in the Business (BU) Department (73.5%), which in turn is higher than that in the Computer Engineering (CE) Department (60.7%).
2. Kind of recipients: a significantly higher proportion of EC students (35.4%) than BU students (19.6%) and CE students (15.7%) send messages to family members.
3. Language used in writing the message: a significantly higher proportion of EC students (63.3%) than CE students (33.3%) and than BU students (28.5%) write messages in English. In contrast, a significantly higher proportion of CE students (70.6%) than BU students (69%) and EC students (38%) write bilingual messages.
4. Use of built-in / downloaded graphics: a significantly higher proportion of EC students (63.3%) than BU students (52.5%) and CE students (34%) use built-in / downloaded graphics in their messages.
5. Kinds of messages sent: a significantly higher proportion of CE students (39.2%) than BU students (21.5%) and EC students (20.5%) send jokes.
6. Reasons for using SMS: a significantly higher proportion of EC students (46.8%) than BU students (29.1%) and CE students (21.6%) report that one of the reasons for using SMS is that it is less direct and can avoid embarrassment.

d. Effect of Frequency of Use:

1. Kind of recipients: a significantly higher proportion of light users (23.6%) than heavy users (17.8%) send messages to ordinary friends. In contrast a significantly higher proportion of heavy users (52.1%) than light users (34.4%) send messages to boyfriends/girlfriends.
2. Language used in writing the message: a significantly higher proportion of light users (45.2%) than heavy users (34.3%) write messages in English. In contrast, a significantly higher proportion of heavy users (66.8%) than light users (56%) write bilingual messages.
3. Whether one immediately replies to messages: a significantly higher proportion of heavy users reply to messages always immediately (17.1%) and immediately most of the time (52.7%) whereas the corresponding figures for light users are only 11.5% and 40.8% respectively.
4. Reasons for using SMS: a significantly higher proportion of heavy users (41.4%) than light users (17.9%) report that one of the reasons for using SMS is for dating; for making new friends: heavy users (15.4%) vs. light users (0.6%); for making jokes: heavy users (32%) vs. light users (17.2%); for calling the recipient to vote: heavy users (3.6%) vs. light users (0%); for it is fun: heavy users (27.8%) vs. light users (17.8%); for the reason that one can be more certain that the other party can receive the message: heavy users (36.1%) vs. light users (24.2%).
5. Impact on relationships: a significantly higher proportion of heavy users (42.4%) than light users (27.4%) report that SMS use has made their relationships with their SMS interactants closer.

Discussion of the Findings

a. Effect of GenderJudging from the above statistical results, SMS seems to be a largely gendered practice, at least for this sample of university students in Hong Kong. For instance, more females than males are using it, a greater proportion of females than males are sending season’s greetings and birthday greetings, and a greater proportion of females than males are sending messages to good friends and to members of the same sex. These seem to support the observation that the new mobile communication technology of SMS simply inserts itself into existing gendered practices of sociality by providing one more effective tool for engaging in existing practices; i.e., more females than males in many cultures tend to send season’s greetings and birthday greetings (e.g., Christmas cards, birthday cards), and traditionally more females than males tend to be willing to spend more efforts and time in keeping up good relationships by social grooming and reciprocating communication and gifts. The new technology has not changed this gendered pattern of sociality practices but simply provides one more effective tool to those (largely females) who have been doing it with other (perhaps less effective) means of communication already.

However, one interesting observation is that a greater proportion of males than females report using this as a means of communication with members of the opposite sex and to make new friends. It seems that males are willing to try this new means of communication to reach the opposite sex and to make new friends. As a greater proportion of females seem to be fond of using SMS, it is then highly effective for males to use a female-preferred means of communication to reach females. To the extent that the male desire to make friends with females provides a strong incentive for males to use SMS (to try a new means of communication) to communicate with females, there is the possibility of gradually changing the patterns of communication practices of males towards more expressive or sentimental discursive practices, which are traditionally more associated with females than males, especially in more reserved cultures such as Chinese cultures. For instance, in traditional Chinese cultures, it is not easy for males (e.g., they might find it embarrassing) to express love to females explicitly, directly or verbally. The new mobile communication means provided by SMS might be a good way of facilitating or enabling young Chinese males to change their traditional cultural practices in gender relations towards more explicit sociality-oriented discursive practices.

b. Effect of Age

It seems that a greater proportion of older students than younger students use SMS. They seem to find English easier to input and send more English messages whereas younger students send more bilingual messages, perhaps because older students tend to have better English proficiencies. It might also be an indicator that bilingual, hybridised linguistic identities (e.g., as symbolised by code-mixing and code-switching in writing and speaking) are emerging more among younger students than older students.

A greater proportion of older students tend to send messages to family members and boyfriends/girlfriends, and to send romantic messages whereas a greater proportion of younger students tend to send jokes. This is perhaps due to the different kinds of concerns in different age groups: older students might be more mature and family-oriented (e.g., interacting more with family members) and more oriented towards courtship (e.g., sending romantic messages to boy/girlfriends) whereas younger students are more oriented towards having fun (e.g., sending jokes).

c. Effect of Academic Department

A greater proportion of the English and Communication (EC) students and Business (BU) students than Computer Engineering (CE) students use SMS probably because of their higher facility with language in general than engineering students. EC students also tend to use more built-in / downloaded graphics and more of them send messages to family members. More CE students send jokes. On the other hand, more EC students report that one of the reasons for using SMS is that it is less direct and can avoid embarrassment. This indicates that EC students, given their training in language and communication, might be more sensitive to subtle aspects of communication than students in other departments.

d. Effect of Frequency of Use

A higher proportion of high frequency users write bilingual messages than English messages and a higher proportion of low frequency users write English messages than bilingual messages. This indicates that among the high frequency users, there seems to be an emerging bilingual linguistic identity as they seem to be quite habitual in writing messages in hybridised, mixed languages despite the fact that it is more cumbersome to input bilingual messages (e.g., one needs to first get out of one language input menu before one can get into another language input menu). Also the high frequency users might have also become more fluent in their skills of inputting and so they can easily shift between inputting in two languages whereas the low frequency users might find it much easier to just to stick to the English language input method as it requires less training than the Chinese language input method.

High frequency users tend to send messages to boyfriends/girlfriends and use SMS for dating whereas low frequency users tend to send messages to just ordinary friends. This seems to indicate that the heavy users might have become heavy users mainly because of the desire and need to stay in instant and constant touch with boyfriends/girlfriends. Heavy users also tend to use SMS for a greater variety of reasons and purposes, including that of calling someone to vote (although only 3.6% of heavy users report this practice, this is in sharp contrast to 0% of light users). This indicates that there is potential to induce heavy users to use SMS for a wider range of purposes including using SMS for encouraging political participation—this purpose is currently under-developed among Hong Kong users but one sees potential in developing this area of functions for SMS use in Hong Kong. Heavy users also tend to report that SMS use has made their relationships with their SMS interactants closer, indicating that heavy users feel that SMS use plays an important role in strengthening their social relationships.

Coda: Revisiting the Sociological Question: Optimism or Pessimism on the Impact of New Technology on Human Connectivity?

We would like to revisit the sociological question asked in the beginning section of this paper: Does new mobile communication technology bring about more human alienation (e.g., aggravating the phenomenon of ‘mobile privatization’ as espoused by Raymond Williams?) or does it bring about more human connectivity? For instance, what is the impact of new mobile communication technology on the sociality practices of young people in Hong Kong?

It might be safe to conclude that the new mobile communication technology seems to have inserted itself comfortably into existing sociality and discursive practices without initiating any radical transformation of young people’s ways of life. For instance, young people use SMS to stay in frequent touch with good friends, classmates and boyfriends/girlfriends—they probably have done so with other (perhaps less effective) communication means before the arrival of SMS. However, the transformation of ways of being (e.g., sociality and discursive practices, gendered communication practices) might be gradual and might emerge invisibly as more and more young people (especially males) become SMS users for a broader ranger of purposes.

Since the current study is a pilot study the findings are to be taken as preliminary indications rather than solid generalisations. However the findings discussed above do seem to indicate some emergent trends and patterns of SMS use among some Hong Kong college students. Among these trends, gendered differences are most apparent, and bilingual linguistic identities also seem to be emerging among the heavy users. Although dating and social grooming with boyfriends/girlfriends seem to be chief motivations for using SMS, there is also potential for broadening the uses of SMS to include that of mobilising young people for political participation.

Further research studies should also include ethnographic studies, communication diaries, focused group interviews as well as fine-grained linguistic analysis of SMS messages to analyse emerging bilingual texting practices which might facilitate a corresponding emergence of bilingual identities. These bilingual identities might in turn bring about bicultural identities which might lead to the expanding and hybridising of traditional Chinese cultural norms that influence gender relations, social relations, social interactions as well as sociocultural and sociopolitical identifications.

There seem to be emerging patterns of bilingual and bicultural identifications among young people in Hong Kong and SMS use seems to provide just another trendy medium for the expression and elaboration of such emerging bilingual and bicultural identities. For instance, in a study (Lai, 2003) of young people’s cultural identification patterns and language attitudes, it was found that young people who identify themselves as Hong Kongers are also affectively inclined towards both Cantonese and English. To them, Cantonese and English are not mutually exclusive and they find it natural, or almost impossible not, to mix English words into their everyday Cantonese (Li & Tse, 2002). Also, given the special sociopolitical, historical context of Hong Kong, it seems that many Hong Kong people have not entirely accepted British colonial rule in the pre-1997 era and yet are equally ambivalent about Socialist Chinese domination in the post-1997 era. Such mixed, ambivalent feelings in national and sociocultural identification seem to correlate with the freely intertwining of Cantonese and English words in the everyday public life of Hong Kong people, and these “non-pure” bilingual linguistic practices seem to be playing an important role in marking out the Hong Kong identity—they seem to serve as distinctive linguistic and cultural markers of “Hong Kong-ness” and seem to constitute some defiant acts of identity. It is almost like saying: We’re Hong Kong-ese and I don’t care whether I’m speaking “pure Chinese/ English” or not!

In this sense then if “Singlish” is a linguistic marker of the distinctive local Singaporean identity (Chua, 2003), then the so-called “mixed code” of Hong Kong is its counterpart in Hong Kong. Like Singlish, the so-called “Hong Kong mixed code” is not a monolithic, stable entity. In practice, it consists of a whole continuum of different styles of speaking and writing, from the use of here and there a few English lexical items in otherwise Cantonese utterances/sentences to the intertwining of extended English and Cantonese utterances/sentences (Lin, 2000). From the perspectives of performativity theory on languages and communication resources (Pennycook, 2004), it will be a better idea not to view languages as separate stable systems with solid boundaries. As Pennycook (ibid) argues, the idea of languages as discrete, stable, monolithic entities with solid boundaries is actually the product of colonial knowledge production. In practice, people draw on a whole range of linguistic resources which cannot be easily pigeon-holed as “separate languages” in their everyday linguistic practices. Parallel to these hybridised linguistic practices are their similarly hybridised sociocultural identities. At least among many Hong Kong people as we witness it today, there do not seem to be any clear-cut “pure” sociocultural identities—the Hong Kong people’s identity seems to be always a “hyphenated” one, indicating its “in-between-ness” (Abbas, 1997).

It seems then that new mobile communication technologies might interact with existing patterns of sociocultural identifications and discursive practices to produce gradual change in these practices as well as in communicative practices between males and females. These further questions can only be addressed in future more comprehensive studies.

Author’s Biography

Dr. Angel Lin is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto, Canada, and has been teaching and researching on topics in youth literacies, youth identities and feminist cultural studies.

References

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and the politics of disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Chua, Beng-huat. Life is not Complete without Shopping: Consumption Culture in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003).

Cooper, Geoff. ‘The mutable mobile: Social theory in the wireless world’, in Wireless world: Social aspects and interactional aspects of the mobile age, eds. Barry Brown, Nicola Green and Richard Harper (London: Springer, 2001),19-31.

Goggin, Gerard. ‘Mobile text’, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, Jan 12th (2004), http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/03-goggin.html.

Ito, Mizuko and Daisuke, Okabe. Paper presented at the conference: ‘Front Stage-Back Stage: Mobile Communication and the Renegotiation of the Social Sphere’, June 22-24, 2003, Grimstad, Norway.

Kim, Shin Dong. ‘Korea: Personal meanings’, in Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance, eds. James E. Katz and Mark A. Aakhus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63-79.

Lai, Mee-ling. Paper presented at the International Conference in Language, Education and Diversity: ‘Cultural identity and language attitudes in postcolonial Hong Kong’, November 26-29, 2003, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Li, David. and Tse, Elly. ‘One day in the life of a purist’, International Journal of Bilingualism,6(2), (2002): 147-202.

Lin, Angel. ‘Deconstructing “mixed code”’, in Language and education in post-colonial Hong Kong, eds. David Li, Angel Lin and Wai-king Tsang (Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, 2000), 179-194.

Lobet-Maris, Claire. ‘Mobile phone tribes: Youth and social identity’, in Mediating the Human Body: Technology, Communication, and Fashion, eds. Leopoldina Fortunati, James E. Katz, and Raimonda Riccini (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), 87-92.

Pennycook, Alastair. ‘Performativity and language studies’, Critical Inquiry in language studies, 1(1), (2004): 1-26.

Puro, Fukka-Pekka. ‘Finland: A mobile culture’, in Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance, eds. James E. Katz, and Mark A. Aakhus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19-29.

Williams, Raymond. Television: technology and cultural form (London: Fontana, 1974).

Williams, Raymond. ‘Mobile privatization’(1974), Reprinted in Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony walkman, eds. Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus (London: Sage, 1997), 128-129.

Yeh, M-J. ‘A preliminary study on SMS use of youth tribes’, Information Society Research, 6, (2004): 235-282. [Original in Chinese]

The first flash mobbing is legendary now, though not uncontested. It happened in Manhattan, New York, between 7:27 pm and 7:37 pm on June 17, 2003. Summoned by text messages, emails and blog banter, a crowd of approximately 100 people gathered in the home furnishing section of Macy’s department store. The crowd surrounded a rug with a $10,000 price tag. Participants, soon to be known as ‘flash mobbers’, were instructed beforehand by ‘moberators’ to tell the salespeople that they all lived together in a free-love commune and that they wanted to purchase a ‘love rug’ (Bedell, 2003; Cotroneo, 2003; Shmueli 2003; van Rijn, 2003). According to several accounts, the mob dispersed rapidly after spending ten minutes discussing the rug among themselves and with salespeople. Other flash mobbings followed in quick succession in cities around the world. In Rome, over 300 flash mobbers invaded a music and bookstore on July 24. Flash mobbers spent several minutes asking employees for nonexistent books before applauding and dispersing (Shmueli,2003; van Rijn,2003). In Vancouver, Canada, 35 people met up in late August 2003 at a major intersection and ‘did the twist, to shouts and countershouts of ‘Chubby!’ and ‘Checker!’’ (Griffin, 2003). Several minutes later, the dancing halted and flash mobbers dispersed into the crowd of spectators that had gathered.

True to its moniker, flash mobbing shone briefly and brilliantly. Though flash mobbings are still generated occasionally, the trend was officially declared passé following the eighth Manhattan flash mobbing on September 10, 2003 (Delio, 2003), just one day shy of the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks by religious extremists in that city. While the trend was popular, numerous disparaging and complimentary characterisations of it were proffered by journalists, police, bloggers, flash mobbers and others. Flash mobbing was described as ‘self organized entertainment’ (Rheingold, 2003b), hailed as ‘a startling intervention in the life of the city’ (Young, 2003), likened to ‘speed dating’ (Nold, 2003) and labeled ‘an incipient form of social protest’ (Shnayerson and Goldstein, 2003: 20). Backlash against the trend located it in the ‘prank tradition of phone-booth stuffing, streaking, flagpole sitting and goldfish swallowing’ (Harmon, 2003).

Why was a trend often described as ‘silly fun’ (Morrison, 2003) so hotly contested? The reason, this paper argues, was the unprecedented conjuncture in flash mobbing of three types of mobile communicating: mobile texting, targeted mobbing and public performing. This paper argues that the conjuncture of these practices—and the popularization of flash mobbing in urban public spaces at this juncture in history—made the trend a significant moment in the history of mobile communication.

Mobile Communicating

Announcements for early flash mobbings were circulated like chain letters via email and text messages over the span of several days and even weeks to desktop computers, laptops, pagers and mobile phones. Though the popularity of flash mobbing was short-lived and its style was deliberately ephemeral, its popularization was well documented by blogs and mainstream media primarily because of the use of mobile communication technologies. As flash mobbing spread during the summer of 2003, it was noted on blogs that journalists with mobile phones and cameras sometimes outnumbered the people who gathered to participate in flash mobbings (Savage, 2003a). Flash mobbers occasionally used camcorders, digital cameras and camera-enabled phones to record their participation in flash mobbings—a kind of ‘mobile blogging’ to document the moment. These digital annotations were later posted to various blogs, most notably cheesebikini? and satanslaundromat that had begun to chronicle the trend and host discussions about it. Over the summer, postings also appeared on blogs from people seeking to participate in flash mobbings. As a result of such requests, several new blogs were created to share information about impending and past flash mobbings in different cities. Since Fall 2003, many of them have become dead links from cheesebikini? and satanslaundromat.

It has been widely suggested that flash mobbing was shaped primarily by Internet use. This conclusion has been propagated, I believe, because discussions of flash mobbing were highly visible on blogs during the trend’s popularization and even after its demise. In addition, links have been made, though poorly elaborated, between the decentralized communication and ambush tactics of flash mobbers and those of anti-globalization activists who organised themselves in the late 1990s via indymedia websites and other activist websites as well as via mobile phones. Without denying that the practices of the anti-globalization activists influenced flash mobbing, it is my assertion that the trend also shaped and was shaped by mobile phone use. This oversight regarding the intersection of mobile phone use and flash mobbing has left a significant gap in the burgeoning research on mobile communication. This paper aims to fill part of that gap.

In some instances mobile phoning was directly incorporated into flash mobbings. For example, during a flash mobbing in Berlin on August 3, 2003 beginning at 6:01pm, flash mobbers shouted ‘yes, yes!’ into their mobile phones in the middle of a crowded street before applauding and dispersing (Shmueli, 2003; Thomas, 2003). Also in August 2003, instructions for a British flash mobbing directed participants to gather at a sofa store on Tottenham Court Road in London. Flash mobbers were instructed to admire the furniture and then call someone on their mobile phone to talk about it, the experience presumably or maybe the furniture, ‘without using the letter ‘o’’ (‘Smart mob storms London’). Flash mobbing was not shaped simply by the incorporation of mobile phones in these instances; which also seemed to function as parodies or commentaries on mobile phoning in public spaces. Flash mobbing shaped and was shaped by a worldwide shift in mobile phone use from private communication characterized primarily by mobile phoning in the 1980s and 90s to more collective uses dominated by mobile texting in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This shift was evident in a corresponding change in sentiments and concerns regarding direct one-to-one mobile phone use versus indirect one-to many mobile phone use.

As mobile phoning grew over the past two decades it was often labeled as symptomatic of the ‘aggressive individualism’ of our mobile world (Harkin, 2003). Unlike wired telephone use, which a century earlier was imagined and deployed initially as mass communication before being made private communication (Marvin, 1988; Fischer, 1992; Flichy, 1995), mobile phoning was immediately adopted as a form of private communication. In the 1980s and early 1990s when mobile phoning was still relatively new, heated debates occurred in Canada, the U.S.A. and other countries regarding the value and appropriateness of the practice in various public and semi-public spaces such as schools, cinemas, hospitals, restaurants, cars, public transit vehicles and places of worship. Numerous researchers concluded that mobile phoning was contentious because users’ voices created floating private ‘phone-space’ in public spaces (Townsend, 2000: 94) and, thus, isolated the user and offended onlookers and eavesdroppers.

Politicians at all levels in several countries responded to public complaints as well as safety concerns about mobile phoning by crafting legislation to ban or curb the practice in some public spaces and in semi-public spaces such as cars. As mobile phoning burgeoned, public and political apprehension converged with concerns about the positive and negative effects of mobile phone use on the boundaries between work and leisure. In contrast to concerns about person-to-person use, by 2003 one commentator on flash mobbing mused, ‘How is it possible that a technology [the mobile phone] with such potential to empower the individual has turned into an irritating clique-machine for the hipster sheep?’ (Tom, 2003). Such laments highlighted the growing prevalence of one-to-many mobile communicating in North America and its association with flash mobbing.

In the late 1990s, North Americans began to use their mobile phones to facilitate rapid, decentralized, one-to-many interaction in a practice that I am calling ‘mobile mass communication,’ for lack of a better term. Though decentralized communication using mobile phones was already widespread in some Asian and European countries, particularly among adolescents (see Katz and Aakhus, 2002), the practice became at once visible and contentious in the U.S.A. and Canada as a result of anti-globalization protests in the streets of Seattle and Quebec City during WTO meetings in those cities in 1999 and 2001. By 2001, conservative American commentator John Dean had declared that mobile phone use by protestors, particularly at anti-globalization demonstrations, had become ‘a means of communications and control that is the bane of law enforcement and security personnel’ (Dean 2001). In studies of the anti-globalization movement, Internet use by activists is conflated with mobile phone use, with the former garnering the most analysis. I am not seeking to rectify this oversight in this paper. Such rectifying would entail a closer consideration of the anti-globalization movement than I can provide here.[1]

In this paper, I simply want to note that mobile mass communication was key to the anti-globalization movement and to flash mobbing and that this overlap suggests the movement and the trend were similar at least in terms of how participants communicated and organised themselves. I also want to note that the shift in mobile phone use in recent years from direct one-to-one communication to indirect one-to-many communication was key to both the movement and the trend because of the conjuncture of two types of mass communication: mass communication as information transfer and mass communication as transportation or corporeal movement. Unlike commercial mass communication, which is characterized by centralized production by a few producers and widespread distribution via mass electronic or print media to disparate audiences, mobile mass communication involves mobile phone users distributing messages, via phoning or texting, to their acquaintances and intimate contacts with a request that the message be forwarded to their recipients’ contacts as well. While early mobile phone use was celebrated for ‘liberat[ing] users from the constraints of place and time’ and also reviled for ‘disrupt[ing] the integrity of place and face-to-face social encounters’ (Ito & Okabe, 2003), the goal of mobile mass communication has been to elicit public gatherings or ‘flesh meets’ (Ito & Okabe, 2003).

I am using mobile mass communication then to describe two forms of communication—virtual and corporeal—that each became distinct only a century ago with the invention of communication technologies like the telegraph and telephone. James Carey wrote in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (1989) that ‘communication’ was commonly used up until the nineteenth century to describe both the ‘movement of goods or people and the movement of information’ (Carey, 1989: 15). Carey stressed that with the advent of modern mass communication, the idea of communication as transportation was merely subsumed, not completely destroyed. Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued in The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century (1979) that the shift from industrial to modern society was signaled by the concurrent popularization of train travel and the novel—two different forms of mass communication. Schivelbusch concluded that as a consequence of having to adapt to the speed and coverage of train travel, the form and flow of the novel, and the company of different classes of travelers, people’s perceptions of time, space and community were changed. Raymond Williams wrote in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) that in ‘[it] was in C20, with the development of other means of passing information and maintaining social contact, that communications came also and perhaps predominantly to refer to such media as the press and broadcasting…’ (Williams, 1976: 62-63).

The notion that communication as transportation was merely subsumed in favour of defining communication as information transfer grounds Williams’ concept of ‘mobile privatisation’ or ‘private mobilisation (Williams, 1992; 1974)). Williams coined the concept to describe a new balance he perceived in mid-century British culture between information transfer, or virtual communication and geographic or corporeal communication. Williams argued that the shift in balance between these forms of communication signaled an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ characterized by yearning among people for more mobility as well as more permanence and privacy. He contended that this paradoxical yearning was reconciled through cocooning in family homes for privacy, watching television, which facilitated virtual mobility and traveling increasingly by car. I am wary of using Williams’ renowned yet gossamer concept to argue that the emergence of mobile mass communication signaled the dawning of new structures of feeling. I do want to suggest this possibility though, with much hesitation, in light of how activists have used mobile mass communication. While mobile mass communication began to appear in Canada or the U.S.A. in the late 1990s as a result of the anti-globalization movement, and appeared visibly and popularly in 2003 with the advent of flash mobbing, the practice had already been used to make a political impact in the Philippines in 2001, in South Korea in 2002 and in several other countries in the years preceding the creation of flash mobbing.

The ‘People Power II’ uprising began when Filipinos took to the streets in January 2001 to force the resignation of then-president Joseph Estrada, who appeared on the verge of being exonerated after a long trial on charges of corruption. Filipinos had closely followed print, radio and television coverage of Estrada’s trial as they had also done during the first ‘People Power’ uprising in 1986 against then-president Ferdinand Marcos. Then, as in 2001, Filipinos gathered at one of Manila’s major highways, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. In 2001, unlike in 1986, mass public protest coordinated through mobile texting was credited with compelling the president to leave office. ‘In the next four days of the uprising that ended with Estrada’s fall, SMS was used to coordinate the protests, keep protestors abreast of events as they unfolded and to mobilise citizens to march…’ (Coronel, 2001: 110). It becomes clear why People Power II has been recounted with mythic zeal in histories of mobile communication (Rheingold, 2002; Agar, 2003) when one reads Vincente L. Rafael’s vivid account of the uprising in ‘The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines’. He writes:

[C]ell phone users themselves became broadcasters, receiving and transmitting both news and gossip… Indeed, one could imagine each user becoming his or her own broadcasting station: a node in a wider network of communication that the state could not possibly monitor, much less control. (Rafael, 2003: 403)

The uprising garnered wide media attention in part because mobile phones were launched in the Philippines only three years earlier in 1999. By 2001, texting among Filipinos was being described as the ‘national pastime’ according to Bella Ellwood-Clayton in ‘Texting and God: The Lord is My Textmate—Folk Catholicism in the Cyber Philippines’ (2003). According to both Rafael and Ellwood-Clayton, the popularity of texting was ‘directly related to the inadequate infrastructure, notorious unreliability of traditional landlines and the low cost of SMS’ (Ellwood-Clayton, 2003: 251). When one reads Ellwood-Clayton’s accounts of texting alongside Rafael’s accounts, it becomes clear why the practice has been described often as a new vernacular (see Curwen, 2002, Crystal, 2003; Goggin, 2004).

The constraints of an alphanumeric keypad require users to type numbers to get letters. As a result, counting and writing become closely associated. Digital communication requires the use of digits, both one’s own and those on the phone keypad, as one taps away. But this tapping unfolds not to the rhythm of one’s speech or in tempo with one’s thoughts, but in coordination with the numbers by which one reaches letters: three taps on 2 to get C, for example, or two taps on 3 to an E. Texting seems to reduce all speech to writing and all writing to a kind of mechanical percussion, a drumming… (Rafael, 2003: 407)

In addition to crediting texting with introducing a new vernacular, I suggest that the practice can also be credited with introducing a new ‘regime of vision’ (Chesher, 2004) that could be called ‘the glimpse’. Chris Chesher writes in ‘Neither gaze nor glance, but glaze: relating to console game screens’ (2004) that alongside the ‘longing gaze’ associated with cinema and the ‘distracted glance’ associated with television, we now must add the ‘sticky glaze’ or ‘immersive glaze’ of video gaming. He describes the ‘glaze’ as a kind of ‘liquid adhesion holding players’ eyes to the screen’ and their hands to controls of the game console (Chesher, 2004). Gaze, glance and glaze are associated respectively with spectators, viewers and players.[2] Mobile phone users became authors who glimpsed at the miniature screen of their mobile phones as they composed, read and transmitted text messages in public and private spaces and in the midst of everyday activities. Ellwood-Clayton describes how Catholic Filipinos were increasingly using texting to circulate inspirational and religious messages to their family and friends at about the same time as the uprising. Rather than encouraging face-to-face gatherings, however, Ellwood-Clayton suggests that such exchanges might have replaced church attendance for some believers. This brief analogy, which is admittedly a tad precious, requires further fleshing out. My point, however, is that texting, which Rafael describes as ‘drumming,’ quite quickly became prevalent in the 1990s because it was being used for everyday communication as well as to call people to gather together in public in their roles as citizens in contrast to their usual roles as spectators, viewers, players or consumers.

People Power II is cited frequently as a significant moment in recent histories of mobile communicating because of the widespread use of mobile phones during the uprising, but it is not the only such moment. In 2002 in South Korea, for example, Roh Moo-hyun’s success in the presidential election was attributed to a group of supporters, calling themselves Nosamo, who used the internet and ‘an extensive mobile phone campaign’ to encourage friends to vote for Roh (Kim, 2003). In Deferring Democracy: Promoting Openness in Authoritarian Regimes (2000), Catherin Dalpino recounts how members of the Thai professional classes used mobile phones to coordinate antimilitary demonstrations in 1992 with students. These activists were ‘dubbed mobile phone mobs’ (Dalpino, 2000: 70). It is my assertion that such moments were significant because Filipinos, South Koreans and Thais were relying on mobile mass communication at about the same time as citizens in other countries and activists in the anti-globalization movement were engaging in this new communication practice for political purposes. In short, several political moments occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s that signaled a creeping shift from an era of centralized communication dominated by commercial mass communication to an emergent era of decentralized communication dominated by mobile mass communication. Other moments included the November 2002 protests by Muslim Nigerians against the Miss World Beauty Pageant, the April 2002 rally by Venezuelans to protest the coup to oust President Hugo Chavez and the attacks by a mob of religious extremists who were linked virtually via mobile phone in the U.S.A. on September 11, 2001. In these instances, people used mobile phoning and texting to communicate in the moment or within the span of a few hours to target sites of significance for peaceful or violent mobbing. The role of mobile mass communicating in these instances did not go unnoticed. In the Venezuelan moment, it has been reported that:

U.S. intelligence had foreseen the possibility of cellphone use by Chavez supporters… [A] U.S. navy warship stationed in waters just offshore had attempted to jam cellphone signals and pagers in Venezuela during the coup (Cizek, 2002)

In the Philippines, Estrada’s successor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo put a tax on mobile texting when she took power (Agar, 2003:109), possibly with the goal of deterring its use because she had witnessed the role the practice played in shaping public opinion and in sparking an uprising in the months preceding her appointment. Other responses to mobile mass communicating by crowds during these years included the jamming of signals from radios and mobile phones around the G8 summit meeting of world leaders in the forests of Kananaskis, Canada, to keep ‘unwanted groups from coalescing in unexpected places’ (van Rijn, 2003). Given these reactions, it was hardly surprising that at the height of flash mobbing’s popularity, a commentary in The Wall Street Journal compared flash mobbers to ‘anti-trade activists,’ calling both ‘purveyors of anarchic idiocies’ (Melloan, 2003). In 2004, a year after flash mobbing had waned, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police concluded in an internal report that mobile phone use in conjunction with mobbing had become ‘a phenomenon to be reckoned with…’ (Moore, 2004). The report stated also that in Britain, police were ‘cracking down on activists who come [to demonstrations] equipped with mobiles—and are apparently empowered to do so under provisions of anti-terrorism laws brought in after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington…’ (Moore, 2004).

After flash mobbing’s demise, other testaments to the political potential of mobile mass communication were evident in efforts to appropriate it for governmental projects. One such example occurred in Singapore in Fall 2004. Mobile texting was made integral to a social program campaign aimed at stopping bullying in schools. The government and schools urged Singaporean schoolchildren to circulate this message: ‘Be cool, be bully-free’ (‘Bullies’ 2004) in hopes that it would reach the 80 percent of Singaporeans who owned a mobile phone at that time. Another example occurred in Beslan, Russia in September 2004, following a deadly hostage-taking in a school. Nearly one hundred and thirty thousand people rallied in Moscow’s Red Square to support the government’s pledge to fight terrorism and avenge the deaths of over 300 hostages. Broadcasts by state-run television had urged people to participate in the gathering, as did text messages sent out en masse by Russian mobile phone companies to subscribers (Contenta, 2004). These examples of messages centrally produced by governments in 2004 for dissemination by citizens stand in contrast to the instances of mobile mass communication politically inspired from the people in the years leading up the creation of flash mobbing in 2003.

Certainly there are many more such moments and reactions to be considered. There are also many distinctions to be made between and among the moments mentioned here. Each was shaped by specific social, political and economic conditions in existence in particular places. The particular conditions that shaped each moment deserve closer analysis. They are glossed over here in order to focus on discerning whether flash mobbing was a politically-inspired trend in light of its creation amidst reoccurring associations between mobile mass communication and political uprisings and in light of increased prohibitions surrounding mobile phone use by both individuals and crowds following the September 11 attacks in the U.S.A.
Many who championed flash mobbing emphasized frequently that it was an apolitical trend. Some flash mobbers claimed the trend was destroyed by people hijacking it for their own political or commercial purposes. They emphasized that unlike other mobs, flash mobs had no leader, responded to no particular issue and had no specific mandate. A repeated flash mobbing credo was ‘the power of many, in the pursuit of nothing’ (Tom, 2003). If political uprisings that preceded flash mobbing did not mark the trend as implicitly political, then these assertions certainly did by linking flash mobbing to historical narratives of the mob.

Targeted Mobbing

Plato’s account in The Republic of democracy as mob rule degenerating into tyranny prepares the way for a host of crowd images… [including] medieval crowds volatile at great festivals and fairs; crowds at public executions; peasant revolts… the crowd in the French Revolution; lynch mobs; the mobs of industrial discontent; the list is endless. Each particular crowd elicited its own theoretical response, often in the form of politically loaded historical narrative and these responses are to be seen as cumulative. (McClelland, 1989: 4)

Bill, instigator of the ‘love rug’ flash mobbing in Manhattan, called the gathering ‘an inexplicable mob’. He has stated in interviews that he thought ‘it would be funny to create a ‘Mob Project’ through a series of inexplicable mobs…’ (Ryan, 2003; see also Shmueli, 2003). The ‘love rug’ flash mobbing was Bill’s third attempt to organise an inexplicable mob. His first two attempts were unsuccessful. Sean Savage, creator of the blog cheesebikini?, is widely credited with coining the phrase ‘flash mob’, following the ‘love rug’ flash mobbing (McFedries, 2003; Merritt, 2004). Savage defined a flash mob as ‘a leaderless group of like-minded people who organize using technologies such as cellphones, email and the Web’ (McFedries, 2003). According to a July 2004 posting by Bill to cheesebikini?, flash mobbing is defined in the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again’ (Bill, 2004). Savage has said that he was inspired to coin the term ‘flash mob’ by the already-existing term ‘smart mob’ (Savage, 2003b). Howard Rheingold popularized the latter in Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2002). Rheingold argued that mobile communication technologies and ‘peer-to-peer’ sharing practices that made services like Napster popular were creating new opportunities for people to connect rapidly for collective action. The resulting smart mobs gather for social or political purposes. Rheingold recounted, for example, how in September 2000:

[T]housands of citizens in Britain, outraged by a sudden rise in gasoline prices, used mobile phones, SMS, email from laptop PCs and CB radios in taxicabs to coordinate dispersed groups that blocked fuel delivery at selected service stations in a wildcat political protest. (Rheingold, 2002: 158).

Though there are clear overlaps, in etymology and style, between flash mobs and smart mobs, Savage and Rheingold made distinctions between the two. For example, in response to an August 2003 posting on Rheingold’s blog, smartmobs, in which someone claimed that flash mobs first emerged in Japan and not New York, Savage responded with the following:

I think you’re completely wrong. I’ve read an awful lot about flash mobs and I invented the term ‘flash mobs’ and this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone claim that flash mobs began in Tokyo… Flash mobs last less than 20 minutes and they are characterized by a quick gathering of people in a place where such gatherings don’t usually happen, followed by a quick dispersal. (Savage, 2003b)

Rheingold responded that he defines a flash mob as ‘a group of people who organize through the Net to stage a public event for the fun of it’ (Rheingold, 2003b). A smart mob he defined as impromptu gatherings, like celebrity stalkings, which ‘are not meant to be public events, but [are meant to] benefit the group that is in on it’ (Rheingold,2003b).

Some people located the inspiration for flash mobs and smart mobs in various forms of protest that preceded both in the late 1990s. These included ‘Critical Mass’ bike rides, the ‘Reclaim the Street’ movement and ACT UP (see Taylor, 2003; McFedries, 2003). Infrequently mentioned sources of inspiration included the advent of the ‘flash campaign’, which was characterized by ‘the instantaneous mobilization of support that can be generated in the flash of a mouse click’ (McFedries, 2000) and the use of mobile phones by British football hooligans to coordinate skirmishes with police and supporters of opposing teams. Online and email petitions are now familiar types of flash campaigns used by various groups and individuals to rally support for numerous causes. Football hooliganism, though not a political movement, functions as political theatre for the aggressive expression of national, sectarian and club loyalties. What was missing from such comparisons, with the exception of the latter conflict that is centuries old, was the conjuncture of virtual and corporeal communication that characterizes mobile mass communication. In other words, people exchange information with the purpose also of coordinating a face-to-face mass gathering.

Frequent comparisons of flash mobbing to flocking and swarming were used to mark the trend as apolitical (Rheingold, 2002: 174-182; Micah, 2003; Bedell, 2003). Flocking and swarming describe the cooperative grouping of certain fish, birds and insects. Swarming was also used to describe the activities of protestors at WTO meetings who used the Internet and mobile phones to coordinate mobs to evade police (Taghizadeh, 2003). These metaphors can be used both in political and apolitical senses. Deleuze and Guattari used swarming and flocking as metaphors to describe types of decentred and leaderless political action (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987;1980). Flash mobbers used these metaphors not to describe their actions as political but to evoke ecological narratives. In other words, these metaphors were used to propagate benign associations and obscure historical narratives of the politicized mob.

Proponents of flash mobbing were keen to emphasize that each occurrence was leaderless. However, it was telling that some postings to blogs lamented that a main obstacle to organizing a flash mobbing was the lack of ‘a central authority who can make decisions and tell you where to show up’ (Paul, 2003). It was also telling that ‘Bill,’ the original moberator, along with Savage and Rheingold were regarded as spokesmen and originators from the early days of the trend. In one of numerous media interviews that Bill gave, he restated that he created the idea of flash mobbing, but added, ‘I write the e-mails, but I don’t think of myself as leader of the mob’ (van Rijn, 2003). Flash mobbing’s credo of ‘the power of many, in the pursuit of nothing’ was shaped by these men and propagated by flash mobbers in media interviews and on blogs. Efforts to define flash mobbing as leaderless and apolitical seemed at odds with the obvious fact that the trend was closely guided from its beginnings. This is not a criticism of flash mobbing proponents, their hopes for the trend, or the pleasure that flash mobbers found through participation. I simply want to suggest that in naming flash mobbing and trying to construct its genealogy, historical narratives of the mob and its complementary propensity toward democracy and tyranny were evoked though such narratives were not made explicit.

Crowds, mobs and masses have existed throughout history and across nations. Each formation has been historicized in slightly different ways by historians such as George Rudé, Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti. For the sake of brevity, in the following section I will conflate notions of the crowd, mob and mass that these historians and others have taken great care to distinguish. I am more concerned with distinguishing the flash mob. What was unique about the flash mob was the centrality of a mobile communication technology to the mob, which itself has historically been used as a technology to ‘bend’ public spaces of significance (MacGregor Wise, 1997: 57) and as a medium or area of exchange for participants. It is widely acknowledged that the term ‘mob’ and perceptions of it have undergone great transformations since the French Revolution. Peter Hayes explains in The People and the Mob: The Ideology of Civil Conflict in Modern Europe (1992) how its meaning was changed.

[A]round the time of the French Revolution, there developed the widespread idea that crowds engaged in hostile collective action could be distinguished from the population at large. The majority of society was defined not as the volatile, factious mobile vulgus, but as being stable and industrious – as the people. From such a perspective, the people could be contrasted with the shiftless, lazy, floating population of thieves and vagabonds who were said to make up demonstrating crowds. It was this latter group that gained the appellation ‘mob,’ although ‘mob’ was an abbreviation of mobile vulgus, the term increasingly came to be used to refer not to the low, unstable majority of the population, but rather to a vicious, unproductive minority, a ‘dangerous class’ that was distinct from the laboring classes… By the later nineteenth century, violent crowd protests, riots and rebellions were generally attributed to this latter type of mob (Hayes, 1992: 67).

J. S. McClelland contends in The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (1989) that the mob claimed ‘more of the attention of rulers at the same time as it [pushed] its way into the centre of theoretical concern…’ (McClelland, 1989: 3). Social Darwinism responded to this prominence by attributing inherent degenerate morals to the mob and aligning these with racial characteristics to classify the mob as ‘dangerous and criminal’ (Hayes, 1992: 6). Crowd theorists skimmed from this classification to argue that ‘certain types of people were more than likely to join the group mind and become part of the crowd, factory workers, for example, or peasants, or women, but nobody was in principle excluded’ (McClelland, 1989: 11). The work of crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon in particular is credited with propagating the notion that instead of individual minds mingling together, ‘the crowd had a mind of its own, ‘mob mind’ or ‘group mind’, which, being unconscious, could be understood as the opposite of all that was rational, civilized, advanced and progressive’ (McClelland, 1989: 31). In addition, as McClelland notes, if the crowd was ‘characterized as a mentality, then the limiting condition of the physical existence of a crowd was no longer necessary before crowd thinking could be said to be going on’ (McClelland, 1989: 14). By the twentieth century, it was generally agreed ‘the crowd [had] ceased to be limited to the face-to-face gathering, but [had] expanded to include an invisible audience that is addressed, through the mediated demonstration’ (Nold, 2003: 17). In Keywords, Williams wrote similarly that by the early to mid twentieth century, the term ‘mass’ was already understood as being directed no longer at ‘masses (people assembled) but at numerically large yet in individual homes relatively isolated members of audiences’ (Williams, 1976: 162).

I suggest that these narratives of the mob implicitly shaped ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ interpretations of flash mobbing’s purposes and goals, though none were stated explicitly. While flash mobbing was popular there was no reported violence related to it. Regardless, as McClelland argues, officials have,

…always tried to prove the existence of some form of criminal conspiracy in the heart of the mob, to show that something important enough to justify their fears was going on. These were fears of a very generalized kind, fears of order, or for ‘the world as we know it,’ threatened by subversion’. (McClelland,1989: 30)

As flash mobbing grew in popularity, it came under increased police surveillance (Taylor, 2003). In some places, law enforcement officials tried to squash the trend. Following the first flash mobbing in India in October 2003, police introduced stricter security measures to discourage others out of fear that it might provide cover for sectarian violence of the sort that rocked Mumbai in August 2003 when bombs killed over 200 people (‘Flash Mobs in Bombay’, 2003).

Geoff Cox argues in ‘the digital crowd: some questions on globalisation and agency’ (1999) that crowds,

… need to be seen as part of a long history of attempts to regulate the right to public assembly. In this way, the crowd can be seen as firmly located in the foundations of political discourse and the fear of the crowd can be taken as a fear of sociality and open democracy. (Cox, 1999: 5)

While this claim might be relevant to each place where flash mobbing occurred, it seems particularly relevant to flash mobbing in the U.S.A. Consider a flash mobbing, called ‘The Grand Central Station Mob Ballet,’ that was scheduled to take place in New York City in July 2003. It was cancelled by organizers because ‘three vague terrorist threats’ were received by law enforcement officials on the same day and ‘police seemed on edge about any gathering inside the famed train depot’ (Bedell, 2003). ‘The National Guardsmen with machine guns had something to do with it [the cancellation]’, according to an email sent from The Mob Project to cheesebikini? (The Mob Project, 2003). In contrast to this policing, Nold notes, ‘when it suits the state [like in the Singaporean and Russian examples of state-organized crowds] the visibility of the crowd, is used to reinforce its authority and yet when the crowd is perceived as threatening, it is denounced as the vocal minority’. (Nold, 2003: 18)

Other historical narratives of the mob that recount its institutionalization were echoed in concerns that flash mobbing would be appropriated for commercial purposes. Foucault recounts in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) how up until the nineteenth century, courts encouraged mobs to gather and participate in the ‘ceremony of punishment’ (Foucault, 1977: 49) that surrounded the public torture or execution of convicted individuals. Paul A. Gilje identifies Anglo-American examples of officially sanctioned carnivals in which mobs were permitted and expected to be rowdy in The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (1987). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, drawing on the work of Bahktin, describe in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) how similarly sanctioned European carnivals incited mobs to participate in ‘a world of topsy-turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all [was] mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 8).

While flash mobbing was being popularized, a fear that someone would appoint himself leader of the mob or that the trend would be appropriated for specific political or commercial purposes was expressed frequently on blogs and in comments flash mobbers made to journalists. A particularly heated debate was sparked among flash mobbers about the purpose of flash mobbing when Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau tried to organise a flash mobbing via his comic strip in September 2003 to support U.S. presidential candidate Howard Dean (Merritt, 2004). On blogs, some postings derided Trudeau for trying to organise a flash mobbing with a political goal. Others applauded his efforts (Michael D., 2003). Photographer Spencer Tunik, who is known for posing and photographing groups of nude volunteers in public spaces, also raised the ire of flash mobbers in November 2003 when he tried to organise a nude flash mobbing (Merritt, 2004). Fears about the appropriation of flash mobbing were heightened to fever pitch when two flash mobbings were held at a Toys ‘R Us store on August 8, 2003, one in New York and one in Toronto (Merritt, 2004). On blogs, opinion varied about whether it was a coincidence or a conspiracy. I suggest it was neither coincidence nor conspiracy, merely representative. Since flash mobbings were organised primarily at sites of significance in each city where they occurred, it should not have been surprising that two flash mobbing happened at a commercial outlet on the same day in Canada and the U.S.A. Such commercial sites are plentiful in contemporary consumer societies. These sites were potentially made even more significant to Americans in light of George Bush’s plea to get back to normal living following the 9/11 attacks by going shopping.

While flash mobbers worried about the trend being hijacked, discussions about its appropriation for commercial purposes were occurring openly in some circles. At the height of the trend, one marketer wrote in an industry magazine that:

[T]he flash mob concept if applied to marketing can lead to an avalanche of ideas. Our challenge as marketers then, is to figure out how to get measurable results from flash mobs. Ultimately, though, the bottom line is whether we’re talking the same language as the mob: fast, adventurous and fun’ (Wong, 2003: 15 original emphasis).

The writer asks readers to imagine the ‘PR and traffic’ that could be generated, for example, on Christmas eve if a flash mobbing was organised and participants were told to ‘wear a red top… and dance like a turkey for a minute at noon at, of course, a client’s shopping mall?’ (Wong, 2003: 15).

Flash mobbing was a short-lived trend, inspired by contemporary conditions and shaped by historical narratives of the mob. As the trend waned, Savage declared that it had ‘empower[ed] citizens in a world controlled by ‘Big Government and Big Corporation’ (Morrison, 2003). Bill said in interviews he believed that flash mobbing was a social activity for some people and for others it was political because ‘just being out in the streets is a political act’ (Shmueli, 2003). He also said, ‘It’s really stunning to be in the mob as it comes together… to see all these people, who up until that very moment seemed unaware of each other, suddenly converge (Ryan, 2003).

Public Performing

In the early 1970s, Larry Niven, a science fiction writer, created a short story entitled Flash Crowd, in which he envisaged teleportation booths that could take people anywhere on Earth within milliseconds. He suggested that one consequence of this was that with the almost instantaneous global reporting of news events, huge crowds of people would instantly appear at the scene of disasters. Over thirty years later with the development of telecommunications technologies, his concept has essentially been realised. (Nold, 2003: 27)

Christian Nold writes in ‘Legible Mob’ (2003) that the instantaneous mass crowds Larry Niven imagined being called together by telecommunication technologies in his 70s science fiction novel were manifest in the flash mob. Nold writes in his essay on representations of the crowd in history that flash mobbing was ‘a vulgar celebration of speed and its accompanying implosion of space’ (Nold, 2003: 28). I do not agree with Nold’s assessment. Widespread mobile communicating was certainly a key factor in the creation of flash mobbing in 2003, but timing—a punctual start and a precise ending—was of the essence at flash mobbings, not simply speed. In our contemporary mobile world ‘late’ increasingly means staying in contact via mobile phone while en route to a rendezvous, in a state of ‘virtual co-presence’ (Ito & Okabe, 2003). In other words, lateness is being made redundant by connectedness. Flash mobbing’s emphasis on punctuality and a timed task was a self-reflexive engagement of this redundancy. I want to suggest in this last section of the paper that flash mobbing be interpreted as a commentary or reflection on contemporary spaces and routines.

One bystander, witnessing his first flash mobbing in Vancouver, Canada, remarked to a journalist that he thought it was either ‘a protest or advertising’ (Young, 2003). Flash mobbing was also described as ‘a cross between streaking and being in a marching ban’ (Walker, 2003). At the height of flash mobbing’s popularity, Bill described the trend as ‘spectacle for spectacle’s sake’ (Hewitt, 2003). Flash mobbers perpetuated the confusion surrounding the trend by declaring that ‘This is a struggle against reality and we refuse to be taken seriously’ (Monty, 2003). However, flash mobbers and others also drew parallels between their activities and those of the Situationists, ‘who called for art that would defy commodification’ (Taghizadeh, 2003). The trend was also compared to Dadaism and surrealism (Karastamatis, 2003; Ryan, 2003; Tomkins, 2003), movements that criticised capitalist spectacles while relying on the creation of their own spectacles for such criticism. Critics of flash mobbing countered that these movements were politically and intellectually rigorous, and in contrast, called flash mobbers ‘sheeple’ who ‘make no apologies for their lack of political mission’ (Harmon, 2003).

Regardless of a clear or consistent mission, some flash mobbings can be read as commentaries on the absurdities of contemporary living. Consider the August 14, 2003 flash mobbing in South Africa when bystanders joined 150 flash mobbers and acted like ducks at an outdoor life show that was being held indoors at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. According to one eyewitness account, ‘Bemused staff and visitors to the Outdoor Adventure Expo… smiled, laughed and even joined in as the group… quacked in circles around the cavernous foyer’ (McKenzie, 2003). It is interesting to note also that the first flash mobbing in New York in June 2003 involving the ‘love rug’ echoed a 1963 performance, entitled ‘Demonstration for Capitalist Realism,’ that was staged by the performance art group Fluxus in a furniture store in Düsseldorf. This echo might not have been merely coincidence. Bill, the ‘love rug’ moberator, was often described by journalists as someone who was an artist or who worked in the culture industries. In other words, he was someone who might have been aware of the 1963 happening and the political intent that inspired it.

Kristine Stiles writes in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1997) that performance artists seek to ‘reengage the artist and spectator by reconnecting art to the material circumstances of social and political events’ (Stiles, 1997: 679). For example, Stiles contends that performance art of the 1960s and 70s ‘rendered palpable the anxious corporeal, psychic and social conditions of global culture in the radically changing electronic and nuclear age’ (Stiles, 1997: 679). If mobile mass communication was generated in response to social, political, economic and technological conditions of the late 1990s, can flash mobbing, which was also called ‘guerilla art’ (Merritt, 2004) and ‘swarming art’ (Morrison, 2003), be considered a response to the social and political conditions of 2003, particularly conditions that existed in New York where the trend was started?
Like performance art, flash mobbing straddled the boundaries between spectacle, activism, experiment and prank. Play is sometimes political. According to one commentator writing on the blog flashmob in January 2004, flash mobbing was a way of participating in ‘some harmless fun, while showing defiance of the fear and paranoia that has gripped the world thanks to the dressed up chimpanzee in the American executive office’ (Mateem, 2004). Another fan of the trend commented that flash mobbing in the U.S.A. was ‘a way to tweak the nose of those responsible for security, since things have gotten so tense since Sept. 11’ (Ryan, 2003).

Stallybrass and White caution that no cultural formation is ‘intrinsically radical or conservative’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 14). However, they allow that though a formation may have ‘no noticeable politically transformative effects… given the presence of a sharpened political antagonism, it may… act as a catalyst and site of actual and symbolic struggle (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 14). Nearly two years after flash mobbing was declared passé, can it now be considered a catalyst of sorts? While the trend was popular, some people openly predicted that it was the sharp edge of a new form of protest (see Morrison, 2003; Ryan, 2003; Taylor, 2003). As flash mobbing waned, Bill declared that it was not a movement; it was ‘a pre-movement’ (Harmon, 2003). He added that:

People intuitively understand that it is a powerful thing to very quickly and surprisingly transform a physical space, and one reason they keep coming back to the mobs is there is this feeling that something is being created that can’t be ignored’ (Harmon 2003).

While flash mobbing was both preceded and followed by political uprisings facilitated through mobile mass communication, a March 2004 instance in Spain stands out as an example of how widespread this form of communication has become. In March 2004 Spaniards used mobile phones to circulate political text messages following commuter train bombings that killed nearly 200 people and injured over 1500. According to mobile phone service providers in the country, the transmission of text messages increased by 20 per cent on March 13 when the political text messages began to circulate (Losowsky, 2004). One recipient of the messages commented: ‘Nobody actually knows where it started. It was sort of like a wave’ (Lynch, 2004). One message read ‘Today at 6pm, Genova Street, to find the truth. Pass it on’ (Losowsky, 2004). The conservative Partido Popular, which held power prior to the March 14 vote, had its headquarters on Genova Street. A crowd of over five thousand responded to the messages by gathering to protest what was thought to be a government cover up of the attacks and official waffling about the extent of Spain’s role in the American-inspired international ‘war on terror’.

March 13, 2004, a moment of ‘digital democracy’ (Lynch, 2004), in Madrid was credited with swaying Spanish voters to a Leftist government in the election that followed shortly after (Dickey, 2004). ‘Some people are now calling Saturday March 13 ‘the night of the mobile telephone’ (Losowsky, 2004) – a reference to the 1981 attempted coup in Spain that was called ‘the night of the transistors’ (Losowsky, 2004). In 1981, Spaniards listened to radios and watched television to hear the latest news of the coup. In 2004, mobile phones carried news flashes created by the people and disseminated via mobile mass communication.

While it is not possible to easily quantify the effects of mobile phone use in terms relevant to political participation, this example from Spain, like the many examples cited throughout this paper, illuminates how the conjuncture of mobile texting, targeted mobbing and public performing/protesting that made flash mobbing significant continues to be meaningful and useful in different cultural and political contexts.

Author’s Biography

Judith A. Nicholson is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. Her research focuses on social and cultural aspects of mobile communicating, particularly in Canada and the U.S.A. Currently she also works as a lecturer in the areas of popular culture, media and gender, and mass communication.

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from comments from two anonymous readers selected by Fibreculture. Kim Sawchuk provided constructive criticism on a draft that was presented to the Canadian Communication Association in 2004. Jonathan Sterne guided me to some relevant articles.

Notes

[1] See Anastasia Kavada’s essay ‘Social Movements and Current Network Research’ (2003) for a comprehensive overview of research on the anti-globalization movement.
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[2] Others have used these metaphors differently. Rob Drew, quoting Theresa Senft, writes: ‘If the characteristic attitude of cinematic society was the gaze and that of televisual society the glimpse… the rise of hypermedia heralds a society of the grab—a bored, restless, aggressive pursuit of momentary pleasures’ (Drew, 2002).
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From stirrups to satellites, the invention of new forms of technical mobility has always created new intensities within the social. Each invention has also required a new idea of what it might be to be human, along with new tensions as older cultural practices and social forms are challenged. The contemporary mobility of digital networks is no exception. This issue of the Fibreculture Journal is concerned with documenting, and beginning to think through, the new mobile intensities allowed by digital networks. “Intensity” here refers not just to the ubiquitous nature of mobile networks, or to the frequency of use of mobile communications. New intensities are like new forces erupting within the old – taking the social somewhere it has not perhaps been before. At the least, these intensities give established orders new energies to either resist or attempt to fold into established social practices and modes of thinking.

All of the articles in this issue deal with these new intensities. Much of this issue develops key ideas and documents new social practices involving mobile telephony. Dong-Hoo Lee documents the experiments with self-image and expression now allowed young Korean women by camera phones. Angel Lin affirms the continuation of older social practices amongst Hong Kong college students using SMS (in the use of SMS to maintain social ties with friends and family, for example). However, she also notes the increased possibility of political participation, and some interesting shifts concerning biligual textual practices – perhaps even a specific emerging bilingual identity within the community of SMS users. Lin also finds that there are gender differences concerning the way that young people in Hong Kong use mobiles (males tend to use SMS to meet females and new friends, for example). Lin wonders if, however, this will lead males into more ‘social grooming’ via mobile communications. This seems to be the case in the study of Norwegian young people, provided by Lin Prøitz. She finds a surprising amount of gender mobility within the frame of SMSing, even when the rhetoric outside of this frame maintains reasonably strict concepts of gendered behaviours. Lee, Lin and Prøitz all outline the role of desire in promoting proficiency and subtleties within SMS use.

Judith Nicholson gives an extensive account of the brief but influential ‘flash mob’ phenomenon, at the same time describing the political potential of mobile networks in terms of new “mobs”. Here Nicholson draws attention to the use of mobile phones to coordinate the political momentum in the Spanish election of 2004, echoing 1981′s ‘night of the transistors’. Larissa Hjorth argues for the enfolding of older forms of communication within SMS and MMS use. Specifically she contemplates the shifting fragile intensities of the border between public and private in both SMS/MMS and the postcard. If there are new intensities of intimacy to be found in mobile networks, they are often mutations of older intensities.

Several articles move beyond mobile telephony, to discuss broader issues regarding networked mobility. Scott Sharpe, Maria Hynes and Robert Fagan consider the Internet as a forum for coordinating resistance to globalisation. As they point out, the Internet is already compromised as such a forum, as it is itself the forum of globalisation par excellence. They suggest rethinking what is possible in such a context. They give a detailed analysis of an older-style approach, that of the IUF ‘superunion’ educational web site, and a newer approach, that of activists, the Yes Men. In a surprising challenge to much analysis of globalisation and its discontents, Sharpe, Hynes and Fagan turn to Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of masochism to point out the limits of the IUF approach. Rather than buy into the hegemony of representations as outlines by global powers (and some of their opponents), they argue for a humorous creation of new possibilities via the Internet. The latter involves an active seeking after new, more creative modes of thought, via which to nudge the new network intensities away from the monolithic nature of global Capital.

Nearly all of the articles in this issue are as contemplative and they are descriptive. The final three articles are centrally concerned with a thinking through of mobile intensities. Ingrid Richardson poses the concept of the ‘mobile technosoma’ – a return to thinking through the new kinds of bodily intensity associated with new technical intensities, and both bodily and technical intensities together. In the process she argues for a new medium specificity. Far from a convergence of media, Richardson comments that new mobile media forms, and their specific embodied contexts, require more in the way of specific analyses of their divergences.

Notions of stability, identity and place keep recurring in the discussion of convergent mobile media. Mobility, in particular the tactility and telepresence of mobile telephony, brings about an intense focus on the specificity of place and bodies. ‘Where are you, now?’ seems to be a refrain for many authors in this issue. The expansive yet normalising architecture of networks produces paradoxically an ethography of innovation and intimacy as shown in the four qualitative case studies from Seoul (Lee), Hong Kong (Lin), Melbourne (Hjorth) and Norway (Prøitz). In a delicately argued article grappling with this new sense of place, Rowan Wilken discusses a sense of place profoundly transformed by mobile networks, but not completely dissolved into them. Wilken points out that we simply cannot do without place, that place has always been a complex experience, and that, although there is no doubt that mobile networks transform place, this only makes it the more urgent to consider a new concept of mobile place – what he calls ‘mobilitis loci’.This new place – a shifting place, a more intense and uncertain place, requires a new and more subtle politics – a central theme in many articles in this issue. This new politics of place is one that will have to consider the mutually infolding of virtual and actual at every moment of mobility. Wilken turns to some architectural/media experiments emerging from the events of the 1960s, such as those of the group Ant Farm, in order to give such infolding some historical context.

Felicity Colman and Christian McCrea take all these questions – very old and very new technics, new intensities and new fragmentation, new relations, the infinite deferral of networks and the way this deferral ties everything into a web – in the direction of what they call the ‘digital maypole’. For Colman and McCrea, ‘the maypole expresses the network’s torsion balance chart of power. The maypole topology is order through rhythmic tension and torsion, and in this sense its continuous binding of power makes the concept the paradoxical apostate of the network’s labyrinthine structure. The instinctual and biological ties of the etymological maypole enable us to focus upon specific power combinations of the network’s prescience’. There could perhaps be no better description of the problems and possibilities given to us by new mobile intensities, whether for those who are trying to mediate the shifts in social practices and cultural cohensions occasioned by mobility, or those attempting merely to analyse them.

We hope that it will be noted that there is a mix of approaches in this issue. In particular, the articles here range from the purely speculative to the mainly empirical. We are very happy that things have turned out this way. We began with a commitment to sparking conversation between different modes of analysis and response to these important issues. Such diverse studies exemplify the kinds of methodological constellations gathering around mobile phone use – and perhaps as importantly, examine the new relations between new, more mobile social intensities (such as biligualism in Hong Kong, gender fluidity in Norway) and mobile technologies as engaged with these intensities.
Biographies

Andrew Murphie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales, Australia. He has published on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, cultural theory, virtual media, network ecologies and popular music. He is the co-author with John Potts of Culture and Technology (Palgrave, 2003) and editor of the Fibreculture Journal. His current research focuses on the cultural politics of models of cognition, perception and life; media ecologies; electronic music; and performance technologies. Recent publications include ‘Differential Life, Perception and the Nervous Elements: Whitehead, Bergson and Virno on the Technics of Living’ in Culture Machine (2005), and ‘The Mutation of “Cognition” and the Fracturing of Modernity: cognitive technics, extended mind and cultural crisis’ in Scan (2005).

Gillian Fuller is Senior Lecturer in Media in the School of Media, Film and Theatre, UNSW, Australia. She publishes on network media and the cultural politics of mobility systems. She is co-author of Aviopolis: A book about Airports (2004, Gillian Fuller & Ross Harley, Blackdog Press: London). She is currently writing a book and developing new interactive work on the politics and methods of distribution architectures, called ‘the queue project’.

Larissa Hjorth is a lecturer in Digital Art in the Games Programs at RMIT University. Hjorth is an artist and lecturer researching and publishing on gendered mobile phone customisation in the Asia-Pacific.

Sandra Buckley has held positions as chair of East Asian studies, McGill University, chair of Japanese at Griffith University and director of the Centre for Arts and Humanities at SUNY, University at Albany. Her recent research project at the Canadian Centre for Architecture was entitled Mobile Architectures and is an analysis of new trends in youth culture, community formations, and movement in urban spaces in the context of emerging mobile digital communication platforms. She is a co-founding editor of the Theory Out of Bounds series with University of Minnesota Press, editor and primary contributor to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture, and author of Broken Silence: Voices of Japanese Feminisms (University of California, 1995). Sandra has also been a management consultant for 20 years.