Goggin G. Cell Phone Culture.
Ch. 8ааа On
mobile photography: camera phones, moblogging, and new visual cultures
There is a practice for people to exchange photos, and if there is a
camera in your keitai, you can make custom wallpaper as well as exchange
photos.
Takeo Uematsu, Sharp Corporation on the first camera cell phone.
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured
in digital photographs and on video.
(Sontag 2004: 24)
A weblog is a record of travels on the Web, so a mobile phone log
('moblog'?) should be a record of travels in the world. Weblogs reflect our
lives at our desks, on our computers, referencing mostly other flat pages,
links between blocks of text. But mobile blogs should be far richer, fueled by
multimedia, more intimate data and far-flung friends. As we chatter and text
away, our phones could record and share the parts we choose: a walking,
talking, texting, seeing record of our time around town, corrected and
augmented by other mobloggers.
(Hall 2002)
In
tracing the development and lineaments of cell phone culture, I have so far
broadly drawn upon the 'circuit of culture' framework to discuss the production
of such culture, its consumption, then, briefly, its representation and
regulation. Through this also, I have from time to time noted how cell phone
culture has developed through mechanisms of and changes in identity. My
principal concern has been the evolution of cell phone culture, characterised
first by voice telephony and then by new sorts of sociotechnical innovations,
especially with the second-generation digital systems when mass take-up
occurred. In the remaining three chapters of the book, my focus is on the cell
phone moving centre stage into the theatre of media transformations that is
still often referred to as 'convergence'.
Convergence
indicates the merging of media and cultural industries associated with forms of
the twentieth century such as radio, television, newspapers, magaнzines that
came to be relatively well established in their cultural bearings.а I Certainly have reservations about this
term: while it may have been revelatory in the early to mid 1990s, it is
certainly not in the present day. The important task is the work of actually
tracing the ways in which cultural practice as well as indusнtrial structure
and political economy is transforming across these sectors, and this is the
subject of much contemporary study and debate, not least in industry policy
settings, specialist publications, and the increasingly influential public
spheres of geek culture magazines, email lists, websites, and blogs. What I
attempt here is to map the convergence of cell phones with other media,
starting in this chapter with camera phones. In the first part, I recount the
invention of the camera phone, and identify some of its uses and the ways in
which it is involved in changing cultural practices and the significance of
this. In the second part, I extend this analysis by looking at the phenomenon
of mobile blogging (moblogging, or blogging using cell phones), in which camera
phones have been integral.
The
invention of the camera phone
Camera
phones have not been in existence for long, yet have been very popular. A
leading country for camera phone design and use has been
[was] designed as a video phone, capitalizing on the relatively fast
transmisнsion speed of the PHS. The press release at the time of the product's
introduction featured a scenario of distant grandparents talking to their
grandson while viewing his face. However, the terminal weighed 165 grams and
was slightly larger than the average handset, attributes not well received by
users. (Okada 2005: 56)
The
widespread adoption of the keitai camera commenced with the introduction
of Sharp's SH-04 phone, manfactured for J-Phone. This was the first cellular
camera phone and included a service called sha-mail (photo mail):
'[the] handset weighed 74 grams and was the smallest of its kind among the
prevailing products. The camera was 110 thousand-pixels, not very high in
graphic quality, and it could only capture still images' (Okada 2005: 56). The
availability of camera phones in
The
uses of the camera phone developed in overlapping sets of cultural pracнtices
associated with ephemeral, one-time-use cameras. Fuji Film had developed a
one-time-use camera (Utsurun-desu, or Quick Snap), 'which popularized
the pracнtice among teenage girls of taking snapshots of friends to keep as
mementos. These young women made original photo albums of the snapshots and
carried them around as precious lifestyle and friendship records' (Okada 2005:
58). The throw-away camera went hand-in-hand with the introduction in July 1995
of puri-kura, or Print Club, a photo booth for making stickers:
[Puri-kura] were set up in arcades and
other entertainment and shopping sites and became a craze among youth . . .
[Teenage girls] turned a section of their personal planners into a puri-kura
album or created an exclusive mini-album for puri-kura stickers,
which they always carried with them. It also became a very common practice to
put a puri-kura sticker of a special friend or boyfriend on their pager
or keitai. (Okada 2005: 58)
As I
have discussed earlier, the decoration and modification of cell phones have
become an important way that people express their identity. With the advent of
the camera becoming part of the cell phone, various aspects of this
do-it-yourself personalisation could be incorporated into the device: 'the keitai
camera has come to encompass the production of customized wallpaper and
some of the functions of puri-kura stickers' (Okada 2005: 59).
While
there are still relatively few studies of the cultures of use of camera phones
or mobile imaging in general (Koskinen, Kurvinen, and Lehtonen 2002), there are
some recurring themes in discussions of the new technology. Central to these is
a strong emphasis on the embeddedness in and orientation of the camera phone
towards a technology of everyday life. A much-cited early piece quotes a survey
in which the highest proportion of camera phone users report that they 'took
photos of "things that they happened upon that were interesting" ',
whereas the capturing of travel photos was down the bottom of the list (Daisuke
and Ito 2003). For Daisuke and Ito, this is a
striking testament to the everyday and ubiquitous uses of the camera
phone. Within the broader ecology of personal record-keeping, archiving and
communication technologies, camera phones occupy a unique niche. In comнparison
to the traditional camera, which gets trotted out for special excursions and
events Ч noteworthy moments bracketed off from the mundane Ч camera phones
capture the more fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and
adoration in the everyday. (2003)
There
is some evidence to suggest social and cultural functions of camera phones are
quite distinct from their digital stand-alone or analogue camera counterparts.
We certainly need to be cautious about forming judgements regarding this; how.
ever, the novelty and new function of camera phones, yet again like other new
technologies, are a prime trope of the discourse accompanying them.
Authors
of a Japanese study discern 'practices of picture taking and sharing that
differ both from the uses of the stand-alone cameras and the kinds of social
sharing that happened via keitai voice and text communications' (Kato et
al 2005: 305). They cite research showing that many of the kinds of photographs
taken with camera phones are similar to traditional cameras, such as photos of
friends, family and pets, and travel photos. However in their survey Kato et al
also note evidence of a 'new mode of pervasive photo taking when a camera is
always at hand':
keitai camera users are taking photos of serendipitous
sightings and moments in everyday life (rather than of special planned events
that have traditionally been documented by amateur photography) . . . [W]ith
the keitai camera, the mundane is elevated to a photographic object. (2005:
305)
The
sheer ubiquity of the phone is one reason for this. A cell phone is for many
people the only other thing they always have with them other than their wallet
or purse, keys, and watch. Previously few people would have carried a camera
with them. Now they find themselves with a camera at their disposal more often
and in a wide variety of circumstances. Also drawing on a Japanese study
(conducted in 2002) France Telecom researcher Carole Riviere proposes that:
When it becomes part of the daily experience of using a mobile phone,
photography departs from the realm of the occasional, or even the exceptional,
that gave it its traditional function. Moreover, the photographic act is disasнsociated
from the possession of a unique, specific object, the camera, whose existence
and representation consolidated the perception of photography as a specific
practice reserved for certain occasions, for specific events. (Riviere 2005:
171)
She
contrasts Pierre Bourdieu's account of the camera as emblematic of the family,
regarded as its joint property and used at ritual events (Bourdieu 1965), with
the status of the cell phone as 'primarily that of a "prosthetic"
object' and so 'part of its owner' (Riviere 2005: 172).
The
trope of the camera phone as an exemplary everyday form of image capture
carries important cultural implications, especially when it is joined up with a
narrative and rhetoric of technologies fit for use for all, a certain demotic
turn in photography. Riviere writes of how such talk of the camera phone
brings photography into the 21 st century as an agreeable form of
communicaнtion or language, one that can be used by anyone, anytime, anyhow. In
this sense, it makes photography 'commonplace', stripping it of every intention
other than for one's own pleasure and the pleasure of expressing something in
the immediate present. (2005: 172)
The
implications of the demotic register of the camera phone typically are carried
forward with a discussion of the way that each person now is able to represent
his or her own 'news'. We can discern at least two sides to this radical
personalisation of news-gathering.
For
one thing, there is the claim that the means of making such imagistic
representations of events are now placed in the hands of the multitudes, so
everyone can aspire to that figure of modernist news and visual culture
(Hartley 1992 and 1996) Ч the photojournalism One exemplary instance of this is
the leaking to international media of the digital photos of the US military
torture of Iraqi detainees in the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal. There are
troubling ethical questions about our investment as viewers in such widely
circulated if not grossly iconic images, as raised by the late Susan Sontag
(specifically Sontag 2004 but also her 2003 study; also Gross, Katz, and Ruby
2003). I am not sure, however, that such considerations were uppermost in the
mind of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose immediate response to the
suspicion that the Abu Ghraib photos were taken by camera phones was to ban
them (ABC 2004). Another haunting example of the cell phone-equipped
citizen-journalist (or 'cetizen', to invoke a newly coined term) at work in the
defiles of everyday life occurred in the terrible
To my
mind, the most memorable, and certainly the most frequently reproduced, of
these crepuscular, flickering images, perhaps, was that taken by a person
struggling to ascend from the infernal scene of an underground tube, moving in
a distraught crowd. Given the flood of potential images now available from de
facto freelance photojournalists, new opportunities have emerged for cultural
intermediaries to filter this jumped-up (micro-content to big media
organisations - an example being Scoopt.com, 'the citizen journalist's
photo agency, selling mobile phone and digital camera photos to the press and
media'. Others simply not interested in established media now have many
opportunities to create their own forms of distribution, or contribute toа alternative media formsа such asа
theа Korean cetizen.orgа site,а
where the cell-phone-user-in-the-street can, and does, upload photos
(Hjorth 2006). Here the citizen-journalist begins to blur into the figure of
activism, another are where camera phones have extended the importance of
cellular telephony and mobile media.
Another
side to this hyper-individualisation of camera phones is the intimate turn of
news. The locus and matrix of news appears to move from the profes sionalised
routines and forms of circulation and production of newsrooms to the
micro-arenas of personal life with their rules of relevance and tiny audiences
defined by the individual, and their immediate friends, colleagues, family, and
networks. Putting this very nicely, Daisuke and Ito segue from their discussion
of camera phones as a technology of the everyday to noting that the photos are
generated as 'photos of everday moments and events that are newsworthy only to
an individual and her intimates':
In Japanese, 'material' for news and stories is called 'neta'. The term
has strong journalist associations, but also gets used to describe material
that can become the topic of conversation among friends or family. Camera
phones provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but
also visually shareable. As the mundane is elevated to a photographic object,
the everyday is now the site of potential news and visual archiving. (Daisuke
and Ito 2003)
This
reworking of the everyday through the camera phone results, in turn, in a shift
in the way news is produced and consumed for larger audiences, in the wider
public sphere. The everyday, small acts of media consumption become also
unstable, potentially bigger, and more significant interventions into what is
colнlectively regarded as the news. Daisuke and Ito propose a 'broad spectrum
of everyday and mass photojournalism using camera phones' where 'what counts as
newsworthy, noteworthy and photo-worthy' stretches from quotidian, almost
inadvertent snaps of moments never to be shared, through 'intimately newsнworthy
moments' to be shared with spouse, lover, family, or friend, or as
'micro-content uploaded to blogs and online journals', to larger audience
activity such as sending 'camera phone photos to major news outlets' or,
presumably, widely read or A-list moblogs. These themes of new media as
pervasive and intimate are recurring ones, not only with the blogs but,
especially given the salience of the visual here, the phenomenon of webcams and
camgirls (and boys).2
As
well as heralding the reconstruction of news, there has been much emphasis on
how cell phone cameras not only inhabit a changed place (the here of the
everyday), but also rearticulate photography in terms of the temporal -
something familiar from the reception of digital photography. Camera phones, it
is often asserted, are about the 'power of now' (Wilhelm et al. 2004:а 1406). A photo from a camera phone can be
immediately viewed, looked at by the phone photog-apher, or shown to others.
Rather than being a somewhat distinct, or even formal art of the recording,
documentation, and remembering of an event or ritual, the camera phone often
becomes part of the event itself. Camera phones are perнceived to offer a sense
of immediacy, lessening the time elapsed between the time when the photo was
taken and the time it is reviewed:
One important capability of the keitai camera is being able to
view the photographed image on the spot. In that sense, the photo can be
experienced immediately, an advantage digital cameras share with puri-kura (instant
sticker photo booths) and instant cameras. Users can check the images, and if
they didn't turn out well, they can retake the photo right away. (Kato et al.
2005: 305)
In
this discourse about the shift in personal time the camera phone represents, we
can observe also a crucial realignment in social function and cultural
practice. The camera phone's anchoring, were it ontologically possible, in the
'now', or at least the sense in which it is taken to signify, or at least be a
better approximation for, the present, is most often linked to the vernacular
theorisation of the device as an instrument for sociability. Digital cameras,
especially those from a camera phone, are in the now, because they are about
sharing. The indispensable innovations in cultural technologies of sharing here
include the screen (for displaying photos) and the data storage, retrieval, and
manipulation systems. With the storage and display facilities available, camera
phones are already being used as a photo album, and of course the sharing,
showing, and talk around photo albums are an importнant form of sociality. In
her 2003 study of young Italian camera phone users, Barbara Scifo reasons:
That a camera-phone Ч unlike the traditional mobile phone Ч can
be seen as a social, collective resource in 'face-to-face' interaction with
one's peer group is evidenced by other modes of use as well. Not only are
camera-phones frequently shared and swapped, thus passing from the owner to
someone who does not yet have one and is curious to its photographic
possibilities, but above all, their use represents an opportunity for play and
entertainment within a group of peers. (Scifo 2005: 366)
Scifo's
point is well made but I would point to the fact that, contrary perhaps to
dominant assumptions about use in Western countries, the cell phone and its
extensions have long been something to be shared and exchanged, something
deeply based in structures and routines of sociality as well as notions of the
local (Larsson 2002). There are salient examples in much youth cultural
practices with cell phones, but especially text messaging (as accounts of SMS
as gift exchange showed;
the camera-phone is not only an increasingly personal technology (being
deeply set within the subject, his or her universe and relationships) but also
a collective technology, a resource for 'face-to-face' sociality, entertainment
and communicative exchanges within contexts of local interaction and
principally within a group of peers. (2005: 367)
The
camera phone, then, is emerging as highly significant for the crucial remaking
of place and context (sometimes called relocalisation) in which technologies
and cell phone culture now take part.
Indeed
camera phones offer a new take, as it were, on sharing of digital cameras,
because of their inherent capabilities for distributing photos over teleнcommunications
and Internet. Not only are camera phones likely to be available in a given
situation, they are potentially now 'always on': 'The keitai camera
repreнsents not only an ever-present image-capture device but also an
ever-present image-sharing and transmission device' (Kato et al. 2005). One way
that photos,аааа videos, and other data
can be sent from a cell phone is via the multimedia аmessaging (MMS) protocol. As we have seen in
chapter 4, MMS was conceived asааа the
successor technology to the popular SMS and extending its capabilities
-hopefully also allowing the adding of greater 'value' to messaging products
and services, and so greater productivity. While MMS has been critiqued, not
least for the complex menu and configuration it required in its first
incarnations (Jenson 200S; Scifo 2005: 367) it has also slowly been adopted.
There
is a small but growing number of studies of MMS. Scifo, for instance,а shows that:
notwithstanding the number of MMS messages that are being exchanged a
present between those starting to use this new process of communication, there
are already clear signals concerning the spread of a precise culture ю communication and the birth of a new language. (2005:
367)
She
notes the association thus of sending MMS with playful, positive emotions and
on special occasions; also that communicating with images is 'closely and
almost exclusively linked to one's network of strong relationships'а (2005: 367). This finding is echoed by a
Japanese study, which found:
Couples and close groups of female friends have the highest volume of
image transmission; among male friends and less intimate relations, images are
rarely transmitted, although they may be shared from the handset when people
are physically co-present . . . visual sharing is most prevalent among
'full-time intimate communities'. (Kato et al. 2005: 306)
As
well as patterns emerging about the sorts of interactions and networks involved
in sharing of camera phone images, there are also early indications of the
sorts of cultural forms and genres that are evolving. Scifo, for instance,
argues that the first forms of MMS relate to representation, witnessing and narrating
situнations, and distinguishes between three main types of messages, namely
performative, informative, and problem-solving. The theorisation of the forms,
types, and genres of MMS is pursued in a thoroughgoing way with Ling et al.'s
pilot study of twenty-five Norwegian users. Ling, Julsrud, and Yttri also
report MMS being perceived as being fun (with humorous messages as an example),
as well as identified genres such as 'almost like a post card', as
documentation (for travelling sales representatives, for instance) or
quasi-typical documentation (to give the receiver at least a sense of what
something looks like), of paparazzi or news reporting, and finally of the need
for care in sending pictures given the pitfalls of breaching privacy or sending
the wrong picture to one or more unintended recipients. They also canvass
whether it will be easier to misinterpret MMS . communication than is the case
with textual SMS communications, and, if so, whether this will give impetus to
SMS/MMS 'developing as communications technologies that need to "hang
together" in the eyes of the reader/receiver' (Ling, Julsrud, and Yttri
2005: 99; cf. Ling and Julsrud 2005).
While
MMS is akin to the planned if not ordained direction of development in which
telecommunications companies would wish camera phones to go, the intensive
activity and cultural ferment is coming from the direction of Internet
cultures. The easy exchange of digital photos through email, file-transfer proнgrams,
or the web, and by memory sticks, disks, cables, or wireless protocols (such as
Bluetooth), now allows images to be easily shared, manipulated, disнplayed, or
printed. A now popular way of sharing digital photos is online photosharing
sites, where users can post their photos online, organised by keywords or tags,
for the public or just friends, to view or save. Perhaps the most well known of
these sites is flickr (http://www.flickr.com/). Because of the
still comparatively low resolution, images taken by camera phone are more
clearly Viewed on digital screens, whether on a hand-held device or a computer
screen. Camera phone images can be uploaded to a photosharing site from a
computer, or directly from a cell phoneа
(whether using a web browser, MMS, or х-mрil. Photosharing sites
clearly build on over a decade's audience and user expectati 1а of webа
culture Ч and theа now
taken-for-granted notion that weа
canа easilyа find information, text, images, or multimedia
material about a person throughа consulting
a website.
In
their incorporation into photo-sharing practices across convergent Intern and
cell phone cultures, camera phones are set to play their part in an enormously
important development in digital culture, the area of what has been called
'social software'. Social software is a development in networked, online
software, especially that based on the Internet, which builds on the cultures
of use established with chat in particular. Social software attempts to learn
from the perceived problems of chat (especially the forerunner technology
Internet Relav Chat) namely about how to enter a public space to meet new
people but how to avoid ,ааа unwanted,
undesirable, or harassing strangers. Examples of social software are the
,.аа Friendsters or the Orkut software.
Users need to be invited to join the social group by another 'friend'. They can
customise their profile to indicate whether they are interested in friendship,
love, networking, or a mix of relationships. They can then access their
friends' friends, or make their friends available to others. Social software
provides a semi-open, regulated way of making new friendships and other
relationships, by mobilising trust.
There
is much else to say about camera phones, but it is worth concluding with
considerations of how this type of photography has uniquely contributed to
digital photography's general reworking of the phenomenology, aesthetics, and
questions of value of the image. Such speculations have their pretexts in the
technical characteristics of camera phones. For the first few years of their
life, for instance, camera phones have suffered from obvious limitations
compared to other types of cameras. The quality of their lenses is inferior to
that of analog and digital cameras, as they are made from plastic rather than
glass. So far resolution has been relatively poor, compared to the standard
quickly established by digital cameras. Other early problems included limited
storage capability, relatively short battery life, and lack of control over
exposure, focus, and lens size, compared to fuller-featured digital and
analogue cameras. Yet much photo theorising and investigation of cell phone
cameras has taken such things as givens, and explored how cell phone
photography frames the world. For instance, inspired by Susan Sontag's notion
that photographs have produced a new practice of mediated vision Ч 'looking
with photographs' (Sontag 1977) Ч Kato et al. claim that:
The experience of seeing people and objects framed with a small camera
and viewed on keitai monitor may result in a new way of seeing things.
In our everyday lives the convenience of taking, storing, and viewing photos on
a keitai handset is part of the recording of the social and cultural
context in which we find ourselves or the recalling of the situation in which
the recording took place. (Kato etal. 2005: 307)
They
discuss the traits of this 'new type of photography': small, compact, and light
photographs; ease of transmission from the handset; focus once again being important
to 'decide what to fit inside the small rectangular frame'; immediate judgment
required on whether to save, delete, send (or use as wallpaper) (2005: 307).
They make another intriguing point also:
when we look with keitai, our vision captures the scene inside
the rectangular frame, but at the same time our attention is drawn to the
surroundings (outside the frame) more than it is with the conventional
photograph. These photos stimulate the imagination by conjuring absence cited
by the image in the frame. Further, they are reflections of individual
viewpoints and subjectivнity that provide insight on the attention and
interests of the person who took them.(2005: 307)
I am
not sure if I am entirely convinced about the proposal of camera phones as
ushering in a 'new type of photography'. Rather I am inclined to see camera
phones as occupying a dynamic and contingent niche in a rapidly changing scene
of digital photography, image circulation, and visual culture. From 2004Ч5, for
instance, camera phone models have steadily emerged with higher resolution,
better storage, and memory card capability, with cell phone manufacturers hopeнful
that the 'quality migration from the camera industry has begun' (Nokia's head
of imaging business, Juha Putkiranta, quoted in Steinbock 2005: 185). From the
other direction, digital cameras are now available with Wi-Fi networking
capabilнities. Thus I suspect that theories of the aesthetics and cultural
dynamics of cell phone photography are rather precarious at this historical
moment.
Moblogging
I now
wish to shift to another set of technologies and practices of mobility in which
imaging has been pivotal: mobile blogging or moblogging, as it has become
known. Blogging is a set of practices and technologies that have built and now
considerably expanded Internet cultures and technologies (for a good introducнtion
see Bruns and Jacobs 2006). Not long after their inception, cell phones and
mobile and wireless technologies started to be used for mobile blogging. Moblogнging
is a handy concrete instance of the coming together of the Internet and the
cell phone (a topic that I take up at length in chapter 9), and technologies of
the image have been prominent in this.
Iа wouldа
likeа toа approachа
theа beginningsа of moblogging by looking very interesting
pre-history: that of University of Toronto engineering pr0fP Steve
Mann's use of wearable computing as a roving reporter.3 Mann tell
his interest in wearable computing in the early 1970s, describing a system h
devised:
A 'photographer's assistant' system comprising my late 1970s wearable
com puter (pictured here with 1980 display). I integrated the computer into
welded-steel frame worn on my shoulders (note belt around my waist which
directed much of the weight onto my hips). Power converter hung over one shoulder.
Antennae (originally 3, later reduced to 2), operating at different
frequencies, allowed simultaneous transmission and reception of computer data,
voice, or video. This system allowed for complete interaction while walking
around doing other things. (Mann 1997)
Later
he devised his WearComp2 device, to which he added a radar location device
(long before the days of Global Positioning System satellites), and in the late
1980s presented this wearable radar device to the Royal Canadian Institute of the
Blind. Mann also designed audio capabilities for the device Ч 'audio wearables'
Ч and communications channels including a modem, to send and receive, via
radio, voice and data and also video (via a different path) (1997). In
addition, he designed a technology called the 'aremac' (camera spelled backнwards)
that allowed his remotely located assistant to see what he was seeing (that is,
experience his point-of-view) (1997). In later 'generations' of this
technology, Mann distributed components in clothing, then as conductive threads
in clothing. Many other inventions followed, notably in 1994 a wireless wearcam
(Mann 1996a; Woolford 2003; see also his 'lookpaintings', Mann 1996b). On his
homepage, Mann himself relates his wireless webcam experiment to a range or
concepts, including moblogs (wearcam.org).
Before I leave Mann's work, I would like to note briefly his pioneering
contribution to the use of mobile image devices in the service of civil rights
and human rights activism.
Mann
proposed a wearable photographic device for human rights workers to take photos
and videos in dangerous situations and transmit these as evidence, without
being the target of violence for using traditional cameras (Mann and Guerra
2001). His 'domewear' product range offered 'conspicuously concealed cameras as
a deterrence against crime' (www.wearcam.org/domewear/). Mann coined
the term 'sousveillance', or 'watchful vigilance from underneath' (Mann n.d.)
referring to the idea of turning surveillance technologies against those people
and apparatuses of control that customarily deployed them, so encouraging
activists, citizens, and others to watch and record the watchers - a
technologically mediated practice of bearing witness. Sousveillance was quickly
picked up by the activist community, as well as artists and writers, with 24 December
declared World Sousveillance Day.
MannТs
Wearcam technology may have prefigured moblogging, but in any case certainly
preceded it by a number of years. Stuart Woodward's text posts from cell phone
to a livejournal server on 4 January 2001 are often cited as one of the first
instances of moblogging (Ito 2003). David Davies is credited with one of the first
SMS posts and blogs ('SMSblog Ч Wherever I am, you'll know!'), on 1
March 2001 (www.smsblog.manilasites.com).
Innovations in text blogging folнlowed but it was the possibilities of
networking camera phones that really trigнgered excitement. By the end of 2002,
a number of people, including Ito and i Woodward, had posted images directly
from their phones to their blogs (these images are still available). The term
'moblogging' was coined in 2002, for which j Adam Greenfield is credited (Ito
2002):
(That's pronounced 'mo,' as in 'mobile.') Take a look at HipTop Nation
for a compelling glance at the future-becoming-present in real time: this is
what happens when you fuse digital cameras and text-entry functionality with a
way to publish it to the Web, for better and worse. (Greenfield 2002a)
Hiptop
Nation was a communal moblog started in April 2002 by Mike Popovic (2002), a
beta-tester of T-Mobile Sidekick, the fashionable phone discussed in chapter 7.
Moblogging using audio and video was also trialled. Moblogging via the wireless
access protocol on mobiles also emerged, with technologies such as wapblogger,
a wap interface to weblog tools such as Blogger and Livejournal. By the end of
2002, the new trend in weblogs had received admiring if quizzical notices in
mainstream old media (Perrone 2002).
Early
accounts of moblogging swung between an aesthetic of the mobile found object
and reporting on the microscopic texture of daily life on the one hand, to
Utopian vision of transfigured citizens and community on the other Ч a tension
picked up in the Guardian article: 'So far, most moblogs seem to be
limited to pictures of friends at parties and text messages during long
journeys. But does anyone except your nearest and dearest really want to know
what sandwich you ate for lunch?' (Perrone 2002). Such a rationale was
perfectly fine for some mobloggers, who saw the moblog as a practice for
supporting and intensifying sociability in daily life, and for creating new
possibilities for the small interactive ^audiences and communities sustained,
if not created, by blogging:
If we can protect our privacy and trust data networks, then we might
find that some of our daily activities would be enhanced by sharing them, both
with our circle of friends around the Web, and the people nearby with like
minds. Each of our moblogs, our mobile information profiles and archives, could
search people in the area for compatible data. Think of it as a Web search the
real world. The results would be constant, part of conversation, tracked by
your moblog. (Hall 2002)
Moblogging
could be something new because it had the characteristics of what аbegan to be called 'locative media'
(canvassed in chapter 10). With its locative media potential, moblogging
promised both to extend but also to intensify blogging itself. For some,
however, moblogging held far more Utopian, or dystopian possibilities. There
were quite a number afire with this possibility memorably captured by Howard
Rheingold's conjuring of 'the power of the mobile many' 'Smart mobs emerge when
communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation.
The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and
destructive' (Rheingold n.d.).
What
was interesting, however, was the speed at which moblogging experiнments and
the meanings beginning to be attached to the technology were quickly inflected
by the commercial. Greenfield, for instance, exhorted cellular service
providers, in these terms:
Help your customers understand this. Offer them a gently branded space
where they can share their stories, let a community accrete around it. Let
users' allegiance develop to that community, which will be a lot realer and
deeper than their entirely notional loyalty to a brand. I guarantee you it will
be the stickiest thing since asphalt in August, because it will take a lot more
than a competitor's superficially sexy phone to wean people away from real
relationships they've built and nurtured. (Extra credit if you can somehow make
the postings location-specific, and thus tie the digital back to the lived
experience of the city.)
Get the UI [user interface] right, get to market first, and even when
your competitors imitate you as they surely will, you'll be able to maintain
your dominance. Because if you get it right, you will be offering, through your
brand and your phones, access to a genuine, organic, lively, unscripted
colloquy: an always-on party where people will meet and fight and fall in love.
(Greenfield 2002b)
The first
international moblogging conference was organised by Greenfield an held in
Tokyo in July 2003, and had a strong focus on the commercial possibilities of
moblogging. I will return to the story of commerce and moblogging later on, but
for the moment I look at a rather ordinary case of inventing moblogging in
everyday life: in the travails of a taxi blogger.
Cabbie flaneur
As
moblogging gathered momentum in 2003 a blogging taxi-driver started to me to
public notice: Sydney-based Adrian Neylan and his blog 'Man of Lettuce: A
Cabbie's Spray' (Neylan 2006). Neylan commenced blogging in December 9003 but
his rise to mainstream media prominence came in mid-2004. On 14 Tuly 2004
Neylan announced a new purchase:
Over the last few days I've invested heavily in a new mobile phone. The
latest on the market with a 1 megapixel camera. I've been waiting 2 months for
this model . . . This phone also has all the whistles and bells . . .
Connectivity is my current dilemma. Once conquered however, I'll be up and
running, posting stories and the like, from the cab in real time.
The
first mobile post came the next day. However, Neylan was not impressed with the
ease of use and quality of his cell phone camera, and discussing a later post
and image with his interlocutors he felt he should be able to do better: 'With
an increasing readership, and the blog to get national attention soon, I figure
this is a reasonable position to take. Maybe I'm just being precious, I dunno'.
Two days later he devised a bracket to steady the camera. The image posted
depicts a fleet of rather blurry looking cabs. Man of Lettuce's first efforts
at sending an image remotely came at the end of July 2004, with a picture of
one of Sydney's best-known taxi-driver haunts, all-night Cafe Hernandez, in
Kings Cross. More phone videos followed, including some in report-to-camera
format, as befitted a fast-rising citizen journalist. In September 2004, a
national lifestyle and light entertainment programme featured 'Adrian, the
blogging cabbie':
Adrian the cabbie is what you'd call a mobile publisher. He drives
around in his cab, seeing a city in action and asking his passengers all sorts
of questions which he then adds to his blog. A far cry from the days when the
only conversation you'd get from a cabbie was, 'Mate, I can't break a SO!' But
the meter's running, so let's jump in with Adrian, the blogging cabbie. (Mondo
Thingo 2004)
The
programme featured some snatches of dialogue, and Neyland explaining his modus
operandi:
ADRIAN: Those couple of passengers I picked up earlier, I've just done a
quick thumbnail of what they thought would happen and just put it straight
online via the mobile phone. And here it is with an image of a city scene . .
For me, because obviously in the taxi I see things around about town which I
just have to capture, things which aren't there five minutes later or hour
later. (Mondo Thingo 2004)
The
resonance of Cab Blog may lie in the figure of the taxidriver as an antipodean
everyman. Taxi-drivers are renowned as (having no choice but to be) lending a
sympathetic ear to their customers. As all people from many walks of life and
social circumstances take cabs, cabbies oversee and observe all manner of
things. They meet all sorts of people, and, like hairdressers, are able to
engage them with their guard down, in a conversational mode as it were. For
this reason, the cabbie is an important cultural figure, a repository of common
knowledge, popular opinion, and street wisdom. The cabbie is often cited as a
barometer of the public mood. Once Neylan's reputation spread in the
blogosphere, and in print and television media, this role, and the authority it
carries, was recognised when he was invited to participate in a public debate
on national television. (He was also invited to lodge the blog in the National
Library of Australia electronic archives). As the recognisable figure of
cabbie, Neylan's Man of Lettuce blog played a mediating role in representing
the new technology and practice of blogging to audiences that were not familiar
with it.
The
Cab Blog was fit-for-purpose for introducing moblogging to wider audiнences in
another respect. There has been a strong association between cell phones and
another twentieth-century technology of mobility, the car, as we saw in chapter
2. Moblogging made it possible to blog from a car; and a cab is a special type
of car: one that perhaps collects more interesting and unpredictable textual,
visual, and auditory information than other cars moving in a city in the
patterns of their everyday lives. A cab is a type of moving theatre, perhaps,
or a microcosm of the larger world, with some familiar, recurring characters,
and some strangers Ч and so not surprising perhaps that rich multimedia data
about a cab driver s journeys might be collected, and be of interest to
audiences wider than the blogger's intimates.
What
we see in this case study is typical of much of the early practice of moblogging,
which very much involved the technological, social, and cultural skills and
disposition of the bricoleur. Or, to frame the pioneering moblogger in a
аdifferent way, what cultural
theorist John Fiske called 'the art of making do (Fiske 1989), something that
David Marshall feels is central to new media cultures (Marshall 2005).
Moblogging is still preoccupied, not surprisingly, with cobbling together the
various bits of hardware, software, transmission channels, protocols, filters,
scripts, and translators into kludges5 that made it possible to post
from a cell phone to the Internet.
Life = blog
From
the Cab Blog case, and the early development of moblogging, I now wish to
return to the question of how commerce has grasped, domesticated, and appropriated
moblogging. As I suggested above, there have been different visions of
moblogging. One vision of moblogging sees its technocultures as a way to
organise, retrieve, and network datascapes and mediaflows of everyday life. On
this view, moblogging allows those who so wish to know, find out, or locate the
nomad-blogger in space. It also serves the restless blogger as a method for
staying connected to the invisible skeins of community and networks, through
the frequent sending of packets of data, embodying texts, words, images,
sounds, and moving images of everyday.
As I
have suggested, for much of the short history of moblogging it has been a kludge-practice
in the interstices of networks, operating at the ragged interfaces of the
Internet and cell phone culture. Much of the interest shown in moblogнging has
been by computer programmers, and those Internet enthusiasts or service
providers interested Ч for reasons of profit or otherwise Ч in devising
workarounds and applications to enable cell phones to send SMS and MMS
(store-and-forward technologies) to email addresses on the Internet, to then
post to weblogs. While various types of cell phones were favoured for their
utility in moblogging Ч especially new camera phones with relatively
high-resolution image capabilities, such as one megapixel Ч and cell phone
manufacturers and network providers were doubtless pleased about the phenomenon
of moblogнging bringing them unforeseen business, they were not quick to
embrace the phenomenon.
Nokia
has been one of the first and few cell phone manufacturers (or network
operators) explicitly to grasp and engage with moblogging. In 2004, it released
its Lifeblog product, described as a 'mobile phone and PC application solution
that keeps an organized multimedia diary of the items you collect with your
mobile phone' (Nokia 2004b; see www.nokia.com/lifeblog). Nokia explained
that:
Blogging is all about communication Ч we are interested in other
people's lives, but at the same time we want to share our own experiences and
thoughts with the others. Having a multimedia diary of your life, is a unique
starting point for sharing the items that make up your life memories. (Nokia
2004c)
One of the
Lifeblogs Nokia displayed on its site as an exemplar was lifeblog.ani-na.net,
chronicling the daily life of a model. In August 2004 Nokia announced a
collaboration with Six Apart (well-known for its popular TypePad software) to
offer greater functionality for Lifeblog. According to Nokia's Christian
Lindholm (one of the Nokians we met in chapter 3):
Nokia
Lifeblog is further evolving into a great tool for life sharing. Thanks to
multimedia messages to their TypePad account the collaboration with Six Apart,
a shaper in the blog community, usersааа
will be able to upload multimedia like photos, videos, text message ,
and multimedia messages to their TypePad account. (Nokia 2004b)
With
the release of the Nokia 7710 in November 2004, Nokia added image editing
functions such as crop, zoom, rotate, and flip, as well as the possibility f
users to write or draw on top of images they have taken with the photo, or just
to draw their own picture (Nokia 2004a).
Nokia
avoids the term 'moblogging', rarely using this word, perhaps because it is not
widely recognised outside those well versed in digital culture. Instead Nokia
talks about 'mobile Hogging' or just 'blogging'. Note here, for instance the
emphasis on 'sharing', whether 'mobile sharing' or 'life sharing'. On his own
blog, designer Christian Lindholm talks about the everyday things he does with
Lifeblog and describes his cell phone as a 'life recorder' (Lindholm 2004).
Thus he recognises the growing importance of the exchange of personal and
personalised images, audio, messages, and video over the Internet, but
increasingly too over the cell phone.
It is
not clear to me yet what the take-up of Nokia's Lifeblog has been, and to what
uses it has been put, and whether their particular commercial domestication of
blogging is having any influence. However, as it has been promoted thus far,
Nokia's Lifeblog is a quite sophisticated and insightful take, as well as an
obviously self-interested take, on the mobile image.
Mobile imaging worlds
I think that 'Moblogging' like 'Blogging' isn't really something that
technicнally new. It is the popularization and the impact of many people doing
it that is exciting to me. Blogging can be said to be just online diaries.
Moblogging is just mail-to-web. Moblogging is just an extension of wearable
computing. Fine. Call it whatever you like, but let's do it, make it widely
available and have fun and change the world. (Ito 2003)
More
so than blogging itself, moblogging is still taking shape. In this chapter,
have only sketched the outlines of a history of moblogging, and have omitted
many important technical innovations and well as canny social and cultural
uses. Thus far, it is 'an initial gadget' (in Latour's terms; cf. chapter 4)
that has interested many groups of people, and so is proceeding. What is also
occurring is how the project is transformed 'every time a new group becomes
interested in the project (Latour 1996). This is evident in the case of Nokia's
Lifeblog. It is evident too in the instance of particular moblogs, such as Cab
Blog, in which the meanings of moblogging take shape. It is also apparent in
the many other experiments with moblogging, mobile and wireless devices,
locative media, global positioning system (GPS), and the many other devices
with which cell phones and mobile technologies can now articulate and connect.
If moblogging as a
technology and part of cell phone culture is still under construction (actually
this is the condition of all technology always, as living rather than frozen or
black-boxed things), this is perforce the case with phones and
telecomniunicative devices in their new role as image machines. With the proporнtion
of new phones shipping with cameras still rising, phone photographers are
hypothetically almost an identical set to cell phone users as a whole. We lack
reliable figures, however, on how widely camera phones are being used, and need
more studies and debates on how, why, and where, and for what, they matter to
people. Despite this, photography is now here to stay in cell phone culture,
and there are signs that it is set to play an important role in cultural
formations more generally.