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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi www.sagepublications.com Volume 8(2): 195–211 DOI: 10.1177/1367877905052417

The mobile phone as media ●

Harvey May and Greg Hearn Queensland University of Technology, Australia

● This article focuses on the mobile phone’s permeation into ‘everyday life’ through products, knowledge and cultural processes. The convergence and blurring of industry boundaries increasingly see entertainment, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and lifestyle products and services combine. The possibilities that digital economies (via products and services) provide in shaping our experiences – and how others experience us – lend support to Featherstone’s comment that the ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ has arrived. The resulting consumption is an experience economy, where a broad range of mobile phone users, with or without technical savvy, expendable income and aesthetic ambitions, can harvest from the ever-increasing palette of the digital domain. Throughout the 20th century, visions of utopia and dystopia have often run alongside such major developments in technology, especially those that have the capacity or likelihood to transform and disturb conceptions of the everyday. Outlining a number of current states of play and future scenarios for the mobile phone in the everyday, we suggest that mobile phone analytics will shift from the utopian and dystopian towards analyses by more conventional theoretical and methodological tools and approaches found in media, cultural and policy studies, as well as in the social sciences and other disciplines. ●

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS ●

technology

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cultural economy utopia

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dystopia

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everyday life

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Introduction It is unlikely that generation Y, teenagers or the Vespa demographic are thinking of Korg synthesizers and weekends spent scraping old walls when discussing polyphonics or wallpapers. The personalization of mobile phones began in the late 1990s (Bradley and Landigran, 2000) with simple monophonic ringtones and changeable plastic phone covers. 2.5 generation General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and 3G mobile phones now offer an extensive range of features with media centre sub-menus. Content is downloadable through a customer’s service provider, the handset company’s website or any other mobile content and application provider found on the web – through their phone. Polyphonic ringtones and MP3 TruTones can be previewed and ordered through the internet. 64K colour screens offering Video Graphics Array (VGA) picture quality make it possible to endlessly replace the phone wallpaper or animated screensaver in the same way as on computers. Three-dimensional ‘avatars’ and ‘virtual spokespeople’ for delivering mobile content are also available, while most sites offer downloadable Java games.1 Video downloads and messaging will also become more popular as video-enabled handsets increase in uptake and 3G networks increase their client base.2 A recent addition to mobile content are three-dimensional animated characters called Weemees, released recently in the UK and Asia, which can dance, fall in love and match the personality of the sender/texter of messages. In Hong Kong, phone technology company Artificial Life will offer those too busy (or too lazy) for relationships a mobile artificial girlfriend (but, as yet, no boyfriend). Imitating what Scansoroli and Eng (1997) foresaw with online shopping and commerce, the mobile phone has begun to offer people entrenched in metropolitan lifestyles ways to expand limited leisure time (cited in Jih and Lee, 2003). In the USA, News Corporation started a direct-to-mobile drama series (Hotel Franklin) composed of 60-second episodes specifically written and designed for the mobile. While the above content resides mostly in the domain of personalized entertainment, established carriers also offer a developing range of more purposeful services for the delivery of information, multimedia and email to the handset that can be personalized and edited. Many large media organizations such as the BBC, newspapers and film distributors have WAP-friendly web content, much like websites for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Along with these features and the mobile’s new fundamental capacity to send words, audio and images from anywhere on the move, their status as a ‘new information medium’ (Dobrowolski et al., 2000) and the convergence of media and ICTs are becoming increasingly established.

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M content One of the keenest and as yet unresolved matters lies with downloaded content and music piracy. Like the compact cassette, CD ripping, MP3s and internet file sharing, ‘popular music has been at the cutting edge of issues surrounding media distribution, power and control’ (Flew, 2002: 107). By far the most popular modification to a mobile is the ringtone. Sales for ringtone downloads in Europe and Japan totalled US$5bn in 2003, with Americans spending US$57m due to their attitudes to mobile telephony as a voice call business only. However, these revenue figures are expected to triple in 2004 (Emling, 2004; Garrity, 2004). That ringtones are a youth market can be derived from the ringtone hit list, where seven of the top 10 downloads in the UK are hip-hop and, in 2004, no top 20 song was a guitarbased hit. The publishing royalties from ringtones are estimated to be worth US$1bn worldwide in 2003 and the profits gleaned from ringtone sales in the UK in 2004 have now more than doubled music CD profits (BBC, 2003; Burrell, 2004; Emling, 2004; Sherwin, 2004). The pioneer of bringing hiphop ringtones to the UK, Alexander Amosu (known as Lord of the Ring Tones), won a Black Enterprise Award in 2002 as young entrepreneur of the year. Now focusing on a mobile TV channel, Amosu feels partly responsible for the now 257 ringtone companies in the UK. This has created what Dobrowolski et al. (2000) foresaw as content moderators working in cottage industries, albeit illegally in some cases. The problem for the music industry is that an unknown but significant number of internet ringtone resellers do not pass on royalty fees in contrast to companies such as Nokia and Motorola who have licensing agreements with the music publishers and other content vendors who supply and format a range of new generation mobile content. Resellers can buy the content from suppliers or make their own unauthorised copies.3 The internet monitoring company Envisional estimates that the music industry could be losing $1m per day in lost royalties (Envisional, 2004).4 Considered to be the new Napster, the core difference between ringtone resellers and file sharing is that considerable profits are involved for those who partake in ringtone reselling. The legal implications of the transactions are yet to be determined (Envisional, 2004). The argument could be made that 10 seconds of a simple ringtone do not constitute ‘substantial’ copying. And does liability rest with the ringtone creator, reseller or customer? And what of those who key in their favourite song on their polyphonic mobile themselves? Once MP3-like formats become more common on phones, the possibilities for swapping TruTones, making your own and distributing them through Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) may further challenge the control over intellectual property (IP) for large music companies.5 The same applies for wallpapers. With an inbuilt camera, one can simply take a picture of a piece of artwork or magazine and apply it as wallpaper.6

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Offshore content providers also provide adult wallpapers, from softcore centrefolds to what would normally be restricted hardcore content under most classification legislation. The above outline of the proliferation of mobile products in the culture domain and the notion of the mobile as a ubiquitous technology have seeded issues that track through the development of the mobile phone, just as occurred with previous 20th-century technologies. Fears for children’s wellbeing, end of the world scenarios, lurking dangers, medical horrors and threats to moral decency find a home with the emergence of many now everyday technologies. Brain cancer, petrol station catastrophes, car accidents, seizures and repetitive motion injury are now outlined in contemporary mobile phone instruction manuals. The attention that such debates cause is a repeat of what Dholakia and Zwick (2003: 2) identify as modernist visions of technological development that tend towards ‘dystopian aesthetics’. Like the mobile, technologies such as video, databases, biotechnology, television and nuclear applications are expressed as intrinsically ‘nefarious’ and a threat to human life. This then initially captures social and cultural research agendas, as well as policy debate, in a lurching pendulum from threat to human good.

Towards a research agenda: when worlds collide When it comes to technology, culture and society, visions of the future have enjoyed both utopian and dystopian prophecies. As far back as Metropolis and thence with films throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, titles such as Fail Safe, Fahrenheit 451, THX1138, Westworld, Logan’s Run and Rollerball presented an experience-rich but emotionally deprived world endangered by the technology that had delivered society from particular tediums and ills. In later decades, the technological spectacle of the Star Wars films and jingoistic Independence Day-type films mingled with slightly more ambiguous scenarios such as those in Brazil, Terminator 2, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky and Minority Report. More recently, The Day after Tomorrow presents a crippled United States reduced to a fleeing refugee population, begging Mexico for entry, as global warming from first world consumption practices has brought about climate catastrophe. However, as Milojevic and Inayatullah (2001: 29) point out, most western sci-fi films offer little insight into the technology and ‘postmodern capitalism’ of the future. Predominantly, such masculinist texts dwell on the inevitable (and spectacular) ‘longing for fulfilment in apocalypse’, where the enduring message has been that hi-tech progress may lead to disaster. The turn from brave new world to bad new future is not a singular experience confined to the technological era. In literature and opera, Mourby (2003: 16) points out that ‘as long as human beings have been able to

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conceive of the future, they seem to have been able to imagine things turning out badly’. Just as the attraction of inevitable destruction pervades technoapocalypses in films like T2, so the ‘eroticism of disaster’ has proliferated for centuries (Gomel, 2000: 405). Taken-for-granted notions of upbeat progress of the industrial era compete with bleak future scenarios based on ideas of technology and development out of our control – or in too few hands (Pantzar, 2000; Slaughter, 2001). Morton (2004) distills Rheingold’s (2002) doppelganger for the mobile in terms similar to those of utopian/dystopian scenarios: That hidden war over the future that Howard Rheingold [is] talking about has already begun . . . it’s a war between two possible versions of the future. One in which we’ll be smart, self-organizing citizens and consumers and another in which we’re passive participants in what Rheingold calls a ‘universal surveillance economy’.

Like so many technology-based cultural products and services over the past century, the possibilities of technology meet with what Luke (2001) calls the ‘doom and gloom naysayers’. The prevalence of SMS chat, adult-only downloads, Java games, cyber-bullying, cheating in exams and ‘upskirt’ images taken on mobiles have become topics for the press and current affairs programmes. Such ‘experiences’ contribute to the utopian and dystopian ‘judgement days’, when the digital and experience economies and worlds collide and converge. It is, thus, hardly surprising that the ever-increasing personalization of cultural knowledge-based production combined with the experience economy have their dystopian and utopian scenarios. When the experience economy meets the digital economy, penetrating more and more intimate domains of personal life, it is reasonable to expect big things to happen. Rifkin (2000: 7) has been a notable champion of such convergence and argues that: We are making a long term shift from industrial production to cultural production. More and more cutting edge commerce in the future will involve the marketing of a vast array of cultural experiences rather than of just traditional industrial-based goods and services. Global travel and tourism, theme cities and parks, destination entertainment centers, wellness, fashion and cuisine, professional sports and games, gambling, music, film, television, the virtual worlds of cyberspace, and electronically mediated entertainment of every kind are fast becoming the center of a new hypercapitalism that trades in access to cultural experiences . . . a world in which each person’s own life becomes, in effect, a commercial market.

That is, commodification penetrates new geographical spaces with existing products or innovations that enable the consumption process to be applied in new social, cultural or psychological spaces. Dedicated products and services, such as those outlined above, are typified by inputs based on

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knowledge, creativity and differentiation. The convergence and blurring of industry boundaries increasingly see entertainment, ICTs and lifestyle products and services combine (Kretschmer et al., 1999: 64). These personalized services lie in contrast to mass-produced goods and services, more suggestive of the modernist industrial period. Poster (2004: 416) notes how in modernity, ‘consumer objects represented social status: in postmodernity, they express one’s identity . . . consumption is part of self-construction’. With recent phones now combining media and information products with digital broadband networks, the ‘scope for interactivity and user customisation of services’ is markedly increased (Flew, 2002: 20). Rifkin’s hypercapitalism of the personal is mobile. As such, phone users now have a means of group communication, media content (entertainment, information, data, pleasure) and the ability to ‘synchronise everyday life’ (Ling, 2001a) with home or work through SMS, mobile email, pictures and video MMS. These innovative yet straightforward applications of the mobile disguise its evolving and as yet undetermined cultural and social applications. As Strocchi (2003: 136) states, ‘once they [3G mobiles] have lost the last image that conceptually linked them to their original function, it is obvious that their value will also become more abstract and further removed from the function for which they were intended’. Some recent examples of unintended mobile phone effects and applications from medical perspectives include: using mobiles for electronic transfer of tracheal breath sounds to remotely monitor asthma patients (Anderson et al., 2001); research showing adolescents using mobiles as a complementary behaviour to taking up smoking to demonstrate maturity (Steggles and Jarvis, 2003); mobiles causing neurological and tissue changes (parotid nodular fasciitis) due to postural and radiation effects (Hocking and Westerman, 2002; Pereira and Edwards, 2000); stress-related atopic eczema due to mobiles ringing (Kimata, 2003); and the use of SMS text messages as a form of contact tracing for the notification of people who have come into contact with those presenting at genito-urinary units with sexually transmitted diseases (Newell, 2001). Such wideranging impacts are likely to increase as the number of mobiles worldwide outnumbers all computers and TV sets. If functionality continues to increase, then their impact on the experience economy may be profound. In this context, scenarios of the mobile and its unforeseen applications, as well as social and cultural implications, will most likely ebb and flow from utopia to dystopia, like those of the television and computer before it.

Mobile life In her book Tomorrow’s People, Susan Greenfield (2003: 10–11) implies a moderately dystopian image for the metaphoric end of public space, as the

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mobile phone becomes a cyborg-like attachment. Wearing the mobile embedded into our clothes, she imagines crowded streets full of people ‘oblivious to the reality of the physical present around them’ – and to each other.7 In a clear reflection of what already occurs on trains, in restaurants and on streets, everyone will chatter, laugh, shout and argue seemingly to themselves ‘within the dimension of a different reality’. Currently, Townsend (2000: 3) believes that such behaviour contributes an ‘element of uncertainty about physical location to our urban interactions’. In a similar vein, Fortunati’s (2000) concept of ‘nomadic intimacy’ expresses how the mobile makes it possible for us to remain inserted in personal networks while travelling, but at the cost of ‘directly experiencing everything the social space can offer’ (cited in Geser, 2003: 10). As Calefato (2003: 165) states, ‘people may be physically present, yet distant’. This removal from the physical collective environment and existing social manners is pitted against those who remain connected to their ‘tribe’ (Lobet-Maris, 2003). The term ‘forced eavesdropping’ appears in research on mobiles as the disturbance of the public sphere (Ling, 2001b). Ling (2001c) describes this as a ‘balkanization’ of space, as mobile users (tribes) ‘colonize a part of the public sphere’ with a mobile tribe discourse, expressing an explicit reluctance to join public space while at the same time compelling others to engage in ‘semi-completed banal interactions without broader context’. Fortunati (2002: 516) signals the public dimension becoming a ‘minority’ space while ‘chance socialness’ grows less appealing. However, the connectivity of the mobile also allows for micro-management of time and space as well as ‘remote mothering’ (Geser, 2003) for that enduring social tribe, the family. Kopomaa’s (2000) judgement on the mobile’s contribution to social life leans towards both utopian and dystopian scenarios. On the one hand, the ‘forced accessibility’ that mobiles bring may lead to a ‘digital panopticon’ of people under continuous monitoring; on the other hand, Kopomaa (2000) also perceives the mobile adding ‘vitality to the public space’: Individual mobility and life management as well as the placeless presence of human relationships constitute hard facts of modern life. The mobile phone is perfectly suited to the ideology of an individualistic networking society . . . life revolves increasingly around personal electronics.

The alarm of social consequences and estrangement due to mobile phones has already become a media issue. In one of a number of stories on mobile phones in recent years, the primetime Australian television current affairs show A Current Affair featured how mobile etiquette is now taught to young women at finishing colleges. The programme advises: staying alert to others around us if we’re talking while walking; a communications academic is concerned that SMS messages allow people to ‘easily and silently lie about their whereabouts and to avoid sticky situations’; and a

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relationship counsellor questions the ethics of communicating ‘bad news’ through SMS (A Current Affair, 2004). In an article in the Dominion Post (2004) entitled ‘Does Your Teen Have Text with Strangers?’, teens are reported to sleep with their mobiles on (i.e. sleep with strangers) in case they receive a reply to a cold call text sent to unknown ‘friends of friends’. The disconnection of control by parents over their children’s communication practices is, however, tempered by the near limitless umbilical cord of the mobile’s reach for monitoring and security of their offspring, not to mention applications that can track the child’s whereabouts to within 150m. This is pitted against concerns for young people’s development skills as they remain in continually occupied/available states. Plant’s (2003: 63) multinational ethnographic study for Motorola found a sense of unease expressed by subjects towards young users becoming overdependent on mobiles, with their skills in ‘self-reliance’ becoming undermined. Similarly, research participants expressed how mobiles may remove elements of chance, adventure and surprise, as the mobile excessively organizes and captures life in motion. Fortunati’s (2002: 515) somewhat critical analysis of the mobile and its implications for limiting social/physical interactive spaces harmonizes with Plant’s subjects: ‘today it is difficult to surrender oneself to “unknown lands” because one can face them armed with a mobile, thus defended by the socialness of one’s point of departure’. These concerns over mobile phones’ intrusions and tendencies for estrangement align with Greenfield’s mildly dystopic scenario mentioned above. However, as expected, alternative interpretations, scenarios and aspirations are possible. Geser (2003: 41) identifies the mobile’s capacity to ‘weaken the control of formal institutions over their member’s behaviour’ as they are able to interrupt or alternate their roles ‘anywhere, anyplace’. Students do this by texting at school, as can workers in highly controlled environments such as call centres. Workers who are not deskbound are also able to blend home, leisure and work more easily, provided that they are able to manage the expectations of the ‘always available’ state. Plant (2003: 75) notes how mobiles allow for increasingly efficient response and organization by groups to marshal political resistance, as was the case in the Philippines in 2001, as well as being employed by ‘British environmental protesters, German anti-nuclear campaigners, Mexico’s Zapatistas, prison rioters in Turkey and Brazil and anti-capitalist activists in Seattle’. Plant’s (2003: 56) research offers ample illustrations of the mobile’s transgressive possibilities: a Dubai woman watching her fiancé face-to-face across the street while they talk on mobiles – impossible to achieve otherwise; a British Asian woman communicating with her boyfriend ‘under the cover of darkness, her bedclothes and loud music’; China’s sibling-less children establishing contacts with networks, filling the hole left by the loss of extended family (2003: 57); and Afghan girls being able to lead alternative lives through mobiles, ‘distant from their families’ control’ (2003: 58).

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In Bangladesh, a village phone (VP) scheme has seen mobiles contribute not only to income generation for rural communities, but they have also brought a sense of ‘status and image’ to women (‘phone ladies’), who are usually the lessee of the mobile phone micro-business (Salahuddin et al., 2003). And, more universally, the deaf community now has a level playing field with the hearing community, as SMS and MMS deliver independence and opportunities not possible beforehand. SMS services such as autoclub breakdown callouts or just getting in contact with friends to relay a message have, in Power and Power’s (2004: 341) words, placed deaf people on an ‘equal footing with the owner of every other mobile phone – SMS represents the first communication technology that has broken down the barriers between deaf and hearing individuals’. The flipside to these empowering functions is how mobiles are also used for more sinister (dystopian) purposes. McKean (2004) speculates as to whether 3G phones will increase the networking capabilities of criminals and paedophiles in particular. Rheingold’s (2002) ‘smart mobs’, which he defines as any group that uses mobile communications to organize collective action (similar to what Kopomaa calls ‘swarming tribes’), are also capable, for example, of organizing the coordination of gang rape by SMS, as was the case in a highly publicised sexual assault trial in New South Wales in 2003 (Morton, 2004). More recently, the 2004 Madrid train bombings were attributable to mobile phones being used as detonators, with the retailers of one phone in an unexploded package being arrested shortly after the event (Tremlett, 2004). Co-fluently, the Madrid incident identifies an additional powerful and unintended role for the mobile in its spatial bending capacities relating to time, the past and death. On the morning of the Madrid bombings, the mobile network became congested as desperate relatives attempted to phone passengers. Likewise, rescuers and doctors must deal with the ringing of victims’ mobiles during large-scale disasters, prompting what Plant (2003: 30) describes as ‘the profound sense of melancholy associated with unanswered calls’ at the scene of tragedies. Following the 11 September attacks in the US, relatives and partners of victims were left with eternal ‘voice prints’ on phone messages sent from those who called unattended home phones or switched off/unattended mobiles before perishing. In the film 21 Grams, Naomi Watt’s character lies devastated and drugged as she continually listens to a message from her husband, delivered as he walks home with their two children, all killed moments later in a car crash. In Finland, a woman who called the emergency number from her mobile to report her husband had been murdered was also murdered as she made the call (Roos, 2004). What these profound occurrences convey are the unintended and ‘abstract’ uses that mobiles have engendered. Disapproval of the mobile’s controlling tendencies and social estrangement is acutely challenged by the above exceptional examples. However, the possibilities for the multifarious,

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the everyday and the mundane also challenge dystopian views, particularly as the mobile becomes ‘utterly normalized’ (Kopomaa, 2004).

Mobile home Nokia is currently developing a life recorder in which software gathers pictures, SMS, video and audio clips and notes from the mobile and arranges them on a timeline in a number of possible ways. The software, called Lifeblog, will make it possible to Google your life, according to Nokia ‘guru’ Christian Lindholme (McIntosh, 2004). At the same time, Bluetooth technology is furthering the nearby and spontaneous communication of individuals as phones share information between users, who flow in and out of each other’s proximity. Bluetooth sets up temporal ad hoc networks as devices move in and out of radio range of each other. Norway’s carrier Telnor is exploring ways to make the mobile emulate ‘spontaneous and opportunistic human behaviour and practice’ (Bygdas et al., 2003: 3). Its aspiration is that the multimedia application of mobiles (such as a Lifeblog in your phone rather than on your PC) will randomly be made available to others, rendering an impression of lives as they pass by. If technologies such as Bluetooth deliver a flow of temporal Lifeblog content to passing users, then, as Townsend (2003: 14) ponders, Nokia’s ‘phone evangelists’ may see the realization of ‘practical telepathy’ if they achieve the embedded mobile in the body, as Greenfield envisages above. Dholakia and Zwick (2003), in supporting such a postmodern view of mobile technology, bring these themes together: ‘With the advent and indeed rapid “insertion” of increasingly miniaturized technologies into our

Figure 1

Capturing the authors’ ‘everyday’ moments in mobile life

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bodies and the fabric of the everyday, the technological aesthetic of modernism is displaced by a postmodern technological aesthetic.’ The term ‘insertion’ of mobile technology into life is not being used in the invasive sense of the word by the authors, but in the sense of membership, fabric and construction. This level of invisible insertion mirrors what Galloway (2004: 388) explores in the notion of ubiquitous computing as a ‘calm technology’. Using Weiser and Brown’s work on calm technologies (1996), Galloway defines a calm technology as one that is ‘so embedded, so pervasive, that it could be taken for granted’. These ideas resonate in Fortunati’s (2002) notion of time’s ‘thickness’ expanding with high mobile phone usage, in much the same way that the establishment of electronic communications and jet travel compressed and seemingly speeded up notions of linear time in the modernist era. Claims of social displacement brought about by the rush, demands and clatter of multimedia mobiles can be countered by their ability to claim back connections to the closeness and meaningfulness of home and friends. Fortunati (2002: 520) sees mobiles as able to reduce the ‘pain of separation’ or the ‘nostalgia to home’ as the mobile becomes itself a ‘true mobile home’. Just as Ishii (2004) found in Japan, the 2.5 and 3G mobile has had ‘positive effects’ on sociability, as mobile net and email use takes over from the PC for intimate exchange with friends and family. Indeed, the study found that mobile internet use is a ‘time-enhancing’ appliance while the traditional anchored down PC increasingly becomes a ‘time-displacing’ device.8 As camera and video phones inevitably replace voice-only handsets, their use in capturing the ‘fleeting and unexpected’ in the everyday may actually invigorate a sense of social sharing in spontaneous ways, not recognizable with the current compartmentalization of media technologies for voice, camera, printing, recording and sharing. Daisuke (2004) examines the fleeting nature of mobile media, noting how Japanese users are more likely to use the mobile as ‘immediate, ad-hoc and ongoing (and sharing that media) in lightweight and opportunistic ways’. Using Lefebvre’s theory of moments, Gardiner (2004: 243) sees moments as ‘partial totalities that reflect larger wholes’. Connecting the ‘fine grain of everyday life’ with the ‘broader sweep of sociohistorical change’, Lefebvrean everyday moments or ‘flashes of perception’, captured and reflected through newer mobiles, can convey the ‘rich and manifold possibilities’ and ‘intensify the “vital productivity” of daily life’. While such sanguine considerations may appear somewhat utopian, the realities of mobile phone abuses and the need for catch-up regulation and policy likely mean that the potential for dystopian technological discourses for the mobile will continue for some time to come. In order to better confront the utopian and dystopian assertions that will invariably be made of the mobile phone, the development of research agendas will be required.9 Such examples include analysing cultural understandings of mobile information access and communication for the identification and exploitation of

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innovation in business, services, governance and social enterprise. Simple questions such as whether the ‘life recorder’, moblogs, 2.5 and 3G mobile phones have ‘positive effects’ on sociability in the family and broader social networks will entail complex research assignments. What are the key contextual factors to consider that promote content innovation, for example, marketing, evolving technology expectations, intellectual property regimes, privacy concerns and illegal activities? To what extent should personal, social group and industrial needs inform customized innovations in technology and its delivery? Do major geographical and demographic sectors within nations differ significantly in their demands for content and its delivery? If so, how are these to be resolved? In the delivery of content, how can the mobile phone provide maximum media complementarity to other institutions and devices contribute to a knowledge society and economy? These are some of the questions that are yet to be fully explored in approaches more common to media, cultural and policy studies research and other disciplines, as the mobile phone continues to immerse itself in everyday lives – in much the same way as communication and media technologies have been experienced and researched throughout recent decades.

Notes 1 There is, however, a keen price difference between content provided by major carriers and that provided by independent internet-based mobile phone content operations. Mobile content providers typically require a call to a 1900 premium service at AUS$4.95 per minute whereas mobile carriers set a fixed price and usually only require an SMS or a visit to their WAP homepage. After the request is made, an SMS is sent to the customer’s phone with a URL address. Through WAP browsing, the phone downloads the content at the URL and it is then installed on the phone. 2 The status of 3G in Australia is still in development, as the only current network (Hutchison) suffered impediments to building its subscription base (100,000 in early 2004). Core issues were call reliability, handset availability and a lack of carrier cooperation, as Telstra, Optus and Vodafone adopted a wait and see attitude with 3G. Telstra will enter the 3G market in 2005, sharing some of Hutchison’s infrastructure. 3 Adopting a socially conscious tendency in the realm of ringtone resellers, content vendor MMS will give resellers the opportunity to donate a percentage of sales to the Starlight Foundation charity, which they then match dollar for dollar. 4 However, the micropayment system embedded in most mobile phone content downloads as a result of carrier billing results in much less financial leakage of copied music compared to the losses associated with file sharing (such as with software like Kazaa).

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5 In its first steps to offering services that may alleviate music sharing and illegal downloads, MTV Europe launched a mobile phone subscription channel for downloading music and videos in 2004. Norway’s carrier Telnor will be first to launch a mobile music channel with MP3 quality downloads for tracks that the mobile user wishes to store. 6 Optus go so far as to allow any picture file on your computer to be uploaded to a wallpaper editing tool on their site, where it can be sized and modified to fit a number of handset screens. The customer then logs into the WAP site on their phone and downloads the picture for AUS$2.95. 7 A Japanese company already offers the possibility for artificial fingernails to be embedded with small LEDs. Powered remotely by the phone, they glow when the phone is in use (Townsend, 2003). It has been envisaged that micro devices be inserted into teeth, providing a direct and discrete conduit between mobile signals and the body (McKenna, 2002). Current Bluetooth technology advances such body-phone integration. 8 The study asserts that near equal numbers of the Japanese population now access internet services via the PC as the mobile phone. Total time spent on the internet through mobile access is 26 percent. With email, 26 messages are sent weekly from a mobile, while 15 are sent from a PC. Mobile emails are mostly sent within the domain of close contacts (friends and family). 9 The research questions developed here are part of a jointly authored discussion paper, ‘The Impact of the Mobile Telephone in Australia: Social Science Research Opportunities’ (Beaton and Wajcman, 2004).

References A Current Affair (2004) ‘Mobile Phone Etiquette: Switching off Bad Manners’, Nine Network Australia (3 March). Anderson, K., Y. Qiu, A. Whittaker and M. Lucas (2001) ‘Breath Sounds, Asthma and the Mobile Phone’, Lancet (20 Oct.): 1343. BBC (2003) ‘Phone Tones Show Explosive Growth’. URL: http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3143651.stm Beaton, J. and J. Wajcman (2004) The Impact of the Mobile Telephone in Australia: Social Science Research Opportunities. Canberra: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Bradley, M. and Landigran, M. (2000) ‘Mobile Telecommunications in Australia: Policy Frameworks and Regulatory Directions’, Media International Australia 96: 37–48. Burrell, I. (2004) ‘Phone Tones Ring £70m Change to Chart Music’, Independent (27 May). URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story. jsp?story=525305 Bygdas, S.S., O. Myhre, S. Nyhus, T. Urnes and A. Weltzien (2003) Bubbles: Navigating Content in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks. Norway: Telnor.

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HARVEY MAY is a research fellow at the Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. He has published on cultural diversity and television in Broadcast in Colour: Cultural Diversity and Television Programming in Four Countries (Australian Film Commission, 2002) as well as researching the social and cultural implications of media in The Social and Cultural Implications of Private Television in Germany: Reflektion einer Entwicklung und Meditationen für Medienproduzenten (Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1997). He is currently researching mobile phones and the second generation of culturally diverse populations. Address: QUT CIRAC, Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Queensland 4059, Australia. [email: [email protected]] ●

● GREG HEARN is a professor and faculty research development coordinator at the Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. He has worked in Australia and overseas as a consultant, researcher and academic specializing in the future effects of new media technologies. Publications include The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age (Allen & Unwin, 1998; with Tom Mandeville and David Anthony) and Public Policy and the Knowledge Economy (Edward Elgar, 2002; with David Rooney, Tom Mandeville and Richard Joseph). Address: QUT CIRAC, Creative Industries Precinct, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Queensland 4059, Australia. [email: [email protected]] ●

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