The Future...

The mobile phone is going to trend in way that involves it becoming increasingly integrated into everyday life, used for tasks such as purchasing and banking, the mobile phone will become a tool with applications in commerce. It will be a universal technology for someone to have at their disposal. The mobile phone is expected to grow in its range of applications, even being put to use in an educational setting as a learning tool.

Currently the general consensus amongst educational institutions is that mobile phones do not belong in a learning environment largely because it serves as a distraction and can be used to cheat during certain assessments. There is consideration towards the mobile phone soon becoming part of education systems. The mobile phone could be the platform from which wireless learning can be done. Educational software, virtual handouts and podcasts could be attained through the mobile; teachers could even monitor attendance with them.

The mobile phone already interacts with current social media services like Facebook and Twitter, so it is safe to assume that it will continue to function as a port for any new social media services in the years to come. The mobile phone could very well take precedence over the home PC and possibly the laptop, in terms of social media service use.  A study from public relations agency Ruder Finn on intent behind mobile phone use in the USA found that 91% of mobile phone users socialize on social media services compared to only 79% of PC and laptop users. These statistics suggest that mobile phones are taking precedence over the more traditional desktop computers where social media service usage is concerned.  

What seems to be emerging is the age of, what Google vice president of commerce Stephanie Tilenius revealed as “Mobile Local Commerce” at the unveiling of Google Wallet. Essentially, Google Wallet is one of the first mobile payment platforms which allows over the counter retail purchases with the mobile phone. Google’s vice president stated, “Your phone will be your wallet. Just tap, pay, and save”. It is only natural that such an innovation occurs when 62% of Americans with mobile phones are keen to pay with them according to a MasterCard survey by Kelton Research. Another statistic courtesy of Ruder Finn suggests that mobile phone users are 1.6 times more likely to manage their finances and undertake business transactions when compared to desktop. It would seem that the mobile phone is going to become a part of everyday shopping, business transactions and personal banking. This concludes my take on the directions in which the mobile phone will trend in the future.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-intent-behind-mobile-internet-use-84016487.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504943_162-20066823-10391715.html

 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2008/tc20080827_832352.htm

Almost Forgot About Twitter 0-0

I don’t use Twitter or know anyone in my social circle that does use it, but apparently it’s the next big thing. Twitter is essentially a micro blogging service where the posts are referred to as ‘tweets’; these tweets are limited to 140 characters. Twitter has roughly 200 million registered viewers around the world; all of these users collectively produce 1200 tweets per second, 110 million tweets a day which results in there being 10 terabytes of information a day, 40% of it being pointless, useless information with no coherent meaning.  You can also ‘follow’ people on Twitter, which means you will be updated and be able to keep a close eye on their tweets. Twitter is used by various types of people including politicians like Barack Obama; celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, musicians like Justin Bieber and even activists have made use of Twitter.

Twitter has many applications and is versatile as it can be used during different scenarios and events as a form of quick, effective communication between people particularly during a crisis event. Though Twitter has been characterised partially by the useless and superficial tweets which make up 40% of its daily information output, it can supply people in a crisis situation “…with actionable factual information” (Farrell et al 2010) which is vital in that type of situation for family members trying to establish contact with and find each other. Twitter has also been utilized to political effect by activists, most notably in Tunisia and Egypt in the Middle-East. Twitter was used as a method of communication amongst the activists in both countries; information that was instructional and organizational in nature was used in conjunction with traditional methods of activism to oust the likes of Tunisian President Ben Ali and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak from office in their respective countries.



The Twitter Density map indicates that the micro blogging service is used mostly in the USA, South America, Western Europe, Indonesia and Japan.



On a more superficial note, Twitter is used by celebrities to keep their fans updated on their activities no matter how insignificant, make derogatory comments about other celebrities as well as posting their opinions on public and foreign events. Twitter can be a great promotional tool for celebrities but it can also be used against them, twitter can be considered a double-edged sword in this way. For instance, the musician Bow Wow tweeted this message to the Twitterverse, “Face numb im whippin the lambo. Tipsy as f**k. Just left the @livmiami Im fu**ed up!!! Ohhhh damn. Y i drive the Lambo Chris might have to drive after next spot.” Celebrities can tarnish the all-important image they are trying to sell to their fans by showing how flawed they are in various ways. From a marketing perspective this is bad but, it can help the followers of these celebrities to connect with them and build a rapport on an intimate level, looking past the constructed image and into a real person.

Sinnappan, Suku; Farrell, Cathy; and Stewart, Elizabeth, "Priceless Tweets! A Study on Twitter Messages Posted During Crisis: Black Saturday" (2010). ACIS 2010 Proceedings. Paper 39. http://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2010/39

http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/03/twitter-numbers-and-statistics/



Virtual to Real?

Meadows (2008:51) argues that experiences create a grounding of belief. “People in virtual worlds build things, use them, sell them, trade them and discuss them. When another person confirms what I am seeing, places value on it, spends time working to pay for it, buys it, keeps it, uses it, talks about it, gets emotional about it, and then sells it – this tells me there is something real happening.  The suspension of disbelief has become a grounding of belief”

Do you agree with Meadows’ statement? If so why, if not, why not?  

I agree with Meadow’s statement because I find it to be believable that, experiences create a grounding of belief in something. It is believable that “...people respond to technology on social and emotional levels much more than we ever thought” (cited Meadows 2008:50) after seeing the statistics about virtual gamers provided by PhD graduate of Stanford University, Nick Yee. Yee surveyed 30,000 virtual gamers and found that 1.40 per cent of men and 53 per cent of women believed their virtual friends were equal or better than their real-world counterparts. These individuals were heavily immersed in the virtual worlds they played in, with 25 per cent of them attesting to their highlight of the week having occurred within a virtual world online. Having invested themselves so much into their virtual worlds, the 30,000 gamers are an example of how experiences create a grounding of belief, in that they can agree that virtual experiences which are not ‘real’ are equal to or better than real experiences.

Mobile Phone vs Everything

The mobile phone is certainly becoming part of our everyday lives in the way it ‘…connects with a distinct set of social practices (like listening to music while travelling on the train or the underground, for example) which are specific to our culture or way of life’ (Goggin 2006) The mobile phone is becoming a tool that can identify you as a certain type of person. The idea of the mobile phone and the individual becoming closer is suggestive of what Faraway (1990) defined as ‘…a hybrid of machine and organism…’ a cyborg. To say that the small devices in our pockets could become part of us in the future, which seems to be in motion, makes it clear that this piece of technology will become a dominant screen in our future.

The mobile phone will undoubtedly become a dominant screen in the future but we cannot ignore other devices such as the television and computer/laptop which have much larger screens, an area in which the mobile phone is lacking in comparison. It is a simple feature, but is actually a very appealing feature amongst devices with screens. Micro-movies for the mobile are not going to replace the other physically larger screens. It cannot replace the culture provided to societies by cinema or even DVD’s at home on the television. Micro-movies seem more like a gimmicky novelty than a feature that will significantly aid the mobile phone’s dominance in the future. The television is going to advance into the future also, in that it will make the home environment more interactive with the world beyond the doorstep. These other screens are not going to be ignored to leave the mobile phone by itself in the future as the dominant screen. The mobile phone will become increasingly involved in the future but not entirely dominant.  

The way in which the mobile phone has become involved with cultures is all due to its portability; it is far less appealing without that factor, then it is just a small screen. Some of the features like movies that will become portable with the mobiles as micro-movies, cannot be experienced in the same way when compared to the device on which the experience originated from. Portable devices are advancing in parallel with their larger counter-parts, the Nintendo 3DS for example, features stereoscopic 3d which is currently ahead of the cinema’s silver screen. If 3d can be achieved from a portable device like the 3DS, then it could be a strong possibility that it will feature in mobile phones. The mobile phone certainly threatens other devices to become the dominant screen of the future.      

Goggin, G. 2006 Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life, Routledge, New York.

Haraway D. 1991. ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, pp. 149-89. New York: Routledge

PoliTube!

Social Media is becoming another front on which the battle for votes takes place. The social media platform presents politicians with a new campaigning tool and opens up a new audience. President of the United States of America, Barack Obama , used Youtube in particular to great effect.

Obama is undoubtedly the politician who has benefitted most from social media screens. An example of how Obama’s run for the presidency benefitted from social media screens can be found in the viral video on YouTube called ‘Crush on Obama’ which features Obama Girl, the video is an Obama tribute to say the least. This video increased Obama’a popularity with younger audiences that will be eligible to vote in a few years, Obama Girl helped build a rapport between Obama and younger audiences somewhat. YouTube seems to have become Obama’s friend in that addresses such as the announcement about Osama Bin Laden’s death are posted on Youtube along with the address made at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. The speech saw Obama absolutely roasting Donald Trump for his scepticism of Obama’s birth certificate. The speech was very comedic (and in my opinion written for him by writers from Saturday Night Live) which Obama received praise for whilst some commenters of the video thought he was merely stooping down to Trump’s level. Social media screens are very risky for politicians and parties to utilize as there is always the risk of negative blowback in some way shape or form.    

Social media screens can be a double-edged sword in that they can positively or negatively affect the disposition of voters towards a politician and the party they represent. Political parties can use Social media screens to find any slip-ups made by the opposition and bring attention to them in order to make the opposition look bad, though the social media platforms like YouTube already do a good job of this anyways. Moments that can be capitalised upon in such a way are known as ‘macaca moments’. Former U.S senator George Allen made the mistake of referring to an Indian-American man as macaca, a word that was used to describe native Central African populations, it means ‘monkey ‘and is considered a racial slur. This macaca moment was used to show that George Allen lacked the discipline of staying on topic while speaking and wounded his campaigning efforts. A recent example of a macaca moment in Australian politics was when Treasurer Wayne Swan knocked over a glass of water during a radio interview. Immediately, this was used to discredit Swan as a metaphor to the way he is managing the budget, with supposedly little care.

The relationship between politics and social media is going to grow and strengthen. I think it could become a good way to introduce younger people to politics, through a medium they prefer and are familiar with. As I stated before, social media platforms allow access to a new audience and can be used to discredit political opponents. Social media has its associated risks as well as its benefits concerning politics.

This next one is called Produsage 1,2,3,4...

What do you get when you mix production and usage? If production and usage had a love-child, what would it be? The answer to both of these questions is produsage. Bruns (2007, p. 1) describes produsage as “the collaborative content creation and development practices found in contemporary informational environments”. Produsage represents a paradigm shift from the traditional industrial model of producer-distributor-consumer to the new model in which the producer and consumer are one in the same. This hybrid role of producer and consumer is prevalent in the Web 2.0 environment, so it is not hard to find an example of produsage in action.

Wikipedia, Youtube and Second Life are all environments in which user-led content is generated. All of these of websites allow open participation in that anybody can create, modify and contribute. The user-led content is not solely for distribution to a target audience, but rather a continuing cycle of refinement in which the quality of the content improves. Such refinement of content can be observed on Wikipedia where a page can be updated with additional information on a topic. Youtube and Second Life both let users access a toolkit with which to create their own content online. Youtube gives users the ability to post their own videos whilst Second Life allows users to create in-game objects which can include anything from clothes to houses. An article from InformationWeek reported that in 2007 Second Life had 34 Terabytes of pure user content, the amount of content has undoubtedly increased since then.

I have witnessed first-hand development of user-led content in the form of a modification or ‘mod’ called NTSD for a game by a small group of coders, GFX artists and sprite sheeters. A forum thread called ‘progress’ is where any new progress on the mod was posted in the form of images and videos, the project was cancelled recently. The mods that people create for games are examples of how pre-existing content can be revamped by users into new content that is circulated through a community and checked for errors such as bugs or glitches. In the case of a game mod, the refinement of content would be dependent on beta testers, people who would actively search for bugs and or glitches during gameplay.

With produsage it seems like everyone wins, those who provide the necessary tools and environments for user-based content and the users themselves. Produsers make content for whoever gave them the tools and environments to do so and for the community to enjoy. I always keep forgetting that users create content because they choose to and are not exploited by those who give them the tools to do so. My disposition towards produsage is generally positive, after all, some of the best content is user-led when it comes to entertainment.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/197800179?pgno=2&queryText=

http://ntsd.open-board.com/t19603-m-a-i-n-p-r-o-g-r-e-s-s

Bruns, A. 2007 'Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation' in Creativity and Cognition: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & Cognition (Can be found via Swinburne Library Online Journals Database under 'Creativity and Cognition Conference'.