George Myerson: Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone (1997)

Global mobile telephony is at the cutting edge of the communications revolution. Humanity, for Martin Heidegger, is ‘the entity that talks’; Jurgen Habermas is a passionate advocate of authentic human interaction. Both are key thinkers in this encounter between alien visions of communication and the utopianism of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Publisher Icon, 2001
Postmodern encounters
ISBN 1840462361, 9781840462364
80 pages

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Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji: The Social Telephony Files (2010)

Over the last twenty years the role of the telephone has been steadily reduced to that of an “interface” – for taking photos, bluetoothing business cards or connecting to an online service to find the nearest late night chemist. Sometimes people make phone calls. It is this rush to keep up with the latest augmentations of the mobile that has obscured the fact that the basic principle of person-to-person calling has still not reached its full potential after over 100 years. So in the first instance, social telephony is a historical project, returning to the handset, the voice, dialling and dialogue to re-imagine the phone call, to see where else it can go now that open source telephony allows us to build our own phone services.

Social telephony is thinking in terms of an “aesthetics of connectivity”, finding ways to build social networks between people that allow them to communicate in unexpected patterns and reveal different kinds of relationship. By taking advantage of the widespread use of phones we have developed arts projects that do not rely on unfamiliar computer systems and only require phone connectivity to take part. We have experimented with the use of auto-dialling to seek out potential participants, building the means of dissemination into the activity itself. We can allow people to pass content amongst themselves through their phones and across all national boundaries. By literally putting these abilities into the hands of our audience we have achieved more proactive forms of collaborative media.

This approach has also benefited from other kinds of connection. Our close collaboration with the Congolese community, especially Nostalgie Ya Mboka, has taught us that communication is not just about increasing the amount of information communicated. Their experience of exile from authoritarian regimes replaces a desire for quantity with a desire for channels, borderlessness and autonomy. The Coltan Wars, the most devastating yet least publicised conflict in the African continent, has shown us that an ordinary device such as a mobile phone connects us not only by wireless transmissions but also through a process of globalisation that includes historical currents, technological proliferation and the traffic of refugees.

How to make these myriad relationships tractable? Not to understand them as such, that is too naïve, but how to gain a purchase on them, a way into Congolese conversations, transnational trading routes and the Victorian inventions that spawned the modern global media empires. It was with this in mind that we developed the workshops and gallery based artworks, to bring into touch communities of migrants, young mobile phone users, critics and cultural audiences in spaces designed for more open ended reflection. This later work is designed not to communicate anything as such, but to reveal the shape of communication itself and a little about our place within it, so that when we perform something as simple as making a phone call we take part in a process that is continuing to shade its own particular cultural, historical and political outlines.

Special Edition for the exhibition of Tantalum Memorial, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK. September 25th to November 21st 2010

Contributing authors: Matthew Fuller, Anaclet Koffi, Vince Luttman, David Mandl, Yumika Tanaka and Yvonne Volkart
Publisher YoHa Limited, Southend-on-Sea, 2010
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license
ISBN 9781907379000

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Naomi S. Baron: Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (2008)

In Always On , Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies–including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis–are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back “whatever” attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are “always on” one technology or another–whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games–we have to ask what kind of people we are becoming, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media.

* The first book to survey the field of electronically-mediated communication, position these technologies with respect to earlier language practices, and then evaluate the personal, cognitive, social, and linguistic consequences of contemporary language technologies.
* Analyzes of instant messaging conversations, multitasking, away messages, Facebook, and mobile phone usage by American college students draw upon original research by the author and her colleagues.

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2008
ISBN 0195313054, 9780195313055
289 pages

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