<nettime> cell/mobile phones

[sean aylward smith <s.a.smith@mailbox.uq.edu.au>]

some thoughts upon the mobile/ cell phone debate:

David Bennahum coined the term cellspace two years ago...

i cant help thinking that the term ÔcellspaceÕ is wrong and imperialistic.
imperialistic, because the term ÔcellphoneÕ is primarily restricted to the
usa, or at a pinch continental north america. as another nettime poster
has already indicated, in central europe the term ÔhandyÕ predominates; in
western europe and australia - the countries with the highest
participation rates (or what the industry so lovingly calls Ôpenetration
ratesÕ), the device is called the mobile telephone. that the term that
predominates in the usa, which has the lowest participation rate in the
mobile-enabled world (the last time i looked, just over 29% of the us
populatyion had a mobile; at the same time australia was just cresting the
50% participation rate, the uk was approaching it and the early adopter
countries of finland and sweden had long since exceeded it), should be
taken as the standard term for the mobile in favour of the term that
dominates in those places that lead the way in mobile use and uptake,
seems to me more than a little presumptuous, denying the taken for granted
experiences of the majority of ppl who actually use the device. the term
ÔcellphoneÕ - and explanatory metaphors based upon it - is, in the
inimitable phrasing of an australian comedy duo, Ôwrong and brokenÕ.

ÒBennahum predicted a bright future for cellspace. "So what happens when
you strap on a wireless modem to a Palm Pilot and access the Internet? You
get a peek at the way many of us will experience cyberspace by 2000. Much
as the Web unleashed a multi-billion dollar global industry and new
cultural forms, so too will cheap, ubiquitous wireless datastreams, what I
call Cellspace."Ò

without having read bennahum in full, its a bit hard to coment
authoritatively, but it would seem as tho he has missed the point. mobile
cellular telecommunications devices arenÕt searching for the killer app to
Ôunleash a multi-billion dollar global industryÕ. the killer app - voice
communication, aka conversation - is already here, and the mutli-billion
dollar industry, one which dwarfs the nascent e-commerce market, is here.
you only need to look at the amounts of money being poured into third
generation spectrum auctions to get an idea of the future profits the
telcos involved are expecting. and you only need to look at the
non-collapse of their share prices during the two technology stock
collapses this year to realise that capitalists the world over agre with
the telcoÕs business models.

mobile phones dont so much break down space as, to paraphrase zygmunt
bauman, decompose time. as does the internet and indeed all remote
communications devices, the mobile enables non-contiguous relationships;
however, unlike computer mediated communcations technologies such as the
internet, the mobile enables synchronous communication - and enables it in
such a straightforward manner that pretty much anyone who can use and
afford a landline can use and afford a mobile. however, it is the ability
to conduct these remote relationships in real time, and to thus save time
- because as bauman points out, time is the one commodity that capital can
only lease, not purchase freehold. the contrast to the bright young
capitalist taking recieving emails on central station is the character of
takeshi kitanl in _hana-bi_ . altho kitanoÕs detective character has a
mobile, no amount of calls to dodgy police, yakuza or loan sharks can
change the fact that his wife is dying of cancer, and he is left, standing
by his car, uselessly holding his mobile, waiting for he and his wife to
die.

the young women eager, as mckenzie describes, to call their friends to
discuss the night out, are not trying to shrink space; theyÕre trying to
decompose time, to reduce the time between having the date and discussing
the date. mind you, all the research on _why_ young women are taking up
mobile phones indicates the single most important reason for their
adoption of mobiles is security, not to call their friends. of course,
security doesnt rate as a reason when they are asked _how_ they use their
mobiles - its all about enabling their relationships with their friends;
however ya gotta gt one first before ya can use it.

the dream of mobile network operators is, as it has been described to me,
Ôthe dick tracy thingÕ - the video phone that is worn by all users as an
accessory, providing the verisimilitude of a face to face communication
with the ubiquity of a wristwatch. video phone capability is the basic
operational parameter of third-generation mobiles; combined with blutooth
technology (a chip that allows blutooth enabled devices eg, yr fridge, yr
carport, the coke machine at work, yr mobile, to talk to each other),
telco operators expect that market saturation for third generation mobiles
to be 200% market participation.... yep, two mobile per person. this is
the next wave in mobile technology: blutooth chips are currently fully
functional, however until they enter mass production and their unit price
drops, they wont enter mass circulation... (and of course, until they
enter mass circulation, few manufacturers are willing to take the risk of
mass producing them.. ;) ). the next wave of mobile telecommunications is
human/nonhuman relations, or human/object relations.

it is possible to construct a formalism between us use of the internet and
european use of mobiles, as mckenzie suggests. it would go something like
usa= individual= suburban= internet usage=market driven= competition;
europe= communal= urban= mobile usage= state driven= monopoly. however,
except as a descriptive metaphor, such a formalism has almost no utility,
and in fact disguises so much of what is actually occurring that it
rapidly becomes misleading.

two examples: it is true that urban usage of mobiles is greater than
suburban usage of mobiles (as long as we lok at usage statistics rather
than possession statistcis: the rate of mobile by domiciles shows an
extremely high proportion of suburban owners, if only because the business
ppl have to go home at night); however, the rate of _rural_ usage is at
least as high as the uban usage rate: in australia, the mobile (in
particular the analogue and the cdma mobile) have been godsends to rural
and regional communities, for whom landline access was always precarious -
even if they could get a phone line laid, getting to it was not always
convenient. however, the fact that mobiles are tied to persons rather than
spaces, as landlines are, has changed this: a recent report of a woman
severely burned during a bushfire but able to use her mobile to call for
help - and who stated in news reports that if sheÕd had to crawl back to
the house to use the landline she wouldnt have survived - vividly suggests
reasons for the popularity of mobiles in rural areas. similarly, altho it
is essentially true that it was technical competition in the us, in
contrast to a unified approach in europe, that explains why the us didnt
take up second generation mobiles in any great numbers, it elides the most
salient points. prior to the development of GSM - ie second gen mobiles -
the us had a well developed, technically unified analogue market, based
upon the AMPS standard. the european commission - note, NOT the
(sometimes) state controlled telcos - mandated the development of an
alternative standard a: to avoid paying royalties to us teclos for the
rest of eternity; b: to kickstart the european telco sector; c: to give a
unifying eu project in line with european commision aims. the development
of GSM was seen in us telco sectors, rather famously, Ôas industrial folly
by european bureaucratsÕ, as an unneccessary governmental intervention in
a stable technological marketplace. much like ibmÕs famous Ôthere is a
global market for maybe 250,000 pcÕsÕ and xeroxÕs belief that Ôthere was
no market for graphic user interfacesÕ, the us corporate sector entirely
missed the boat on second generation mobile. (in fact, it raises the
interesting and very real question - would the internet have occurred if
the us govÕt hadnt funded it, with the very obvious answer: of course
not). having to play catch up, and unwilling to go the cooperative route
that european companies such as nokia and ericsson, enamoured by the
european commissionÕs vision, had taken, the us telco sector began
competitively developing their own second generation standards. without
the cooperative and unified aproach of the european telcos however, the us
developments never had a chance of moving beyond their proprietary
networks, such that not only more sophisticated technologies as CDMA
remained marginal global technologies, but third generation (3G)
standards, adopted by european, japanese, chinese, korean, australian and
some us telcos, are firmly based upon GSM foundations. this is not us
competition falling to european monopoly power or even us private sector
falling to european state regulation; this is competitive short-term
self-interest unable to compete with rational cooperative international
behaviour; a very old story well described by, amongst others, fernand
braudel. The wireless application protocol, WAP, by the way, is not the
enabler of short message systems (SMS) - SMS is a basic function of second
generation GSM; whilst WAP is part of what is known as GSM 2.5 - an
interim standard to deliver some internet functionality to GSM, prior to
the launch of 3G networks - designed to prevent network operators (note,
NOT users) migrating over to CDMA standards. (CMDA, being fully ten years
younger than GSM, offers internet functionality that the original GSM
could only dream of; 3G offers functionality CDMA can never deliver; the
strategy with GSM 2.5 is keeping network operators using a GSM base until
3G comes online).  these technological developments onyl provide part of
the explanation for the stagnation of the us mobile market in the
bourgeois/ privileged/ niche market demographics in the face of
mass-market participation rates in other countries. the other crucial
factor, as mckenzie alluded to, is call costs. local call costs in the us
are free, as far as i know, so internet usage was always cheap; timed call
costs in europe have long made the internet a device only for the anoraks
and the bougeois - ie, a niche technology. on the other hand, the fact
that only the caller pays for mobile calls in most countries, and that
competing local landline calls are not free (and in most places already
timed) makes mobile usage extremely attractive in most countries,
competitive with landlines and with greater utility and benefits.
conversely, in the us, the fact that both caller and reciever has to pay
immediately makes the mobile expensive, combines with free competing local
calls and subsidised long distance calls condemns the mobile to be a niche
techology that only the privileged or those with excessive disposable
income can afford. as another nettime poster indicated, the amazing
diffusion of pagers in the us - a technology which is long obsolete in
most countires - indicates the factor call costs play in the distribution
or lack thereof of mobile telephones in the us compared with, say, other
OECD countries. you dont need to rely upon dubious formalisms when
technological standards and basic economic realities will suffice.

similarly, you dont need to speculate as to the psychological state of
users, as benjamin geer did in attempting to explain why he was struck by
the sight of a mobile user having entirely ordinary (if nonetheless
annoying, for their invasive qualities) conversations on the street. the
need to speculate on the mindstate of users is not so much an attempt to
understand why mobile users use their mobiles as an example of the very
marginal and niche nature of mobiles in the us that i have been
suggesting. the user on the street having a banal conversation is a
liminal figure, worthy of comment, only because they are so rare. think by
way of comparison, of the archaic figure of the fob watch wearer: when
timepieces we expensive and hence only accessible in numbers to the
bourgeoisie, the fob watch was eo ipso a marker of said bourgeois status.
similarly, in places where mobile ownership is still minoritarian, the
mobile user is a liminal figure; in places such as australia however, such
liminality is restricted to, for example, mobile users who use ear-mouth
pieces to avoid possible radiation risks (because they are a minority of
mobile users) or mobile users who are schoolchildren (because only a
minority of schoolchildren can afford mobile telephones).

cheers,

sean smith (yeah, i promise, i will actually publish the results of my
research on mobile telephones. im just a bit busy at the moment, *doh*)

___________________________________________

'one fears an indefinite future of pious bourgeois certitudes'
					 - jg ballard


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