Summary: Mobile Cultures from London Yuppies to #TaksimSquare
26 June 2013
It was a warm and muggy London afternoon, with a slimy sprinkling of pollution and a fair amount of intense pollen flying around and making our eyes water and throats dry. It felt like Singapore when Indonesian forest fires blow north, engulfing the city in a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke from the palm plantations. I was rushing to Arts Catalyst for our final Cybersalon before the summer break, and casting wistful glances at a nearby park , where all the sensible people were spread out on the blankets with their cold beers in the buckets. Not me, duty calls and with pizza under one hand and a bunch of halogens in another, we made our way to Shoreditch. The evening started slow, with a trickle of guests coming, looking hot and bothered. We assessed the situation as 9 out of 10 on the emergency ranking and dug deep into the fridge to get them the coldest of beers. It worked. After about 30 minutes the audience perked up and the grey matter started firing up on all neurons. And we needed the guests to be sharp as the topic of the Cybersalon was a loaded one – Mobile Cultures 1993-2013, from London Yuppies to #TaksimSquare.
First we had the intro from Niki Gomez, who is one of the authors of the Mobile Manifesto (Cybersalon 2001). Sporting an extremely elegant purple (yes, it’s the new black!) ankle long dress, Niki took us on a memory trip back to one of the early Cybersalons, when Jaron Lanier just hit the scene with his Internet-Dystopia-on-tour attitude and destroyed Niki’s Aibo Sony dog on stage during one of his anti-tech rants. Watching the video of it was quite entertaining in itself, but the point Niki was making, was that we have developed a pre-Twitter wall device that we called CyberTalk. It was an audience participation tool and allowed the guests to SMS us during the event, comment on Jaron’s rants and take a view on the mistreatment of the poor Aibo dog.
CyberTalk was actually quite a smooth process, the audience loved being part of the conversation via SMS on the large screen. I am still puzzled why we did not develop it then as it was immensely successful during the subsequent Cybersalons. Maybe I was too busy coping with the post-dot-com-crash picking ourselves up from the post-investment floor, the London scene full of start-up blood and corpses of various Internet tragedies like Boo, that all crushed about that time.. You can read The Guardian’s article on CyberTalk from 2001 here.
Niki also showed the Cybersalon Mobile Manifesto from 2001 and picked up on how some of the ideas in it survived the test of time well. Much scaremongering amongst the so-called futurologists in the 90-ties was about Haves-and-Have-nots, expecting some super-rich tech-elite to take the world over and the poor becoming the casualty of tech-progress. The mobiles initially were only accessible to the very wealthy stock-brokers, currency traders and finance professionals (Yuppies). Nobody expected at that time that mobiles will turn into micro—uber-computers, and also that the price of the mobile computing will become so low as to be available practically to anyone who wanted to use it. We still have tech-elites, but it is not based on wealth but other variables.
Sophia Drakopoulou, our very own Cybersalonista who completed a PhD on the topic of Mobile Cultures, took us through the early history of mobile phone activism (from WTO 1999, Philippines 2001, Madrid 2004 after the terrorist train tragedy, and more recent Arab Spring, covered in detail by Paolo Gerbaudo in “The Tweets and the Streets”).
She noted that we should avoid jumping to techno-deterministic conclusions that technology led to those movements. She comments that that the movements of resistances were augmented by technology, contributing to the intensity and concentration of resources. Sophia also noted the key characteristics of a phase we are going through now, where Urban Spaces are getting increasingly mixed with Virtual Spaces (bits). But we are sharing our Now, we are sending photos, we are capturing, savouring the moment. The culture is of a very social nature and it is focused on the intense experience of the presence and the sharing of the moment with the significant others. It was noted there there is an extreme Time- proximity of taking the photo and sharing, which is different to the pre-Social Media manners of using photos for social purposes. In UGC the cameraphone images are often poor quality, grainy and smudgy, adding to the authentic character.
She noted that the physical and virtual is meshing, developing new rules of engagement. Perhaps some of those rules are subconscious, but as any society, even the virtual-physical will get organised alongside some lines, we just don’t know yet what they will be. One of her comments particularly struck a chord with me – according to Sophia, if someone responds fast to your Txt or Tweet, it indicates a high degree of intimacy. So new rules of social media engagement are emerging and a new netiquette is being forged, those allowing us to maintain the intimate links without drowning in the see of the ‘river of Twitter or FB news’.
Her presentation also touched on User Generated Content received by the BBC for:
July 2005 London Bombings – 1000 photos sent by the public
Feb 2009 the snow in London – 24,000 images, and
Dec 2010 Christmas snow in London reached 35,000 images.
Beyond this, recent data in UK shows that we take 1.9 bn images in just a month! Less than 10 % of those ever get printed or become physical objects. There is a danger that lack of proper archiving will lead to a massive gap in records as with progress of technology platforms, most of those images will become inaccessible. This is not a problem for the suppliers of Cloud and Photo Stream as they are not responsible for future-proofing your images, this is a problem for us as individuals!
Sophia also looked at contribution of Blast Theory (2002-2004), Urban Tapestries (2004) and Node London Festival (2006) that explored the power of Locative Media, experimenting with early GPS and various aspects of physical presence on electronic maps, each addressing a subtle and sensitive re-negociation of the impact of the knowledge where things/people/events are in real-time.
Watch this space as Sophia is working on a new paper, commenting on the latest developments.
A Moment of Experimentation: Spatial Practice and Representation of Space as Narrative Elements in Location-based Games (a past work).
Pete Gomes then explained his fascinations with Making the Invisible Visible.
It all started with walking around London to find Wi-Fi spots (in 2001 he found only four!) and noting them on a map as a resource for the other artists. He was exploring the power of mapping knowledge, making Chalk Marks on the pavements as sign for others that Wi-Fi is HERE! That grew to be a shared knowledge, very useful in the early days of Wi-Fi. Working outside of your office on a laptop on a bench was extremely radical at that time (2002) and people who did that, found a shared notion of belonging to a ‘Wi-Fi’ nomad tribe. A tribe that we all have quickly joined ourselves! Also, it pushed him to investigate the impact of mapping the Nautical GPS coordinates, and locating bin bags with their exact geo-Loc. “Mappiness is happiness” at it was emerging that all the Geo-knowledge was extremely enjoyable for the participants and was going to produce great new mobile experiences!
Although at the time it was an art piece, today the concept of embedding a location signal in bin bags could be easily applied to improve the efficiency of rubbish collection (Smart Cities).
We speculate that the Geo-Location knowledge of moving objects in real-time can be highly powerful tool in the Urban Protest movement, increasing the efficiency of the choreography of crowds – from walkie-talkies to Location Based Check-in, the mapping allows the protesters to have the same knowledge as the police during the protests therefore levelling the playing field for the first time since the Urban Protests emerged.
Our final speaker, Christian Nold is a pioneer of early Self-Tracking. He has applied instruments like the Lie Detector to track the physiological changes during a walk around town, and notifying changes over the mobile, creating a map of emotional states of his neighbourhood. The sensors that enabled the ‘quantified-self’ were used while sober, drunk, having an argument and having just a normal set of activities in the usual places, his ‘local’, the shops and mapping it all to produce a ‘sentiment map’.
This map indicated that we are very sensitive to the environment, and even a fairly innocuous pedestrian crossing caused a significant hike in the heart rate and pulse. He then tracked others in a similar vein, and observed that some places spiked more than others in anxiety, for examples shops ( where an ‘Argument with Mum’ took place, was mentioned often), and bad street planning. It could be useful to gather today’s quantified-movement tribe data and collate it for some key locations, to help the planners and developers of the Smart Cities movement. Today Christian is engaged in Extreme Citizen Science work where those techniques are used to help and resolve issues around new runway planning (Heathrow). The audience was very intrigued in the civic applications of collated self-tracking and Cybersalon will return to the topic in November for a Smart Cities event in the autumn.
Christian also mentioned the early camera that he developed for his self-tracking escapades in 2002, one that was taking photos every 30 seconds and documenting his journey during research. A very similar one has been now successfully funded, called Memoto.com that utilises cloud storage for the immense amount of photos generated. He commented that the cloud enabled those old ideas to be viable through resolving the photo storage issues, and that there is a great amount to be uncovered from the early self-tracking and Locative Media experiments. He pointed out how academic technologies developed by academia are being repackaged and repurposed by entrepreneurs- from Steve Mann and his wearable computer at MIT to Memoto today.
We finished the evening with a very intense debate about the future of Mobile Cultures. One priority was to consider whether mobile culture is Borg like? Is it swallowing the Internet, and what are the implications/regulations as the move from PCs to mobile computing has massive implications on retail, education, health and work practices.
Also, the issue of a contagious addition to mobile phones was raised by Rob La Frenais (our Arts Catalyst host). Research was quoted that we look at our phones about 150 times per day on the average, and many of us do that much more often. In fact, some of us admitted to not looking much at anything else! The discussion moved to finding tools to be more mindful, and examine if technology can help to increase mindfulness and concentration.
If you’re interested in this area, seek Wisdom 2.0, a Mindfulness Conference in Silicon Valley.
Richard Boase (who we met through an interest in Bitcoin) responded that technology makes mindfulness impossible and we need to seek solutions by limiting the time on the device rather than yet more technology to augment mindfulness. The audience agreed that liberating our minds and attention from the additive mobile devices is a priority. He also talked about the idea that the Internet is writing our biographies using all our public data, but we need to intervene to author our autobiographies.
At this point we moved to a physical pub, where a very beautiful, eerie installation of halogen lights and half-shades completed the intense mood of the evening. The ongoing discussions in the pub were massively helped by the heap of mobiles placed strategically on the centre of the wooden table, to ensure the full, uninterrupted and intense engagement with a pint of a cool lager. Despite the muggy day, the evening turned out to be a highly stimulating gathering which left us with more questions than it answered, but that is how we like it!