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Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence (1): Morning session
[Anthony and I are at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference for the next couple days, and I thought it would be worth it to post notes of the talks. Here are the morning papers.
Of course, the usual caveat applies that these notes are my impressions of the talks, not a definitive record, and all quotes are tentative.]
Kristof Nyiri, "Opening Remarks"
Recapitulates his own move into this subject. Worked in traditional subjects like philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, but in the late 1980s rediscovered 1920s and 1930s Hungarian philosophy of communication writing on silent reading, writing techniques, film theory. (They were read by Marshall McLuhan, and influenced his work; it sounds like their relationship to McLuhan is like Ludwig Fleck's relationship to Thomas Kuhn.)
"When the Internet arrived, we were conceptually equipped to understand it," likewise for mobile communications. In 2001, launched the first conference on the mobile information society.
In 2005, just when it seemed like the field has been worked through, convergence started getting real, and it all started again. Today, we don't have a good vision of what telecommunications convergence means, or where it's headed; "the road ahead in bumpy, theoretically speaking."
The one thing that's clear is that convergence is no simple matter: it means convergence in the digital sense (when everything is zeroes and ones), essential objects (digital device platforms), cultural sense (convergence of activities), action/activity spaces, language, philosophical and literary theory, and the body itself. The purpose over the next few days is to map this territory.
Mark Turner, "What Are We: Convergence of Self and Communications Techology"
"I'm going to talk about everything in the world:... self and technology." 10 minutes on nothing about technology, then 10 minutes connecting the first 10 to mobile communications.
Humans are "designed to operate with objects:" we're the only species who also engage in conceptual blending, to take things that are complex and diffuse, and to integrate them into familiar frameworks.
Take cause-motion constructions: I threw the ball through the window, but "England pushed France to war" is a cause-motion construction at a vastly different scale, and even though they're different phenomena, we use the cause-motion construction to make sense of it. This allows us to turn unfamiliar things into familiar ones, make big phenomena into ones at human scale, develop and evolve culture, etc..
Ironically, we're not built to understand ourselves: we're built to understand our world well enough to avoid being eaten and to find things to eat, but self-consciousness is an accident rather than an evolutionary advantage. We can describe ourselves in terms of stable identities, even though we vary greatly over our lives. We explain our actions in terms of desires or rationality, even though we often act first and "make" the decision a few milliseconds later.
What has all this to do with technology?
We have always blended our selves with our technologies. Writing and language are technologies, and are especially powerful ones. (The metaphor of communications is especially powerful in cause-motion constructions: we think of the self as converser, talk about "peoples of the book," etc.) These days, we think of ourselves in terms of our communications technologies, by blending our general concept of ourselves with our understanding of how the communications technology works. In a sense, we know our technologies better than we know ourselves.
This matters because of the addictive power of communications technologies; the ease with which we can create avatars or online identities radically different from the ones we have in real life; the opportunities it creates to merge with others (or at least to engage in collective action), to differentiate or contextualize our identities (e.g., having different SIM cards that work in different countries, have different contacts).
Zoltan Kovecses, "The Cell Phone as a Conceptual Category"
Background in cognitive science and linguistics.
Wants to understand how people think about and describe cell phones (and it'll be completely objective, since I don't have a cell phone). People seem to use four dimensions: function, significance, effect, and use.
Function. Cell phones are like computers; by implication, because we tend to think of computers are somewhat like human brains, this suggests a measure of cognitive anthopomorphization of cell phones as well. Integrates a handheld device with a model of the mind. Cell phones can be like other devices as well: comparisons with the Swiss Army knife are also popular. Some people also describe cell phones as friends.
Significance. Cell phones are like essentials: air, food, lifelines. They're like extensions of the body, organs or appendages. They're like languages: being without a cell phone is like not knowing the language.
Effect. Having a cell phone is like smoking: it's addictive. Cell contracts are like prison sentences.
Use. People conceptualize the value in numerous ways, but one dominant metaphor is automotive, both in terms of importance, and in terms of customization and price (you can pimp out both, there are basic and expensive versions, etc.).
Naturally, there are gender metaphors: cell phones are like hookers-- the thin ones cost more; they're like men-- after the first one, you know how to choose them well.
Appropriate versus inappropriate uses: driving while talking on the cell is like drinking and driving; regulation of cell phones is appropriate.
(It would be fascinating to do this study for several languages-- for English, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, etc.)
Jane Vincent, "Emotion and My Mobile"
There are 2.5B users, and in some countries more phones than people; there are more Internet-enables phones than PCs. So there are lots of people using mobile phones, and using them in lots of ways.
Vincent's interest is in the emotional dimension of mobile phone use. She uses it do some familiar things-- talk, take pictures, write to others-- and this familiarity is important in the object's ubiquity. She also uses it to remember things: they take pictures of stuff in stores, posters for upcoming events, ads, etc..
On the other hand, there are differences: photos 100 years ago were memorabilia, while today's cell phone pictures are often completely disposable. The picture-taking itself can also be the point, rather than the pictures. People also use it to capture more ephemeral memories: to record things that might not have been commemorated (it's more ethnographic than ritualistic).
The research. Looking at emotional relationships or attachments to phones. Working out of the interactionist theory (following Goffman), emotion work (Hochschild on managed emotions and "moments of pinch").
• Relationships and mobiles are integral but not always symbiotic.
• Communications occur in the "middle stage" of interactionist theory.
• There's an emotional paradox of wanted and unwanted communications.
• Managing the intrusions of Back Stage-- dealing with "moments of pinch."
• Using emotion work to manage mobile phone communications.
Some "events... occur in a special or unique way when mediated by the mobile:" some users have practices that are unique: some couples talk while commuting on different systems, or use the phone to take pictures of kids because the kids react in certain ways. What they love is not the device, but what you can use it for.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communications"
(Barabasi is the author Linked, and a number of scientific articles on the importance of networks and power laws in understanding everything from animal behavior to cell phone tower load balancing.)
When do events take place? When doing things like calculating the capacity of communications system, we assume that it's random, uniform in time, and the timing follows a Poisson process. In reality, communication tends to be bursty: e-mail, for example, tends to be sent in clumps. It follows power laws, and can be mapped as a straight line on a log-log scale. This same distribution is also the case for library visits (measured by checkout records), document printing, web page views, cell-phone calls, and just about everything else we can measure.
Why does life work in bursts? Look at to do lists. We tend to assign priorities to tasks, rather than do them randomly or treat a list as a stack. When you follow priorities, high-prority tasks are completed quickly, and some will be done after a long time: you end up with a power law.
Does the length of the queue matter? No-- you get the same kind of behavior.
Random Walks. Lots of things follow random walks, or Levy walks (where jump size can vary). Studies of animal motion follows Levy laws, and humans do too: an analysis of money movement from Where's George also follows Levy laws, as does the motion of cell phones detected from tower triangulation.