Alex de Carvalho

Solitary Mobility vs. Mobile Sociality

by Alex de Carvalho. Average Reading Time: about 2 minutes.

Nokia 6680
Nokia 6680,
by alexde­car­valho.

Chris­t­ian Lind­holm cre­ated a stir while pre­sent­ing Nokia’s new prod­ucts, includ­ing the N90 trans­former, at Reboot 7.0:

“If you own an iPod, please stand up”. [Most con­fer­ence atten­dees stood up]

“Now take the iPod out of your pocket”, [only] two peo­ple can pro­duce their iPod.

The point: “If it’s not in the pocket, it’s not mobile”.

(Via Michael Heile­mann, Binary Bon­sai).

Surely,
it would be rude to
lis­ten to an iPod while the speaker is talk­ing, but so would
speak­ing on the phone. And yet, most peo­ple chose to carry their mobile
phone in their pocket and not an iPod / mp3 player (or for that mat­ter,
a com­pact camera).

Granted, no one goes to a con­fer­ence every­day and usage of these devices depends on the con­text of the upcom­ing activ­ity: when you walk out the door, would you rather stay in touch with oth­ers
or would you rather lis­ten to music? And if you have a fixed bud­get and have to choose between
buy­ing your first mobile phone or your first mp3 player, which would you
buy?

Your choice depends on whether you value soli­tary mobil­ity or mobile sociality:

  • With an iPod while on the move, you cre­ate soli­tary mobil­ity, by 1)
    sig­nalling to peo­ple you are not avail­able to social­ize because you are
    wear­ing your head­phones; and by 2) shield­ing your­self acousti­cally from
    your envi­ron­ment, by build­ing your own pri­vate sound bub­ble (ie., lis­ten­ing to music).
  • With a mobile phone, you achieve mobile social­ity and can con­nect with the world while on the move, through voice, SMS, MMS, e-mail, inter­net access, etc.

New con­verged mobile devices do both, by com­bin­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion (phone), hobby (music, cam­era, games) and pro­duc­tiv­ity (pda) tools. For instance, with the Nokia 6680 pic­tured above, you can take pic­tures (1.3 mp … see exam­ple images), record video and sound, play mp3s, use a PDA, read an eBook, browse the inter­net, “blue­jack” (see Nokia Sen­sor), play games and more, thanks to exten­si­ble mem­ory, Sym­bian S60 soft­ware and open SDKs, all in a classy pro­fes­sional cas­ing (weighs in at 133g). 

Or, you can  switch to “offline mode” (or even take out the SIM card) and use the mul­ti­pur­pose device with­out net­work coverage.

Too bad it’s not a dual-mode 3G/wi-fi hand­set … but that would be ask­ing for too much (mobile VOIP, anyone?).

So, in most cases there’s no need to make that iPod / dig­i­tal cam­era / mobile phone trade­off anymore.

Nokia, let me count the ways …

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  • http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/08/20/solitary_mobili.html Smart Mobs

    Soli­tary Mobil­ity vs. Mobile Sociality

    Alex de Car­valho com­pares mobile phones and iPods in a ques­tion that reaches into the power of mobil­ity: soli­tary or social? “… most peo­ple chose to carry their mobile phone in their pocket and not an iPod / mp3 player…

  • http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog/2005/08/alex_de_carvalh.html Lifeblog

    Alex de Car­valho: Soli­tary Mobil­ity vs. Mobile Sociality

    Found this while read­ing Alex’s site. Alex got this via Michael Heile­mann, Binary Bon­sai. Read what Alex’s insight is on this exchange. Link: Alex de Car­valho: Soli­tary Mobil­ity vs. Mobile Social­ity. Chris­t­ian Lind­holm cre­ated a stir while pre­sent­ing N…

  • http://www.theZone.blogs.com dave tilley

    we agree on ipods but dis­agree on cell phones using voice. I tend to find peo­ple using their cell­phones while out and about but not alone, as being anti-social to every­body else nearby.

    good arti­cle though. I have ref­er­enced it. Makes one think.

  • http://www.tapio.com Alex

    Dave, thanks for your com­ment and post.

    There’s no fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment and it’s cer­tainly true that a cell phone can be an anti­so­cial nui­sance: while you’re social­iz­ing with some­one on the phone, you’re effec­tively shut­ting out the peo­ple you are with. Indeed, it can be par­tic­u­larly dis­con­cert­ing to see some­one walk­ing (or dri­ving) while appar­ently talk­ing to him­self, when in fact they’re using a small blue­tooth head­set. I believe there are even blue­tooth ear­pieces and the ear implant may not be far away ;)

    Like­wise, the iPod may be a “social object”, for instance when used with exter­nal speak­ers or plugged into an ampli­fier. Also, with iPod photo, you are being social when you show images to your friends.

    Over­all, though, the mobile phone’s mul­ti­ple abil­ity to con­nect with oth­ers, through voice, text, blue­tooth, infrared, inter­net (wap/3G), etc., makes it more of a “social machine”, com­pared to an mp3 player, which arguably was designed for “soli­tary mobility”.

    With big­ger hard dri­ves and embed­ded audio func­tion­al­i­ties, new phone mod­els may become an alter­na­tive to a stand­alone mp3 player and rumors have long cir­cu­lated on whether Apple will enter the mobile hand­set game …

    This com­ment is cross-posted from Dave’s blog entry at
    http://thezone.blogs.com/root/2005/08/alex_de_carvalh.html

  • http://www.heZone.blogs.com/ Dave

    Totally agree about ipod vs cell phone. Just not that either is that social.

    Also, last night I noticed an ipod phe­nom­e­non. It gen­er­ated a very inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on the music that each per­son had on their ipod. Peo­ple are now swap­ping ipods for a week.

    Also the itrip is change­ing the social. My son com­mu­ni­cates with me by play­ing his itrip in the car. We end up expand­ing my lis­ten­ing to his music.

    I won­der if the exchange of ring tones will hap­pen. My friend has a son who com­poses music purely for ring tones.

    This becomes like musi­cal haiku.

  • http://www.mobilejones.com mobile jones

    What catches my atten­tion about Dave’s com­ment is the dif­fer­ent demo­graphic that he points to instinc­tively. His son wouldn’t be at Reboot. So the ques­tion might have very dif­fer­ent results in a dif­fer­ent demo­graphic. What if that same ques­tion were put to a high school assem­bly or a group of col­lege students?

    My bet is that they would have both devices in their pocket or nap­snack. Not likely that one of those would be a high end smart­phone, though. More likely the iPod would be in their ear and a small low pro­file fea­ture phone would be in their pocket.

    Every­one remem­bers the music of their youth and con­tin­ues to favor it through their life times. The iPod or any music con­veyence is far more impor­tant to a teenager or young adult than to those older. Music is your voice before you’ve dis­cov­ered your own. And it’s a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of social inter­ac­tion for younger peo­ple. It’s the emo­tional glue that con­nects many firsts and events in our lives.

    There’s also a dis­cov­ery process tak­ing place as a teenager and young adult when we’re exper­i­ment­ing with iden­tity and social­ity. Many are learn­ing what their favorite music is, mak­ing them more likely to ask, “what are you lis­tent­ing to?” That is, an iPod would be more social for a 15 year old than a 30 year old. The iPod swap­ping Dave men­tions is one example.

  • http://www.tapio.com Alex

    Both Mobile Jones and Dave Tilley have made lots of great com­ments, which I sec­ond. Indeed, that is the main point of my post­ing, where I argue that with the con­ver­gence of mp3 and mobile, you no longer have to make a cell­phone / mp3 play­ers trade­off. Music is very impor­tant, no argu­ment there.

    Music brings peo­ple together and it’s telling that Dave’s son com­mu­ni­cates with him by shar­ing his music. The iTrip but also exter­nal speak­ers and just plug­ging your iPod into an amp makes this pos­si­ble (dual head­set jacks are also available).

    And yes, Mobile Jones, high-schoolers will prob­a­bly have both an iPod and a cell­phone in their pocket. Remem­ber, I talk about usage con­text … and that the device you choose to take with you (mp3 player, mobile phone, or both) depends on what you’ll be doing after you walk out the door.

    Both Mobile Jones and Dave Tilley point to a spe­cific type of usage which is about face to face social­iza­tion using the object (iPod) as the com­mon inter­est, rather than social­iza­tion with some­one at a dis­tance through some kind of a wire­less (voice, inter­net, blue­tooth, etc.) connection.

    I would call this a dif­fer­ence between mobile social­ity, explained in this post, and “social cur­rency” (see Dou­glas Rushkoff at the now defunct The Fea­ture). Social cur­rency is about social­iz­ing by trad­ing base­ball cards … or nowa­days, swap­ping iPods.

    I’ll post on usage of devices (iPod, mobiles and other) as “social cur­rency” this week when I get a chance.

  • http://www.mobilejones.com mobile jones

    Social cur­rency is an argue­ment against the soli­tary mobil­ity posi­tion. If the response to the ques­tion “What are you lis­ten­ing to?” is social cur­rency, then an iPod isn’t a soli­tary mobil­ity expe­ri­ence. If an iPoder says, “hey! check out this song.” and that’s social cur­rency, then how is an iPod soli­tary? The same is true for Dave’s example.

    I do believe that net­work con­nec­tiv­ity is impor­tant. What I don’t know is which net­work will ulti­mately enable social media. Will it be 3G, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, DVB-H, Media Flo or some com­bi­na­tion of these? Prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion, but which one is more dif­fi­cult to predict.

    There are com­pli­cat­ing fac­tors for mobiles and music like DRM, and cost of 3G OTA down­load­ing or worse stream­ing. DRM pre­vents one from mov­ing con­tent between the devices owned or from doing so with­out being tracked by licenses. Stream­ing pre­vents one from hav­ing a copy for future play­back at all. So, the inten­tion of recent imple­men­ta­tions of mobile music is to pre­vent social cur­rency from being exchanged. And yes, that’s a bad thing.

    http://www.mobilejones.com/archives/781/

    I agree with you and Rushkoff that social media is the tar­get ver­sus a pure con­tent play. Hope­fully, the operator’s build out of the infra­struc­ture for their doomed pure con­tent plays will lead to reduced trans­ac­tion costs for the social media between mobiles in the future.

    PS. Thanks for your com­ment at mobilejones.com

  • http://www.tapio.com Alex

    Great stuff, I’m with ya. Let’s get oper­a­tors to move beyond their “walled gar­dens” men­tal­ity, their high pric­ing for 3G packet com­mu­ni­ca­tions charges and their lack of trans­parency in billing.

    DRM is another big hairy issue not eas­ily dealt with.

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