File this under “Yet Another iPhone Lover”. I think the iPhone rocks, and I haven’t even seen it yet.

A while back I wrote about “Soli­tary Mobil­ity vs. Mobile Social­ity”.

The premise was that on the one hand, with an iPod or other MP3 player, you cre­ate “soli­tary mobil­ity” because you sig­nal other peo­ple via your head­phones that you are shield­ing your­self acousti­cally from them and into your own sound bubble.

Of course, iPods may be used in a social con­text as well, as a “social object”. And there’s Zune’s tagline of “Wel­come to the Social”

(via Com­mu­nity Guy):

But shar­ing music on iPods isn’t all that easy. Also, accord­ing to Giz­modo, 42% of the songs peo­ple are try­ing to share on Zune are on the “Zune shar­ing pro­hib­ited” list. My guess is that these would be the songs peo­ple are most try­ing to share any­way. So much for that idea and the pri­mary func­tion of MP3 play­ers is still about soli­tary mobility.

With a mobile phone, on the other hand, you achieve “mobile social­ity” because the phone is by def­i­n­i­tion meant for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, a social activ­ity. The idea was to say that given a choice of tak­ing either the iPod or the mobile phone when you walk out the door, most would choose the mobile phone because it allowed you to stay in con­tact with oth­ers, through voice, SMS, e-mail, etc. For instance, accord­ing to Mar­tin Parr:

There is no escap­ing this mod­ern phe­nom­e­non [of peo­ple talk­ing on mobile phones] and my rela­tion­ship is one of “I couldn’t sur­vive with­out it” but what a pain in the arse they are.

With hybrid mp3-phones, you have both mobile social­ity and soli­tary mobil­ity. Quot­ing from David Byrne’s Jour­nal:

An ad for a cell phone with speak­ers that slide out. A crowded city street. Every­one is wear­ing white iPod head­phones and clear fish­bowls on their heads. They are all iso­lated in a world of their own, is the clear impli­ca­tion. One cou­ple tries to smooch through their glass pris­ons — but every­one knows you can’t kiss with a fish­bowl on your head. One guy, clearly frus­trated, takes off his space helmet/fishbowl and smashes it into a mil­lion pieces on the street. He rips out his head­phones and begins lis­ten­ing to music from a small object he proudly holds aloft. A cell phone with tiny speak­ers that slip out. (I can imag­ine the sound qual­ity! Free­dom! A 1962 tran­sis­tor radio!) Imme­di­ately all the other young hip­sters take off their hel­mets and rip off their iPod head­phones and are groov­ing to this guy’s tunes! The world, it is implied, has been lib­er­ated by a new gizmo and an early adopter. Bring back boom boxes on the subways!

Enter the iPhone: iPod+phone+internet all_in_one_device. No more choos­ing between mobile social­ity or soli­tary mobil­ity. And we all knew the iPhone was com­ing, didn’t we?

Tech­no­rati Tags: iphone, apple,  mobile+sociality, solitary+mobility