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April 24, 2006

Receiver Magazine, #15

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Wish You Were Here

Receiver Magazine, #15: We always take the mobile with us because we want to be reachable. But who do we want to be reachable for? Take a closer look: primarily for those we love. Apart from using them for work-related purposes, mobile phones are a great source of strength for our inner circle - they connect us to those stored in the handset's contact list whom we want to reassure that we are with in spirit, and who know when we might need the emotional support of a quick text. This receiver issue is all about that yearning factor that comes with using the mobile phone, about the meta-message which is always present: 'wish you were here'.

Vodafone's receiver magazine is a neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting, future-oriented aspects of communications technologies. Started over five years ago as a platform for exchange about how innovations in this sector affect societies worldwide, receiver is now established as one of the industry's key idea generators.

Articles:

Jane Vincent: I just can't live without my mobile!

Could it be that we are not only emotional about the ones we keep in touch with, but that we have come to assign an emotional quality to the handset itself? Jane Vincent, whose paper is the opener for our 'Wish you were here' issue, thinks so! She has worked in the mobile communications industry since 1982. A Research Fellow with the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey, Vincent's main interest is in user behaviours associated with mobile communications. She has long pondered over the one and crucial question: 'How come we feel emotionally attached to our mobiles?' and presents some of her findings here in receiver.

Rich Ling: Nomos and the flexible coordination of the family

Rich Ling is a Senior Research Scientist at the research and development division of Telenor, Norway's largest research establishment within information and communication technology. Ling, who investigates the social impact of mobile telephony, is a most influential writer on mobile matters, serving on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals. He authored The mobile connection - the cell phone's impact on society, a book published by Morgan Kaufman in 2004. Read Ling's article for receiver to learn how mobile communication contributes to the maintenance of the family as an institution.

Ruth Rettie: How text messages create connectedness

Ruth Rettie is an ex-Unilever Brand Manager who is currently a senior lecturer at Kingston University in London. At the University's Business School she lectures on internet marketing, E- and M-commerce and has a strong research interest in communication theory. She is currently completing her PhD in sociology at the University of Surrey, which focuses on mobile phone communication. In her receiver contribution, Rettie explains how connectedness is a premier driver of mobile communication.

Tim Kindberg: We are cameras - image acts in personal interaction

Tim Kindberg, a senior researcher at HP Labs Bristol, UK, with a strong interest in nomadic and urban computing, has recently focused on the usage of camera phones. He and colleagues at HP Labs Palo Alto (Mirjana Spasojevic) and Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK (Abigail Sellen and Rowanne Fleck) carried out an in-depth study into camera phone use in the UK and US. Findings: people often have strong social or sharing intentions when capturing a picture, but typically use 'capture and show' rather than 'capture and send'. Read Kindberg's receiver contribution to find out more about the social uses of camera phones.

Jeff Axup: Blog the World

Jeff Axup is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His research in Mobile Community Design focuses on the development and design of mobile devices used by groups and how device design might change group behaviour. Axup has chosen to look at one highly mobile group in detail and examines what technologies could be used to support backpackers. Read his receiver contribution to find out about the usage patterns and demands he came across with a group of people who to a large extent depend on forming social networks while on the move.

Joachim R Höflich: The duality of effects - the mobile phone and relationships

Joachim Höflich is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has been looking at forms of media-driven interpersonal communication for many years. His particular focus is mobile communication, and he has written and edited a number of books including Mobile Kommunikation (2005) and Mobile Communication in Everyday Life, which will be published shortly. In his contribution to receiver, Höflich weighs up the positive and negative effects of mobile phones as a medium for relationships and takes a look at the particular way in which relationships are affected by them.

Pierre Proske: Bleating in the bank queue

Pierre Proske is a Melbourne-based programmer and digital artist with a background in music, engineering, literature and performing arts. Proske's artistic work focuses on people's relationships with technology, his most recent example being True Blue Love. This mobile phone based mating experiment was launched at last year's Mobile Journeys exhibition in Sydney, a venture that explores the creative potential of Australian mobile culture. In Bleating in the bank queue, Proske introduces us to his match-making project which plays with an inversion of the silent communications that mobile phones promote.

Mark Federman: Memories of now

Mark Federman is completing a PhD at the University of Toronto, researching the future form of corporations in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world. Over the last five years, Federman has been Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto and is co-author, with Derrick de Kerckhove, of McLuhan for Managers. His receiver contribution tells us, in his own and in McLuhan's words, how we have focused on sharing the "here and now" since we learned to use tools that enable ubiquitous communication.

Nicola Döring: Just you and me - and your mobile

Nicola Döring is Professor of Media Design and Media Psychology at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany, where she researches psychological and social dimensions of new communication technologies. She has published widely on online and mobile communication, focusing on communities, language, learning, identity, gender, sexuality, romance and interpersonal relationships. In her receiver contribution, Döring takes a closer look at mobile phone interruptions during romantic dates and meetings with friends based on an observational study.

Posted by jo at April 24, 2006 01:23 PM

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