Dallas, Costis (2006) Socio-cultural aspects of the emerging mobile communication society.

15th IST Mobile and Wireless Telecommunications Summit, 4-8 June 2006, Mykonos.

Socio-cultural aspects of the emerging

mobile communication society*
Costis Dallas◊

My personal experience with mobile devices is perhaps typical of Europeans

in their forties. I only bought my first mobile phone in the mid-1990s, per-
haps a couple of years after they were in circulation. Working daily with com-
puters since my student years in the early-1980s, I did not feel the need for a
PDA until the last few years, and then, before I could settle for a standalone
PDA, I was taken over by combination mobile phone-PDAs, using them
regularly to the present day. I synchronise my current mobile phone with my
work computer; I input and manage appointments directly on the phone; I
carry a few MP3 songs for the odd moment of rest in public transport; I check
the weather on the Internet, especially when at sea on a small boat; I send text
messages very occasionally, especially when I’m tied up in meetings and can-
not respond to an urgent call; oddly enough, I don’t have a camera in my cur-
rent phone, and while I have a few pictures on its memory card, I don't feel I
am missing something important.
I would therefore have little new to offer on the basis of my personal experi-
ence. Professionally and academically, on the other hand, I have been in-
volved for a number of years in the field of cultural communication and
management, as well as in conceptualising, designing and creating web and
multimedia solutions for relationship management.
I will start my brief exploration of mobile technologies from the field of arts
and cultural heritage. During the last few years, I have been involved as
Steering Committee member with the Digicult series of strategic foresight
and technology watch studies, funded by the European Commission IST pro-
gramme. As part of our Technology Watch Report series, in 2004 we pub-
lished a report on "Mobile access to cultural resources", in which we identi-
fied the potential of mobile phones, location sensing, Bluetooth networking

*
Address to the 15th IST Mobile and Wireless Telecommunications Summit, 5 June 2006, Mykonos.
◊
Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Management and Advanced Technologies, Department of Communica-
tion, Media and Culture, Panteion University; Vice-Chairman, PRC Group – The Management House;

© 2006 Costis Dallas <cdallas@panteion.gr>. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution -Non Commercial -No Derivatives 2.5 License.
Electronic version: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/>
 2 COSTIS DALLAS

and PDAs as a powerful means for enhancing the experience of the public
within the arts, heritage and tourism sector. Among the couple of dozen other
areas we looked at were agents and avatars, personalisation, RFID devices
and smart tags, innovative human-computer interfaces, semantic web tech-
nologies, virtual and enhanced reality solutions. We focussed on providing
definitions, on establishing what the state of the art was in each particular
technology areas, on identifying innovative existing practice and on deriving
foresight scenarios from experts in each field.1
Our choice of mobile technologies among these selected topics was not acci-
dental. Mobile computing applications appeared in the field of culture almost
as early as the appearance of the first mobile devices in the mid-1990s. The
notion of providing enhanced, interactive, location-aware, multimedia access
to augmented resources via a handheld device, through orientation and
learning support services to museum visitors, emerged a natural develop-
ment from the tradition of human guides and docents in visitor attractions,
combined with the long-existing technology of audio-guides and the more
recent forays of cultural institutions into interactive, hand-on exhibits. Solu-
tions such as the Sotto Voce application developed by HP for guiding visitors
at the Filioli historic house, the Rememberer developed for the San Francisco
Exploratorium, the Worldboard solution of the University of Indiana, installed
in the local Mathers Museum of World Cultures, CIMI’s Handscape project,
led by Cornell University HCI lab and involving several US museums such
as Field Museum and the Smithsonian Institute, and Glasgow University’s
Equator, developed for the local Lighthouse Centre for Architecture and com-
bining a handheld device with ultrasound location sensing, virtual environ-
ments and hypermedia technologies, were greeted as important develop-
ments of the last few years. Current practice by established leaders in the
field, such as the Tate Modern, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, involve renting out specially configured wireless-enabled PDAs, with
varying multimediality, interaction and location-awareness abilities, and are
producing lively debate between innovators and luddites in the museum
field.
However, as is noted in the Digicult technology watch report, “in contrast to
the use of audio guides or other specialised devices which typically required
to be maintained by the cultural heritage institutions and were borrowed by
the visitors, new mobile devices are often owned by the visitors themselves.
This may bring a radical change in the way heritage institutions think about
formulating and financing their technology strategies.” And, should I add,
also a radical change in the types of interactions and services made possible,
as each individual will be accessible through his or her own personal mobile

1
Ross, S., Donnelly, M. & Dobreva, M. (2004) Mobile access to cultural information resources. In
Digicult Forum (2004) Technology Watch Report, 2, 91-118.

© 2006 Costis Dallas <cdallas@panteion.gr>. Some rights reserved.

 SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE EMERGING MOBILE COMMUNICATION SOCIETY 3

communication device, combining, apart from voice communications, capa-

bilities of text and multimedia messaging, Bluetooth networking, an embed-
ded camera, and the ability to run push applications.
This point is fundamental, and not limited to the field of culture and the arts
from which we started our exploration. We already see a significant increase
in the market of personal devices that combine mobile telephony, networking
access, and significant computing and storage capacity to allow the deploy-
ment of sophisticated information and communication services. Without un-
derestimating the hard work still needed before significant issues of perform-
ance, scalability, quality of service and security are overcome, one cannot help
but sense that our current ability to conceptualise, design and develop solu-
tions that make justice to what is possible, already lags behind the current
capabilities of the technology.
Well-known network society theorist and professor of the University of
Southern California Manuel Castells introduced, in a recent ground-breaking
report funded by the Annenberg Foundation, the notion of the mobile commu-
nication society.2 Castells’ research team investigated a global perspective of
quantitative and qualitative data, exploring trends of social use of wireless
communication technologies in Europe, America and Asia Pacific, their find-
ings concerned, among other things, "the deep connection between wireless
communication and the emergence of youth culture, the transformation of
language by texting and multimodalty, the growing importance of wireless
communication in socio-political mobilization, and changes in the practice of
time and space resulting from wireless communication." They illustrate, no-
tably, the trend towards saturating time with social interaction - through the
use of mobile devices - when all other practices cannot be conducted (as in
queue waiting or during travel); the prevalence of affective - related to feel-
ings - rather than instrumental use of texting; the significance of SMS messag-
ing and mobile phones in recent political campaigning in Korea and the Phil-
ippines; the prevalence of content-driven mobile platforms, such as DoCoMo
and i-mode in the Far East; the increasingly blurred context of mobile device
use, including, apart from interpersonal communication, image taking and
sending, audio retrieving and playing, and data transmission; and, on the
whole, the emergence of a "nomadic way of life", whereby the actual location
of social actors is not anymore a determining factor for communication prac-
tices, and the whole notion of social time and space is altered.

2
Castells M, Fernandez-Ardevol M, Qiu JL, Sey A. 2006. The Mobile Communication Society: A cross-
cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology. An-
nenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
(http://arnic.info/WirelessWorkshop/MCS.pdf).

© 2006 Costis Dallas <cdallas@panteion.gr>. Some rights reserved.

 4 COSTIS DALLAS

Intriguing recent experiments appear to support the intuitions of Manuel

Castell's study. The Social Tapestries research project, led by London consul-
tancy Provoscis in close association with London School of Economics Media
and Communications department, and a host of other partners, “develops
experimental uses of public authoring to demonstrate the social and cultural
benefits of local knowledge sharing enabled by new mobile technologies.”
The two software prototypes developed by the project as part of the Urban
Tapestries platform – one for mobile phones, the other for wireless-enabled
PDAs – were tested in public trials in order to investigate the potential use of
mobile technology beyond the narrow consumption and consumerism strait-
jacket. By means of providing capabilities of spatial annotation and public-
collaborative authoring, the experiment verified the potential of mobile tech-
nologies to provide users with an modified, and in some ways, richer experi-
ence of space. This richer notion of space goes beyond a narrow definition of
x-y coordinates location to include topographical, social and cultural infor-
mation, as well as indications of human presence as manifested by other us-
ers’ traces, or by sound maps of one's own experience. 3
Social Tapestries researchers looked into scenarios in the field of education,
community arts and regeneration, social housing, and local government.
Similar to Castells’ view, and enriched by cultural and social research by
writers such as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau and Guy Debord, they
focus on the idea of a new kind of nomadic social experience, whereby peo-
ple's interactions move across physical and social space, and on the need to
provide significantly differentiated technologies which will support a "no-
madic way of life" – one that is not confined, anymore, to adventurers or
vagabonds, but which typifies the social and professional experience of a
large number of people at a time of increased work mobility, international
travel, urban consumerism and fluid social and economic bonds. The quest
for identity and locality, which goes together with globalisation, adds yet an-
other dimension to the nature of this "nomadic way of life".
The conviction that mobile communication technologies will have profound
implications on a wide spectrum of social practices is echoed by the Demos
think-tank in their "London Calling” report, published in 2003: they envisage
a world whereby mobile phones will be used to store passenger smartcard
credits usable in public transport; whereby in-car guidance systems will be
enhanced with local knowledge about places, services and facilities; whereby
citizens will increasingly use mobile phone cameras for security and crime
reduction, and will be able to transmit such information to the authorities in

3
Lane G. (2003) Urban Tapestries: Wireless networking, public authoring and social knowledge. In
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 169-75; Lane G. Social tapestries: public authoring and civil
society. In Provoscis Cultural Snapshots, 9, pp. 1-9 (http://proboscis.org.uk/publications/
SNAPSHOTS_socialtapestries.pdf).

© 2006 Costis Dallas <cdallas@panteion.gr>. Some rights reserved.

 SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE EMERGING MOBILE COMMUNICATION SOCIETY 5

real time; whereby wireless note-taking will help medical stuff reduce pa-
perwork; whereby education will be enhanced by the capacity of mobile de-
vices to serve interactive multimedia content in real-time, and will allow
more direct and frequent communication between students and parents; and,
whereby the tourist experience will be revolutionised by the ability of mobile
devices to help reduce queuing in attractions, book tickets, and push relevant
location-based information to users.4
There is a significant amount of work needed, focussing on the issues emerg-
ing from the increasing importance of intangible assets and their manage-
ment by companies and organisations. It is important to recognise the in-
creased importance of ICT-based solutions for helping organisations achieve
business and organisational goals, and of conceptualising, designing and de-
ploying such solutions as knowledge portals, sophisticated call centres, and
analytical CRM applications. Such solutions, however, should not be seen as
isolated, self-sufficient means. On the contrary, ICT solutions should be
viewed as part of a wider, socio-technical system. Given the massive penetra-
tion of mobile devices, and the profound implications of their social use,
noted above, advances in mobile and wireless computing should be taken
onboard as tools for providing better services to organisations, and thus for
maximising the utility of their intangible assets. In fact, the areas of mobile,
location-aware, wireless solutions are an important pillar in a cutting edge
technology solutions offering, together with knowledge web applications and
relationship management solutions. Driven by a public-centric, user-laden
approach, one may envisage a future where services across the intangible as-
sets management spectrum are integrated seamlessly with applications de-
livered via mobile information devices.
In the field of tourism communication, for instance, I recently led a team to
conceptualise and design a content-rich, XML-based, WAP and mobile Inter-
net portal, accessible from small screen devices such as web-enabled PDAs
and mobile phones – the first service of this kind in Greece, hosted by the na-
tional rural tourism agency Agrotouristiki.5 In a typical scenario, a tourist on
the way to Cyclades, Crete or the central Peloponnese is able, in only a few
steps, to select her area of interest on her mobile phone, get a listing of alter-
native tourism hostels or farms, call them directly from the phone, and get
additional information about cultural and natural spots of interest. If she
wishes, she can supply her mobile phone number, so that the system can
send updates and provide personalised information.
The system contains real-world information, but it is available only to mobile
phone owners with a data connection and WAP or web-enabled devices. We

4
McCarthy H & Miller P. (2003) London Calling. London: Demos.
5
Accessible at http://mobile.agrotravel.gr..

© 2006 Costis Dallas <cdallas@panteion.gr>. Some rights reserved.

6 COSTIS DALLAS

are still scratching the surface of the possibilities: wouldn't it be good, for in-
stance, if the system could use the actual location of a visitor to provide him
with locally-relevant information, foregoing the need for selecting location?
In addition, wouldn't it be nice if, on arrival, users could be called back by a
system to be provided by an audio introduction to what a historic place or
other point of interest has to offer? And, wouldn't it be great if the same mo-
bile phone could be used by people to capture photos or short videos of ac-
tual places and post them by a single click to the information system, for
friends to access? And this is only in this particular field of tourism: one
could equally think of ways in which blended learning and training, as well
as on-the-job training, could be revolutionised by the use of mobile devices;
or, by new mechanisms to support collaborative work, sharing personal and
group information, and enabling better interaction between remote co-
workers, using such technologies. I have the feeling that we are on the way to
such developments as will allow such functionalities, and more.
For public organisations, companies and even individuals, technologies are
what anthropologists call "extra-somatic means of adaptation" to changing
needs. In the current stage of a post-industrial, knowledge-driven economy
and society, it becomes evident that technologies evolve to support ever-
increasing degrees of embeddedness and mobility - represented, respectively,
by the sectors of pervasive computing and mobile computing, deemed to
merge, within the foreseeable future, within a unified vision of ubiquitous,
ambient intelligence. A socio-cultural approach, addressing the social and
cultural communication aspects of emerging technologies, may be an essen-
tial element for a successful deployment of this vision.

© 2006 Costis Dallas <cdallas@panteion.gr>. Some rights reserved.