Mobile internet services have to start simple and take advantage of the huge reach of basic mobile phones (everyone’s got one but the phones can’t do much).
This sets up a positive feedback loop between lots of happy users, who are usually young people wanting to be entertained, content providers, who are getting paid, phone manufacturers, who have an incentive to build new models with enhanced functions to sell to the many happy users, and networks, who get lots of money from data downloads by lots of happy users.
This is what happened with i-mode in Japan, where-as western networks tried to sell WAP to business users with expensive phones. [Jeffrey Funk, The Mobile Internet: How Japan Dialled Up and the West Disconnected, 2001].
The i-mode/WAP observations may be old news now, but a similar thing seems to be happening within the world of cultural/social/creative stuff-to-do-with mobile technology (sometimes recently called “locative media”).
Up in the top left corner of the reach/richness trade-off diagram are the expensive-business-user-phone based projects like Urban Tapestries and Wavespotter, with complicated “rich” interfaces, often based on maps and exactly defined GPS location.
Down in the bottom right corner are the bog-standard-teenager-and-everyone-else-phone events like citypoems (live, public and still happening from February 2003), Murmur (live, public and still happening from Summer 2003) among others, that use simple SMS or voice content and interfaces, and let location be defined by names of places and the users’ own sense of those places.
It will be at least another three years (according to this article) before the majority of phones bought are smart phones on which you can use Urban Tapestries or Wavespotter, and even then it’s likely that teenagers will still be less likely to have them than businessmen.
Teenagers are not only enthusiastic mobile phone users, they also make up the largest group of bloggers (evidence, though this may well not be the last word), so are exactly the kind of people who are likely to be the first to pick up on this kind of possibility: why not leave messages down at the local shopping centre (mall, perhaps) for example.
And even when the majority of teenagers do have smart phones, they’ll have to start discovering these possibilities from scratch, using map-based interfaces that just don’t seem necessary, let alone a welcoming, encouraging and easy way to draw people into sharing information about the places they are in and probably visit regularly.
After all, every town and village in the world has a local newspaper that uses place as a way of filtering information, but none of them ever put maps next to their stories, because their readers are already part of that place, they know where they are, and if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have bothered buying a local paper.
What worries me is that if you think that it’s a good thing that mobile technology might help to grow a renewed sense of place, localness (League of Gentlemen style) and neighbourhood (I won’t use the worn out word “community”), which I do, there’s a danger that the wind might be taken out of our sails by the lack of success (for the foreseeable future at any rate) of projects that try to start with richness and hope to pick up real life users at some unspecified later date.
And it’s maps that are really responsible for that high richness low reach starting point.
I hope that doesn’t happen because the experience of all the high reach low (technological) richness events I know about is that they are very successful in attracting people to take part, people who are not techy, arty or anything-elsey, just people who find they can use their mobile phone to notice something new about their world.
Zvakwana, meaning 'enough' in the Shona language, is a protest group in Zimbabwe.
