"While the mobile user experience may sometimes bring representations of nature to us, I think its more important role is in being with us in the natural world, augmenting not replacing reality. This is a very different role for the internet-enabled mobile device compared to the internet-enabled PC.
And with this role of enhancing nature, the mobile acquires affordances that make it a part of the natural world. It knows where it is, and which way up it is. It responds to our gestures."
That is quite a rich and productive way of thinking about how we use mobile phones, and what mobile phones are, taken from a discussion about mobile user experience and Ruskin's ideas about Gothic.
It stretches out and intertwines its branches quite readily as well.
There is an interesting Steve Benford paper about the difficulty they had with timelines in a game played by text message. It doesn't say so in the paper, but I think that might have been because mobile phones follow a rhythm rather than clock time.
This rhythm comes from the intimacy with which we use them. They are powered by body heat. Mobile phone time shrinks and expands the way person time does.
I wonder if Monsters! is a kind of Gothic augmentation?
Here is a gargoyle to brood on:
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