Global Mobile Media

Gerard Goggin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415469173
• eBook ISBN: 9781136908316
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gerard Goggin has produced an incisive and penetrating overview of the world according to mobiles. Covering sight, sound and status, plus a host of other issues, he provides a provocative analysis of how mobile communication gadgets come to play such a prominent role in our lives. Any scholar of New Media will want to read this book – James Katz, Department of Communication, Rutgers University, USA

With billions of users worldwide, the cell phone is not only a successful communications technology; it is also key to the future of media. Global Mobile Media offers an overview of the complex topic of mobile media, looking at the emerging industry structures, new media economies, mobile media cultures and network politics of cell phones as they move centre-stage in media industries.

The development, adoption and significance of cell phones for society and culture have been registered in a growing body of work. Where existing books have focused on communication, and on the social and cultural aspects of mobile media, Global Mobile Media looks at the media dimensions. Goggin provides a pioneering yet measured evaluation of how cell phone corporations, media interests, users and policy makers are together shaping a new media dispensation.

Global Mobile Media successfully places new mobile media historically, socially and culturally in a wider field of portable media technologies through extensive case studies, including:

• the rise of smartphones, with a detailed discussion of the Apple iPhone and how it has catalysed a new phase in convergent media, audiences and innovation
• the new agenda in cultural politics and media policy, featuring topics such as iPhone apps and control, mobile commons, and open mobile networks
• a succinct map of the political economy of mobile media, identifying key players, patterns of ownership and control, institutions, and issues
• a critical account of cell phones' involvement in and contribution to much-discussed new forms of production and consumption, such as user-generated content, p2p networks, open and free source software networks
• an anatomy of how cell phones relate to other online media, particularly the Internet and wireless technologies.

Global Mobile Media is an engaging, accessible text which will be of immense interest to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in Communication Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, as well as those taking New Media courses.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Cell phones as global media

In late 2008, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) declared that the number of cell phone connections in the world had passed the four billion mark (GSM World 2009). In 2010, the figure will soon exceed five billion subscribers. Driving this growth are countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, with their momentous economic and social changes. Also responsible for the rise and rise of the cell phone are those living in smaller, poor, developing countries, and indeed across continents such as Africa, where the technology is finding not only new users, but new uses too. In Europe, the US, Canada and the Asia-Pacific, subscribers have embraced the cell phone even more intensely. Already taken-for-granted the cell phone comes with a welter of new applications, and has achieved an even more prominent place in commerce, work, intimacy, family, social networking, culture and politics. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the remarkably plastic technology of the cell phone continues its seemingly unstoppable career – emerging largely unscathed even from the prolonged and profound world financial crisis that hit in 2008.

In Japan, people read cell phone novels on the way to work. In Tanzania, a farmer finds out market information, and sells produce with his phone. In Bangladesh, the famous ‘phone ladies’ of the GrameenPhone provide a communications service for all and sundry. In Seoul, avid social networkers upload photos and updates on their mini-hompy. In the US, Iran and many other countries, friends, colleagues and celebrities micro-blog with Twitter. In Belarus an underground theatre company performs its plays in people’s houses, and other clandestine venues, and audience members are contacted by cell phone to let them know details of where the night’s performance will be. In the city of Barcelona three North African immigrants listen to music on their cell phones, swapping tracks via Bluetooth. In Australia, avid fans follow the cricket on mobile television. In trains, planes and automobiles, people watch short video, and downloaded programs on their handsets. Pretty much everywhere people take photos with their cell phones, and show them to their friends, families and colleagues – or message the images on, and upload them to their blogs or photosharing site. Devotees brandish their iPhone like a Nintendo Wii, playing a bowling game, or revelling in the download of yet another application. Walking or driving, people in motion navigate with their various mobile location technologies, whether SatNav, Google Maps or mobile location finders. Standing out front of a store, a would-be customer receives an ad on their phone. People wake up to text messages from their lovers, and fall asleep bathed in the consoling blue light of the console, beeping to signal the arrival of another communiqué.

Mobiles as global media

These are a few vignettes to evoke the rich and prosaic, complicated and everyday facets of mobile media. In my 2006 book Cell Phone Culture, I sought to provide a biography of the cell phone to that point in time. Many of the features of this new culture of cell phones still hold. However, the scale, complexity and depth of the imbrication of cell phones in contemporary society requires a different perspective. The approach that I have chosen is to look at cell phones as a species of global media. There are four main reasons why I think it is important to undertake an inquiry into mobile media.

First, the cellular mobile phone has moved beyond being a communications technology, in a way that is still recognizably an evolution from the telephone. From at least 2001 onwards, the mobile has been imagined, discussed and shaped as a form of media. By the middle of the decade in 2005, media industries were regarding mobiles as an integral part of cross-platform media businesses (Groebel et al. 2006). Old and new media, entertainment and communications companies were increasingly taking a stake in mobile companies, mobile content and media ventures, and were creating or modifying programmes and materials for delivery on more and more advanced mobile handsets. This was a period when camera phone culture became well and truly entrenched, mobile television emerged worldwide, and cell phones became used in tandem with YouTube and other video-sharing internet architectures to create new forms of audio and televisual experience. In the process cell phones became a serious part of mainstream media business, policy, social life and public debate.

Second, thinking about cellular phones as media is a useful move for trying to comprehend the changes they bring to established ideas of how different communication and media technologies relate to each other, and how they connect with the social. My focus on mobile media is not just about large-scale corporate attempts to fashion recognizable forms of television for small screen viewing. It is about the durability and inventiveness of very basic forms of mobile culture as they become media: text messaging as low-cost mobile media in India; local mobile news for communities in Kenya; user–producers using media capabilities of phones to create their own content, and distribute via the internet. There are new uses of cell phones that question and extend our typical understandings of media: the role of cell phones in community development; as crucial to small, micro and medium enterprise; the importance of mobiles for healthcare (for instance, notification of newly discovered HIV–AIDs status to a person’s partners); and, not least, the way that cell phones redraw the boundaries between private, intimate communications and media, and larger public understandings and expectations. Many of these transformations are neither solely due to, nor the exclusive province of, cell phones – but the technology plays an indispensable role in them.

Third, as handsets are shipped with media and internet features, computing, handheld and portable media devices are taking on capabilities formerly restricted to the world of telecommunications. Microsoft’s Zune, Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, Research in Motion’s Blackberry, not to mention voice and video over Internet Protocol on laptops are all examples of technologies from the world of computing and internet that have been adapted to incorporate elements of cell phones. What are these things? And what has happened to the object we call the cell phone as it has had a metamorphosis into media? What are the relationships between cellular mobile networks and the panopoly of affiliated reconfigured networks? For instance, the circuit-switched fixed-line telecommunications networks moving to Internet Protocol-based networks; the wireless networks, whether corporate or home Wi-Fi, or new Wi-Max networks; television networks, being reworked through digital broadcasting; radio networks, and digital audio broadcasting initiatives; satellite networks (still important, if not widely used by consumers); private networks, of corporations, governments, or educational institutions; the ad-hoc networks created through transient, local Bluetooth connections.

Fourth, what is the relationship between the cell phone as media, and other forms of media, whether older forms such as television, radio, newspapers and publishing, or newer forms such as internet and games? If mobile media is starting to be taken seriously by consumers and producers, and is emerging as an important part of culture and society, what are the implications for the traditional ways we understand the role of media? What is the role of cell phones in media diversity, long regarded as the sine qua non of citizenship and democracy? Are new audiences and publics being created with mobile media? Where do cell phones fit into new approaches to media, such as ideas about innovation and creativity? What are the implications of the salience of cell phones in media for how we formulate and tackle questions of access and participation? What, finally, of the pressing questions that cell phones raise for policy and public debate, calling for urgent debate and fresh models associated with intellectual property, privacy, content regulation and cultural and media policy?

Updating global media

Cell phones are an exemplary global technology, as their worldwide diffusion suggests (Castells et al. 2007; Edgerton 2007; Law, Fortunati and Yang 2006). The field of mobile studies is flourishing, with many helpful accounts now available. A strong focus among many recent accounts, seeking to advance social and scientific knowledge, is particularly on understanding mobile communication (Haddon and Green 2010; Katz 2008; Koskinen 2007; Ling and Donner 2009; Qiu 2009). How does mobile communication differ from other forms of communication? What are its typical contexts and characteristics? How does study of the emerging, even novel, aspects of mobile communication deepen our understanding of human communication theories? While mindful of these new theories of mobile communication, and hoping to contribute to such debates, my focus in this book is upon mediated communication. That is, I approach mobile communication with a particular interest in how it is transforming media.

Thus what I hope to add to the understanding of cell phones is twofold: firstly, I hope to provide a comprehensive account of the cell phone as media; secondly, I wish to highlight the importance of a global approach to mobile media. My rule of relevance is how various incarnations of mobile media relate to the cellular mobile phone. Thus my starting point, and main focus, is the cellular mobile phone, its networks, dedicated applications, affordances (Gibson 1977 and 1979) and cultures of use. I am interested to show how the cell phone developed to encompass various forms of media, whether mobile internet, mobile games or mobile television, or uses of mobile technology for reinventing place or community. While I fully recognize that the cell phone is entangled in – and constitutive of – a larger, messier media and communication ecology, I am interested in looking at media convergence from the point of view of cell phones. Thus I look at how cell phones are being disassembled and then reassembled into these new digital, networked systems, that have been the subject of so much attention. My attention will be directed to how other media systems are interacting with cellular mobiles; the interzones, borders, exchange and trading places, and new domains of innovation among mobiles and internet, mobile networks and Wi-Fi; the adaptation and transformation of the cell phone into the new objects of smartphones, iPhones and open source phones; the new policy debates that straddle and cross-fertilize the traditional agenda associated with telecommunications and cell phones, on the one hand, and those of press, publishing and broadcasting, on the other.

As I hope to show, cell phones need to be understood as an important part of the contemporary global media system. Yet, as is also the case, local settings, including the national, are very much key to how media do their public and private work (Goff 2007). There is a substantial literature, which places local, national and regional media in a global framework (Balnaves, Donald and Donald 2001; Cunningham and Sinclair 1994; Demers 2002; Flew 2007; Gerbner et al. 1993; Hackett and Zhao 2005; Herman and McChesney 1997; Machin and van Leeuwen 2007; McPhail 2010; Miller et al. 2005; Murphy and Kraidy 2003; Raboy 2002; White 2005). The strength of this literature is that it does seek to comprehend media in a global context, and to identify the particular global forms, structures and organization of media. While different approaches are adopted to the investigation of global media, the political economy approach has dominated (Babe 1995 and 2009). It has sometimes been criticized for taking a monolithic approach to media – focusing too much on the imperialism or dominance of particular countries (especially the US) in media – at the expense of adequately characterizing the complex relations between culture and economy, something that has been a great topos of the debate between political economists and exponents of creative industries (for instance, see Cunningham 2008; Flew 2009; Flew and Cunningham 2010; Garnham 2005; Miller 2002 and 2009). Global media approaches have also been faulted for lack of subtlety in capturing the relationships among national or international actors, the interplay of the global and local captured in theories of ‘glocalization’, ‘hybridity’, or even the intercultural and cross-cultural. While acknowledging these debates, and hoping to do justice to the combination of different factors, I believe that it is productive to undertake a treatment of global mobile media. We still know little of what is distinctive about cell phones as media; how they fit into global media generally; and how, when we consider this seriously, the inclusion of cellular phones changes our understanding of global media, its structures and implications.

My starting point is the political economy of cell phones. There exists quite a literature on the economics and policy aspects of cell phones, but still little that focuses on the political economy of mobile media (for a fine exception on mobiles and advertising, see Wilken and Sinclair 2009a and b). There is an evergreen body of work on political economy of media, and even newer media such as the internet (Mosco 2004; Schiller 1999 and 2007), but as yet this approach has not been extended systematically to mobile media. I draw upon the tradition of political economy of telecommunications in the 1990s, with its fine studies undertaken by Robin Mansell (1993), Jill Hills (1986, 2002 and 2007), Vincent Mosco (1982, 2004 and 2009), Dwayne Winseck (1998) and others, and set out to investigate forms of power as they are unfolding in mobile media.

To investigate how mobile media are placed at the transactions between culture and economy, I also offer a preliminary exploration of the cultural economy of mobile media. There seem to me to be two closely interrelated and mutually constitutive parts to understanding the media–political nature of cell phones: an economy that needs to be grasped as both political and cultural. The benefit of thinking about the cultural economy of mobile media is that it immediately brings into relief the large and pressing questions of cultural politics today and into the future: participation and culture; cultural policy; innovation; the figure, powers and limits of the user; cultural citizenship; the commodification and controls of ideas and intellectual property; and how to design cultural technologies for democracies. My approach to cultural economy is an eclectic one, drawing across various traditions in the area (Anheier et al. 2008).

Elsewhere the book’s design and itineraries are very much influenced by the desire to take a media approach to cell phones, so drawing upon the work of various media studies traditions and writers – especially those concerned with new media (such as Bruns 2008; Burgess and Green 2009; Hjorth 2009; Lovink 2008). Also, however, I am especially interested in theorizing media as technology, so I am informed by theories of social studies of science and technology (Brown 2009; Flichy 2007; Latour 1996 and 2005b). A further thread through the book relates to policy studies; at various times I draw upon work in telecommunications and media policy and regulation in particular, but also new work and concepts generated around the movements associated with the commons and open source software (Deek and McHugh 2008; Feller et al. 2005).

A roadmap of mobile media

Ahead of the itinerary of the book, first a note on terminology. My main focus is upon media based upon cellular mobile telecommunications technologies, with their associated handsets and other devices, manifold applications, technologies, organization forms, and institutions. By ‘mobile media’ I principally mean the types of media that are based on cellular mobile phones, devices and networks. However, I am also aware of a range of other potential ‘mobile’–or indeed ‘portable’ media – from radios, newspapers, and books to game consoles and handhelds, portable digital assistants, e-books and e-readers and laptops. So as the book proceeds, I discuss other kinds of non-cellular mobile media, especially as they vie with, connect to and form hybrids with their cellular counterparts. While ‘wireless’ is a term that can refer to cellular mobiles – especially in North America – I use it to mean a range of standards and technologies associated with other networks (notably Wi-Fi networks that many people use to connect to the internet in home, offices, airports, hotels, cafés, or public spaces). Again, these kinds of wireless networks are very much involved in a process of convergence with their cellular counterparts – so they very much feature as dramatis personae of this story. With all the array of technologies encountered in the book, I hope the reader will bear with me as I try not to dwell overly on the technical details – simply giving the essential characterization as clearly and economically as I am able.

The book falls into three parts. Part I, ‘Cell phones and the new media economies’, sets the scene, outlining the key features of the production and consumption of mobile media, and how these are intertwined. In Chapter 2, ‘Power and mobile media’, I aim to sketch the key facets of power in mobile media, as it is shaped especially by patterns of corporate ownership, control and cultures. The chapter opens with a discussion of telecommunications and cell phone carriers. With a focus on regional multinationalism, it provides short case studies of new kinds of carriers significant in the development of mobile media, such as the Hong Kong based ‘3’ (Hutchison Whampoa), China Mobile and the Mexican giant América Móvil. Then I discuss some new kinds of companies providing application and content for cell phones. Here there are a bewildering array of businesses, from very small start-ups or niche companies, to large media and entertainment companies. Next I discuss cellular handset and equipment manufacturers, considering the long-standing dominant firms, emergent competitors, those promoting new technologies (from smartphones to e-readers) and the rise of informal ‘copycat’ production of cell phones in countries like China. The third section looks at the dynamic area of mobile content, services and applications, where new firms and cultural intermediaries have emerged, very much pioneering the first established, profitable forms of mobile media. After a brief consideration of computer and internet interests moving into mobile media, I explore the emerging network infrastructures, such as the rapid rise of mobile broadband, the cross-overs between cell phones and wireless, WiMax, fourth generation cell phone handset (4G), and internet protocol based next generation networks, which promise to fundamentally reshape the nature of boundaries of cellular mobile networks.

In Chapter 3, ‘Cultural economy of cell phones’, I shift focus to considering consumption of mobile media, and how this is closely linked to – and indeed altering – what we understand by production. First, I look at what we know about who consumes and use what kinds of mobile media, where and how. Second,...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Tables and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Permissions
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Cell phones and the new media economies
• Part II Mobile media cultures
• Part III Politics of mobile media networks
• Bibliography
• Index