I want to thank your MET peer Andrew Murray for his fine work in assembling a debut set of Mobile Culture readings and resources for this week.
Rather than pretend to set a stage for all of Mobile Culture – which would be fun, to say the least – I will begin by sharing two ideas that motivate my thinking on the essence of mobile culture. Both topics look far back to the origins of human culture as a way to see forward. These ideas are deliberately ‘out there’, so you don’t need to believe either one, but I trust they will be worthwhile for reflection.
Let me tell you a story…
As I mentioned earlier, my first love and career was astronomy, and while observing in BC I was drawn to learn about how First Nations cultures here understood the stars. I humbly believe I’m still a ‘world expert’ on northwest coast (NWC) cultural astronomy and cosmology, only because I don’t know of anyone else who has ever studied it systematically(!).
The image below is of Bill Reid’s stunning “Raven and the First People” sculpture at UBC. Raven is a mythological “trickster”, and his cycle of tales is deeply interwoven with astronomical knowledge, along with countless other cultural themes. I wish I had the space or mandate here to fully describe the cosmological significance of Reid’s work: it is the purest and most beautiful piece of astronomical art I know of.
NWC First Nations were an oral culture, expressing their cultural identity fluently across all of their mature ‘media’ channels: story-telling, poetry, song, dance, costume, carving, food, social organization, etc. Layers of abstracted belief were directly linked to aspects of observable reality, such as the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets, establishing resonance for cultural meaning and identity. So, for example, the Raven Cycle, a supernatural epic shared intensively during the annual winter solstice, was deeply rooted in observable nature and meaning. It seems to me that this intimate linkage was a predigital form of mobility, and openness, in the generation of identity, making me think of the Dylan poem, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”.
In contrast, our major media today have evolved to present abstractions of abstractions, where the technological limitations of the media themselves offer relatively few opportunities for embeddedness in reality. The stories of Christmas, Hanukkah, etc., are also told at the winter solstice, but the natural meaningfulness of this has been lost in translation for millenia. The roots have withered due to the limitations of our storytelling/storykeeping technologies.
My provocation is that “transmedia storyworlds” isn’t something that Hollywood just invented, it is an ancient form of human narrative artisanship: cultural tapestry-making that has been largely incompatible with modern media, with significant consequence for unraveled identity, until now. Are mobile media, in our hand and meshing all parts of our real and virtual lives, perhaps the dawn of a new kind of oral culture?
Take a moment to imagine your brain functions as analogous to a giant app store. From a neuroscience perspective we now know that, over the ages, natural selection has coded a large number of highly sophisticated neural tools to help us analyse and interpret incoming sensory data in advantageous ways. We don’t normally think of our brains as toolkits because the separate tools all interoperate so seamlessly that we are never aware of them individually. For example, our brains have a permanent, hardwired visual ‘app’ for recognizing and differentiating between human faces. The DNA-driven ‘downloading’ of this app into the fusiform gyrus portion of the temporal lobe of our brain provides us with distinctive social advantages. People born without it, or who lose it through disease or injury, have a condition called Prosopagnosia, where they might not even be able to identify themselves in a mirror or photograph, let alone close friends, family and myriad acquaintances, even while they can recognize all manner of other objects easily. We have complementary specialized apps for recognizing people using our ears, noses, and so forth, so when the visual app malfunctions we normally have sufficient redundancy to at least cope in society. The brain is such an advanced piece of technology that it is still magical to us – we have no idea how many apps are in there to help us with inputs (understanding the world) and outputs (operating in the world). There may be thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Now imagine the addictive nature of Facebook, Instagram, etc, as an early forms of ESP (extra-sensory perception) that the brain craves, as it does for analysis from its inboard apps, in this case for giving you an active ‘sense’ of what is happening in your extended social network. That creates an advantage for you, therefore Facebook can be considered a “transhuman” app. What other transhuman potentials are already here, or imminent, to be made immediate and pervasive by mobile media? One example along the same lines as Facebook could be the application of emerging social media analytics to provide each of us with dashboards to report the current emotional state of members of our family, social and professional spheres. Does that sound too creepy to accept? Well, don’t be hypocritical – you already continuously use another highly-advanced brain app that enables you to reliably infer any person’s changing emotions by spying on the slightest variations of their facial expressions, voice, etc. We don’t ask their permission when we spy on them thus – should we?
Natural selection has established many standards for human interaction that we take for granted, and society has gradually developed many more. Both methods for generating “humanity rules” are complex, and both are in motion – the standards continue to evolve. We know, for example, that device use is influencing brain operation (e.g. thumbing) and therefore likely is influencing brain evolution. It’s also obvious that mobile technologies are influencing cultural evolution, and therefore modifying other humanity rules. Given that human culture is driven by, and drives, the app store in our heads, what are the transhuman cultural implications of the rapid emergence of scores of deeply personal yet non-biological brain-augmenting mobility apps?
Weirder yet, an innovation program I lead, Urban Opus, focuses on another emergent form of mobile culture: the personal, social and cultural potentials of massive data at urban scale. You’ve probably heard of “Smart City” projects, which look to make cities vastly more efficient through networks of sensors streaming live data to optimize traffic, power, etc. These ideas pursue a ‘machine model’ of cities, where a city is like a car that can be tuned precisely if we can get enough live data feedback. This is an interesting opportunity, but Urban Opus prefers to view cities through a human lens, as incubators of humanity, where the smartest sensors have two legs (i.e. engaged citizens with smartphones who voluntarily contribute anonymous data related to their urban lifeways, both passively and actively, to enable unprecedented collective benefits). We are exploring how the next dimensions of learning, and other essential facets of society and culture, can ride a wave of massive citizen data. Is it the future? Who knows? The magic of mobility has barely surfaced.
In this activity, you are expected to explore resources available in the Knowledge Mill under the “Mobile Culture” category. Many of these resources are assignments posted by previous students, but there are also items of independent news, analysis and research on this topic discovered and posted by your peers. Your role is to add value to this stream as follows:
Step 1: Peruse (browse, search, sort, filter, etc.) the posts in the Mobile Culture category sufficiently to identify at least two (2) posts of particular interest to yourself.
Step 2: Critically consider your selected posts, along with any existing reviews that may be present. Add critical value to the post by: A) providing a “thumbs up” recommendation for any reviews that are particularly insightful; B) rating the post itself using the star rating criteria introduced earlier; and C) if you have something original and worthwhile to contribute, author your own review using the Comment (“Leave a Reply”) field.
Elaborating on your experience with the existing set of 523 resources, go forth boldly into the full Mobile Internet to find other (better, more recent and different flavored) resources to expand our Knowledge Mill. Here are some tips to help your mining:
Tip 1: Use keywords or ideas you encountered in Activity 1 or the Frontiers Poll to narrow your search range.
Tip 2: Use your mobile browser to find mobile-friendly content. We’re only at the dawn of Mobile Internet – most content is still created by desktop authors for desktop readers. We’re looking for resources designed for, or at least easily accessed on, mobile devices.
Tip 3: Count how many seconds it takes to access the resource and give up any site or file that cannot be opened in 8 seconds — that is an optimistic limit of a mobile user’s patience.
Tip 4: Choose content based on credible sources, unbiased research and thorough reporting, not advertisements or marketing material. Consider the origin date — mobile technology is developing so quickly that content even a couple of years old may be out of date — if possible select content posted within the last few months to ensure you don’t duplicate something already present in the Knowledge Mill.
Tip 5: It might be strategic for you to mine one or two topics you are considering for your Assignment #1 – this activity would be a great way to get a head-start.
Tip 6: If you don’t find anything of significant interest or critical value, don’t post something inferior just for posting’s sake.
When/if you find an appropriate new resource, please make a new post under the category of “Mobile Culture” in the Knowledge Mill, embed the resource link in your post, or upload in a file format. Then write a brief review for it, including why you consider it worthwhile.
Once you have completed the activities above, please move on to this week’s discussions