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Authors: Jon Agar

Tags: #science, #engineering and technology, #telecommunications, #electronics and communications, #telephone and wireless technology, #internet, #mobile telephones

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Chapter 27
Smartphone culture

The
phone, like any form of communication, can be analysed in two overlapping ways: by paying attention to its technological structure and to the information that passes through it. The great Canadian commentator Marshall McLuhan called these the medium and the message, and argued that one decisively shaped the other. The old telephone was a classic case of what McLuhan called a ‘cool' medium. A tiny channel of communication was opened up when answering a call – a disembodied voice heard over a crackly line. Concentration was needed because most of the cues we need to easily follow a conversation – the movements of hands and head, the eye contact – are missing.

As the phone has passed from landline to mobile cellphone to smartphone, so the channels of communication have become immensely richer. If we wanted to – and largely we don't – we could routinely hold video conversations instead of re-enacting the old telephone style. Actually making calls is not how we have used the new richness of smartphone communication. Rather we have used the widening of the channels – the gush of broadband information – to make the smartphone our primary personal cultural node, our way of recording, transmitting, storing and manipulating meaningful
messages. Smartphones are increasingly the tool by which we manage culture.

Let us explore this development by looking at three types of cultural data: images, locations and play. Cameras started appearing in cellphones, as a routine feature, in the very early 2000s. Since then the quality of the lenses, and the size of the images produced (as optimistically measured in megapixels) has increased, to the extent that the digital camera industry, barely coming down after its victory over 35mm plastic analogue film, is in crisis. Camera phones, like the earlier mobile phones, provoked anxieties about privacy, although in an interestingly inverted fashion. Speaking on the phone risked a breach of one's own privacy, and the complaints were of hearing – or rather, overhearing – too much personal information. An example would be on a crowded train in which all but one of the passengers are frozen, embarrassed, as the carriage is filled with the sound of one voice recounting the details of a medical examination. Public space was being mistaken for one person's private space. Camera phones, inversely, were a potential invasion of one's privacy. In both cases the social breaching was most evident, and most discussed, in the early formative years of the technology.

For example, in 2004 the anti-surveillance group Privacy International campaigned against the invasion of the camera phone. ‘The misuse of phone cameras', said
the director of PI, Simon Davies, was ‘becoming a real threat to privacy.' The danger was that people were being photographed without realising it. One of the reasons was that people saw a phone as just that, and not as a potential camera. He called for it to be compulsory for phones to flash every time a picture was taken. Another option, pursued in countries such as South Korea, was to make it impossible for users of camera phones to disable the entirely vestigial ‘click' that accompanies the taking of a digital photograph. ‘Unless action is taken immediately', said Davies, ‘there is a risk that social intimacy will disappear within a decade.'

Social intimacy is not dead yet. One reason is that as camera phones have become commonplace, so societies have improvised, as they do, formal and informal rules for their use. Another reason is that the camera phones are so useful that we have accommodated some of the loss of privacy. Gerard Goggin, the foremost scholar of emerging cellphone culture, cautiously noted in 2006 that the ‘social and cultural functions of camera phones are quite distinct' from older camera cultures. In Japan, an early adopter of the camera phone, for example, Fumitoshi Kato and colleagues had noticed that they were used for ‘taking photos of serendipitous sightings and moments' rather than the ‘special planned events that have traditionally been documented by amateur photography'. And as camera phones
became ubiquitous, so any newsworthy event was equally likely to be caught serendipitously. In Britain this phenomenon was dramatically exemplified by the 7 July 2005 bombings. Grainy camera phone footage of passengers picking their way through the smoke and carnage of underground train wrecks defined the initial media coverage. It was taken by the passengers themselves.

In a more mundane sense, of course, camera phones are now an everyday tool for taking, storing and sharing photographic images. A picture at a family celebration will now be most likely taken on a phone rather than an old-style camera, digital or analogue. Any public event, from a concert to a coronation, will be greeted with a forest of hands holding smartphones aloft. As smartphones act as our intimate personal computers, we can use software and websites to manage these pictures. To take one example Flickr, a digital photo-sharing website that began in 2004 and is now owned by Yahoo, has over 50 million members. According to its own data the most popular device for taking pictures shared on Flickr is the iPhone, beating the Canon EOS, the top digital camera, hands down.

The sharing of camera phone videos sparked an unusual moral panic in Britain in the mid-2000s. Starting in late 2004 and peaking in the summer of 2005, newspapers and TV news programmes carried shocking stories of out-of-control teenagers running up to victims
and hitting them while an accomplice filmed the violence on their phone. The practice was called ‘happy slapping'. Here is one report by BBC News:

A 14-year-old has been attacked by three people who videoed the assault on a mobile phone.

The victim and his brother were walking along Dallington Road in Northampton last Wed­nes­day evening when they were approached by three men.

One of the three pushed the boy into a bush before punching him in the side of the head.

The attack was videoed by another man on his mobile phone – a craze known as ‘happy slapping'.

Detectives said the three then walked off towards a nearby pub.

One of the offenders has been described as white, between 15 and 20 years old, about 6ft 2in tall and was wearing a white and blue top.

He also appeared to be wearing eyeliner.

In another case the mother of the victim was reported to be demanding that camera phones be banned from schools. The ITV investigative news programme,
Tonight with Trevor MacDonald
, labelled happy slapping an epidemic and sought to place the blame on kids copying violent reality stunt shows such as
Jackass
. In fact it was a moral panic. Camera phones are more widespread
now than ever, yet ‘happy slapping' no longer troubles the headlines. Partly, according to Graham Barnfield, a lecturer from the University of East London who has ruefully reflected on his unwitting role in the snowballing of the story, the moral panic was caused by a media feeding on itself without taking the time to research further than Google. But partly, the moral panic came from social anxieties, specifically anxieties about the mass extension of making and sharing video images by unsupervised young people. Or, put another way, the furore over ‘happy slapping' was an inarticulate and misdirected response to the spread of the intimate personal computer.

The capacity of smartphones to display high quality images, when combined with the ability to determine location, has meant that mobile devices have rapidly displaced the paper map. Just as the mobile phone started as a car-based technology, so mobile cartography first reached public attention in the 2000s as a car-based driving aid. These ‘automotive navigation systems', made by companies such as TomTom, Garmin and Navigon, displayed a map of the oncoming road and told the driver where to drive. Digital cartography – such as Google Maps, launched in 2005 – rapidly became standard features on smartphones. They were a spur to further innovation; many applications overlay the basic geographical map with useful information. Google Maps, for example, overlays maps with traffic
data – a jam will flash an angry red, a congested road yellow and a clear drive will be a calming green. Cunningly, the data comes from people's phones – it is part of the licence agreement, if you look carefully. By driving around with an Android phone or an iPhone 4 you are feeding location data back to Google which then collates and represents the data back to you as a traffic colour.

The traffic function on Google Maps is a good example of how mobile digital cartography is not merely more convenient than traditional cartography, but represents something qualitatively new. The novelty is not mobility. After all, most paper maps are designed to be mobile. Nor is it simply the overlay of information, although there is no doubt that the ease by which geographical data can be combined digitally is behind the explosion of diverse location-based applications. Rather the revolution comes from the map, once it is held on a smartphone, becoming a portal for information to flow in two directions. Not just from map-maker to map-reader, but vice versa too. Think how the driver consulting Google Maps' traffic report is also feeding back information. Now the map-maker is mapping the map-reader – and changing the map accordingly! The individual gets a useful service. But the company also profits from the new cartography. The aggregate data of movements and locations is a goldmine that map-makers, such as Google and Apple, exploit.

Much
of this location-based tracking takes place without the user's attention being drawn to it. Sometimes it can be truly underhand. In the spring of 2011 two programmers, Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden, discovered that the iPhone and the 3G iPad with the operating system iOS4 systematically log the geographical location of the device along with a time stamp in a file called ‘consolidated.db'. (Others knew of this file, but it had not been publicised.) As they wrote on their blog, raising the alert: ‘Anybody with access to this file knows where you've been.' What is odd is that no one really knew why Apple put it there. For the record, Apple swiftly issued a press release stating that the ‘iPhone is not logging your location' – it was just logging the dates and positions of lots of sites
very near
your location, and anyway it was just doing so to make your iPhone work better.

More generally, the collection of location information, made possible either by GPS or by phone mast tracking, has opened up immense sets of data for social and natural scientists to examine. In 2008 the scientific journal
Nature
carried a paper with the title ‘Understanding individual human mobility patterns'. In it scientists Marta Gonzalez, C.A. Hidalgo and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi reported on the results of tracking 100,000 anonymised individuals as they carried mobile phones over a six-month period. People generally didn't stray more than ten kilometres from their bases,
while a few roved over hundreds. This might not seem to be the most surprising scientific result of all time, but, as of 2012, according to Google Scholar the paper had been cited over 1,000 times. The finding informed work on urban planning, the sociology of friendship and the spread of viruses, both human and computer.

Taking pictures and reading maps are, nevertheless, relatively minor uses of the smartphone. Research on British smartphone users, commissioned by O
2
and released in June 2012, found that on average 25 minutes per day were spent browsing the internet, eighteen minutes checking social networks, fifteen minutes listening to music and fourteen playing games. Making calls was only the fifth most common use – just twelve minutes. Confirmation, perhaps, that we should stop calling these things ‘phones'. Taking photographs took up just over three minutes – less even than the nine minutes absorbed by reading a book. In between were activities such as checking and writing emails (eleven minutes) and watching TV and films (nine minutes). In total, this group of smartphone users spent just over two hours a day in constant touch. Most used their phone as their alarm clock. Market research in the United States and Canada reveals broadly similar patterns.

Playing games is an area of culture that has been transformed by the smartphone, and in an
extraordinarily short period of time. Reading reports as recent as 2005 and 2006, one is struck by how pessimistic the mobile games industry was. Developers (typically very small new technology companies) had a poor relationship with ‘publishers', the mobile companies, in which there was no agreement about a fair way to channel revenue and divide up profits. And players weren't interested. In the United States in 2006 in an average month, for example, less than 4 per cent of mobile phone users downloaded a game. But the smartphone, and the iPhone model of the App Store in particular, offered solutions to the revenue and quality issues.

The games that have sold well are simple and addictive. Angry Birds involves pinging birds with catapults at the ramshackle defences erected by egg-stealing pigs. It's colourful and equally amusing to nine- and 90-year olds. Fruit Ninja, reputedly a favourite way to ‘chillax' of the British prime minister David Cameron, involves sweeping your finger – a ninja's sword – through fruit. It's not complicated. Typically of smartphone culture these games are absorbing – never has constant touch been better illustrated – and only apparently individualistic. One plays Angry Birds alone, in a private bubble, but it has been picked out and purchased because of the social aggregating of consumer choices choreographed by the App Store.

The successful games make their money through
direct sales (59 pence or 99 cents through the App Store, say) and advertising (Android advertising alone is worth $1 million a month to Rovio, maker of Angry Birds). Many also encourage users to link up, for example reporting high scores to social media. As noted above, using social media is among the top uses of smartphones. Facebook, which started in 2004 and has a billion members worldwide, and Twitter, even younger (b. 2006), are currently the leading sites. Yet again we notice the characteristic intimate, personal, individualistic surface appearance which hides a business model based on the gathering and exploitation of aggregate information.

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