Feature: Life in the Mobile Age

Last month people from 24 countries came together for three days to talk about the impact of people using technology on the move, at a conference called "Seeing, Understanding and Learning in the Mobile Age". There were philosophers, politicians, psychologists, technologists, educational theorists and social scientists. Papers ranged from the factual – how picture messaging is used – to the fanciful – Jim Katz of Rutgers' wonderful pictorial exploration of how spiritual matters have manifested themselves in people's appropriation and use of mobiles (mobile phone coffins and gravestones; phones that switch to vibrate mode during set prayer times, horoscopes by text). Questions ranged from: 'What is the meaning of the mobile phone?' to 'How will information and communication technologies change as the century progresses?' to 'Are people adapting their lives and lifestyles, or even their brains, to exploit mobile technology?'. Predictions were made and challenged. Arguments blew up and faded. The scene was the beautiful building that is home to the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in the heart of Budapest.

Relevant snatches of the resulting sessions will be featured in separate stories on UN over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, below are some leading themes from the conference, and a few compelling but abstract ideas that won't appear elsewhere. (And if you are after more background, see also how the Institute came to be working with T-Mobile Hungary on the event in UN story: When the Going gets Tough, where's the Funding?).

In such a disparate group - the conference spanned several academic communities - differences of approach could be expected, even welcomed. For instance, the event concerned itself with mobility. But for some presenters, mobility was a feature of people and the topic was new ways to support this; while for others, the emphasis was on the mobility of devices and what they provide. Meanwhile, everyone was talking about some aspect of human engagement, be it learning, understanding or communicating. But there was a gulf between the people who looked at internal processes, such as the panel of philosophers who asked whether our minds are being extended by using mobile phones and portable technologies – they concluded not – and those speakers more concerned with the use of, or changing relations made possible by, different modes of communication. Only a few crossed these divisions, and considered how new relations to other people might change the nature of society and therefore future generations.

Another major issue was knowledge, and what future there is for the aspects of culture that the academic world currently values highly, such as reading books, with the onset of 'the mobile age'. For instance, one speaker dwelt solely on whether mobile telephony would prove 'significant communication', defining significant as resulting in new forms of knowledge transfer across generations (a quality that can only really be assessed with hindsight), and concluding not. Other people took a more people-centric view: significance might depend on the context of the message, the person receiving it or its impact on one's life. But the anxiety about deskilling was pervasive. As one person from the audience put it: 'These changes are likely to produce a semi-literate group that wasn't there before, although [with texting] we may also see a totally illiterate group become semi-literate.' Philosopher Andrew Brook of Carlton University, Canada, asked whether we are not so much creating a 'knowledge society' as a 'random, unreliable opinion society'.

Others were less conflicted. Conference chair Kristóf Nyíri said that he was wildly enthusiastic about mobile phones, 'not because it's my job, but because it is my conviction'. He gave a talk that united the themes of the conference in his discussion of collective thinking. His paper is available at: http://www.fil.hu/mobil/2005/Nyiri.pdf and doesn't summarise easily, but as a flavour... Solitude and reflection, supporting deep thinking of the kind we value, or 'thinking turned inward', are features of a literate society where silent reading is the norm, a phenomenon that only began half a millennium ago with printing. The metaphor of 'superficiality' is meaninglessly attributed to developments emerging from a shift towards conversation and/or shared images as the dominant form of extended communication: people have always thought dialogically. However, this dialogicality became obscured from theorists when societies started to use print to distribute authored texts, playing up the individual aspects of thought. With new communication technologies such as mobile phones, 'our tools and devices are materialized results and vehicles of, as well as ever new inputs to, collective thinking.'

Julie Tolmie of Simon Fraser University, Canada, raised the question of whether we have the vocabulary to talk about the distributed nature of our experience with mobile communications. Her presentation addressed this, using frameworks from game studies and arguing that abstracted notions of space, time, rule structures/ infrastructure, connectedness and presence/ absence, apply to both players in a game environment and humans going about their lives in the mobile age. (See her website for the rest of the argument and some interesting related graphics: www.tolmie.eu.com).

On-Kwok Lai of the School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan, was considering how mobile technologies might change the environments available to learners, for instance with the growth of peer-to-peer. He punctuated his talk by quoting Confucius: 'Learning without thinking is labour lost; thinking without learning is perilous'. Listening to the words of a man who lived 2500 years ago suggested that little fundamental about wisdom has changed, even if the kit, the context and the knowledge has.

In the closing plenary, Jérôme Bindé, deputy assistant director-general for social and human sciences at UNESCO, talked of moving "Towards Shared Knowledge Societies", looking at ways of tackling the world's knowledge divide. 'The global information society is not necessarily a knowledge society. It should not be forgotten that the digital divide is itself the consequence of a more serious split: the cognitive divide, today more than ever, separates the countries endowed with powerful research and development potential, highly effective education systems and a range of public learning and cultural facilities from the other nations with their deficient education systems and research institutions starved of resources and under head-on attack from the brain drain.'

It was a morally inspiring end, fitly complemented by a suggestion from Jane Vincent of the University of Surrey that the development of mobile phones might be held up as a case study for the sharing of knowledge, since, without worldwide collaborative work on standards, the technology wouldn't be truly mobile. Though no one even nodded towards the development of the air transport that had brought people from South Africa, the Americas, Israel, Japan and all over Europe to Hungary to speculate together in this way in the first place...

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