Grt. Anthr bldy txt.

So, happy birthday to the mobile telephone text message: first sent on December 3rd 1992 by Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, and it read 'Merry Christmas'. Not the most auspicious start ('It was a dark and stormy night'? 'It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen'?) but an important one. Vodafone, Papworth's employee, thought that text messaging would be a useful diagnostic tool for its engineers, not a consumer tool at all.

I read yesterday that the 3.8m inhabitants of Ireland sent 8 billion text messages in the January-March period this year. I'm stunned they haven't all lost their fingers.

Why is the text message so popular? Why not just make a phone call? I think it's a control issue. If you phone somebody, you cede control. They might not stick to the point. They might talk over you. They might disagree with you. They might object to the purpose of your call. A text is a short monologue. You can't be interrupted or contradicted. You'll be late and there's nothing the recipient can do about it. You can receive a text and ignore it for a while. You have the power.

And yet the humble text message is a marker of our existential and logocentric dread. We were talking about this in my lecture on mobile and social media yesterday. We send texts as part of our attempts to organise the world around us: yet the non-reception of texts is – in Kevin Barry's words – a little ego-death, inflicted several times a day. You have no (0) messages. Nobody acknowledges your existence. You are functionally dead. The logocentrism bit relates to the way we add all these little symbols. :), :3 or whatever betray a fundamental awareness that language is always escaping from us. Our typed words can't convey what we want them to bear, and can convey things we don't want them to carry - meanings are outside our control, fought over by us, by the words that pre-exist us, and by the reader. Context and tone are difficult to communicate, so we add emoticons, or lots of !!! or 'ha ha' and any other devices designed to restrict meaning by closing down the recipient's interpretive range. It's a struggle for power.

Power's at the heart of mobile communication generally. I had a little rant about this to the students yesterday. The infiltration of mobile phones and Walkmen, iPods and the like into shared space has led to the privatisation of public space. On the train, we used to talk to each other, or read, or look out of the window. There was a sense that we were fellow passengers with a responsibility to each other to make the journey as pleasant as possible. It was public space. With the rise of personal communication and entertainment devices, we've carved up this shared space into overlapping private spaces. I can block you out with my headphones. But my headphones leak into the space. I've appropriated the public space by treating it as my own. So has everyone else. I've chosen a private virtual space in which I commune with my chosen social network rather than make any kind of connection with the unchosen social network of people sharing physical space. No doubt my fellow passengers are psychopaths anyway, hence my retreat into my own head. By doing so, I demonstrate my superior willpower: I choose not to regard my surrounding and the people in it as being of any consequence.

That's not the only way in which power is manifested in mobile technology. Take this ad for the Palm Pre, an early smartphone:



Isn't technology great? You're free to be out in the lovely countryside without every being out of touch. But look more closely. What's she doing? Working: work is no longer somewhere you go and something you do for a set period. Instead, 'life' flows together – you're meant to be 'at work' wherever and whenever you are. Emails appear at midnight: deal with it. Meeting are scheduled at the last moment – tough. Family and friends and work are all categories to be mashed together and then 'organised': you're working hard. But the payoff is visually obvious here: the young lady is at the centre of the world, distinguished from the others by her (fraudulent) autonomy and different clothing. The world, quite literally, revolves around her: friends, family and even work: they don't have autonomy or freedom. You're being sold freedom when the actual product is… you: available 24 hours a day.

Oh dear, I may be in trouble

Classroom management is fraught with danger. Nobody wants to be like a schoolteacher, but some things really get on your nerves:

Frank J. Rybicki, assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, did the equivalent last week when he shut the laptop of a student who was allegedly web surfing as opposed to taking notes. She filed a complaint (reportedly about a finger or fingers that were hurt when he shut the laptop) and the university’s police arrested him on a charge of battery. The Georgia institution suspended his teaching duties there, although not his pay.

Reached on the phone, Rybicki confirmed his arrest and suspension, and said that he had been told by the university to not answer questions about the incident. He did say that the article and comments in the student newspaper, The Spectator, were accurate. The article quoted students who saw the incident as saying that Rybicki closed the laptop amid an argument with the student over his view that she had been on websites not related to the course.

Rybicki is accused of actually hurting the student's fingers - something the other students don't believe.

In my first year of teaching, I once collected everybody's mobile phones in a bag and returned them at the end of the class. This was 2000, so it wasn't that many. It seemed to amuse everybody and did the trick for the rest of the term. I also vaguely remember answering somebody else's mobile during my lecture and telling them that the student was busy. But perhaps that was a dream: I'd never do that now.

So what to do? It's normal for phones to go off now, normal for people to text their way through a lecture or seminar. Classroom web access is useful in many ways - checking facts, seeing if a book I mention is in the library - but it can be hugely disruptive. I know it annoys other students, which is the major problem, not my feelings.

(click to enlarge or bigger version here)

The question is, what to do? I roll my eyes, make what I think are humorous comments, but what I'm really thinking is this: why bother turning up? Most of the texters are those who haven't read the books, don't want to join in the discussion. Others are engaged but really don't understand that their concentration for those couple of hours should be solely on the matter at hand. Part of the answer, of course, is to make my classes more interesting…

Fame at last

One of my rants (not a very focussed one) about mobile tracking, is excerpted in the Guardian! I don't live in a Faraday cage with a foil hat on really.

O Brave New World

I blogged recently about a Digital Media lecture on social networking I went to - and asked for your responses to the new social formations promised by the information age. One of the participants has certainly responded to our suggestions that social-networking trains us to surrender personal information to any authority, commercial and public: the gentleman behind Unluckydip.com is closing down many of his accounts.

If you're bothered, matey, read this: 'Facebook users unwittingly reveal details' and this: 'Mobiles could spell the end of privacy': basically, Google et al. are tempting you to run location-sensitive applications - so that they (and whoever is tapping in to your account) and all the world's advertisers, know where you are for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, if you think technology can be fun, you'd be right. You can now use free Guardian APIs to do odd stuff, and one fan has tracked the history and characteristics of swearing in the Guardian. According to the graph, 'wank' is much underused. To the comment boards!