"Life in the Real-
Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism
Anthony M. Townsend
Relationships with the object: an extension
of the body
Individuals develop very personal relationships with mobile telephones.
Yet it is probably what the telephone represents, more than the
object itself that consummates the relationship. It should come
as no surprise that in London, mobile phones recently became the
most commonly left item on subway trains in the Underground, replacing
the umbrella. (Adams and Sanghera, 1999) Still, the physical object
fills some significant role in the hand of its owner. Despite the
fact that there is no service in the deep tunnels of the Underground,
people are still losing their mobile phones because they are
holding them in their hands.
The contradictions of this relationship are many. Personalizing
phones is extremely popular: by entering commonly called numbers,
adding new songs to replace the standard ring alert, or buying colorful
clip-on faceplates to replace the standard black matte. Yet the
Subscriber Information Module (SIM), which stores all of the data
necessary to tell a phone what its number is and who owns it, makes
the object of the cell phone replaceable in an instant. All personal
information is contained within a small smart card that can be dropped
into any phone chosen on the basis of cost, technical sophistication,
or cosmetic appearance. The phone is a commodity, yet the information
coordinates of the telephone network that it represents have a powerful
pull. They are protected with highly sophisticated encryption schemes.
In Manhattan, where a designer perfume “212” now bears
the name of the precious area code; the very coordinates themselves
have become important status-bearing personal identifiers.
Yet despite these conflicting trends in personalization and depersonalization
of the physical artifact, the mobile phone is more and more becoming
perceived as an extension of the body, again though perhaps more
in a virtual sense than a purely physical one. As Wired magazine
reports:
In the
last couple of years, Finnish teenagers have quit referring to their
mobile phones as jupinalle — “yuppie teddy bears”
— started calling them kannykka or kanny, a Nokia trademark
that passed into generic parlance and means an extension of the
hand.
(Silberman, 1999)
From a
very physical metaphor of something separate, cute, and essentially
useless — a teddy bear — the name has evolved into a more
abstract, loaded term. A metaphysical extension of the hand, a serious
tool linked to the owner on the most basic level. And this deep
cognitive link between the phone and the owner is a persistent theme.
Katz reports a study in which:
Relative to either home or work phones, [digital
mobile phone service] was judged to be much like a friend; one user
even said that the [mobile] handset began to feel like a "part
of my anatomy". (Kiesler et al., 1994 in Katz, 1999)
In Japan,
one of the highest rates of mobile phone penetration in the world
has led to the introduction of mobileaware jewelry. The Osaka-based
Sunshine company has developed an artificial fingernail featuring
a tiny lightemitting diode which glows red or blue when the user’s
mobile phone is active. The nail can be filed to any shape and since
it is powered by the mobile’s wireless transmissions, it requires
no batteries. (Boyd, 2000) The body metaphor appears in negative
contexts as well with regard to mobile communications technologies.
In a New York Times article, one teen seethes at the invasion
of privacy that occurs when her parents summon her by pager:
Originally, Zan said, she wanted a pager so her friends
could get in touch with her. But now most of the pages seem to come
not so much from her friends as from her mother, she said, and she
is having second thoughts.
"It just complicates matters, really," Zan said. "Now
it's like I have kind of a dog chain on. If she pages me, I have
to call her back. She always has some kind of access to me."
Before she got her pager, Zan said, "it felt almost as if I
had a little more freedom." She added that life with a pager
made her "feel kind of overwhelmed and cramped, like my personal
space is being invaded." (Hafner, 2000)
In this interview, it is as if the young woman is unable to describe
her relationship with her pager’s capabilities in terms other
than those that suggest a physical attachment — “dog chain”,
“access”, “cramped”, and the invasion of her
“personal space”. On another level, the commonly accepted
name for these devices — technically “wireless telephones”
— but more commonly in the United States, “cellular telephones”
- has begun to change as well, reflecting these trends of internalizing
the technology and attaching it to the body in a figurative sense.
The name “cellular” was derived from the geometric structure
of the antenna grid that links these devices into terrestrial telephone
systems. A city or metropolitan area is divided into a grid of hexagons,
or “cells”, at the center of which are placed transceiver
antennas. As a subscriber moves from cell to cell, the antenna switches
the call off to the antenna in the next cell. The recent explosion
in subscribership, however, has coincided with a decisive shift
away from the “cellular” designation towards the use of
the term “mobile telephone” or “mobile communications”.
This implies a broad shift in cultural perceptions and marketing
campaigns from a position where the usefulness and functionality
of the technology is seen to be in the supporting infrastructure
(the antenna network) to one where the intelligence is embodied
in the device itself, “the mobile”. And unlike linking
oneself in one’s mind to some complex (and constraining) grid
of antennas, the idea of augmenting oneself with a tiny “smart”
device is very appealing. In fact, fashion has rapidly adapted to
accommodate mobile phones. For example, The Yak Pak, a popular massproduced
line of bicycle courier-style bags sold through the national chain
Urban Outfitters, are flush with handy pockets for holding mobile
phones and pagers. Cargo pants have also become extremely popular,
as the extra pockets provide more room for the electronic accessories
of everyday modern urban life.
More and more commonly, the popular culture is accepting and reflecting
this perception of the mobile phone as an extension of the body.
In a New York Times article a graphic designer producing signs for
restaurants to discourage the use of cell phones during meals, ponders
this link:
A cell phone is "a pacifier for adults,"
said Maira Kalman, the president of M&Co, a Manhattan product
and graphic design group. "It makes you feel connected, that
you're not alone on this planet." (Louie, 1999)
It’s hard to imagine a more loaded analogy than the pacifier,
a substitute for the mother’s nipple. How long before people
begin thinking of cell phones as an umbilical cord?
Cutting the Cord At the final extreme, the mobile phone’s
connectivity is completely subsumed into the body and all other
forms of communication become redundant."
HARLON
FROM VIDEODROME DIALS A WRONG
NUMBER ON HIS KANNY...
