THE IDENTITY POLITICS OF MOBILITY AND DESIGN CULTURE
Nina Wakeford from Incite
mobility is a situated practice - very hard to discuss without standardizing and categorizing. we need more and less of this \”trope\” mobility.
ethnographic data suggests what we think of unproblematically as mobility is more ethnographically portrayed as encountering of infrastructure.
more mobility - making mobile theories risky and dangerous
rheingold: smart mobs - there will be more cooperation and this is a good thing - across wireless devices and through reputation systems.
sara jain: will the mobile phone provide more creative ways to transverse the physical laws of spaces, or will we be caught in the endless loop of amplifying homogenous lives?
- mobility in sociology has a traditional meaning - class mobility - ideology of opportunity - need to remember dispciplinary specificity.
- newer reconceptualizations by sociologists- john urry - sedentarist metaphysics - to nomadic metaphysics
- mobility is now about freedom - movement belonging, communicty, etc. - decoupling these notions
- ideologies of product design - ideologies of consumption
tim cresswell - mobilizing place 2002 vs. Ien Ang, on not speaking chinese, 1984
how do objects and infrastructures authorize different meanings of mobility? (HSBC ad)
- Phyllis Pearsall’s location based service 1936 - 1935 - got lost in london using most recent map - led to obsessive documentation in london’s city streets
- catalogued 23,000 streets by working 18 hours a day 3,000 miles
- 1936 - published the result
- treated with suspicion,
- created her own company, still publishes a-z
“urban errands” a study of women in the USA
mobility counterparts and mobility providers
- taxis
- shoping centres
- drive through services
project: “sunset at capham” - four 17 year old boys - given nokio 7650 + payg credit - research conducted over 2 months - two individual interviews with each, three group interviews, weekly phone contact - daily SMS, MMS, contact - wealthy backgrounds - mobile - tended to not send MMS - would rather thake the pics to the pub and show friends
“in limbo” - mobility of homeless mothers - 18 month ethnographic study - many women from somalia - made homeless after pregnancy - cannot have permanent housing until secured “points” - extra points for each month living in shelter, having the baby, medical complications - very ligtle communication between women in the house - all have own mobile phones and access to internet - the mobiles were most often used to keep in touch with community - garden was the mobility access space
produce geotraphic social and familiarl stability - reduce the status of being in limbo technologies wich give residents insight into their individual case and control were more important demands of mobility and mobility phones differ.