Constant Touch
Page 15
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 O2 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.
Chapter 28
Cellular war
In March 2003, the United States, in a coalition which included the United Kingdom, invaded Iraq on the pretext of Iraq’s failure to satisfy United Nations resolutions regarding the possession of weapons of mass destruction. The war was actively opposed by many countries, in particular France, Germany and Russia. For example, in February, France and Germany (with Belgium) had set opposition to the war above the obligations of NATO membership, by maintaining a veto on plans to defend Turkey if attacked by Iraq. France and Germany insisted that policing Iraq with United Nations weapon inspectors was preferable to war. France, Germany and Russia threatened to veto any new United Nations resolution authorising military action. The Europeans were swiftly demonised by the ‘hawks’ in George W. Bush’s administration.
One of the patterns that we have seen so far in Constant Touch is that international political relations powerfully shaped the development of the mobile phone, in particular through the negotiation and operation of cellular phone standards. The squabbles over who would win the contracts to build Iraqi mobile systems in the aftermath of war illustrate again this phenomenon. Mobile phones had been (effectively) banned under Saddam Hussein. In July 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority invited expressions of interest in three Iraqi mobile licences on offer, and laid down strict rules over what kinds of bid were allowed. One of these rules, which stated that no government could ‘directly or indirectly own more than 5 per cent of any single bidding company or single company in consortia’, seemed to many commentators designed to exclude companies based in continental Europe, in particular Orange and T-Mobile (in which the French and German governments held significant stakes, a legacy of the companies’ origins as spin-offs from national telecommunications authorities). The rule also seemed to exclude the neighbouring Arab companies, including MTC-Vodafone in Kuwait and Batelco (Bahrain) which had already rigged up a working emergency system around Basra and Baghdad respectively. (Nor were these newcomers. Batelco had a venerable history in mobile phones: a tiny Batelco cellular network may well have been operating as early as 1978, which would make it one of the first in the world.)
Even more controversial was the decision over whether to adopt GSM or one of its rivals as the second-generation standard for Iraq. Barely a week into the war, the Republican congressman for San Diego, Darrell Issa, denounced the very suggestion of deploying ‘a European-based wireless technology known as GSM (“Groupe Spécial Mobile” – this standard was developed by the French) for this new Iraqi cellphone system’. (He was wrong, of course. As we saw earlier, GSM was not developed by the French alone, although it was undoubtedly a European project.) Congressman Issa urged the choice of a rival standard, CDMA, which, as we have seen, was developed in San Diego County by a firm with intimate and long-standing links with the US defence industry, Qualcomm.
So the choice was between GSM, used by all neighbouring countries to Iraq, as well as being the standard on which most of the world’s cellphones operated, or CDMA, a product and symbol of American security interests. In August 2003, following an outcry from Arab companies, the 5 per cent rule was relaxed to allow a 10 per cent stake. This still excluded companies such as Batelco. However, GSM was chosen. In the event, the three licences were finally awarded in October 2003, after delay, obfuscation and allegations of corruption, to three Arab consortia: Egypt’s Orascom Telecom, Kuwait’s National Mobile Telecommunications and MTC (which had strong British links, via Vodafone and the British administration in southern Iraq). As part of the Orascom Telecom deal, the key infrastructure contract went to Motorola, the one company that could boast a happy combination of GSM expertise and American ownership.
Once the infrastructure was in place, Iraqi cellular phones were snapped up. By 2012, according to World Bank figures, 71 subscriptions were in place for every 100 people, which isn’t far short of the Middle East average. And the full range of mobile culture and uses developed. Without mobile phones the infamous 2004 images of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison would probably not have been taken, and certainly not as widely shared. Likewise, mobile phone shops in the Shia areas of Baghdad were selling camera phone footage of Saddam Hussein on the gallows within a day of his hanging on 30 December 2006.
In Afghanistan, whose conflict with the West has dragged on just as long as in Iraq, there are other mobile stories to tell. It’s a poorer country and the market was less tempting to cellphone companies. Nevertheless, mobile subscriptions by 2012 stood at about four in ten of the population, and four companies combined to offer mobile phone services across three quarters of the country. The fact that cellphones could be tracked or eavesdropped meant that these companies became the target of the Taliban. In February 2008, a Taliban statement demanded that the companies turned off the cellphone infrastructure from 5.00pm to 7.00am. ‘If they do not heed it’, ran the statement, ‘the Taliban will target their offices, suboffices and tower stations.’ The companies agreed. Interestingly the Taliban did not call for a total suspension – presumably the phones are just too useful. But some analysts saw a message in the Taliban’s partial blackout as well as a compromise. ‘Tactics like the cellphone offensive have allowed the Taliban to project their presence in far more insidious and sophisticated ways, using instruments of modernity they once shunned,’ notes Alissa J. Rubin in the New York Times. ‘The shutoff sends a daily reminder to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Afghans that the Taliban still hold substantial sway over their future.’
&nbs
p; Afghan workers inspect the burned remains of mobile phone equipment after an attack by Taliban militants, Kandahar, March 2008. It was the second such assault in two days, after the Taliban warned phone companies to shut down their towers or face attacks. (Press Association)
Chapter 29
The revolution will not be mobilised
As mobile phones have become widespread throughout much of the globe, so it is no surprise that they are used as a tool of communication for all purposes, including the organisation of political protest. We have already seen the case of the ousting of Joseph Estrada in the Philippines in 2000–01. But great care has to be taken in the analysis of such episodes, for two reasons. First, commentators in the West have been over-eager to attribute unwarranted, specific power to new technologies as tools of political protest. The novelty can distract attention from the continuing and probably more important roles of older methods of organisation. Second, unpleasant regimes have not been slow to learn lessons. Indeed, there are plenty of reasons to think that new information technologies offer new ways to repress protest and to bolster authoritarianism.