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MOBILITY

Jim McGuigan

Ultimately, the development of communication technologies is not as interesting as their use and how they actually operate in relation to ways of life. To make sense of the sociality of television, in the first instance but also of broader significance, Raymond Williams formulated the notion of mobile privatisation in his book, Television - Technology and Cultural Change, published in 1974. For him, this referred to a relatively new patterning of everyday life associated with urban-industrial society in general as much as the specific use of communication technologies. First, Williams noted 'two apparently paradoxical yet deeply connected tendencies of modern urban industrial living: on the one hand mobility, on the other hand the more apparently self-sufficient family home'. Developments in transport, especially building of the railways and mass migration in steam ships, had increased the mobility of people and peoples. Yet, at the same time the atomisation of modern societies had concentrated life outside paid work in the small family home. There had emerged, 'an at once mobile and home-centred way of living: a form of mobile privatisation'. Broadcasting fitted perfectly into this arrangement, not only with the radio and television replacing the hearth as the site of gathering together in the home but also in giving access to events occurring at a distance.

The concept of mobile privatisation captures the contradictory role of television as a characteristic feature of modern life. Television facilitates a much expanded albeit imaginary mobility through the vast array of representations available to the ordinary viewer. Here, a distinction might be drawn between physical mobility - facilitated by modern transport - and the virtual mobility that is facilitated by telegraphy and broadcasting from the late-nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. Domesticity becomes the focus of expanded consumerism, labour-saving devices and the like, and indeed broadcasting's typical mode of address to the listener and viewer in the domestic setting with all that this entails. To some extent, broadcasting would come to actually schedule activities in the home: day-time programmes addressed to 'the housewife', children's programming when the kids get home from school, 'the toddler's truce', 'family viewing', adult viewing after 'the watershed' when children should be in bed. And, with the advent of satellite communications from the 1960s it became possible, from the comfort of the home, to see events actually unfolding simultaneously across the other side of the world.

Returning to the concept of mobile privatisation in 1983, several years after formulating it, Williams remarked in Towards 2000, 'It is an ugly phrase for an unprecedented condition'. It was not just that people in urban-industrial societies were living in small family units (the nuclear family replacing the extended family) but that many were comparatively isolated and private individuals while 'at the same time there is a quite unprecedented mobility of such restricted privacies'. Williams notes that in his novel Second Generation, published in the 1960s, he had commented upon the sociality of motor car traffic:

'Looked at from right outside, the traffic flows and their regularities are clearly a social order of a determined kind, yet what is experienced inside them - in the conditioned atmosphere and internal music of the windowed shell - is movement, choice of direction, the pursuit of self-determined private purposes. All the other shells are moving in comparable ways but for their own different private ends. They are not so much other people, in any full sense, but other units which signal and are signalled to, so that private mobilities can proceed safely and relatively unhindered. And if all this is seen from outside as in deep ways determined, or in some sweeping glance as dehumanised, that is not at all how it feels like inside the shell, with people you want to be with, going where you want to go' (from Towards 2000).

So, mobile privatisation is not a social phenomenon confined to broadcasting in general and television in particular. It also includes driving a motor car either by yourself or with a few significant others as passengers, separate from yet coordinated, in some remote sense, with others doing the same thing in their little, shell-like worlds. For Williams, these phenomena - watching television, driving a car - are synecdoche for a larger whole, 'a now dominant level of social relations'. He links this larger whole to the market system: 'The international market in every kind of commodity receives its deep assent from this system of mobile-privatised social relations'. The shell, to return to our given examples, might be a house or a car, sites of private consumption and mobility.

It is not difficult to conjure up other examples appearing at a later date than Williams's preliminary ruminations on mobile privatisation: desk-top computing on-line, portable telephonic and music-playing devices, being the most obvious ones. An additional point to make, of course, is to do with screening, certainly in the convergence of computing and television, whereby everything is seen, literally, through a screen, mediated and packaged for consumption, sometimes quite active consumption.

Mobility is now such a hot topic that a new school of Sociology has even been announced in its name by a professor at the University of Lancaster. During the 1990s the mobile phone became the coolest 'icon' of the age. In the 2000s its position has looked vulnerable to usurpation by the ipod/mp3 player. The most likely victor, however, is a hybrid of the two: the all-purpose mobile communication device.

The history of the mobile phone is an exemplary one with regard to technological innovation and turnover, changing patterns of sociality and consumer seduction. Transition from first generation (1G) to second generation (2G) mobile phones - the shift from besuited business users with their large and expensive bricks on display to mass-popular use, particularly as a leisure medium for the young - was dramatic to say the least. Suddenly everyone seemed to have one and was using it incessantly. The transition to third generation (3G) devices (in effect, on-line access to multiple services) has been much more stuttering, with an endlessly awaited and ever delayed 'tipping point' about to be reached.

Fortunes were made from the mass-marketisation of 2G, which eventually meant that phones themselves could be literally given away by the telecoms companies in order to sign up more and more customers to contracts. However, with such rapid success the market became saturated. The business dynamic, then, required the introduction of replacement devices and services at much greater cost to consumers (WAP, etc.). In the late 1990s at the height of the dot.coms boom, several countries, such as Britain and Germany, sold 3G franchises to the telecoms companies at astronomical figures in the billions whether you count it in dollars, euros or pounds. However, very soon consumer reluctance to move on put revenue and future profits at risk. This can only be explained by the remarkably swift and embedded sociality that was fostered by actual 2G use. People were apparently satisfied with their 2G phones and were not much attracted by the extravagant promises of 3G.

Ethnographic research conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s goes some way to explaining why this was so. A great deal of attention is lavished in the trade press upon the practice of early adopters, those readily seduced by advertising claims and most enthusiastic about tooling up with whatever the market has to offer. However, these are not necessarily the most significant users. There are discernible patterns of mass use that are much more significant and, indeed, consequential for the take-up of new communication technologies.

By the mid 1990s, mobile phones had become a striking feature of youth culture, seen as desirable objects in themselves and essential tools for the conduct of everyday social life. In fact, the typical compact design of mobile phones is especially amenable, not accidentally so, to the young with their tiny buttons and quick-finger facilities, including text-messaging, the enormous success of which was never anticipated by the telecoms companies. For the young, however, it was cheap, easy and, equally important, mysterious to the grown-ups. Older people with failing eyesight and slower sensory-motor skills find it harder to use mobiles.

The mobile may at one time have been a luxury but, for some users, however, it became a necessity. For keeping in touch with a circle of friends, arranging meetings and simply being in society, the mobile was seen widely as a must-have tool by the young, children and, increasingly, older people as well. This was accentuated by the fad of picture-messaging a few years ago.

Research also shows that the mobile phone facilitated the routine conduct of work and domestic management for older groups. For example, working mothers found the mobile invaluable when arranging childcare and keeping tabs on the kids. Mundane use of this kind became ubiquitous. The value of more expensive 3G mobile communications was not so obvious to such users.

At the same time, significant developments were occurring in mobile music listening. The Sony Walkman was the pioneering device of the late 1970s and 1980s. It went through a typical process of diffusion, beginning with the young and eventually capturing the attention of older generations as well. It was designed and marketed deliberately in order to do so. This was a miniaturised cassette tape recorder that played back but did not record. Thus, it took a device both of production and consumption and turned into one solely of consumption. Cassettes had to be otherwise recorded or bought already recorded. Notionally, the earplugs only allowed the listener to hear, though others might be rather too well aware of a crackly noise nearby. The Walkman epitomised mobile privatisation in the 1980s. The individual could be cocooned in his or her own private audio-space separate from others in public space. It was objected to on similar grounds to the way the mobile was objected to later. There were health panics and complaints about the breakdown of communication brought about, paradoxically, by a communication device.

The Apple ipod and kindred mp3 devices slot neatly into the space carved out by the Sony Walkman. As market leader in mobile devices for listening to downloaded music from the Internet, the ipod sets the tone. Apple is one of the 'coolest' of business corporations, combining innovation, profitability and a rebellious style. Apple users have been encouraged to see themselves as 'outlaws', somehow distancing themselves from corporate capitalism whilst simultaneously contributing to the coffers of the same. 'Cool' is actually the dominant tone of capitalism today. Corporations have incorporated counter-cultural traditions and deployed signs of 'resistance' in order to market their wares.

This is the era of cool capitalism. The original 'spirit of capitalism', often associated with puritanical Protestantism, emphasised deferred gratification and hard work. The 'new spirit of capitalism' is much more hedonistic and, indeed, 'cool'. Immediate gratification is sought and sold in the sphere of consumption. Consumers are, in effect, seduced by the delights of high-tech and 'cool' commodities, promising to satisfy their every desire, especially if they are 'different' and vaguely rebellious in tone. Great stress is placed on individual autonomy. The individual perpetually on the move, accompanied by a personal soundtrack and in constant touch, is the ideal figure of such a culture.

In February 2006, the 3GSM World Congress was held in Barcelona. This was an industry event, not something to trouble the minds of the ordinary punter. The key problem of the congress, however, was to find ways of encouraging consumers to do more with their mobile communication devices. Executives at the conference will have been supplied with plenty of market research to tell them what consumers could reasonably be encouraged to want. It was still proving easy to sell new ring tones to consumers in large numbers but not much else. Picture-messaging had been a bit of a disaster, partly because of incompatibility between different systems and, also, because it was only a fad anyway. The reluctant customer was the industry's biggest problem. New services - such as e.mail, music downloads, gaming and internet access - were simply not selling in sufficient volume from the business point of view despite all the hype in the trade press and on the specialist pages of the news press.

By this time, everyone knew what 'the killer application' - in the unfortunate term used by the industry in spite of occasional health scares over the effects of radiation - was, at least in broad terms: the hybrid device, most notably, combining telephony with music. Still, it was thought, but probably with little conviction, that more people could be persuaded to watch television on their mobile phones.

The story has become very familiar over a number of years now. It is the story of successive false starts and re-launches, recurrent declarations that have all been heard before. If it were only about technology, all this would be incomprehensible, but, it is not; it is about sociality, cultural preference and economic contradictions as well.

Raymond Williams was critical of simplistic cause-effect determinism, such as you find in specialist and demotic forms of technological determinism. Instead, he favoured the notion of 'determination', which he said is the setting of limits within which there are variable possibilities. Clearly, there are limits to the determinacy of newer communication technologies but within these limits there are alternatives. The industrial and commercial interests that promote constant change in product manufacture and marketing so as to seduce consumers and enhance profitability are not all powerful. Their schemes do not necessarily come to the fruition they so ardently seek and ordinary people may make all sorts of uses of the gadgets that were hardly imagined possible.