Hi,
Please have a look at my paper that is linked below. It is a tiny snippet from my PhD thesis that I hope to defend before the end of this calendar year (the paper is from last Autumn). The title of my thesis is "Evolutionary dynamics of new media forms: the case of open mobile web". As it says, it is focused on the development of platform-specific media forms (so, 'media' and no so much 'communication'). It is not also so much focused on mobile use but on the production of those forms by the industry. It studies the industry power struggles around the mobile web standardisation - what should the ubiquitous and device-agnostic web of the future be like (hence, basically, has a political economy agenda). Among other 'sites' I studied the mobile web standardisation at the W3C and discovered some of the important power struggles that are relevant also when we think about bridging the 'digital divide' with the help of mobile devices as a new access platform to the web. The important struggle that emerges is that who gets the power to adapt, optimise or transcode content for the different access devices of the web, on what (whose) terms will it take place and how will the users have a say in that process. And that will especially hold in case of the users in the developing countries. However, I also suggest at the end of the article that as for these users the mobile is/will be their first and only access platform to the web there is a chance that when it comes to the further evolution of the mobile web and its media forms it will be them who will turn into the 'lead users' of this platform, driving its further evolution. I suggest a research agenda that we start looking at the global dynamics in this regard - where we have Western users for whom mobile is a complementary access platform and users from developing countries for whom it could emerge as the main access platform. It will be interesting how will these differences condition the further evolution of the web and its content forms, cross-media strategies, etc. As to Rich Ling's article. Well, it is a telling mapping of today's users and today's situation re the technology and social divides. But we shouldn't 'forget the future', still. According to several industry consultancies by 2012 the mobile will be dominant access platform to the web. We don't know now, of course, what will be impact of the recession to this development, but the trend is there. And, hence, the potential of mobile platform to bridge the existing divides is important. And, therefore, the ongoing work in this regard, among other places taking place in W3C is both valuable and should also be a critical research topic. Some of the numbers that Rich Ling brings at the end of his article are, however, confusing. It is not right to generalise and talk about 'Opera browsers'. Opera Mini is effectively also a server-based transcoder and enables the transfer of at least 10 times of less data while still download the same websites. And poorer users with less advanced phones tend to use exactly either Mini or similar solutions - operators' transcoders behind browsers. It is important to make that difference. To compare 'general users' with iPhone users and their data usage simply doesn't tell us much - we don't know what browsers did the 'general users' or Nokia N95 users (I mostly use Opera Mini and not S60 on my Nokia N95) use as compared to iPhone Safari users. Did the operators also have some general transcoders in place? Therefore, this part of the article would need some more precision. To overcome this problematic maybe we should start talking about pageviews instead and then still make the difference between mobile-optimised and desktop-optimised webpages (however, server-based adaptation of pages makes this solution again problematic...). Here is the link to my paper: http://www.eys.ee/~ibrus/Ibrus-StandardisingMobileWebForDevelopment.pdf With best wishes, Indrek Ibrus London School of Economics/Baltic Film and Media School --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mobile-society" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mobile-society?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
