I forgot my phone at home when going to work yesterday afternoon. In over a year of cellphone ownership, this was the first time I’ve done that. And you know what, as much as I hate to admit it, I felt terribly naked. That phone has become, aside from a tool with which I can instantaneously speak to the world (ie. “moblogging”), my combination worry-bead, rabbits foot, and security blanket. I’ve long since taken to absent-mindedly opening it up to check for new messages, in the same way that before I would have looked at my watch to check the time, even if I had checked it a minute before. One just needs sometimes some thing with which to ease the self-conscious idle waiting one does when commuting.
When I was coming home, I felt an unease at not being able to send my customary, always the same “I’m coming home. I love you and Kaika” message to my wife. Naoko expressed the same unease later when we talked about it, that without this ritualized piece of communication, something just seemed amiss, not quite right.
It’s quite funny that this would happen on the eve of the First International Moblogging Conference to be held later today in Tokyo. In advance of the conference, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about moblogging, and cellphones, and the effect it has had on my life. With that in mind, I’m going to jot down some random thoughts on moblogging here. This will be written out very quickly as it’s late and I need to go to bed.
Although my moblogging has picked up a bit this week, no doubt because otherwise it would be embarrassing to show up at the conference not having moblogged in 2 weeks, in reality I’m less enthused about it than when I first started doing it. Part of this is just my natural tendency to get all excited about some new toy or functionality, use the hell out of it for the first couple or weeks or so, and then burn out. I’ve burned out on the thrill of having a camera phone, and to some extent I’ve burned out on instantaneously posting pictures and thoughts to the web, eg. moblogging.
But burn-out isn’t the only reason. In fact, if my usual behavioral patterns hold true for moblogging, my enthusiam will ebb and flow naturally. Some other considerations are at play, all of them plebianly practical:
Expense — While sending email with one’s cellphone is very cheap, adding an image or two to that email isn’t necessarily, and the costs start to add up. Cellphone charges in Japan are based on packet-size, or packet-transfer. I knew what I was in for, but getting that first bill was still a bit of a reality-check. (Part of the problem was that I was also emailing myself all my pics and movies I was taking with the phone, which I’ve since stopped, as I now have a cable with which to transfer them cost-free to my desktop.) Throw in GPS, or “movie mail,” and you can start to imagine how costly it can be for someone with a family and other responsibilities/priorities.
Anti-social — Moblogging is for the most part solitary, and it takes time to moblog, time that needs to be carved out of the time one might be spent with others, with friends, loved ones. I feel I can really only moblog when I’m alone, and those times when I’ve done it in the presence of others I found extremely unsatisfying. If I’m moblogging in the presence of my wife, that’s time I’m not spending talking with her. If I moblog when I’m with Kaika, that’s time I’m not talking to him, playing with him, getting him to know his father.
Another thought….
One of the things that has bothered me, well before I ever began to actually moblog, was this implication that somehow moblogging meant posting a picture from a cellphone, and maybe text. The first moblog I ever saw, Joi Ito’s, featured entries with a photo and a title, and that was all. Nothing wrong with it, it was (still is!) compelling. And I admit that even when I first moblogged, back in January, using wapblogger, I felt I was missing something.
But there is something that bothers me about this primacy of the image, and I think it relates to concepts of truth and authenticity that I like to question from time to time. There seems to be this idea, not just among mobloggers but among society in general, that if a thought or statement or report isn’t accompanied by some visual representation, it is somehow less true or valid.
Take the embedded reporters in Iraq and the coverage from the major TV networks. More often than not, the images that were beamed back from Iraq to accompany the reporters’ stories were artifacted, digitized, highly abstract visual accompaniments. They were, for all intents and purposes, worthless in terms of communicating information, of news, or even propaganda. Yet they were shown night after night. Why? Because they symbolized a kind of truth, a visual statement that said “we’re in Iraq right now covering this war.” (Let’s leave aside for now the issue of what these embedded reporters were actually reporting on, eg. what the Pentagon wanted them to). Moblogging with photos, on a much lower scale and with different motivations and impulses at play, tends to play into this idea that image is king.
You know, Kevin, the developer of Moblogging for Other People (MFOP), and now MFOP2, the free program than enables me and many others to post to our blogs via our phone, doesn’t own a cellphone himself. It’s one of those great storylines of moblogging that’s almost too good to be true. But then I was remembering a comment Kevin once made to an entry here, where he talking about how he sometimes made sketches while on the train. The other night, ruminating about moblogging on the train as I’m wont to do, it occurred to me that in a way, I’m also a sketch artist, or that, in moblogging, I’d rather be sketch artist than a photographer. These are thoughts I would like to develop further.
Speaking of Kevin, earlier this week he asked me about my process when moblogging. Perhaps others will find this of interest. (click the link below to see my reply to him)
Continue reading “Moblogging thoughts”
