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)
You asked about my process, I almost always take a pic, write something about it, and then send it off. Once in a while, I can’t finish the post and I save it in my outbox, and maybe send it later (though when I do this, I often find that I don’t send it at all– all the “unsent” email in my outbox are moblog posts I never ended up sending). It’s definitely about the moment for me, or at least an “extended moment”. For some reason, if I take a pic one day and were to write about it and post it on another, it wouldn’t seem “true” to me — i figure if i’m going to do that, i should just write about it on my regular blog. I have kind of a weird hang-up about keeping true to the “moblog” aesthetic, or at least the one I’ve carved up for myself, to the point that if, for example, I start
a post on the way home but don’t finish it, rather than starting over on the computer (eg. sending the image and then going to MT on desktop to add the
text), I continue to type on the phone, and send it. I’m weird!
It does take a long time to write, especially as I’m not the fastest writer (pretty good speed actually typing, either on a keyboard or with my thumb on the phone keypad), and tend to fret too much over every word, and one of the reasons my moblog has “dropped off” considerably is that sometimes I just can’t be bothered, or I know that I don’t have enough time within which to write something quality, or I’m in a different zone (lately I’ve been interested in using
train ads to enhance my Japanese study, for example). And if I’m with my wife, like I was yesterday, then I find it very distracting, and I’m sure she doesn’t
enjoy it either, and so I usually don’t post (or wait till she runs off to the bathroom).
about taking pics and posting, i think actually I haven’t become “used to” the idea yet, in other words if I see something that interests me, there’s a delayed reaction before I say to myself (sometimes too late), “oh, that’d make a good moblog post”. I also find myself wanting to write something “from the road”, but I don’t because I think that folks expect to have moblog texts annotated by an image, and all that’s around me are passengers feet on a train.
at this point, I started to talk about blogging and images in a similar vein to what I wrote above.
Surely more thoughts will come after the conference.
I have a few thoughts about this from the POV of a blog/moblog reader and viewer.
Of course there is something of a “battle” between image and text in our society and media. The CNN example is a good example; it proves once again that people will embrace lower quality as long as there is a spark of “reality” or instant gratification. It follows pornography, MP3, supposedly unrehearsed and handheld shot “reality” shows, films shot on DV, etc. And crap quality moblogging photographs.
I’m naturally one of those people that gravitates towards text. For me the rise of the internet is mostly about text, reading/writing email and reading web pages. I used to read more books before the web, now I read more magazines, journal articles, blogs, all on the web. Though text is always just text – I guess with the bloggers there is a ‘lower quality vs. instant gratification’ trade off- the text is coming from a single person, delivered in small doses and is usually not edited. From a reader’s point of view, I’m not sure blogs are that much of a revolution, besides the fact that there are so many more journals to read. And if that is the key next step, a giant network of people commenting on everything, fine.
With this vast network it seems the quality of writing, the polish and shine of the text has actually improved. Sure you can find some typos and there are certainly some idiot bloggers, but the network reveals a vast number of intelligent people who have their own interests, slightly unique perspectives, etc. The subjects covered and the opinions about these subjects are what keeps me reading. The writing is better than most newspapers and magazines.
But about truth and text I have to disagree with you. Across the blogsphere the text is well-written, but there is something frigid about it. Maybe it comes from the interface of the blog or the culture around blogging, but there is something less honest about it than some of the pre-blog writers who did things by hand. I simply don’t read that many posts like the one you wrote about your depression. People are obviously sharing a part of their lives in the blogs, sharing their time to produce them, but it’s a careful part and a limited part. Between the polish of the design and the text it feels like people are putting on a face. A game face, a happy face, an I’m a clever person face.
Yet sometimes these same blogs put up snapshots (usually from digital cameras, now from phones) and the images feel more truthful than the text. Whatever the “truth” is, there is a stark contrast between text and images. Some of these well-educated people who have complete control over language and text are inexperienced photographers. Maybe it is a simple lack of visual literacy or maybe people are just too busy to edit photos (either while framing photographs or on the computer) in the same way they would edit their thoughts for a blog posting.
Moblogging with photos will become more popular. The quality and editing filters will increase. Bloggers will catch up and their images will become just as calculated as the text. But images produced for moblogs as opposed to mass media will always have one thing going for them: You can write about whatever subject you want to, link to whatever thing in the world interests you, but you can only take photographs standing in the middle of your life.
Kurt,
Have you been at the Moblogging conference? I haven’t seen you there. Anyway, if you have time, I would like to meet you. Send me an email, I check them every day.
I am leaving on July 9.
Best
Roger
Kurt – In some ways I equate the moblog phenomenon to the CB Radio boom of the late 70’s – early 80’s.
Kurt,
It was nice to finally meet you yesterday @ the 1IMC. I haven’t been back to Hawaii since I got here in Jan. of this year, so it was nice to talk to someone from the islands.
On MoBlogging, I just setup a MoBlog so I don’t have any ‘war stories’, but one thing I noticed is that taking photos and emailing them is easy. To write a message using your keitai and then send this to the MoBlog takes alot of time. Maybe I’m not used to typing on the keitai keypads or just not in the habbit of MoBlogging. Doing the writing portion on my work train commute makes sense, but it seems like you’re not capturing the ‘moment’ if you write about it later. Though, most of my blog is using this technique so .. I guess I’ll need to see how this works out by experience.
One thing I’ll definitely take from your experience is watching out for the bill.
Hope to catch you at the next Tokyo Bloggers Meetup!
Take care and Aloha!
chriskk
Hi Kurt, it’s a shame I didn’t get to meet you at the conference – hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk in person some time.
Judging from your post, our experience of what we are doing is quite different. One of the reasons I continue to moblog is that it feels like a very non-disruptive activity. I tried blogging for a while and always felt an uncomfortable pressure to say something ‘important’ or ‘meaningful’. Moblogging, on the other hand, feels much more playful – rather than spending a lot of time thinking about new posts, I see something, take a picture, send it, done. Very similar to sketching, both in content and in context.
If there can be any comparison between moblogs and CNN’s war-coverage-by-sattelite-phone, it is in the technological constraints of limited bandwith and low resolution. While these constraints don’t do much for the credibility of voice-overs, I enjoy making these tiny images because they seem to enhance the playfulness of moblogging. With my current phone, I could choose to capture and post larger images. But higher resolution would not only increase my phone bill, it would also change the way in which I take images. And it would change the way the images are viewed, putting more emphasis on single photographs. More pixels do not necessarily result in better images, so while I’m sure we’ll have 2 Megapixel cameras in phones very soon, I’m also sure that I’ll keep my moblog format as it is, at 160×120 pixels a pop.
I agree with the anti-social bit. However this is only the result of the inadequacy of the devices. Takes too long. I have done two mobile posts so far, and it’s a pain. Sorry, I cannot get any gratification out of torturing my hands or fingers trying to write something meaningful. On the other hand it is just as anti-social as someone writing email or talking on the phone while being with you somwhere. Sitting in front of a computer while being with family is also quite bad.
By the way, I think writing Japanese on a mobile is much more efficient somehow. Just a few characters and you can say something. Don’t know about the number of keystrokes though, may even be the same, who knows.
Maybe Carsten is doing it the right way, just posting pictures. Capturing and releasing to the blogosphere.
As for the conference (be honest, was it really a conference or just a glorified user group or enthusiasts meeting?), the best thing about the day was meeting and talking with Kurt and Gary afterwards, about the unsaid issues.
Many people accuse bloggers of too much groupthink. I found that the conference illustratd that in a way; everyone’s happy that everyone’s agreeing that everything is so great. Reaffirmation, amen.
Dirk
A number of us were waiting for someone, anyone, to disagree with the party line. Seriously. But no one did. Vigorous discussion and disagreement is worth a lot more consensus.
Really? Even in Japan? 😉 Mmmh, guess I should have been a bit more vocal then. I have interjected once or twice briefly, but didn’t feel any support. Too bad, but too late, I don’t want to criticise things now. But in a way I realise a point behind your comment, Gen:
There was a lot passion and enthusiasm, but we haven’t seen any discussion that really pushes the envelope, opens new horizons. In that respect the conference just presented the status quo, but did not open the new frontiers. As you say, a spark and a discussion could have led to the unplanned, the “plus alpha”.
Don’t get me wrong, I am saying it was or a failure or anything. On the contrary, it was a great first effort. Sometimes the magic occurs, sometimes it doesn’t.
Dirk
I agree with Dirk to some extent, but I also think that there was some descent. Molly was the most inspiring to me because she did break away and get upset that people weren’t challenging enough new ideas.
I myself am a huge skeptic of moblogging as it was discussed at the conference. I think images a great, and I love taking photos, but if there is a conference about it, I want to make it more than that. Although I am proud of Mfop, I am a little embarrassed to talk about it in such a situation, because it almost seems to simplistic.
To be honest, I was just looking at vudeja.com’s moblog gallery and I really felt that “moblogging” as we know it is more suited to Gallery than MT or Blogger. People can tweak MT to look like a gallery, but aren’t the purposes different?
What I’m not skeptical about though, is the fact that people enjoy it. I’m glad to hear that Carsten does his the way he does to keep it fun… why does everything have to be serious?
Gen, as for waiting for someone to challenge, I have been thinking a lot about the whole conference, and I was wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to do it more like an Opra show… where there is a host who introduces people and what they do, (greatly shortening the “look at my project” portion) and asking some pre-planned, well thought out questions to elicit some informative responses, and of course challenge new ideas. It can then be opened to audience as questions arise. I think this would get a lot more of a dialog going than just a few questions and answers after a one-way presentation. If one person is talking, I am polite and let him finish. If two people are having a converstation, I am more likely to butt in.
A lot of great comments and discussion, folks. It deserves a new post to sift and process the divergent viewpoints and perhaps crystallize my own, but frankly I’m a bit petered out by all the ruminating I’ve done, and so some cursory and not well-thought-out comments from me will be posted here.
Wayne, I think you said a number of points that are important. I suppose there is something to be said for the “naivete” of snapshots (from camera phones, digicams, whatever) that escapes that “frigidness” you talked about, I hadn’t really looked at it that way. In any event, I wasn’t really saying that one or the other was more truthful….just questioning this assumption that visual accompaniment (or by extension, GPS tagging, metadata, user rating, all the
stuff talked up at the conference) equals a more “truthful” experience. I suppose I should be rejoicing right now as these naive bloggers or mobloggers or whomever are, in their vernacular way, capturing a truth which just a few months from now they’ll be incapable of, after they’ve had a chance to “filter” their snaps.
One thing your comment alluded to, and it came up in a conversation I had at the conference, is a decline in reading. I too do a lot less reading these days, or should I say, offline reading. And I notice that with the online reading I do, I seldom have the patience to read complete posts or articles (I think it’s safe to say that if I was a reader of my blog rather than the writer of it, I wouldn’t read many of the posts on this here blog). It’s an over-simplification, but this seems to me just a continuing MTV-ization of our cultural landscape. This has it’s positive aspects, to be sure, a de-mystifying of processes (blogs make it easy for anyone to publish to the web, moblogs will eventually make it easy for anyone to post pictures or messages from their mobiles), and a de-fetishization of the art object, and the whittling away of received notions of what is a good photo and what is not, what is a “proper” subject and what is not, who is part of the “canon” and who is not, etc.
That said, perhaps it’s just all that post-mod reading I did many moons ago but
I can’t shake this conviction that hitching ourselves to this idea that images imply a bigger truth, or a more complete truth, is going to take us down a foolish path. In some ways, I liken it to Adam Greenfield’s closing talk at the Conference, entitled “Whatever Happened to Serendipity,” in which he worries
aloud if this new-fangled vision of a moblogged and tagged city, with everything
laid out for one, with no room for accidents and the flailing about of self-discovery, is really a world we want to live in. I think in this headlong rush to embrace moblogging, it seems that photos have been defacto accepted as the medium of choice, and I have to wonder/question why that is.
Chris, you mentioned about how moblogging could be just like blogging if one were to edit/add text to posts at a later time. As I mentioned in the part of the post wherein I was replying to Kevin, I noted that for me I feel I have to finish the post in one go, or else I’m not true to some sort of moblogging
standard I’ve set for myself. If I start to later substantially edit or add to my moblog posts later, I feel that then I’ve crossed over into blogging, and for me to do one or the other, they have to be different, with distinct practices.
Otherwise, why bother, especially as we can all agree that typing on the keypad is no picnic (though I must say I seem to be less bothered by it than some). To me, this is part of the challenge, knowing I have a limited amount of type within which to write, and limited typing ability. It doesn’t make it any more or less pure than the next person, there is no right way, just this is the way I do it.
Carsten, likewise a shame we didn’t get a chance to meet, especially as I was sitting right behind you some of the time! Yes, I think we can agree our approaches are quite different. I too feel a pressure when blogging to be “meaningful” or “important,” but I like this, I feel it pushes me not to just throw up anything, to take care with what I publish. Again, this is not to say I
think this way is better, just that it’s true for me, it’s the way I want to approach things. Perhaps this is my problem, that I have yet to accept that the nature of moblogging, because of the limitations of the tools and its immediacy, is not like blogging. That I need to “let go.”
At any rate, I would be willing to bet that you are (or will be soon) in the minority of mobloggers who would remain with their sub-megapixel camera phones and 160 x 120 pixel format, but I have to say, more power to you!
I like your point about the “standard” of not going in later to edit it. And the limitation of the tiny keypad; and the limitation of how many photos you can upload without racking up a huge bill; it forces you to think in moblog haikus. In any new medium (silent film comes to mind), the limitations often inspire bring about the most interesting uses of the medium (telling a story through images vs. spoken words).
About reading, you are right that reading online is different. Certainly there are more blogs and bite size bits of text to consume that speak to your point of MTV-ization. But I’d like to think of online reading in a positive light. There are several publications that I read that feature long articles that I never read the print versions of before they published online. And I think the wider range of sources makes up for ADD-size articles.
Kurt,
Firstly,great discussion. As Gen mentioned, it would have been interesting to have discussed some of these issues at the conference.
One of the things that we discussed after the conference was the frankly AWFUL quality of a lot of moblog pictures. I like Mie’s site, and look at Stuart’s and Carsten’s occasionally, but let’s be honest about this – most cellphone moblog pictures are fuzzy, often dark and out of focus. This is NOT a criticism of the users, more the tools available. Perhaps I look at Mie’s site because it is done on a mobile – the novelty factor.
Secondly, totally agree with Kevin about the way the conference was organized, especially the “round table discussion”. Again, this is not meant to be a criticism of specific people, but people (Hirata-san, Totsuka-san) bringing a presnetation along to the “discussion” meant that there was no time for discussion. I felt that the panel Joi chaired, in particular, was a great opportunity wasted.
A wise man once said: “It’s the photographer that takes the photograph, not the camera.”
Image quality is not the issue. Good artists work with what’s avalable and produce very good results. That’s how I consider Carsten “Shuwesich”‘s site. In fact, I quite like the quality of the pictures. It’s appropriate for the purpose.
But that’s a different discussion really.
However I agree with the lack of adequate moderation at the event though.
Dirk
A great thread, that sums up a lot of the issues that seemed to come up in discussion after the conference.
Moblogging for me, especially after struggling to write comments on posts to the 24 event, should be a playful instant event.
Despite being a fan of blogging, I really think the whole process of taking a photo should take as little time, and have as little extra explanation as possible.
It’s always been about capturing a moment and sharing it. Moblogging should make it faster, and easier to share, not force it into the blogging template.
(I’ve only just got back from my week in Japan, so apologies for my lateness as I surf round the various conference notes)
Still catching up on my reading after our two weeks in England…
Your talk about “being true to the moblog aesthetic” finally clued me in to what bothers me about this topic. For me weblogs and moblogs are techologies, tools used to create art, or what have you. When a tool or a medium dictates the artform, well, that’s just too much for constraint for me.
Only by breaking form can one differentiate one’s work from everyone else’s. Every new movement in art, music, dance, poetry, etc. springs forth from someone breaking the rules.
So whether your a traditionalist or in the avante garde, never feel guilty for doing it your way.
Well, just to be clear, I wrote that I was talking about being true to a “moblog aesthetic” that “I’ve carved out for myself”. I don’t believe in rules for the reasons you mention M. Or rather, rules imposed from outside, from others, or techology per se. I do impose my own rules because I think I need that, something to bump up against to challenge me, to keep “the game” interesting so to speak. And anyway, I think technology does impose rules or constraints, it’d be foolish to think otherwise. Doesn’t mean one has to let them “dictate” the game, though.