FINAL VERSION AVAILABLE AT:Oppegaard, B. (2015). “Future of Media: A mobile mindset,” in Carie Lambert and Maribeth Schlobohm (eds), “Communication and Emerging Media: What’s Trending Now,” Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company.

Chapter 2Future of Media: A Mobile Mindset

Brett Oppegaard, PhD

Television viewers in the mid 1960s were mesmerized by the communication technologies presented in “Star Trek.” Each member of the crew, for example, carried around a personal wireless communicator that could be flipped open dramatically and they could reach anyone anywhere at anytime. Some crew members in these science-fiction scenarios also had high-tech earpieces and electronic notepads, and when the situation and people involved were really important, they talked to each other through projections on large video screens.

In retrospect, about 50 years later, these ideas proved predictive:. The Star Trek universe might have been envisioned as 300 years in the future, but, in this present version of reality, Captain Kirk would have traded in his flip phone a decade ago. Communications Officer Uhura could find many more fashionable Bluetooth headsets at a local mall. And now, all crew members could videoconference about whatever they want through free services, such as Skype.

Predicting future technologies can be fun, and sometimes theresults seem prescient, although all of the failures in thisfolly-filled field rarely get acknowledged. (Where is the closest transporter room?) But in the early days of the Space Age, Clarke (1962) plainly suggested what forecasters inherently understand, which is that the “real future is notlogically foreseeable” (p. 145). As a thought exercise, Clarke challenged anyone to imagine back a single lifetime, to the early 1900s, when contemporary technology would not

just be considered incredible—but “incomprehensible”—to the top scientific brains of that era (p. 146). They might, he argued, be able to figure out how a wagon could transform into an automobile but would have no mental framework to understand electron beams, transistors, and cathode-ray tubes. In the Computer Age, more and more of our technologies have become, as Clarke also remarked, advanced to the point of being indistinguishable from magic.

Some of us might have been able to imagine the transformation of a landline telephone into a personal communicator, such as a cellular telephone. But to mentally leap from that communicator to its super-powered abilities as a social-media broadcast station, capable to instantaneously spread independent news (including photographs and video) about whatever you want—at any moment, around the world, to the masses, at all times (with audiences for such information)—simply is not a theme for which science fiction prepared us well. The ways in which ubiquitous digital media have disrupted foundations of core public institutions—such as education and journalism including disturbances economic, social, and practical in nature—have been similarly shocking. From this grounded point of view, the future of human communication frankly is unfathomable.

What will communication be like in 50 years? Will we swap scents? Plug directly into each other’s minds? Or will the concepts of plugs and wires be merely metaphoric at that point, too restrictive and antiquated to be taken seriously as a solution to problems we cannot even imagine. Will everything happen wirelessly on a nanoscale? Will we have become post-physical?

Instead of devolving into pseudo-science fiction, this chapter’s scope is more conceptually based, reigned in, and limited to what Dourish and Bell (2011) describe as the proximate future, or the future “just around the corner” (p.23). With wearable computing, for example, we already can see emerging technologies that take advantage of scientific

advancements that allow sensors and transmitters to be miniaturized and embedded into environments, including woveninto our clothing. With that knowledge, we easily can picture a future landscape covered with the transparent sheen of microscopic networked sensory devices responding immediately to our whims, like the adaptable art aesthetics of Bill Gates’ mansion, as luxury machinery becomes more affordable to the masses.

Emerging technologies cause great excitement about their perceived potential, but they also illustrate the paradoxical relationships we continually develop with our gadgets, as we begin to realize their full individual and societal costs. Will we, for example, upload our child’s digital doodle onto our refrigerator screen? And will that feel as “real” and as fulfilling as the analog equivalent?

Conceptually, McLuhan (1962) contended that a new communication technology will alter the sense ratios of a person, and with such extensions (and ensuing contractions),the user will feel new powers but also—even if subconsciously—will become restricted in other ways. McLuhan(1997) used the example of the railroad as a technology thatenhanced the speed and scale of human communication while also working within traditional transportation paradigms. According to this example, whether via horse-drawn wagons orgiant steel bullets, cargo still was being delivered via wheeled containers on man-made pathways. Those wheels, by the way, were not a new idea, and neither was the steel, theengine, the doors, the seats, the levers, the handles, etc. However, the railroad, in terms of new sense ratios, was a marvel that evolved perceptions of humanity in ways that generated different kinds of work, play, and eventually cities. This evolution occurred throughout the country, regardless of a town’s climate or the local cultures and irrelevant of what the trains carried. Railroads simply madepeople see the world in new ways.

Mobile technologies have had similar sensory recalibration effects, whether the content transmitted through these

devices is a photo of a funny cat or the detailed plans to detonate a nuclear bomb.

Early in the Mobile Age, the powerful and portable machines magnified some sense ratios and diminished others. As a result, people saw an application economy (new jobs), application entertainment (new leisure), and another evolutionary efflux in the composition of our cities around hubs of network connectivity. As the economy responded, businesses started to mushroom around these mobile ideas. Some businesses—such as Apple and Google, Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp—grew in size under mobile-first philosophies. As a result, a mobile-powered societal surge began and should lead us to many surprising places in the long term. However, short term, mobile technologies embody futuristic ideals and can provide an orienting perspective into the haze of the proximate future. This chapter looks through that mobile lens at what aspects of our lives are—and will be—experiencing the most seismic shifts in the coming years because sense ratios are being recalibrated through new media and new mediums, including mobile technologies.

COMMUNICATION’S MOBILE LINEAGEOur communication technologies always have been mobile at their cores, in a sense, because some of the earliest advancements in this field—for example, in the creation of language—were inherently a part of us, and with us wherever we went, as is the smartphone today.

As Chapter 1 noted, the lack of portability of certain innovations, such as cave-wall paintings, for a long time limited their reach, including audience size. As the value of message mobility was reemphasized in other forms, such aspapyrus, the societal impulse to share knowledge grew beyondwhat people could tell each other face-to-face. As information of all sorts rose in perceived value—such as forbattle strategy, political leverage, economic advantage—the capitalistic drive to circulate this knowledge compelled faster speeds across farther distances as a competitive

advantage or, as Heidegger (2001) elaborated upon Marx (1973), the push to annihilate space and time.

Messages could only travel via people at first, and the speed of that delivery depended on how fast those people could walk or run. In fact, marathons commemorate such communicative feats of human speed and distance by paying tribute to the apocryphal 26 miles that Pheidippides ran during the Peloponnesian War to deliver the news to Athens of victory over Persia on the battlefield of Marathon (Grogan, 1981). Thousands of years later, at the start of the American Revolutionary War, people worked at the greatest possible speeds to share the news of the Battles ofLexington and Concord, with messengers traveling by horseback. Even with the pace and endurance of the horses, information still took 4 days to travel from Massachusetts to New York. While the Americans were transporting messages by horseback, the British, relying on ship transportation, could not relay news to London for almost 7 weeks (Albion, 1932).

Within a single lifetime, however, the railroad had increased in speed and the telegraph made instantaneous the spread of information.

Abraham Lincoln was among those who recognized quickly the many advantages and disadvantages of the new communication technologies and infrastructure. He used quick wire dispatches, for example, to outwit and outmaneuver his political and military antagonists (Kielbowicz, 1994). He also initiated a shadow effect of unprecedented media manipulation, creating the US’s first federal censorship guidelines (Kielbowicz). Lincoln was able to relay Civil Warmessages more easily and faster than George Washington relayed Revolutionary War messages. The increase in speed, reach, and censorship efforts (all spurred by the advent of the telegraph) demonstrates how emerging technologies tend to change us in ways much more complex than advertising slogans suggest. Mobile technologies today, for example, create increasingly complicated relationships between

people, their communication channels, and their audiences. They change those relationships, for both the better and theworse.

People have limited ways to opt out of this societal evolution. Just as horse-drawn-carriage makers, regardless of the quality of their carriages, eventually lost customersto automobile manufacturers, people who favor typewriters, the postal service, and landline telephones eventually will struggle with the ostracizing obsolescence of analog technologies as they compete with digital media technologiessuch as computers, email, and smartphones.

Therefore, instead of suggesting that we all will travel viaflying cars someday or that refrigerators will learn to restock themselves, this piece examines the dualities of ournewfound mobilities, embodied in the mobile technologies of today, but with an eye to the proximate future and the emerging technologies that are changing the communication environment of tomorrow.

THE SPREAD OF THE MOBILE MINDSETHow we control or release information significantly affects the composition of our societies, and as new communication technologies have emerged, they invariably have impacted, ifnot initiated, social change. These changes span from the effects of the alphabet to the printing press to the computer. Prototypical of such change, the telegraph dramatically altered the ways in which people communicated with each other: in terms of speed and especially in relation to distance (Lubrano, 2013). For the first time, information was freed from its human and time-space shacklesand let loose to the world.

An early pioneer in this field, Samuel Morse, who created anelectric telegraphic system that communicated through his proprietary code, chose an apropos Biblical quote as his first telegram: “What hath God wrought?” By the end of the 19th century, telegraphy had created a truly global communications network, intimately involved in the

intricacies of worldwide trade and war, colonialism, and theintensification of imperialism (Goggin, 2006). The advent ofthe telephone, however, quickly displaced the telegraph. Andwith the telephone, the communication media ecology welcomedvarious new platforms for a century—including radio, film, television, and the Internet—before mobile technologies emerged, brought these channels back together, and funneled them through a single glass-slab interface.

The worldwide diffusion of mobile technologies, in turn, hasbeen unprecedented in speed and scope (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu, & Sey, 2009). In addition, most people around the globe now have access to a mobile device of some kind, including more than 90 percent of US adults. With these mobile devices, the more limited functionalities of feature phones quickly are being replaced with the computer-like wizardry of smartphones, such as iPhones, iPads, and their Android equivalents.

Accessibility is high: the number of mobile subscriptions inthe world is nearly equal to the number of people: 6.9 to 7.1 billion (International Telecommunication Union, 2014). One billion smart devices were sold worldwide each year in the past three years (IDC, 2015). Meanwhile, mobile industrycontributions to the global gross domestic product rose to 3.6 percent in 2013, or $2.4 trillion (GSMA, 2014). As moneydrives economies and economies shape societies, the effects of the mobile mindset are everywhere. This mobile mindset raises an important philosophical question: Does the technology shape us or do we shape the technology?

EVOLVING PERSPECTIVES ON MOBILITYMobile technologies are not neutral; they are sense-ratio altering, which creates positive and negative implications, simultaneously. For example, Ling (2004) articulates a common perception of mobile devices by noting that they regularly “disrupt the public sphere” (p. 5). This dynamic can be considered positive, in a sense, when you mentally escape into an online article rather than interact with strangers on a subway. At the same time, this same situation

can be negative when your focus on the online article eliminates your possibilities for a fortuitous chance encounter. Which is more valuable? The answer depends on thequality of the encounter. The encounter could change your life in ways much more significant than reading a thousand articles. In regard to these questions, researchers have been investigating ways in which mobile devices disconnect users from their surrounding spaces, including users who have been documented as unaware of events happening within close proximity (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008).

Mobile devices also have been criticized for their negative influences on life. For example, they quicken the pace of life, yet you also can be more productive because of what mobile devices provide. They increase the loss of privacy, yet they allow you to share more efficiently and effectivelywith family and friends. They are accelerating the erosion of the public-to-private distinction, although mobile devices bring together both aspects of a person’s life (Katz& Aakhus, 2002). To characterize the rift created by mobile devices, May & Hearn (2005) paraphrase a section of Rheingold’s (2003) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution:

It’s a war between two possible versions of the future. One in which we’ll be smart, self-organizing citizens andconsumers, and another in which we’re passive participants in…a ”surveillance society.” (p. 199)

In actuality, we will be both citizens and consumers, participants and watchers.

Location-tracking hardware is included with every mobile device today, even if the user never consciously activates that hardware. The hardware makes the impacts of that aspectof the technology essentially unavoidable to consumers and everyone with whom they come in contact. Users’ concerns about privacy loss and the increase of surveillance and evensocial matters, such as etiquette, are important and worthy of extensive study.

User’s practices are the subject of research for many scholars, who investigate how users respond to the perpetualdevices. As Plant (2001) remarked,

Many people feel irritated and disconcerted by this new electronic soundtrack. All ringing phones are disruptive,even arresting.… Like a calling bird, a ringing phone demands a response. Public uses of the mobile spread thistension to all those within earshot. (p. 30)

But like the naughty act of a child, this annoying behavior—using mobile devices everywhere—gets a preponderance of attention. At the same time, other researchers work less conspicuously to try to understand how which mobile devices within an environment can improve lives.

Those who think mobile devices separate people from their surroundings and those who think mobile devices allow peopleto blend better into our heavily mediated and digitized physical spaces have created a parallel debate in mobile spatial theory. This debate is described by Burke (1966), who puts this rift into historical perspective by arguing that humankind is defined, in part, by being “separated fromhis natural condition by instruments of his own making” (p. 27). Once a person, no matter how primitive, departs from the needs defined by survival standards of sheer animality, a new “natural” emerges. From that perspective, over time, mobile devices will be less foreign and more integrated intoour spaces, like other ubiquitous technologies that now are accepted as a part of modern life, such as eyeglasses, books, and television screens.

Space also has been envisioned through various lenses of technology. For example, Barton and Barton (1993) note that a paper map not only presents a skewed sense of a physical space but also delivers ideological undertones. Whereas, a map may be considered by most people as a “neutral” form, not a colonizing endeavor or a type of civic boosting. Thus,a map that is created from an optimist’s view to draw visitors is a rhetorical exercise, designed to communicate

as well as omit certain properties of an area (Barton & Barton, p. 236).

The novelty of mobile devices, for now, allows the technology to maintain its hypermediacy, in which users seemaware, albeit unable to articulate, that something significant is happening to them and their surroundings whenthey use mobile devices. By using these devices, the user and medium merge and become a cyborg, and from this perspective, each informs, expands, and limits the other’s capacities (Hayles, 1999). For cyborgs, space, digital information, locative applications, and we, the users, are bound together (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2011). Although weare sensitive to these technological wonders, our sensitivities are fading quickly, just as they have with every other technology. To illustrate this point, can you recall how amazed you were the first time you encountered technology—eyeglasses, a telephone, an email, a Webpage—and discovered what it could enable you to do? Yet, today, thosetechnologies are part of every day. Like those wonders, mobile technologies are destined to meld inconspicuously into society while remixing our media ecologies into neoteric amalgamations.

As a convergence medium, mobile technologies and their related spatial experiences therefore can be pictured as a physical-digital merging dynamic set into motion, as if users can enter a hybrid realm that integrates physical, digital, and represented spaces. With this merge, the concept of place, from this paradigm, generates new spatial perceptions and new possibilities for social networks acrossall spaces. These spaces, however, do not completely overlap. Instead, they are superimposed and connected through social actions. These sense-altering perceptions, ineffect, create a doubled perception of space with a clear articulation between the physical and the informational, or what we traditionally classified as the real and the virtual. We simultaneously can see and experience our physical surroundings while in this realm but also

superimpose the representation of that space on the mobile device (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008).

Such transformation of physical location into digital information and vice versa illustrates the concept of “becoming,” based on Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011), or, maybe more grandly, the “Singularity,” as Kurzweil (2005) described it. From a Deleuzean perspective, the real is pure immanence, absorbingboth virtual and physical realities, whereas the virtual is always prepared to emerge and have physical existence. Thus,if people operate through technologies in space, space and technologies also operate on people (Gordon & de Souza e Silva, pp. 33–36).

As a distinguishing characteristic, mobile technologies directly respond to space and to place. In this tone, Foucault (1986) characterized the modern epoch as one of space. He reflected a developing understanding of our futureimmersion into a media ecosystem, when he added,

We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that ofa long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. (Foucault, p. 22)

We cannot escape the physical. People always will need physical interfaces to reach digital environments, but, increasingly, spaces that we encounter somehow are mediated.In turn, the physical space can be considered the interface for information while information, reciprocally, becomes an interface for the physical space (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). As an illustration, this physical space in the symbolism of the alternate-reality gaming crowds can serve as a game board for an experience happening underneath ordinary everyday activities.

Adding complexity to reality, location-aware interfaces (like those that mobile technologies routinely offer) increase rather than negate, replace, or diminish our options in space (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2011).

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM VS.SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISMRegardless of what technology we are discussing, scholars argue about the role of that technology in social change. They ask if technology causes social change or simply facilitates inert social movement. Computer Age developments, which you might have witnessed firsthand, for example, demonstrate the dramatic alterations of lifestyles that can come with new technological marvels.

Smith and Marx (1994) contended that computers not only affected the people using them, but they also affected people who interacted with the people using the computers—insupermarkets, post offices, banks, libraries, schools, airlines, and hospitals or engaged in military service—creating a sweeping effect. Smith and Marx documented similar impacts throughout time by other technologies, such as the printing press, depicted as driving the Reformation by putting The Bible into the hands of non-clergy and allowing them to create their own interpretations of the scripture.

Such deterministic thought can lead to the oppressive idea that technological advances are inevitable and that lead us down paths of inescapable necessity. In regard to advances, Postman (1992) writes that, any technology’s uses are largely determined by its structure, and its functions follow its forms. For example, a smartphone could be a paperweight (albeit an inefficient one) but not as a flotation device. It could tell time, like a watch, or record quick thoughts, like a notepad, but it also could take and instantaneously publish photographs to a worldwide audience. Some of those functions have more external value than others. Postman noted that the control that people fundamentally have with a technology is to choose whether to

admit it into society, for once it has taken its place, it typically does what it is designed to do. As an example, with the technology of writing, if people are trained to be literate and allowed to write, they will write about whatever they want to write about.

Regardless of what we write about, writing amplifies our cognitive abilities, similar to how the railroad functions regardless of what it carries. With writing technology, we can create, retain, and transmit precise and replicable messages across vast distances and expanses of time. We might not know Socrates from look or sound, but, primarily through the writings of Plato and Xenophon, we know—thousands of years later—exactly what his contemporaries wrote about him. Each view their teacher from a different perspective, but the writing technology does not care; it does what it was designed to do—preserve thoughts.

Another alternative perspective on technologies is that theyare socially constructed, and the people who use them ultimately hold the power to shape and to apply these technologies in ways that benefit the users. From the technological determinist perspective, the technology takes on a life of its own and draws humanity into it, hearkening to a homogenous myopia related to Mass Society Theory. From another perspective—that of the Social Construction of Technology—these conceptual innovations survive and thrive through broad communal embrace and heterogeneous adjustments, without the individual inventor providing a central explanation and inseparable from social, economic, and political contexts (Bijker, Hughes, Pinch, & Douglas, 2012).

Smart mobile devices, such as the BlackBerry and Palm Treo, for example, existed for many years and in many forms beforethe iPhone was released in 2007. However, once the iPhone established the mobile idea for society—as the direction we wanted—and the app markets provided expansive agency throughsoftware to manipulate the hardware, mobile technologies became the underlying foundations upon which society placed

its footing. From this perspective, the unit of analysis expanded from artifact to sociotechnical ensemble (Bijker, 1995).

In such a transformative moment in society, Postman (1992) warned that unexamined “technopolies” could arise and createelite groups with technical competence. Those groups likely would gain undeserved authority and prestige by those who have no such competence or concerns. Those technologies meanwhile work as they were designed: to alter the structureof our interests or those things about which we think. In that process, they alter the character of our symbols (what we think with) and the nature of our communities (the arenasin which thoughts develop).

As the technological churn increases with each advancement, organizations must seek to survive and thus constantly develop new ways to conduct business: to refine planning, production, logistics, marketing, and management. In response, individuals constantly need to adjust and respond (at work and home) to changing demands. Mobile technologies also continue to break down the walls between public and private, work and home, professional and leisure.

In response, the next section intends to identify and illustrate five key sociotechnical paradoxes that are arising along with the mobile mindset and that deserve increased scrutiny, thought, and further discussion.

CONNECTION BETWEEN EDUCATION ANDTHE MOBILE ECONOMYIn a moment of prescience, Papert (1993) observed that most people at that point in time were doing jobs that did not even exist when they were born, and that situation, with theincreasing churn of technologies developing constantly throughout society, would only accelerate even more dramatically in the future. He therefore concluded,

…the most important skill determining a person’s life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to assess new

situations, to deal with the unexpected. This will be increasingly true in the future: The competitive ability is the ability to learn. (p. vii)

That sentiment reflects dramatic changes ahead in both education and the workplace, but those two also are bound, like in a three-legged race, to work together. Students still predominately receive training inspired by the century-old Industrial Age model of standing people in rows and ringing bells to mold them into factory-style efficiencies—into widgeters who go to the correct place at the correct time, completing their assignments without a fuss and consistently being productive throughout a day.

One of my professors pondered what would happen as an alternative approach if everyone dispersed and reconnected on our mobile devices. So during class one evening, we went wherever we wanted. We conducted our class remotely, regardless of what was going on around us. One person went grocery shopping. Another person cared for her children while attending class. I went to a nearby lake and sat on a bench. It was a sunny day, and I felt inspired by the environment and engaged by the richness of the full sensory experience (the beautiful scenery, the wind, the smells, thefascinating discussion points, the focus on the ideas, instead of classroom discomforts).

The mobility felt like freedom. The conversations during theconference call had a heightened sense of energy and concentration. That class is one of the few I can recall in detail from more than 20 years of formal education. I wonderif the approach would lose its novelty if every class met that way. Would I pine for the passivity of days sitting in rows and waiting for the bell to ring? A better question might be this: What prepared me better for life after college—sitting in rows to listen to lectures or engaging ina conference call with colleagues in my field about an issueof pressing concern?

If we are not learning to work in factories (and few Americans are learning to do that), then what relevance does

the current education model have for the work of the future?This monumental question is shaking the foundations of the educational establishment. We have to wonder, when we no longer learn in rows and traditional classrooms, if we need traditional college anymore. We must also consider a dark matter of the economy in which our most valuable resources—our intelligent and innovative people, who will perform all of the jobs—are being squandered intellectually and developmentally through outdated indoctrination and control systems. If you think this is only a problem in education, consider who will be the leaders in your field in 30 years and what skills will they have to respond to changes in the organizational environment and sociotechnical ecology. Will we import our future innovators, like we do our clothes and plastic goods?

While education should not be completely aligned with the workplace, or else risk the rise of a fascist state, education also should not be completely detached from the occupational interests of a society. Most people need to work, but, from a humanist perspective, that work also should be as meaningful and fulfilling as possible. If untended, technology can thoroughly dehumanize and devalue us as individuals. If managed as a grand social enterprise, it also can be constructed for our broad benefits. Thus, depending alone on technology to define who we are (or, for example, how we train for our jobs or study) decreases our humanity.

Whether you come from a labor or a management perspective, compare the goals and objectives you (or your organization) had one decade ago with those of today. (Find documents thatoutline the perspective and compare then and now). Some of the abstract ideas—increase product, productivity, or quality—might be the same, but the details and processes probably are dramatically different. In one decade, mobile technologies have changed workflows, accountability, productivity, and measurements of success among other aspects of professional life.

For example, the position for a social media manager did notexist a decade ago but now is a common occupation, as a growing legion of marketers shape consumers’ impressions of brands through decentralized media channels. This position was developed with the support of education systems. Collegeprograms anticipated a coming trend and began to offer a fewclasses in social media, and the demand came from a workforce need, which came from the rapidly shifting media ecology that was trending toward mobile. The most nimble segments of the education system (many of which were small new-media programs) recognized this future need in the workforce, adopted a mobile mindset, and started to train students in best practices. Larger and less-flexible programs then recognized the need, and mobile sensibilities began to infiltrate other layers of the education system. The position of social media manager continues to evolve, while education and workforce systems influence each other toward solutions.

The underlying problem is that, before that one occupationalsituation settles, similar new workplace urgencies emerge, such as the wearable computing manager, and the education and workforce systems may not be mobile-minded enough to respond. Mobility implies responsiveness, flexibility, and adaptability, per the Papert projection (1993). Mobility requires that you always reflect on ways you can live better.

CHANGING PUBLIC EXPERIENCESTHROUGH MOBILE INTERFACESAmericans have connected through shared moments via media, such as the radio broadcast of the Hindenburg explosion, thenon-stop television coverage of the Twin Towers falling on September 11, 2001, and today’s instantaneous updates of social media buzzing headlines into your hands. While the 1960s ossified around the nationally televised coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK), mobile delivery systems have made mediated information more personalized andmore individualized, shattering such communal experiences into multiple channels.

We still gather around the news; however, mobile delivery systems allow us to tailor that activity to our whims, as wecome to know information in different ways through differentmedia. If JFK had been killed in today’s diverse and direct media ecosystem, some Americans would experience the loss through radio, some through television, some through Websites, and some through social media. Each medium would be piping information most accessibly through their mobile interfaces. No one would need to wait for the 5 o’clock newsbroadcast to begin. People also could respond immediately tothe tragedy, in glib as well as intimate ways, including “liking” related posts on Facebook or posting videos to YouTube to express personal responses.

This scenario illustrates the increasing mediation of society through mobile devices and our expanding interactionwith media, instead of directly with people, as a major component of how we process the perceptions of our realities. While few of this book’s readers likely were in New York in 2001, and even fewer near or in the World Trade Center when it was attacked, most of you probably have a detailed story of where you were when the attack happened and how you heard about it. The attack happened to you too, in a sense, because of your media exposure to the event (which may be one reason the country became so united in itslust for revenge).

As mobile devices become more pervasive and media becomes more ubiquitous, we live more of our lives through media frames, rather than through unmediated sensory data and, in turn, the more media will inform and enlighten but also control and manipulate us. Media literacy was important before mobile devices, but with most adults and many children “plugged in,” and more of an emphasis on being first than correct, the traditional filters are failing.

Mobile devices are simple to operate: put your fingertip on that icon on the screen and you immediately access today’s news. Mobile devices are like an appendage: always on and always with you. Mobile devices bring together the

newspaper, the nightly news, cable news, and the gossip of friends and family; serious information and listicles mingle; diverse viewpoints mix and the noise can be deafening. On the mobile screen, little differentiates a yearlong journalistic investigation by The New York Times and an off-the-cuff rant by a blogger. And, we may struggle in the future to understand that information does have a quality that needs to be assessed on many levels, not just convenience. Those who are trained to be media literate willhave distinct advantages over those who are not. What peopleinterpret from information and how it dictates their lives also is part of the growing complications of the societal equation.

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY’S EFFECT ON JOURNALISMWhen mass media had more control to circulate public information, people could criticize editors and reporters for their choices but those professionals typically operatedunder a code of ethics and were accountable to their audiences and publishers. When the business model of journalism began to dissolve—starting with the loss of paid classified ads to the Craigslist model of free postings—the freedoms of the Internet also loosened controls on public discourse and deteriorated incentives for funding objective journalism. Partisan journalism, content marketing, integrated marketing, and other methods rose in prominence because the Internet opened new media channels, including cable television but also corporate Websites as well as YouTube, Facebook, and other Internet content-distribution systems. Mobile devices also dramatically have changed how journalists report and publish. Journalism has experienced aconcentration on speed and quantity, commodifying the news-gathering process.

In the mid 2000s, just before the release of the iPhone, newspaper leaders realized that an opportunity opened for a FCC-less multimedia takeover of market television and radio news. Therefore, as what happened in my newsroom and in newsrooms across the US, reporters were given video cameras and audio recorders and told to make audio and video stories

in addition to their traditional research and writing. Theserecorded stories would build up the company’s Website. However, about the same time, radio and television stations also realized the opportunity and, without investing millions in equipment and staff, they could take over the local newspaper market with an online version of the news they already were producing. Video reporters suddenly were asked to post expanded versions of their scripts.

As everyone was trying to take over the news, social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter appeared. Quickly, Tweets, posts, and interactions with audience members becamepart of the journalist’s workflow. Then smartphones were released, and journalists could take photos and produce videos on their phones and upload those immediately, which provided even more options for the industry without questioning what was lost in the pursuit of those efficiencies.

Today, the mobile journalist is envisioned as the super-human content producer, equally as adept at producing a podcast as shooting a video and writing an investigative story. Whereas some of these multi-tooled talents have emerged, other journalists who had some other interests leftjournalism for public relations or marketing jobs, trading their ideals for a steady paycheck and seemingly less chaos.Yet, public relations and marketing also began to realize that the mass media outlets they had worked to infiltrate might be unnecessary in the distribution channel. As newspapers and radio and television stations could freely distribute information via the Web and particularly on mobile devices, so could the companies trying to tell their stories. For example, with content marketing, corporations can create news as they want without worrying about difficult follow-up questions or alternative viewpoints.

With mobile and digital media, audience members also have gained agency and can publish. Whereas journalists and theirworks were once easily identifiable, information received through mobile technologies today has few clear markers of

intent and potential conflicts of interest. Unpaid bloggers can create excellent journalism, and highly paid journalistsare shilling for side interests. When everybody can be a journalist, does anybody qualify? In the proximate future, particularly before more robust and transparent business models emerge, such informational and source complexity willincrease and confuse us even more about who and what we believe. Will journalism ever return to its pedestal and regain its trusted place in society? Has sophistry won, as persuasion and influence suppress the communal truth-seekingmission?

Mobile technologies also might counterbalance such a dystopian outlook by enriching journalistic discourse as mobile devices allow more voices to be heard through evidence-based arguments and to vet and critique work as it is published through audience review. Mobile has changed journalism and not always for the better. However, mobile technologies also have the potential to allow quality publicdiscourse in new ways that expand the definition of journalism.

TENSION BETWEEN PRIVACY AND PARTICIPATIONMobile technologies inherently are social, from their foundations as interpersonal communication devices to their most common social currencies today. Comparing technologies,landlines were relatively private technologies with which two people, usually in homes or offices, discreetly connected and talked, generally without anyone else listening. In contrast, mobile devices took these calls—and their senders and receivers—into the world, where anyone nearby, regardless of their interest in the conversation, could eavesdrop on personal details being shared at that moment from that preoccupied speaker. Mobile devices, as machinery, also tracked these discussions, recording who called, when they called, and how long the connection lasted, creating an analytic database of interaction profiles. Those who use mobile technologies in the future will continue to build this record of data about themselves,creating outlines of lives and patterns of predictability.

What happens to this data is an important part of predictingour future. Currently, companies who control and analyze this data know more about some of your habits than you do. Of these companies, Amazon.com states clearly that the company uses algorithms to decipher your buying habits and suggest items that you might want to purchase. Other companies are more discrete and therefore, at least in theory, are more dangerous. The more data that you share with companies—and they share this data for enormous sums ofmoney—the more your digital fingerprint becomes a code that companies seek to break so they can anticipate what you wantto buy and then can be readily available to provide those products and services. They may also seek to create demand by carefully crafting messages based on predictions they make about you.

Again, the more data you create, the less mysterious to advertisers you are. Alternatively, you can limit the data you share, staying out of social media and mobile tracking channels. However, you would pay a high price for that strategy. Mobile devices are extremely powerful social connectors, connecting friends and families around the worldto you and your personal news. In return, you can connect with them and know their activities. This connection is valuable.

A few decades ago, people paid exorbitant prices to talk fora few minutes via telephone to friends and relatives in far-off places. Today, those social ties can be text messaged, emailed, called, pinged, and videoconferenced for free—unless you decide that you do not want to participate in mobile analytics. For example, if people gather on Facebook,you cannot be connected with them without sharing personal information to log in. If people want to microcoordinate at a public event to find each other when everyone arrives, youmust consent to use your mobile device and possibly downloadan application on your mobile device or you cannot communicate with your friends.

People mindlessly make these tradeoffs every day, providing the most detailed information—such as where you are, who youare talking with, when you are talking, and even what you are talking about—to a nameless, faceless company to handle that data as the company wants. In the future, devices will come with even more sensors, and they will be increasingly embedded into your environments, creating data-gathering hubs and services that will be offered to you, usually at noadditional cost except at the expense of your privacy. As these data accumulators fade into the background, the bliss of sharing a photo seems a small price to pay. But is it? Wewill probably struggle to engage in data-sharing activities enough to allow participation but not to be needlessly exposed as a pattern-making being.

FUTURE PLACES AND SPACESPrivacy concerns aside, your mobile device may become like the battery that makes future sociotechnical environments run or the key that allows you to access all available treasures.

Whatever the metaphor, the services will involve costs, including some that might seem heavily significant, such as the mass production of e-waste, the erosion of privacy, and the lack of accessibility for some, which might further ostracize them into undesirable social classes. However, if you are one of the blessed, think about what you will be able to do:

become super brained, see the world in layers, change your physical surroundings, and create macro commands for life.

Let us consider how digital technology can provide us with these new experiences.

Become Super BrainedA search of the Internet is powerful today; however, consider if the databases and resources of all of the museums and libraries in the world became digitized and accessible to you via your mobile device? Access like this

might ruin the fun of all future trivia games, like Jeopardy. And imagine if your mobile device looked like eyeglasses and you could discreetly access this information directly into your inner ear.

See the World in LayersIf you began with the physical environment as your interface, you could use what you see and hear as functionalprompts to request more information. You could ask about a blooming flower you were seeing, a sound in the distance, orsomeone you were meeting. Your mobile device could recognizeanything through sight and sound per your focus or experience.

For example, inventors at Google who are working with GoogleGlass are working to develop an app and hardware for people who are blind or have low vision (Aguilar, 2013; D’Onfro, 2014; Duffy, 2013; ). The app will allow audio to describe the camera viewpoint from a simple command akin to “What am I seeing now?” If we expand that idea into layers and each user is able to go deeper into the layers of information about the surroundings until the user loses interest, then mobile alignment of these layers will be an informational advantage.

Change Your Physical SurroundingsWe may be able to soon use mobile technologies to influence and even change our perceptions of our surroundings. Consider how much personal impact you can have on your environment when you put in earphones and turn on the music stored on your mobile device. Now consider if you could influence your surroundings by controlling what you experience through vision: so you only could see the sandy beaches of Hawaii while you listen to a slow slack-key guitar track, all as you go through an underground tunnel onyour commute to work.

Mobile technologies will continue to increase the control that people have over their spaces, from full sensory replacement (maybe even smell someday) to targeted

augmentation. For example, if you are in London today, you can use an app that shows where every bomb during the Blitz in World War II was detonated. With the app, you can see icon bubbles floating over the location as you look through your camera at the landscape. Now imagine if these icons were animated representations of those bombs landing or if you could see the bombings from a different perspectives—from the ground, from the air, or from a distance—all while you commune with the sacred ground simultaneously in a physical way. That physical-digital juxtaposition increasingly will become important in design discussions.

Create Macro Commands for LifePerhaps you tend to order a high-priced drink from the neighborhood coffee shop about 2 hours after lunch on Fridays. Or perhaps your mobile device knows this after processing detailed analytical reports about your behavior, your financial activities, and your preferences. The location- and spatial-awareness features built into the device could be programmed to confirm that you are near the coffee shop, and the contextual awareness capabilities couldcheck the coffee shop’s hours and special discounts, particularly for linked customers, and then could provide a frictionless transaction of funds to order and pay for your drink so it was waiting when you arrived.

These tasks are all possible with today’s devices and may beavailable in some form already. So we can ask where mobile technologies will develop in the future. Technologies will continue to emerge and amaze us and also blind us to their costs until we already feel like we need the new developments for ease in our daily lives. You can anticipatethat something incredible—like the discovery of endless amounts of free energy or nano-transmitters that allow mental telepathy—will appear on the market and make today’s mobile technologies look as quaint as the telegraph does today. For now, however, we have these amazing little computers that we carry in our pockets and purses that allowus to communicate in new ways. And we still are learning what we can do with that unwieldy idea.

CONCLUSIONThe Computer Age transformation into the Mobile Age has opened our eyes to what dramatic impacts our technologies can have on society in a short amount of time. We can take advantage of what mobile technologies allow while not being limited by the constraints—part of how we adapt to a mobile mindset, in which we more deeply understand an increasingly complex media ecosystem.

This chapter exists to raise your awareness of mobile technologies and their place in the current ecosystem but also to recognize them as powerful precursors to the sociotechnical changes ahead, including more ubiquitous computing, more powerful mobile devices to interact with complex interactive environments, more technologies fading into the background, and an increase in the needs for mobilemedia literacy and its growing importance for us to navigatelife.

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