Unwired
: Now at an ETech session on “untethering the social network.”
: Howard Rheingold, Dr. SmartMobs, says the users take over technology and do with it what they please, not what the company providing it pleases.
: Mimi Ito on her research on kids’ use of mobile phones in Japan: Most communication occurs inside an intimate group of two to five friends… As social software, it’s different from the Internet because it’s more personal…. Some say it’s now rude to make a phone call without first sending a text message to make sure it’s ok; it’s the knock on the door….
There’s much use of photo mail. “One common genre is the new-haircut shot.”
: Joi is asking how to make mobile devices more hackable to get more social development. The devices aren’t hack-friendly. The telecom networks certainly aren’t hack-friendly. But open-source, open-standard, hack-creativity as we’ve seen on the Internet will explode development in mobile.
Joi is talking about hacking the power law, too. See the Technorati discussion below; the blogs with five links, in aggregate, have more links than the blogs with hundreds of links. Similarly, in the mobile social sphere, the links and networks and connections are all fewer.
So it’s not about mocking mass media. It’s about expanding communications.
: Howard uses the opportunity to share a “cheap joke” of a scene he witnessed here as one person greeted another with the question: “Are you my friend?! Yes?! No?!”
: Kevin Marks asks what it will mean when videogame boxes are connected to the Internet. Danah said there is a backchannel to the gameplay. Even here… “We’re playing at the same time that we’re engaging.” Orkut is play, too. “You can’t take it seriously.” People game it because they don’t take it seriously.
: A questioner and Mimi Ito see a tension in blogs and in mobile interaction between intimate, personal tone and larger-scale addressing an audience.
: Someone said this was unreadable. Admitted. This one was hard to distill. Or perhaps to digest. Or perhaps I’m just stupid.
