Subject: [NEXTEL-1] "International mobile phone culture"

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 17:59:04 -0500

http://cnniw.yellowbrix.com/pages/cnniw/Story.nsp?story_id=34286859&ID=cnniw&scategory=Business+and+Finance&

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Mobile world: Big talk: What can 'international mobile phone culture' mean? Is it all about macs, moustaches and handheld bricks? Steven Poole went to a Motorola exhibition to find out

Source: The Guardian

Publication date: 2002-11-11

The design guru from Motorola has a metal briefcase in his hand.
It's not actually chained to his wrist, but it might as well be.
It's full of top-secret concept models for future mobile devices.
The man's name is Tim Parsey, and he talks of "lovely object value"
while also emphasising his corporation's humility and social
conscience. I am allowed to touch and coo over a few of his babies -
shiny and curvy like today's phones, only more so. I feel I need one
now.

We are at Mobile, a new exhibition of "international mobile phone
culture" in London's Brick Lane. It consists entirely of Motorola
products, so it is just as well that the company has a pioneering
history. In the beginning was the military-green, portable two-way
radio known as the Handie-Talkie, of which 100,000 were produced for
the US army by the end of the second world war. The civilian version
of the 1950s is a black Bakelite monster that looks like half a
payphone ripped out of a booth, receiver cradle intact.

Further exhibits include the first car radios and the radio
transponder from the Apollo 15 lunar rover, but the basic handset
silhouette remains the same up until the Dynatac "brick" phone of
the late 1980s, much beloved of those who enjoyed lampooning City
traders. From then on the mobiles get smaller and cuter, right up to
the current model with the rotating flip, which is more
aesthetically intriguing than functionally useful, and already
betrays a kind of techno-nostalgia with its old-fashioned, reversed-
out LED display.

Advertising materials on the walls demonstrate changing attitudes
to technology. A second world war poster pictures a helmeted GI
talking into his radio, with the legend "Handie-Talkie signals the
attack!" By the 1950s a businessman is pictured carrying a radio
phone that is, incredibly, "smaller than a briefcase". An early
1960s radio pager is illustrated with a picture of a medical nun,
smirking mysteriously to herself as she decants some foul brew into
a beaker.

For the Pulsar II mobile telephone of the 1970s, men with dodgy
porn-star moustaches lounge around looking purposeful in cars or on
building sites. Later on, another porn man gazes in wonder at a
Dynatac glowing on some kind of dripping industrial vice. Happy
foreign children begin holding their pagers up to the camera in the
early 1990s, and the first StarTac is advertised to Japanese
customers against the background of a golf course. There is a
blissful throwback in a 1994 advert for a slimline pen-shaped pager,
as a suited businessman slips it into his inside jacket pocket with
the worrying advice, "Dress for Access". This is the first hint that
the mobile was going to become a fashion trinket, or, as the man
from Motorola says, "a toolkit to express yourself".

The Dynatacs of the 1980s gloried in a loathsome brown-and-beige
colour scheme, but in 1989 the successor model, the Microtac (with
the first flip-open mouthpiece) turned to black, with words printed
in the kind of curvy "futuristic" lettering that looks so Fisher-
Price these days. Small pager devices of the mid-1990s were
constructed out of brightly coloured translucent plastic, in homage
to Apple's iMac computer. Phones themselves, however, remained
various shades of grey and black until around 2000, when the silver
revolution happened. Why everything became silver a few years ago -
not just mobile phones but also cars, hi-fi systems, TVs and laptop
computers - is an underexplained event in cultural history. Why did
silver supplant the short-lived fad for "champagne" colouring of
electronic goods, and will the understated black ever make a
comeback?

The idea that your choice of mobile phone is a fashion statement
is one of those self- fulfilling capitalist memes: the idea behind
it, obviously, is to persuade people to change their phone more
often than they need to. The exhibition glances only briefly at the
industry in Japan, where customising of mobiles really is a whole
subculture of its own. Huge, multicoloured bunches of tassles and
tags hooked on to the mobiles of Japanese girls transform a
utilitarian device into an ostentatious display of social
connectedness.

The exhibition's major shortfall is inevitable: the ways in which
mobile phones really have affected our lives - the asynchronic
virtual world of voicemail and text messaging, and the casualisation
of social arrangements - are not phenomena that can be visually
demonstrated. Mobile phones only mean anything when they are
switched on and being used.

Dotted around the exhibition space are translucent display boards
on which are written inspiring stories of how life is improving in
developing countries: apparently mobile phones are helping to solve
the problem of nonexistent communications infrastructure in
Afghanistan or Bangladesh. A discreet little touch-screen computer
invites visitors to play a texting game, where falling words must be
"translated" into text before they hit the ground. Your
correspondent only managed a pathetic fifth on the high-score table,
and naturally blames the rules. The requirement that every word must
be stuffed into a vowel-free three-letter space is already obsolete,
with the ubiquity of predictive text, which allows the rapid input
of normally spelled words. "Txt" as a language was historically tied
to a short period of technological inadequacy, and its time is
already past.

But what does the future hold? Projected on to one wall of the
exhibition space is a baffling document entitled The Device Formerly
Known as the Cell Phone: The Search for the Next Species. It is a
sort of genetic tree diagram, packed with made-up quotes from youth:
"I'm the fastest at finding the best MP3s," says one, "and I share
them immediately with my friends." We are not, presumably, meant to
infer that Motorola encourages music piracy.

Also festooned over the tree are made- up words describing the
uses to which customers would like to put their mobile
communications devices: they must be "multable", "tvable",
"wholeable", "boomable" and "softable". I take my chunky silver
handset out of my pocket and gaze at it sadly: there's no way I can
mult or soft or boom this thing. Ah well. Maybe next year.

Mobile is at the Glass Gallery, Old Truman Brewery, London E1
(020-7770 6016), until November 23.

Publication date: 2002-11-11

© 2002, YellowBrix, Inc.

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