[-empyre-] Mobile Media

[Alan Drury <ADrury@dmu.ac.uk>]

I'm resending my post in plain text. My apologies for sending it initially
in the wrong format.

'In response to Luis's question, surely the point is the perception of the
user in the public space. I recall a person on a train in the early days
holding six of us strangers agog over a crucial business deal he was doing.
The end of the call was ambiguous, so he was asked how it had ended. 'That's
private,' he blustered. 'Not now it isn't,' we replied. (I'm pretty sure
everyone had this experience.) This is analogous to the cameraman in war
time who, because he is looking at things through a lens. thinks he can't
get shot.

 

Users vary in the sophistication of using what was an originally private
means of communication in a public sphere, and people listening in now have
far more sophisticated filters. However, we still find we've locked in when
particularly interesting information about peoples' sex lives is being
stated or implied. However, this is no different from Virginia Woolf
observing couples on buses and wondering 'Are they, do they and if so,
what?'

 

Each use of private communication in a public space is a negotiation between
privacy and exhibitionism for the user and voyeurism and disinterest for the
rest. It always has been. Would you read a sexually explicit love letter on
the tube? It takes time to realise how the parameters operate within new
forms, but the basic tensions remain the same, as recent smutty adventures
in cyberspace show.

 

Protocols are defined by money and sex in this as in any other sphere.

 

Alan Drury.'