Changing the Rules for Mobile
The world is comprised of networks: social networks, fiber-optic networks, wireless networks, and many other kinds of networks. People do not live in isolation and they do not interact with technology in isolation. Nowhere is this more visible than when we think of mobile technologies. What’s the point of having a phone if it’s not connected to the network? More importantly, why bother having a phone if you aren’t a part of a social world?
As mediators, mobile phones connect people across distance. They allow people to talk, text, and share. Yet, all too often, there are barriers that get in the way of people connecting to people. People using different handsets can’t do things together because of operating system or application-level failure to inter-operate. Developers can’t innovate easily because there are no standards. Carriers introduce another barrier, both at the structural and economic level. Friends on different carriers can’t do things together because their carriers won’t them. More commonly, people resist doing what they want to do because it’s either unaffordable or they don’t know how much it will end up costing them.
Many of us take the affordances of the Internet for granted (although, with Net Neutrality being compromised, maybe we shouldn’t…). What made the Internet so powerful is that barriers to participation were relatively low. As ugly a HTML is, that simple standard allowed anyone to make a webpage that could be accessed by anyone, regardless of machine. This paved the way for unbelievable web development efforts, allowing people to focus primarily on their site (although compatibility issues still exist). Pressure to make free websites forced people to develop new business models and the fact that so much was free meant that discussions of a “digital divide” focused on getting people baseline access so that they could do unbelievable numbers of things for free. Companies quickly figured out that it was viable to make basic web communication and information capabilities free in return for ads.
Around the world, more and more people are going mobile. The desire is there. And yet, due to all sorts of barriers, innovation lags behind. Change needs to happen and it needs to happen at multiple levels:
- Handset standards need to be developed and adopted so that applications can be easily built and all of the energy that goes into web development can be channeled towards innovating with the mobile in mind. No one wants to write code for 100 different operating systems.
- New economic models need to be developed so that mobile interaction can flourish.
- Carriers need to allow interactions to occur that cross different carriers.
- Alternatively, mobile innovation needs to bypass carriers by building devices that take advantage of other mechanisms to connect to the network.
- Citizens need to rise up in favor of Net Neutrality and Municipal Wireless so that their rights are not taken away.
I am worried about the state of mobile. Efforts by handsets and carriers to play power games, hoard resources, and lobby against anything that challenges their outdated business models have heavily curtailed innovation and curbed consumer participation. It doesn’t have to be like this.
What excites me about Blyk is that it’s an effort to change the rules. What happens when a key population curtailed by economic resources (a.k.a. youth) are given access in return for advertising? Given its networked model, what happens when entire friend groups start sharing the same service? It’s a critical experiment, one that will teach us a lot about the future of mobile.
1 comment November 3rd, 2007