Program Title: Opening Mobiles, Community Activation and the One Wireless Web
Description: It was once said that the Sony Walkman, not love, would tear us apart. Contrary to these claims about mobile privatization, whereby individuating technologies are said to produce alienated populations running around in mobile media cocoons, and for some quite unexpectedly, the diffusion of advanced mobile devices and applications offers new opportunities to build and activate communities, invoking a radical reconstruction of media, art production, intellectual property, and public space. Ubiquitous, open, mobile, and accessible internetworking technologies, heralded by portable wi-fi devices such as the Nokia N95 or Apple's iPhone, will enable us to continue the legacy of our tethered social media cloud - media sharing, wikis, tagging, twemes - in a radically different space than we're used to (or one that we've simply forgotten about somewhat): public space. This is contested terrain, with a complex political economy, but the potential for a ubiquitous mobile web is now too alluring to ignore. This talk will navigate the mobile web space with one eye on media history and political economy, and another eye on the accompanying VJ screen, to assess how the speaker's messages are being scrambled while this all unfolds.

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Featured Speakers/Guests: Jean Hébert is a PhD student in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, studying the cultural use of mobile technologies. He is also the current Program Manager at Mobile Muse. He blogs at clicknoise.net.

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