Why Mobile Media Are So Different

Around 1990 many friends in traditional media companies discovered the Internet and dove in. It wasn’t easy to swim given all of the new technologies and unfathomed user interface issues. Now I’m seeing my traditional media friends (the web being traditional now too) eyeing the deep end of the mobile ocean and I’m thinking, “Take a really big breath!”  I believe the potential of mobile media is the biggest creative challenge our media-obsessed species has ever faced.

What is so hard?  In one word: “context”.  Context is about ‘where I’m at’ in terms of identity (e.g. personality, preferences), place (location, bystanders, politics, time), community (friends, family, colleagues, services), and purpose (work, learning, recreation, entertainment, shopping, commuting).  The vitality and value of mobile experience are ruled by such contexts.  When theatre made successive transitions to film, radio and TV nobody had to worry about context because these media are about vacations from reality rather than immersions in it.  

Another way to think about context is that old media have never been able to ‘touch down’ – without contexts they can only offer identical experiences to everyone.  It’s like they are autistic – unable to discern or respond to the social motivations of the people around them.  One could also claim that the last century of media innovation has increasingly cocooned us from our immediate community.  First, the invention of film took us off the streets in groups of a hundred or more and put us in dark places where we don’t talk to one another while the media plays.  Then TV took us off the streets into living rooms in smaller, isolated family groups where the media continue to stifle interaction.  And most recently the Internet isolates us further into bedrooms and offices where we typically become solitary media consumers. While the Internet has begun pretending to be “social”, the reality is that people are fully alone when this happens.  I’m not promoting a conspiracy theory about old media being antisocial; my point is that mobile media, as they spill out into our streets, can serve the very valuable purpose of reconnecting people and revitalizing communities in tangible and authentic ways.  It is our first digital medium to have this intrinsically human potential.

One context-driven opportunity is to break free from the tyranny of the linear narrative.  For centuries the technical constraints of our mass media have seduced us into a monolithic production paradigm.  We need to design open-ended, context-embedded urban narratives that can run parallel to our daily lives. When we solve this and other context-related experience design challenges, mobile media will begin to weave an unprecedented richness, complexity and connectedness through the strands of our existence. 

That’s the mission of MobileMUSE.ca.  Content is still king, but in our emerging mobile media world it will be dethroned by context.