Here’s an article titled "It’s all in your head" from the October 9, 2005 Toronto Star on the topic of communities, public space and personal portable mobile devices. It’s interesting in the way it deliberately swerves the conversation away from the 911 and ID Theft memes of security and privacy toward the social implications of such devices within the idioms of community, the construction (or “appropriation”) of public space.
The article is also cool for the way it turns to researchers and scholars in the academy for some insights, and not just the marketing folks at the regional carrier.
The article mentions a book by Michael Bull called Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience in which Bull “..interviewed more than 1,000 iPod users, mostly in North America and
Europe, and discovered that a good 25 per cent of them actually hated cellphones.”
Why do I blog this? Because i’m drawn to discussions as to the possibility of new kinds of social formations that obtain through the use of personal portable mobile devices, either through purposeful design of device usage scenarios, or by the way iPeople make use of the device through their own form of DIY usage hacking.
