‘Mobile Internet’s “Creative Destruction”:

Implications for Global Mobile Policy’

Gerard Goggin, Tim Dwyer, Fiona Martin, Jonathon Hutchinson

paper for Global Media Policy Working Group IAMCR, Dublin, 2013

• mobile Internet imbricated in current economic crisis & reshaping of geo-political & communication orders

• not just mobiles + Internet, mobile Internet spans a complex assembly of emergent, hybrid media forms –– from smartphones, tablets, and the apps phenomena, through new televisual ecologies and locative media, to pervasive computers, connected cars & smart cities

Life’s better shared

• these developments are not well captured in Internet governance & policy discussions, nor in traditional global media policy frameworks (whether telcos, broadcasting, or media diversity)

• key challenge we face as citizens, policy-makers, and researchers, is develop, democratize, and open-up Internet governance and policy to discussion, deliberation, and debate by the very large publics now interested in it

• e.g. intense world-wide interest among users in intellectual property and copyright laws is notable here, because new forms of sharing are core to contemporary mobile and social media – yet such counter-publics and their user cultures, visions, and values are not well recognized in media policy

Moving Media

• three-year Australian Research Council-funded project Moving Media: Mobile Internet and New Policy Modes

• mapping responses of policy institutions and actors to the range of forms of mobile Internet and the new kinds of governance these are eliciting

mobile Internetmobile Internet involves convergence between the broadband Internet and other media technology along at least three major axes:

1. with mobile telephony and telecommunications; 2. digital television broadcasting; 3. new media ecologies evolving around locative,

spatial/mapping, and sensing technologies4. communicative mobilities + other kinds of mobilities (e.g.

transportation; automobility)

(1)

figure 1: axes of mobile Internet convergence

case studies

• news on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile Internet platforms;

• television and mobile Internet technologies;• health apps;• locative media;• mobile Internet in cars.

approach

• analysis of policy documents, observation/engagement with policy fora, interviews

• Twitter-based analysis of discourses and networks associated with new areas of mobile Internet, to gain data to map policy dynamics

• seek to understand specificities of mobile Internet forms, uses & infrastructures in particular settings – case studies will draw on research across a range of countries including Australia, Hong Kong, China, South Korea, UK, US, Mexico, South Africa and India

• use Global Media Policy database to document, categorize, analyze and visualize information – and make it available to other researchers

mapping health apps• we have archived and mapped #mHealth, #healthapps,

#mobilehealth• next image represents a conversation of 7963 tweets which is

increasing by approx. 10 000 tweets per week• experimental, developing methodology• preliminary finding is that there are1463 communities in this

data set with four lead influencers who are influencing a top 20 other participants/influencers

credit: Jonathon Hutchinson, Fiona Martin

new media forms & actors from mobile Internet

• some areas such as locative media or health apps draw on antecedent technologies, & histories & uses; also social imaginaries such as sharing

• each of the major players in these new areas is unlikely to interpellated by traditional national or global media policy

• stances of players varies a great deal, e.g. Google has been quite engaged in media policy fora (esp. under banner of Internet freedom), others such as Facebook and Apple shown some reluctance

mapping the media forms of mobile Internet

• a necessary starting point is mapping the particular forms of mobile Internet – in the case of locative media, for instance, we know relatively little about how its affordances and uses, connect to its social imaginaries, and political and cultural economies;

• then we can begin to map the ways in which the actors in locative media (& other areas) attach to global media policy

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mildlydiverting/5065226/

Twitter v. Foursquare

• Twitter not at first thought of as a locative media platform: ‘Twitter developed geotagging capabilities to encourage a richer user experience and more contextually relevant, finely granulated data. One of the key means by which Twitter both encourages location disclosure and accesses this information is via their subscribers’ use of third party applications interacting with the Twitter interface’. (Wilken & Goggin, 2013)

• ‘check-in’ application Foursquare has taken different route from Twitter –keeping its API accessible, to allow partners such as Instagram to provide location-based data

actors in mobile Internet are increasingly important part of emergent policy ecology:‘what used to be multilateral arrangements amongst state actors, has now turned into a highly complex landscape, where states and intergovernmental institutions share the stage with private corporations, standard setting entities, civil society organizations, epistemic and technical communities’ (Raboy and Padovani, 2010: 15).

for many actors in mobile Internet – such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and apps developers -- the starting point of global media policy is obverse to state actors: instead, private corporations, start-ups, commercial and social entrepreneurs, software developers, scientists, public health advocates, and NGOs seek to create a new stage, or theatre of immanent media, in which states and intergovernment and supranational organization media policy lies in the wing, if acknowledged at all.

locative media concerns• new information ecologies with pervasive of locative media• raising new issues about privacy, use, disclosure of user location

information, ethics of advertising & marketing• Internet media entities such as Google and weibo dominate

contemporary media landscapes but are only partially covered by existing national privacy protections & may be slow/unwilling to respond to requests to delete data or to address potential breaches of codes or laws

• media companies are rolling out locative media technologies commercially on a mass scale without any debate about what rights citizens and users might have to use these infrastructures or what their informational ‘commons’ aspects might be – what other kinds of ‘sharing’ might & should be supported by locative media

health apps• growth of the mhealth apps industry responds to crisis in

healthcare funding in industrialised countries and looks to shift costs

• re-orientation of health policy to everyday delivery of healthcare via media services and products and communications networks involves has seen a convergence of health, information, comms & media

• policy concerns include digital citizenship (information literacy, data protection) and media content regulation (advertising, content classification, speech laws)

• governments have been reluctant to regulate the developing industry on an innovation and economic policy basis, leaving largely US based apps store providers as defacto corporate regulators

Fiona Martin, ‘A Smarter Smartphone?’, IAMCR paper, 2013

conclusion

• Mobile Internet is an important site of contemporary media, social, and political transformations — in the vanguard of how our present crises are to be worked through

• we need to understand what mobile Internet actually is, does, and means as media – as this is by no means straightforward; & to map and theorize the discourses, actors, and modes by which different forms of mobile Internet are beginning to appear in global media policy

• early signs that mobile Internet appears to profoundly expand the domains and modes of policy-making, the actors involved, and the processes of public engagement and deliberation.