Most mobiles…

Warner Brothers is releasing a re-make of the 2003 Japanese horror film “One Missed Call” (Chakushin ari) in early January.  I haven’t seen either version of the film, but I gather that the mobile occupies a central spot in the plot, allowing unfortunate folks to hear voicemail messages left by their future selves.   The messages are not good news.

On the missed call theme, the film draws from a form of the practice called Wangiri or “one and cut”. At the time of the 2003 film, Wangiri was frequently used to deliver random solicitations for pay-per-call telephone sex line services.  The use of missed calls to drive people to recorded messages (sexy or otherwise) is not so common in India, since it seems that relatively few people use voicemail. 

As for the phantasmal, there are scholarly assessments of the mobile handset as magic device or portal to the afterlife by Jim Katz (see chapter 2) Bart Barendregt, and Jane Francis Agbu, among others. Bart’s paper, The Ghost in the Phone and other Tales of Indonesian Modernity, was originally presented at a conference on Mobiles and Asian Modernities in 2005, and will appear in an upcoming special issue of the Information Society. 

By the way, my literature review on mobiles in the developing world will appears in the same issue; in the meantime, an updated/temporary/working version of the review is available here.

Apologies for the lengthy absence – it’s been an unusually busy stretch. 

My paper on “The Rules of Beeping” is now available as part of the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). 

I’ve had lots of fun this month speaking to the broader community about beeping and missed calls, and I’m grateful to many of you for your interest. A piece from Andrew Havens at Reuters kicked off this round of discussion, which has carried into German, Swiss, and Indonesian venues (at least), plus to the Scientific American Blog. 

I also had a chance to do a podcast interview with Kamla Bhatt on beeping/missed calls this week; part one of the interview is here.  I cover a lot of the same ground in the interview as in as the paper…in case some of you prefer just an occasional ‘um’ or ‘ahh’ mixed in with your communication theory.

It was a pleasure to compare notes with Andrew Heavens at Reuters about beeping and missed calls in Africa.  Andrew, based in Khartoum, has just completed an article: Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”  

I had not heard the Ethiopian term for the practice  – “Miskin” (Pitiful) — until now.  It’s perfect. Also good to hear  another datapoint on the proportion of calls on the network which are beeps/missed calls: 

“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”

I’m sure it varies from network to network, but this instance of 25% of the total dialed calls per day is in line with other estimates I’ve found.

The article mentions an upcoming paper in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.   It is not live yet, but tThe paper is a significantly revised version of my ICA paper from a couple of years ago.   I’ll keep the ICA paper on this site until the JCMC paper is available.

Some perspectives today from the Hindu Business Line on the needs of rural mobile phone users in India. The article covers a lot of ground; missed calls, sharing, livlihoods, and text-free user interfaces figure prominently.  I thought this quote was particularly interesting:

If you thought missed calls is a purely Indian phenomenon, think again. Says Sarup [from Nokia], “I too thought so but was amazed to see this phenomenon in Africa. There they call it ‘flashing’, and the basic message is ‘Call me back’.

Having spoken to users in both spots (India and Africa) about beeping/flashing/missed calling, I’ve been impressed by how people want to describe the practice as something unique to their region.  One of my interview participants started his explanation of beeping with: “you see, in Rwanda, we have a culture…”.  I think it has to do with how people learn to beep/flash/miss call.   They’re introduced to the practice by friends and family, not by websites or manuals.  Beeping is therefore perceived as a social practice, as a (re) creation of the people they know, rather than a property of the handset or even the network to which it connects.

Putting people first highlights a new piece of research, which makes me wish I read French. 

The French newspaper Le Monde reports on new research, published today, that shows how mobile phones are increasingly becoming objects of collective use.

The research, which involved six months of field observations and interviews, was commissioned by the French Association of Mobile Operators and managed by researchers of Gripic, a research group of the information sciences school Celsa at the University of Paris-IV-Sorbonne.

For monoglots like me, the post on putting people first has relatively lengthy translations of some of the findings, which include observations of family sharing patterns as well as beeping/missed calls.  It’s not exactly focused on the developing world, but the beeping and the sharing make it worth mentioning here.

The parody site mutiny.in has released ’secret details’ of Apple’s plans for the iPhone India Edition. Among them is MMS — in this case, Miss Call Management Service, which “allows you to make calls to friends without giving them a mill-second to pick up your call”. Might be useful…particularly if your friends are quick to answer their mobiles.

The spoof requires a kernel of truth; missed calls are indeed pervasive in India.

Kudos to Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth for arranging a great conference in Sydney last week.  Mobile Media 2007 welcomed attendees from around the world, and did a great job pushing new themes within the mobile research community.

There were more than a few papers dealing with mobiles in the developing world, although they were interspersed throughout the conference panels.  Thus, I missed a few good papers, including Thomas Apperley’s talk on mobile gaming inVenezuela, and most of the papers about SMS/MMS in China. 

I did however, get to see Jack Qiu’s presentation on the ‘Information Have-Less’ and their use of ‘Working-Class ICTs’, a topic he continues to explicate with a great mix of ethnographic/micro observations and macro-level summary data from the rapidly changing telecommunications environment in China. (earlier presentation here)

Genevieve Bell also touched on issues relevant to mobiles in the developing world, during her keynote. She mentioned the phenomenal success of handsets and services to support the needs of Muslim users (example), and mentioned beeping/miss call behavior. In general, Genevieve emphasized the importance of exploring the regulatory and infrastructural factors which both support and complicate the ways people use mobiles in different locations. Indeed, she questioned whether there is really a single device called a ‘mobile’, asking us to consider instead the whole range of mobile devices and functions, notably GPS.

I presented a small paper on differences in perspectives towards mobile phones vs. PCs, among small businesses in urban India. This is based on a Q sort I put together a few months ago, but only with the assistance of Gaana Nair, Gautam Prakash, and Arundathi Vishwanath, all students (past or current) at Christ College in Bangalore. Thanks again!

I’m coining a new term today. The condition of not knowing your own mobile number should be called SIMnesia. I saw it happen to a couple of world travelers yesterday, and was remained of how frequently I see variants of this scenario:

Say Joe, an American, flies to Sydney for a week or two. Being thrifty and not thrilled about roaming charges, Joe buys a prepay SIM card to make inexpensive local calls while he is visiting. But Joe has thrown-away the box with his temporary mobile number on it, and can’t (or can’t be bothered to) learn how to call up his number on the handset’s OS. So, when his new pal Jennifer in Sydney asks Joe for his mobile number, he hasn’t the foggiest idea. Joe suffers from SIMnesia.

If anyone has heard of another term for this unfortunate condition, please let me know.

Actually, yesterday I also saw how the effects of SIMnesia can be treated using a variant of missed call/beeping/flashing behavior:

While they are standing right next to each other, Jennifer says her number out loud to Joe, who dials Jennifer’s mobile, quickly hanging up to leave a missed call.  Now, not only does Jennifer have Joe’s number–and the chance to make an address book entry with it–but she can then tell Joe. 

This ‘number exchange’ is different than other common forms of beeping: call back beeps, pre-negotiated instrumental beeps, and relational beeps. In this case the message in the beep is the number itself…like the tiniest of vCards. I’m not sure whether I will place a footnote into the next version of my paper on beeping, or actually elevate this to a class of beeping onto itself.

When/if/how Joe commits his temporary number to memory is another question entirely.