Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Mobile Effect

2005; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/135485650501100204

1748-7382

Drew Hemment,

Multimedia Communication and Technology

In considering the mobile phone I shall here return to a text by Shuhei Hosokawa on an earlier form of mobile media, 'The Walkman Effect'.1 This text, published just a few years after Sony's introduction of the Walkman in 1980, is less about the Walkman as technological artifact than about the emergence of a cultural object at a specific historical moment, with the event of the Walkman or Walkman as event and with the kind of spatial and urban strategies it makes possible. In March 2005 Sony Ericsson unveiled the Walkman phone, but my interest is likewise not in the evolution of the mobile as media player or multifunction device.2 Rather, I shall consider Hosokawa's insights into the relationship between the Walkman and the embodiment and context of Walkman users, and how these can help us to account for the way that the mobile phone operates simultaneously as a node within networks and the point of intersection between the virtual space of telecommunications and physical or embodied space. Like Hosokawa, I am interested less in the object in itself, than in the object 'under use'. I shall approach this by drawing upon a consideration of the practice of artists and technologists exploring social and creative applications of mobile technology, as well as upon certain representations of the mobile phone user within popular culture.