Distraction Culture: Challenges to our mobile future

November 2005

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Marko Ahtisaari, design director of Nokia, has published a very good piece on the social issues surrounding mobile usage.

I loved this as an attention grabber....."How will we explain to our children that before, when you wanted to call someone, you needed to stand against a wall?"

And this as insight...."The last, and often overlooked, feature of the mobile industry is that it was based on a shift from a familiar collective object - the family phone - to a personal object, the mobile phone. The idea of a personal phone simply did not exist in the popular consciousness 20 years ago."

Given the premise of "Distraction", I was especially interested by his thoughts on "always on", an issue that I've been talking about for some time now as social not technological.

"Sometimess Off vs. Always On

Time is the ultimate scarce resource in the information age. It is the subject of endless pop song wish lists ranging from turnin’ it back to makin’ it (or dis moment) last forever. The desire to stop time has always been with us and the conveyor belt lyrics of today have a deep ancestry. Witness the recently deceased Pakistani master singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan:

Throw out the clocks, My lover comes home, Let there be revelry. My lover comes home, Let there be revelry.

In this excerpt from a characteristically moving qawwali "Mera Pia Ghar Aaya" (“My Lover Comes Home”) Nusrat interprets the same theme. As is often the case in sufi qawwali the object of love remains ambiguous between the divine and the human. Either way, we’d like the clocks thrown out.

The same could be said of the ubiquitous mobile devices that connect us. In Finland the everyday word for mobile phone is kännykkä meaning “extension-of-the-hand.” “Because we carry our always-on cellular prostheses,” Derrick de Kerckhove notes, “it is the world itself that has become always on.” These technologies have become so embedded they are invisible. Almost. These technologies still interrupt us. They make us in principle always available. In the rush to connect we have not designed what it means to disconnect, to tune out.

The challenge: How do we design to be sometimes off in a world that is itself always on?

As a side comment, WH Auden in Funeral Blues (made more famous by Four Weddings and a Funeral) says this

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Distraction Culture

The social price and potential of new technology

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November 2005

Challenges to our mobile future

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