emerging mobile internets: new communication politics, policy & citizenship
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Emerging Mobile Internets:
New Communication Politics, Policy & Citizenship
Gerard Goggin, Fiona Martin & Jonathon Hutchinson (Sydney)@Mobileinternetz
http://mobileinternetresearch.net/
emergence of mobile tech policy & law
• with flexibility of the cell phone and the emergence of mobile media, the line between regulating for content versus carriage is blurring, with profound consequences for law, policy, and regulation
• alongside the ITU and WTO, cell phone issues have become policy concerns for other international bodies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and organizations involved in Internet governance
• the rise of cell phones has coincided with a new landscape of policy expectations, framework, and actors.
See: Goggin, Gerard. ‘Mobile Communication Law and Regulation.’ In International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, ed. Ang Peng Hwa and Robin Mansell. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
mobile policy actors
• while state-based law and policy have remained important, independent telecommunications regulatory agencies are key players
• because of the lack of alignment still among broadcast, telecommunications, and Internet law and policy, many issues in mobile data services are also dealt with via self- and co-regulatory bodies.
democratic deficit in mobiles policy
• unlike the Internet governance area, where the multi-stakeholder model has secured widespread, if precarious support, mobile policy remains an obscure and inaccessible area — with a stark democratic deficit in citizen involvement and public benefit
• e.g. regulation of apps remain under the “bottle-neck” control of corporations such as software and computing giants, e.g. Apple and Google.
research gap• cell phones and mobile media are vibrant part of media research, when
it comes to policy there is little research that does justice to its complexities
• especially on the regional framing & geopolitics of policy; cf. most global telecommunications policy is based on narrow, neoliberal paradigms (cf. Goggin, Global Mobile Media 2011)
• add to which mobiles policy out of step with realities of cultures of use & social functions evident in majority world
• available work largely comes from law, economics, engineering, and telecommunications policy
• rather than other traditions – e.g. global media and communication policy, or information policy - which have grappled with restructuring of telecommunications, and the new challenges of convergent media, especially the Internet — but not really tackled the policy and legal issues raised by mobility
Moving Media
• Australian Research Council Discovery project Moving Media: Mobile Internet and New Policy Modes (CIs: Gerard Goggin, Tim Dwyer, Fiona Martin; researcher: Jonathon Hutchinson) hopes to theorize contemporary mobile media
• mapping responses of a wide range of international policy institutions and actors to the range of forms of mobile media & Internet and the new kinds of governance these are eliciting
• Range of international case studies on: news diversity; locative media; connected cars; wearable computers (Google Glass); mobile health applications
• More information on Moving Media blog: http://mobileinternetresearch.net/latest/
mobile media + Internetinvolves convergences among Internet + other media technology along at least three major axes:
1. mobile telephony and telecommunications; 2. digital television broadcasting; 3. new media ecologies evolving around locative, spatial/mapping, and sensing technologies
4. communicative mobilities + other mobilities (e.g. transportation; automobility)
University of Illinois's PLATO IV terminal, which used an infrared system c. 1971 (from F. Ion, ‘From touch displays to the surface: A brief history of touchscreen technology’, Ars Technica, 5 April, 2013)
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Ley de Geolocalización(Mexican Geolocalization Law)
• The Mexican House of Representatives passed the Geolocalization Law on September 2011, followed by the Senate on March 2012.
• the Geolocalization Law extended existing provisions to require telecommunications carriers to make geolocal data, gathered through cellular mobile devices and networks, available to agencies — hence the title of the law.
• to target drug dealers, kidnappers, and blackmailers who use mobile ICTs to carry out illegal activities
See: Gerard Goggin and César Albarrán-Torres. ‘Locative Media, Privacy, and State Surveillance in Mexico: The Case of the Geolocalization Law.’ In Locative Media, ed. Rowan Wilken & Gerard Goggin (Routledge, 2014)
ICT in Creative Arts, Businessand Science, Mitchell et al. 2003
Invention:“Manufacturers”
Application:“Consumers”
Leadbeater, 2008
Innovation Policy Moment
The Australian Policy Push
OECD
Research on Road Transport and Intermodal Linkages (RTR)
Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS)
Transforming Personal Mobility
Mobility InternetDriverless vehiclesShared vehicles
Specific purpose vehiclesAdvanced propulsion systems
Transforming healthcare
• Shifting costs and responsibility from institutions to care providers and citizens
• Curative to preventative• Modularised and ‘incentivised’ health care • From patient to monitorial self
– subject of constant real-time, digital surveillance
– a self-caring, responsible citizen who acts on technological health imperatives
– discriminating consumer, digitally literate
• Sensing, recording, storing, representing and communicating bio-data
• Shaping user experience of mediated environment
• Managing remote consultations/networked therapeutic forums
• Communicating public health information
Mhealth: a media and communications concern
Apple is positioning its Health app as the point of aggregation for all the user’s different health data, and Health Kit the development platform
to enable that integration. But critically, indications are that the health data will for the
most part be collected by sensors (Nike+, Withings Scale, Fitbit Flex etc) of other wearable
manufacturers….
(D.Waite in Shaugnessy, 2014)
Hybrid policy framework
contested:
- communications infrastructure
provision
- comms & content standards
- data privacy & access
- speech regulation
- consumer rights
highly regulated: medical
self regulated: therapeutic and
wellbeing
prescriptive and co- regulatory:
information privacy
light touch: telecommunications
and media
innovation/competition
policy: software
Social media network analysis (SMNA)Who are the key influencers in mhealth policy discussions and why?
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ReferencesGoggin, Gerard. ‘Mobile Communication Law and Regulation.’ In International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, ed. Ang Peng Hwa and Robin Mansell. Vol. 4, ed. Sandra Braman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
Goggin, Gerard, Tim Dwyer, Fiona Martin. ‘Moveable Media: Mobile Internet & New Policy’ in Creativity, Innovation an Interaction: Public Media Management Fit for the 21st Century, Michał Głowacki & Lizzie Jackson (eds). Routledge. 2013.
Goggin, Gerard, Fiona Martin, and Tim Dwyer. “Locating the News in the Mobile Worlds of Audiences,” Journalism Studies. (2014).
Goggin, Gerard. “Driving the Internet: Mobile Internets, Cars, and the Social,” Future Internet vol. 4, no. 1. p. 306-321. 2012
Goggin, Gerard and César Albarrán-Torres. ‘Locative Media, Privacy, and State Surveillance in Mexico: The Case of the Geolocalization Law.’ In Locative Media, ed. Wilken & Goggin.
Lupton, Deborah (2012) M-health and health promotion: The digital cyborg and surveillance society. Social Theory & Health (2012) 10, 229–244
Wilken, Rowan and Gerard Goggin, ed. Locative Media (Routledge, 2014)