Moblogs – MMS, mobile communities, and media geography.

Last Updated (Wednesday, 29 October 2008 12:27)

Anne Scott Sørensen

The integrated communication and media technologies, often termed Web 2.0, configure a new generation of web-based services, which facilitate the creation of a personal media platform, as well as social networking and collaborative, user generated content.

Web 2.0 media challenges our perceptions of public and private, personal and social, performer and audience, etc. by providing new practices at the borderlines (Couldry, Livingstone & Markham 2007, Finnemann 2006). Examples of such media are weblogs, moblogs, iPods, and open resources, such as YouTube and Twitter, or MySpace and Facebook.

The aim of this project is to research Danish moblogs, a kind of shared digital photo album, based on the so-called MMS technology, which integrates the mobile phone and the web, and relates this to the use of digital photos on social networking sites, such as Facebook. The study will consist of 1) a survey among Danish users of moblogs, via the service albino gorilla;2)net-based interviews with 10 to15 users; 3) multi-modal discourse analysis of the 10 to 15 cases; comparative investigation of European moblog services on a given day (among them, the Swedish mobilblogg.nu, the Dutch moblog.nl, and the British moblog.uk). The extent of the study of the use of photos/photo albums on Facebook has not yet been determined.

In continuation of my own earlier research on weblogs and blogging, I will address questions such as identity formation, personal archiving, social networking, and collaborative content creation (Scott Sørensen 2006, 2008). In particular, I will address the intersections of time, place, and movement, and qualify the thesis that the moblog is distinguished by the way it is used to share embodied experiences of things, people, and places, and to engage in situating oneself, localizing one another, and mapping things, bodies, and places in relation to each other. Whereas the classic family album is signified by a retrospective and biographical memorizing, the moblog is supposed to perform an on-the-spot and right now kind of experience, identified by a vertical and relational movement. Methodologically, I make use of the rather new approached called media geography (Falkheimer & Jansson 2006, Katz & Aakhus 2002), in combination with virtual ethnography (Gemzoë 2004, Hine 2000, 2005), and multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & Leeuwen 2001, Jewitt & Kress 2003).

The project raises further questions as to the interchange of visual technologies and cultural forms: In which ways does the digital photo (album) change classic portrait, family, and tourist photography, and the classic album, bound in leather – or plastic? How does it transform the ways in which we memorize, archive, and tell about our lives and ourselves? Might it eventually change memory itself (Dijck 2007, Merewether 2006)? The project is related to the Swedish media project, ‘Från celluloid till megapixel. Nätverk och ritual kring mobilkamera och e-bio’ (‘From celluloid to megapixel. Network and ritual around mobile camera and e-bio’). (Vetenskapsrådet/Karin Wagner).