Wendy Simpson, from the Havengrove residence for homeless single mothers, explained how residents used mobile pay-as-you-go phones extensively to develop their social networks, and the Net to research places where they might be pressed by the local authority to relocate (unwillingly). John Pateman, of Friends, Families and Travellers, described how mobiles were essential for travellers running their businesses on the move - and to call the organisation for help when harrassed when seeking sites. A Cyber Pilots project was providing children with their own web space and Net skills, and there were prospects of travellers' sites getting wireless networks, so becoming WiFi hotspots.
For those living with uncertainly or change mobile communications could provide some stablility. They could provide information and connections wherever you were.... you could have more choice on where to be. But the conference also heard that being accessible could be a disadvantage - and this didn't just apply to the business user always on call. Women with abusive partners could find they were called many time a day in an effort to check and control their movements.
Here's how I see it. Your choice of communications will depend on where you want to be - and the control you have.
Other dimensions affecting type of communication and choice of technology discussed included income, age, and personality type. Early in the day Professor John Urry provided a backdrop analysis and projection of our desire for greater physical mobility. We travel five times more than in 1950; travel and tourism is the world's largest industry; 85 per cent of journeys are by car - and growth in car use occurs even when public transport is good, as in France. Rich people travel 3.5 times more than the poorest.
Increased travel leads to - or is linked with - a wider spread in our social networks. We have more 'weak' links, our networks are less coherent, and we have to work on maintaining them. We are less likely to meet people casually - so we have to expend more time and energy on planning meetings.
John offered five reasons to travel:
- Legal, economic and familial - from work to weddings.
- Social obligations. The need to be there with friends and colleagues... literally keeping in touch.
- Object obligations. The need to work elbow-to-elbow on some projects.
- Other meetings and events.
- Obligations to place. The feeling that there are some places that you have to experience.
Some physical travel could be substituted by virtual contact - but some could not... the need to meet people face-to-face to build trust, maintain 'feel'. Visiting places on the Net could lead to a desire to visit for real.
John's slides are downloadable here as a pdf , and you can find more at his Centre for Mobilities Research.
This increased desire for travel raised the issue of how far we had a right to mobility. Should there be limits? 
Anne Pridmore, UK Disability Forum for European Affairs, chatting here with John Urry, provided a reality check from her wheelchair - reminding people that planes did not provide wheelchair access to lavatories. For some people long distance was not an easy option. Anne is chair of the UK Forum women's committee.
Cameron Marlow of MIT Media Lab took the conference into the blogosphere.... the world of blogs and bloggers where personal websites are driven, he said, by a culture of sharing information and a culture of self. The ability to link blog postings, and to check easily who is publishing what through RSS news feeds, means that it is possible to map the emerging networks of bloggers.
His weblog diffusion index - blogdex - shows the most 'contagious' information currently spreading on the Net.
Plenary discussion focussed on the need to 'grow' and support intermediaries who can help organisations and individuals choose and use appropriate technologies. Unfortunately the people-people (development workers, meeting facilitators) are often short on tech skills, and the techies can be short on people and community skills. As Professor Steve Woolgar, director of the Virtual Society? programme, reminded everyone it is a lot more complicated that saying either focus on the people, or technology will solve problems on its own, or it's a mix (well, rather more sophisticated than that, but my conceptual abilities were flagging).
As I write this, Newsnight is reporting on the dominance of Cisco in providing Net 'wiring', through their successful company culture of stock options, egalitarianism, and frugality. CEO John Chambers was being very optimistic on camera about the social, educational and economic benefits of the Internet. One of their guys had taken the trouble to come to the Oxford conference, and over coffee we discussed day-to-day realities of living with the Net. Despite success in other fields, it seems even Cisco engineers and information experts - in common with others - haven't entirely worked out how staff can best deal with a one or two hundred email messages a day (though they are working on it). What hope for the rest of us? It's still a question of skimming for people you know, subjects you are interested in, and binning the rest. Just like the rest of life.
‘Community and Remoteness’
Thanks to David for his thorough review of the Community and Mobility conference in Oxford last week. As reflected in that posting, much was said about mobility and about the technologies of remote communication. We also gained some insights into how they relate to notions of ‘community’ and I just want to add some thoughts on that from a community development perspective.
We don’t have to look hard to find examples of genuine community in a wholly or predominantly virtual context. That doesn’t mean that when a number of people gather together online – synchronously or asynchronously – a sense of community is an natural direct consequence. Similarly, there are plenty of examples of people living in physical proximity where there is little evidence of a sense of community. The notion that community can only be found where people have face-to-face interaction is as flawed as the notion that community is an inevitable consequence of such interaction.
It seems reasonable to suppose that where people share a common experience of particular intensity – as we heard in the case of women experiencing domestic violence, for example – then the sense of community is likely to form readily if communication channels can be opened and sustained. The role of mobiles in this example was really striking. Responding to questions, Joy Etheridge clarified for us that although members of the network were just calling one another, one-to-one, nevertheless they were doing so very much within the context of their supportive community.
We know also that when a group of people share a common lifestyle or have in common some all-consuming aspect of their lives, the sense of community is readily sparked when they connect. In the conference we heard about Turkish speaking communities, young gypsies and travellers, and disabled people, who reflected the value of being able to retain that sense of commonality remotely. Indeed it did occur to me that we might have titled the conference ‘Community and Remoteness’ – since in some cases it was the power of the remote technologies, more than the fact of mobility, that generated the insights into the nature of community.
Posted by: Kevin Harris | October 08, 2003 at 02:32 PM
i like your site. really good.
Posted by: heidi | May 26, 2004 at 08:51 AM