cell phones

Cell phone is one of the most popular and portable of almost all the modern electronic gadgets used in the modern world, especially by young men and women. A cell phone nowadays has become a multi-purpose household electronic device since its utility has been highly increasing day by day, for speaking and chatting, for sending and receiving messages, as a camera, as a storehouse of a number of valuable information, as a music player and recorder (voice recorder too), as an FM radio, as a calculator, as a modem for internet connection and internet surfing, as a medium for advertisement, even as a medium for conducting bank transactions, as a mini-projector and so on. Recently it has become the latest form of entertainment, in providing novels for readers through its screen which has been called by various names such as cell phone novel, mobile phone novel, text messaging novel, m-novel, m-lit, cell literature, phone novel, and even as SMS novel.

(source: Introduction of Cell Phone Novel A New Genre of Literature)

The paper describes and reflects upon a research and development project specifically related to a sound installation – Listener (Hoem 2014) – where the purpose has been to examine artistic possibilities when staging an auditive user experience, via micro positioned mobile devices. Listener is augmenting an existing environment, adding a fictional layer, using sound as the only expression. The auditive text is experienced through headphones, connected to a location aware mobile unit, which is positioned by “beacons” (Bluetooth LE transmitters).

Listener tries to relocate an environment, from Bergen railway station to the Bergen University College’s premises, using sound. To this environment we have added six fictional characters, and the user can listen to these characters’ cell phone calls. The text has to be experienced by moving around, as the sounds corresponds to the user’s position and orientation.

What distinguishes Listener from many other installations that are often based on localisation by GPS is the concept of micro positioning. The paper will discuss and exemplify this concept in general, and look more specifically into how this can be implemented to tell micro positioned stories.

Micro positioned texts are discussed in light of the experience of place (locus) and the perception of space (platea). When following the development of theatrical performances back to when travelling companies were performing in the streets, the theatre companies had to be able to adapt their performances to different places. This was achieved by a close understanding of the two ways of using space as an integrated part of the performance: The platea, an open space used to perform the play, contrasted by the locus, a defined space that can be given representational meaning. Locus always represents a specific location, and the platea is essentially fluid and non-representational (Dillon, 2006:4).

Where a space is given by the physical environment, place can be seen as constructed through a meeting between mediated artifacts, actors and interaction between those. Thus the linking between place and space becomes determined by social relationships, emotions and sensations. There will always be several, often competing notions of place, which leads to a potential for staging different narratives within the same physical environment.

The paper will discuss and try to exemplify and finally conclude upon questions about how the relationships between locus and platea are influenced by mediation artefacts that represents parts of the environment by virtual and/or augmented artifacts, and how this relates to concepts of electronic literature.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Before the ubiquity of iPad, Kindle, and other tablets ushered in a new appreciation of the literary, there was the cell phone novel. Initiated in Japan around 2000, one of the most popular examples of the cell phone novel ( keitai sh ō setsu ), Koizara , was successfully adapted into a multimilliondollar fi film. The success of keitai sh ō setsu can be attributed to a variety of factors: Japan’s cell phone ( keitai ) market, where screens are big; long commutes on public transport; the specific fi characteristics of the Japanese language; and the long tradition of the “personal, pedestrian and portable” (Ito 2005) as part of everyday life. As a medium, it has been embraced by young women, as both readers and writers, for its ability to provide new avenues and contexts for expression around previously tacit practices (e.g., domesticity; Hjorth 2009b).
Ryan, Marie-Laure, Emerson, Lori, and Robertson, Benjamin J., eds. Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.

The keitai sh ō setsu u phenomenon began with the founding of one of Japan’s most pivotal usercreated content (UCC) sites for mobile Internet, Maho No Airando ( maho meaning “magic”), in 1999. Although keitai sh ō setsu u were initially written by professionals, by the mid-2000s everyday users had begun to be inspired to write and disseminate their own keitai sh ō setsu . Predominantly written by y women for r women, this mode of new media highlights the signifi ficance of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999); many of the successful keitai sh ō setsu u (millions produced yearly) are adapted into older media such as film, fi manga , and anime (see remediation). This practice can be seen as an extension of earlier gendered tropes of Japanese new media that were dubbed in the 1980s the “Anomalous Female Teenage Handwriting” phenomenon (Kinsella 1995). Characterized by “ kawaii” ” (cute) transformations of the Japanese alphabet, hiragana , an emerging genre of new media writing (which has a history as “women’s language”), soon dominated mobile communication from the pager onward; it became known as the “highschool girl pager revolution” whereby female UCCs hijacked (through personalization techniques) the technologies industry conventionally aimed at businessmen (“salarymen”) (Fujimoto 2005; Matsuda 2005; Hjorth 2003).

(Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved)