Citizen Mobile: opportunities and challenges of the mobile society

SSIT5: Mobile Interaction, Monday 4 April 2005, 5.30-7pm

Industry panel

Every day brings us both positive stories of the potential benefits of mobile technologies such as mobile phones and ever-smaller laptops, and negative messages of increasing work pressure, use of technology to survey activities, and the lack of proven benefits for organisations investing in these technologies.

In all of this it is clear that the experienced and potential impact of these technologies on the individual can only be properly understood by considering the intricate relationships between a range of social and technical elements. It is also clear that the simple image of imaginative and innovative mobile services being used in an unchanged social context where everything is as usual is not a fair representation.

The close connections between us as individuals and the increasingly ubiquitous technologies we use imply, for better and for worse, a co-evolution of new ways of working, living, and experiencing through and with mobile technology. The technologies simultaneous free and constrain us. A lot of people can work wherever they are, so when will they stop? It allow us to access essential information sources, colleagues, friends and family. Does it also keep us from essential breathing spaces where we can reflect?

The aim of the panel is to engage in a guided debate across traditional boundaries. In order to tease out some of the essential issues we must engage in debate between industry, academia, the arts and the public sector. The format will be that a number of specially invited participants will prepare on a range of topics and use this in a guided debate involving both invited experts and the floor.

Within commercial and governmental organisations, innovative uses of mobile technologies allow for new ways of working and living. In academia there is a growing interest in more fundamentally describing and understanding the mobile society. The full story of what it is like being a citizen in the mobile society can only be told by bringing together the concerns from a varied set of contexts. This panel aims to do so and hopefully at the same time engage all participants in a lively and entertaining debate.

The debate will focus on the experiences of the individual as a consumer, worker and social being. How do mobile technologies influence the ways we manage each other? How do they move us from being consumers to being active producers of information? How are our social lives changing with these technologies? How do they allow us to experience the world differently? Is there a risk that excessive communication makes us less reflective and more reliant on sedimented habits?

^