The Cameraphone As A Social Medium!!

Howard Rheingold writes, the cameraphone exists at this moment in that ephemeral, potent and confusing phase of its adoption cycle where people are still deciding what kind of social medium it is. This happened to previous generations with the camera, the phone and the Internet. If recent observations from Keio University researcher Daisuke Okabe can be used to forecast future trends, we will find that the social role of the cameraphone is distinctly different from both the camera and the phone. And although these devices transmit images through the Internet, they are also turning out, rather unexpectedly, to be face-to-face media. It looks like this newly ubiquitous device could be more about flows of moments than stocks of images, more about sharing presence than transporting messages, and ultimately, more about personal narrative than factual communication.

Observations of Japanese mobile phone users led to adopt a conceptual framework of "technosocial situations" in which people "assemble social situations as a hybrid of virtual and physically co-present relations and encounters." The "heightened sense of visual awareness" that Okabe detects in her subjects' mundane communications might well be the early indicators of a new dimension to social sensibility, the kind of media-enabled sensory shift, the kind that changes not only the way we make small talk with friends, but the very fabric of social relations, in ways that are not possible to predict when they first surface. Perhaps we can't predict. But research like Okabe's and Ito's can sensitize us to what people are really doing with their latest doodads.