Ratchet Up

[See With Your Ears]

What is a map but an interface? Thanks in part to new media, the verb "to map" has escaped its cartographic origins and become a powerful moment and metaphor in information representation, exchange, transformation and control.

A new technology from "vOICe" seeks to help blind people map their environment by translating visual images into sound "images." Users wear a head-mounted video camera that records the the visual field in front of them. A wearable computer then scans the resulting video image and translates it into an audio signal that the wearer mentally transforms into a sonic map of their environment. It's a kind of technologized synethesia. The image on the left is a kind of visualization of the sound patterns one might receive from a human face. [It's an illustration, which is to say a map of a map of a map.]

Just how well this works, of course, depends on one's skill at map reading, since the audio files sound like sine waves in continuing transformation. [Note to self: post on micro-sound tomorrow.] Maps are representations, and representations demand interpretation. It appears that the challenge is to listen for sonic patterns that invoke spatial patterns.

A key distinction in sound studies has been between "semantic listening" and "causal listening." In semantic listening we attend to structured, coded communication, as in listening to speech. In causal listening we attend to the type of space, object or person creating the sound. The "vOICe" system is mostly causal listening; it's really about sensing rather than communicating.

Naturally the system's inventors are racing to take advantage of all the new goodies tumbling into the market these days. You can use your Nokia phone with its camera function to take "vOICe" pictures that are then translated into audio. You can use advanced functions like 3D video, digital zoom, slow-motion. You can even try a negative image, no doubt a fun timeout for blind hemp aficionados. You can even use integrated e-mail to send camera snapshots to friends. So a blog where blind "vOICe" users share pleasing audio snaps can't be too far in the distance.

Want to give it a try? I tried to link you directly to their java applet, and to their little movie from TechTV or German television, and to their page on mobile phones, but unfortunately their navigation doesn't allow it. The "vOICe" technology is obviously more sophisticated than their website. Don't be put off by the design, which suggests at first glance that the whole thing sells for $29.95, God's favorite price point these days for stuff that adds up to nothing. It's no doubt a home brew site that hasn't learned the first thing they teach you at MIT: it' all about the demo.

[Seeing With Sound: vOICe]

[Tom Johnson: Rational Melody]

Listen Up!: Tom Johnson: "Rational Melody" [Flute, Eberhart Blum]

When mobile phones first became a big thing, anthropologists discovered that women felt that men with mobile phones exuded “power” and were "highly esteemed.”

Men discovered that using their phones publicly in self-conscious, flamboyant ways turned the devices into babe magnets, at least every once in a while. So it wasn't long before some men--horney and broke, but resourceful--took to making cardboard phones.

In Europe, where strolling on shopping streets is still a custom, these mobile phone peacocks flocked on street corners. In the US, faux-phones were more often deployed in the car, where reflective glass and natural distance aided considerably in the ruse. Posed at the stoplight with cardboard phones in their hands, men could be seen in heated discussions with their brokers shorting stocks with the visible intensity of a 16-year-old high school student playing an 80-year-old tycoon in a high school play.

Technology changes; men persist. Today's of-the-moment babe magnet is a $400 iPod on your belt--worn discreetly, but for sure visibly. Not getting hit on? Don’t have one? Well now you do.

But be warned. There is a dangerous new trend afoot. In some hip urban areas where iPods are common, it has become a thing for complete strangers with iPods to claim immediate friendship. It’s a bit like the old custom of honking at anyone with the same kind of car as you. [I actually honked at other VW convertibles with gusto in the ‘70s, so I know.] Now the custom—and this is particularly favored by self-confident women—is simply to walk up to some guy and to invite him, often silently, to jack in to her iPod. It’s a new kind of “this is what I’m listening to”...”hope it turns you on”...”I’m who I listen to, who are you?” kind of thing.

So be careful with your faux-pod. You can't get lucky without some real tunes.

Cody Brown found a detailed history of the early Mosaic browser, see his reference in comments.

In Minnesota pilgrims and Santa can now carry concealed blunderbusses.

So here's an invitation to stretch your visual imagination. You'll have to follow this link to the image on the homepage of Applied Digital Solutions. They make satellite-link kid-tracker watches so you can know exactly where your kids are--right down to whether they're getting playing time or sitting on the bench at soccer camp.

Now Applied Digital Solutions is developing an implantable chip that will turn you into a human credit card. Just walk by the cash register with your shopping cart, run your chip-implanted hand over the scanner, and the bill for all those goodies will go up to the satellite and right down to your bank. Neat, sweet...and thanks to new Verichip-like technology...petite.

Looking at their frontpage graphic, you'll see that their current product is a goiter-sized watch that you can strap to your kids. It's sending an animated .gif signal 'round the world and presumably to the satellite in the upper right. Mom and dad--or are they grandma and grandpa?--have been kind enough to drop by from their day jobs as models at a stock photo agency. They seem pleased that the kids on the right--endearing cut-and-paste multi-culty faces--are safe thanks to signals pulsed to the satellite with the certainty of a heartbeat. Awash in reassuring 1's and 0's, gyros and uplinks, this is the new American family, circa next week.

But the family circa next year is actually going to be a bit more like Little Fluffy, that charming little ankle-biter next to the kids, since presumably Fluffy carries her ID chip under the skin. [What dog could handle the "just-who-am-I-timewise?" anxiety of shopping for watches?] Right now Fluffy's chip is keeping her safe, but with a little change in a few lines of code Fluffy could be ready to shop. Meaning that a brief scamper around Pets 'R Us could set you back $300 or $400 dollars and unwittingly summon bird seed, parrot perches and plastic water lilies to your doorstep a week later.

Now Applied Digital Solutions wants to put something like the Verichip under our skin so we can be good to go shopping just like Fluffy.

Which leads to my invitation to take a minute and imagine what you'd like to see on the next iteration of ADS's frontpage graphic. How would you promote the shopping hand?

- A comparison graphic of a skinny, streaked & tweaked 30-something being merrily "waved through" check-out next to a haggard, collagen-depleted housewife digging through a cavernous purse pressed between her legs?

- A shot of a delighted teen getting chipped while still in his high school graduation gown?

- Fluffy in rhinestones--now feral and camping out on the parking ramp, but lovin' it?

- Let your twisted mine put the next bullet points here...

[Wired]

In 1993, Marc Andresseen and the group that developed the first Mosaic browser introduced the "inline image tag" that made it possible to display images in HTML. Before this snippet of code most pages looked like this.

Although greeted with some opposition, Andresseen persisted and within a year or so Mosaic morphed into Netscape which, as you know, fueled popular uptake of the Web. In just a decade the Web's "giant sucking sound" has absorbed something close to the world's image history.

Some time this year we should be celebrating the 10th birthday of the inline image tag. If you know the exact date or even month, let us know, since it's well worth a toast--if you're willing to get up from your flickering blue screen to shuffle out to the refer, that is.

Lewis Weinberg is the designated driver at Carleton whenever our computers start to careen off the road. He's a smart, talented and all too modest guy--an artist who who likes to help people make things happen with digital media. Louis recently sent me this URL with some of his work, which is excellent.

When I started "Lili" [1999], I glanced up to see Wolf Blitzer intoning on CNN. I muted Wolf and for a few minutes and let "Lili's" propulsive world beat soundtrack provide a backdrop for news from the Middle East. Try it with headphones, and crank it up.

[5-Pack Assortment from Lewis Weinberg]

Interested in the way people are turning natural sound recording--nature, urban or otherwise--into compositions, I recently stumbled onto San Francisco composer Stan Shaff's "Audium." It looks to be a wonderful sonic performance space for audial immerersion. Although this place looks like it could have been built yesterday, it's a couple of decades old. [The chromey '80's chairs are a tip off.] It probably has a more tattered charm today, since Shaff looks to be one of those passionate, brilliant eccentrics in which San Francisco specializes.

Shaff performs his compositions every weekend, so when we're next in SF, let's give him a try. How could you miss listening to sound sculpture in a place like this?

"I have always been possessed by the evocative qualities all sounds seem to have, whether natural or electronic. Sounds touch deeper levels of our inner life, layers that lie just beneath the visual world. All sounds are communicative - sound as birth, life and death; sound as time and space; sound as object, environment or event. Audiences should feel sound as it bumps up against them, caresses, travels through, covers and enfolds them.

"I ask listeners to see with their ears and feel with their bodies sounds as images, dreams and memories. As people walk into a work, they become part of its realization. From entrance to exit, AUDIUM is a sound-space continuum."

05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Post from Joe Slag:

I'm just back from the National Conference on Media Reform at the University of Wisconsin where roughly 1,700 people from across the country debated ways to fix our media system. Attendees included government officials, union members, journalists, researchers, teachers, and grassroots activists. A detailed list of the big name attendees, along with some audio and video of the sessions and performances, can be found at the above site. Accounts of the discussions, as well as a host of related links, can be found at the "Be The Media" blog.

The "Be The Media" blog is named after a track of sessions that ran in parallel with the official ones. These events were open to anyone--not just registered conference attendees--and focused on grassroots techniques for creating print, media, radio, and web sites, in contrast to the official conference's wider focus on participatory media, media regulation, alternative media outlets, and other issues.

This gap between the "official" sessions and less formal participatory workshops reflected dissenting views about how the conference should be run. Some people disliked having three or four designated authorities speaking to a large group. Although they had good things to say, so did the audience. Given the experience of the Independent Media Center with consensus-based decision making, and of internet resources like web logs, there are clearly other models for stimulating group discussion

I went to the conference hoping to get a better understanding of media reform, to identify an area in which to work myself, and to network--ideally so that I can work in this area full time. Others had different agendas. Some wanted to produce a concrete plan of action. Some were seeking support for specific projects. Others were looking for new partnerships.

Overally, this assembly of 1,700 mostly like-minded activists had a very positive outcome. It didnt produce a silver bullet for media reform, but it energized all participants and provided a strong base on which to build in the future.

It's getting phone crazy. The current toy-in-my-pocket buzz is around bluejacking. This is a new, fun-twisted use for phones with Bluetooth communication technology installed. If you don't know, Bluetooth is a system of near-field [30 feet or so] wireless communication initially invented in order that electronic components in a room could communicate without being wired together. The original vision was something like "no more printer cables!" It has been the next big thing that hasn't quite happened for several years, but now looks finally to be having its day.

Anyway, high-end mobile phones now come with Bluetooth. And people have figured out how to use it to send messages anonymously to other Bluetooth phones in the area. It's the dawn of drive-by messaging--someone nearby sends you a message, but you don't know who. Put Bluetooth and hijacking together and you get bluejacking.

But why, you ask? I think it has to do with the fact that as social beings we continually adjust our presentation of self to fit the situation. [Check Erving Goffman on this.] We're one person in public, another in private. New media communication technologies are playing mix-and-match with the conventions associated with these many personas and their contexts. In Goffman's parlance, we're now often revealing our "backstage" selves "frontstage." That is, when at the computer or phone we seems to be in a private spaces--no eyes are watching me now--that are often technologically projected into a public spaces. This inner self is impish, impulsive, transgressive. And generally endearing. There are scores of new media technologies [not least of which are blogs] that are enabling our often silly private selves to escape the parental function of the ego. In short, bluejacking appeals to the emergent technology-enabled inner child in all of us. Its just another new media interference effect jumbling public and private spaces.

Naturally, a new site has popped up where you can learn more about bluejacking and no doubt buy a tee-shirt--the above is my suggestion, free to you as a Ratchet .png download.

"Using a phone with Bluetooth, you can create a phonebook contact and write a message, eg. 'Hello, you've been bluejacked, in the 'Name' field. Then you can search for other phones with Bluetooth and send that phonebook contact to them. On their phone, a message will popup saying "'Hello, you've been bluejacked' has just been received by Bluetooth" or something along those lines. For most 'victims' they will have no idea as to how the message appeared on their phone. So, personalised messages like 'I like your pink top' and the startled expressions that result is where the fun really starts."

One bluejacker is quoted as saying: "not knowing whether the victim will react in an amused/confused or negative way gives me an adrenaline rush." That "the fun really starts" with the "adrenaline rush" seems to make my point above. [Note to self: communications revolutions, like armies, travel on their mental bellies.]

"By the way if, you're wondering where the Bluetooth name originally came from, it's named after a Danish Viking and King, Harald Bltand (translated as Bluetooth in English), who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Harald Bltand united and controlled Denmark and Norway (hence the inspiration on the name: uniting devices through Bluetooth). He got his name from his very dark hair which was unusual for Vikings, Bltand means dark complexion. However a more popular, (but less likely reason), was that Old Harald had a inclination towards eating Blueberries , so much so his teeth became stained with the colour, leaving Harald with a rather unique set of molars." [Source]

Even the name came from an impish impulse.

[Happy To See Me, Or Is That Just Cardboard In Your Pocket?]

When mobile phones first became a big thing, anthropologists discovered that women felt that men with mobile phones exuded “power” and were "highly esteemed.”

Men discovered that using their phones publicly in self-conscious, flamboyant ways turned the devices into babe magnets, at least every once in a while. So it wasn't long before some men--horney and broke, but resourceful--took to making cardboard phones.

In Europe, where strolling on shopping streets is still a custom, these mobile phone peacocks flocked on street corners. In the US, faux-phones were more often deployed in the car, where reflective glass and natural distance aided considerably in the ruse. Posed at the stoplight with cardboard phones in their hands, men could be seen in heated discussions with their brokers shorting stocks with the visible intensity of a 16-year-old high school student playing an 80-year-old tycoon in a high school play.

Technology changes; men persist. Today's of-the-moment babe magnet is a $400 iPod on your belt--worn discreetly, but for sure visibly. Not getting hit on? Don’t have one? Well now you do.

But be warned. There is a dangerous new trend afoot. In some hip urban areas where iPods are common, it has become a thing for complete strangers with iPods to claim immediate friendship. It’s a bit like the old custom of honking at anyone with the same kind of car as you. [I actually honked at other VW convertibles with gusto in the ‘70s, so I know.] Now the custom—and this is particularly favored by self-confident women—is simply to walk up to some guy and to invite him, often silently, to jack in to her iPod. It’s a new kind of “this is what I’m listening to”...”hope it turns you on”...”I’m who I listen to, who are you?” kind of thing.

So be careful with your faux-pod. You can't get lucky without some real tunes.

Cody Brown found a detailed history of the early Mosaic browser, see his reference in comments.

[Turkeys Beware]

In Minnesota pilgrims and Santa can now carry concealed blunderbusses.

[Left hand: Shopping Hand]

So here's an invitation to stretch your visual imagination. You'll have to follow this link to the image on the homepage of Applied Digital Solutions. They make satellite-link kid-tracker watches so you can know exactly where your kids are--right down to whether they're getting playing time or sitting on the bench at soccer camp.

Now Applied Digital Solutions is developing an implantable chip that will turn you into a human credit card. Just walk by the cash register with your shopping cart, run your chip-implanted hand over the scanner, and the bill for all those goodies will go up to the satellite and right down to your bank. Neat, sweet...and thanks to new Verichip-like technology...petite.

Looking at their frontpage graphic, you'll see that their current product is a goiter-sized watch that you can strap to your kids. It's sending an animated .gif signal 'round the world and presumably to the satellite in the upper right. Mom and dad--or are they grandma and grandpa?--have been kind enough to drop by from their day jobs as models at a stock photo agency. They seem pleased that the kids on the right--endearing cut-and-paste multi-culty faces--are safe thanks to signals pulsed to the satellite with the certainty of a heartbeat. Awash in reassuring 1's and 0's, gyros and uplinks, this is the new American family, circa next week.

But the family circa next year is actually going to be a bit more like Little Fluffy, that charming little ankle-biter next to the kids, since presumably Fluffy carries her ID chip under the skin. [What dog could handle the "just-who-am-I-timewise?" anxiety of shopping for watches?] Right now Fluffy's chip is keeping her safe, but with a little change in a few lines of code Fluffy could be ready to shop. Meaning that a brief scamper around Pets 'R Us could set you back $300 or $400 dollars and unwittingly summon bird seed, parrot perches and plastic water lilies to your doorstep a week later.

Now Applied Digital Solutions wants to put something like the Verichip under our skin so we can be good to go shopping just like Fluffy.

Which leads to my invitation to take a minute and imagine what you'd like to see on the next iteration of ADS's frontpage graphic. How would you promote the shopping hand?

- A comparison graphic of a skinny, streaked & tweaked 30-something being merrily "waved through" check-out next to a haggard, collagen-depleted housewife digging through a cavernous purse pressed between her legs?

- A shot of a delighted teen getting chipped while still in his high school graduation gown?

- Fluffy in rhinestones--now feral and camping out on the parking ramp, but lovin' it?

- Let your twisted mine put the next bullet points here...

[Wired]

[Tenth Anniversary Of The Visual Web]

In 1993, Marc Andresseen and the group that developed the first Mosaic browser introduced the "inline image tag" that made it possible to display images in HTML. Before this snippet of code most pages looked like this.

Although greeted with some opposition, Andresseen persisted and within a year or so Mosaic morphed into Netscape which, as you know, fueled popular uptake of the Web. In just a decade the Web's "giant sucking sound" has absorbed something close to the world's image history.

Some time this year we should be celebrating the 10th birthday of the inline image tag. If you know the exact date or even month, let us know, since it's well worth a toast--if you're willing to get up from your flickering blue screen to shuffle out to the refer, that is.

[Lewis Weinberg 5-Pack]

Lewis Weinberg is the designated driver at Carleton whenever our computers start to careen off the road. He's a smart, talented and all too modest guy--an artist who who likes to help people make things happen with digital media. Louis recently sent me this URL with some of his work, which is excellent.

When I started "Lili" [1999], I glanced up to see Wolf Blitzer intoning on CNN. I muted Wolf and for a few minutes and let "Lili's" propulsive world beat soundtrack provide a backdrop for news from the Middle East. Try it with headphones, and crank it up.

[5-Pack Assortment from Lewis Weinberg]

[Sonic Immersion, Old School]

Interested in the way people are turning natural sound recording--nature, urban or otherwise--into compositions, I recently stumbled onto San Francisco composer Stan Shaff's "Audium." It looks to be a wonderful sonic performance space for audial immerersion. Although this place looks like it could have been built yesterday, it's a couple of decades old. [The chromey '80's chairs are a tip off.] It probably has a more tattered charm today, since Shaff looks to be one of those passionate, brilliant eccentrics in which San Francisco specializes.

Shaff performs his compositions every weekend, so when we're next in SF, let's give him a try. How could you miss listening to sound sculpture in a place like this?

"I have always been possessed by the evocative qualities all sounds seem to have, whether natural or electronic. Sounds touch deeper levels of our inner life, layers that lie just beneath the visual world. All sounds are communicative - sound as birth, life and death; sound as time and space; sound as object, environment or event. Audiences should feel sound as it bumps up against them, caresses, travels through, covers and enfolds them.

"I ask listeners to see with their ears and feel with their bodies sounds as images, dreams and memories. As people walk into a work, they become part of its realization. From entrance to exit, AUDIUM is a sound-space continuum."

05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Post from Joe Slag:

I'm just back from the National Conference on Media Reform at the University of Wisconsin where roughly 1,700 people from across the country debated ways to fix our media system. Attendees included government officials, union members, journalists, researchers, teachers, and grassroots activists. A detailed list of the big name attendees, along with some audio and video of the sessions and performances, can be found at the above site. Accounts of the discussions, as well as a host of related links, can be found at the "Be The Media" blog.

The "Be The Media" blog is named after a track of sessions that ran in parallel with the official ones. These events were open to anyone--not just registered conference attendees--and focused on grassroots techniques for creating print, media, radio, and web sites, in contrast to the official conference's wider focus on participatory media, media regulation, alternative media outlets, and other issues.

This gap between the "official" sessions and less formal participatory workshops reflected dissenting views about how the conference should be run. Some people disliked having three or four designated authorities speaking to a large group. Although they had good things to say, so did the audience. Given the experience of the Independent Media Center with consensus-based decision making, and of internet resources like web logs, there are clearly other models for stimulating group discussion

I went to the conference hoping to get a better understanding of media reform, to identify an area in which to work myself, and to network--ideally so that I can work in this area full time. Others had different agendas. Some wanted to produce a concrete plan of action. Some were seeking support for specific projects. Others were looking for new partnerships.

Overally, this assembly of 1,700 mostly like-minded activists had a very positive outcome. It didnt produce a silver bullet for media reform, but it energized all participants and provided a strong base on which to build in the future.

It's getting phone crazy. The current toy-in-my-pocket buzz is around bluejacking. This is a new, fun-twisted use for phones with Bluetooth communication technology installed. If you don't know, Bluetooth is a system of near-field [30 feet or so] wireless communication initially invented in order that electronic components in a room could communicate without being wired together. The original vision was something like "no more printer cables!" It has been the next big thing that hasn't quite happened for several years, but now looks finally to be having its day.

Anyway, high-end mobile phones now come with Bluetooth. And people have figured out how to use it to send messages anonymously to other Bluetooth phones in the area. It's the dawn of drive-by messaging--someone nearby sends you a message, but you don't know who. Put Bluetooth and hijacking together and you get bluejacking.

But why, you ask? I think it has to do with the fact that as social beings we continually adjust our presentation of self to fit the situation. [Check Erving Goffman on this.] We're one person in public, another in private. New media communication technologies are playing mix-and-match with the conventions associated with these many personas and their contexts. In Goffman's parlance, we're now often revealing our "backstage" selves "frontstage." That is, when at the computer or phone we seems to be in a private spaces--no eyes are watching me now--that are often technologically projected into a public spaces. This inner self is impish, impulsive, transgressive. And generally endearing. There are scores of new media technologies [not least of which are blogs] that are enabling our often silly private selves to escape the parental function of the ego. In short, bluejacking appeals to the emergent technology-enabled inner child in all of us. Its just another new media interference effect jumbling public and private spaces.

Naturally, a new site has popped up where you can learn more about bluejacking and no doubt buy a tee-shirt--the above is my suggestion, free to you as a Ratchet .png download.

"Using a phone with Bluetooth, you can create a phonebook contact and write a message, eg. 'Hello, you've been bluejacked, in the 'Name' field. Then you can search for other phones with Bluetooth and send that phonebook contact to them. On their phone, a message will popup saying "'Hello, you've been bluejacked' has just been received by Bluetooth" or something along those lines. For most 'victims' they will have no idea as to how the message appeared on their phone. So, personalised messages like 'I like your pink top' and the startled expressions that result is where the fun really starts."

One bluejacker is quoted as saying: "not knowing whether the victim will react in an amused/confused or negative way gives me an adrenaline rush." That "the fun really starts" with the "adrenaline rush" seems to make my point above. [Note to self: communications revolutions, like armies, travel on their mental bellies.]

"By the way if, you're wondering where the Bluetooth name originally came from, it's named after a Danish Viking and King, Harald Bltand (translated as Bluetooth in English), who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Harald Bltand united and controlled Denmark and Norway (hence the inspiration on the name: uniting devices through Bluetooth). He got his name from his very dark hair which was unusual for Vikings, Bltand means dark complexion. However a more popular, (but less likely reason), was that Old Harald had a inclination towards eating Blueberries , so much so his teeth became stained with the colour, leaving Harald with a rather unique set of molars." [Source]

Even the name came from an impish impulse.

[Report From The Inaugural National Conference on Media Reform]

Post from Joe Slag:

I'm just back from the National Conference on Media Reform at the University of Wisconsin where roughly 1,700 people from across the country debated ways to fix our media system. Attendees included government officials, union members, journalists, researchers, teachers, and grassroots activists. A detailed list of the big name attendees, along with some audio and video of the sessions and performances, can be found at the above site. Accounts of the discussions, as well as a host of related links, can be found at the "Be The Media" blog.

The "Be The Media" blog is named after a track of sessions that ran in parallel with the official ones. These events were open to anyone--not just registered conference attendees--and focused on grassroots techniques for creating print, media, radio, and web sites, in contrast to the official conference's wider focus on participatory media, media regulation, alternative media outlets, and other issues.

This gap between the "official" sessions and less formal participatory workshops reflected dissenting views about how the conference should be run. Some people disliked having three or four designated authorities speaking to a large group. Although they had good things to say, so did the audience. Given the experience of the Independent Media Center with consensus-based decision making, and of internet resources like web logs, there are clearly other models for stimulating group discussion

I went to the conference hoping to get a better understanding of media reform, to identify an area in which to work myself, and to network--ideally so that I can work in this area full time. Others had different agendas. Some wanted to produce a concrete plan of action. Some were seeking support for specific projects. Others were looking for new partnerships.

Overally, this assembly of 1,700 mostly like-minded activists had a very positive outcome. It didnt produce a silver bullet for media reform, but it energized all participants and provided a strong base on which to build in the future.

[Drive-By Messaging: Bluetooth, Pink Top]

It's getting phone crazy. The current toy-in-my-pocket buzz is around bluejacking. This is a new, fun-twisted use for phones with Bluetooth communication technology installed. If you don't know, Bluetooth is a system of near-field [30 feet or so] wireless communication initially invented in order that electronic components in a room could communicate without being wired together. The original vision was something like "no more printer cables!" It has been the next big thing that hasn't quite happened for several years, but now looks finally to be having its day.

Anyway, high-end mobile phones now come with Bluetooth. And people have figured out how to use it to send messages anonymously to other Bluetooth phones in the area. It's the dawn of drive-by messaging--someone nearby sends you a message, but you don't know who. Put Bluetooth and hijacking together and you get bluejacking.

But why, you ask? I think it has to do with the fact that as social beings we continually adjust our presentation of self to fit the situation. [Check Erving Goffman on this.] We're one person in public, another in private. New media communication technologies are playing mix-and-match with the conventions associated with these many personas and their contexts. In Goffman's parlance, we're now often revealing our "backstage" selves "frontstage." That is, when at the computer or phone we seems to be in a private spaces--no eyes are watching me now--that are often technologically projected into a public spaces. This inner self is impish, impulsive, transgressive. And generally endearing. There are scores of new media technologies [not least of which are blogs] that are enabling our often silly private selves to escape the parental function of the ego. In short, bluejacking appeals to the emergent technology-enabled inner child in all of us. Its just another new media interference effect jumbling public and private spaces.

Naturally, a new site has popped up where you can learn more about bluejacking and no doubt buy a tee-shirt--the above is my suggestion, free to you as a Ratchet .png download.

"Using a phone with Bluetooth, you can create a phonebook contact and write a message, eg. 'Hello, you've been bluejacked, in the 'Name' field. Then you can search for other phones with Bluetooth and send that phonebook contact to them. On their phone, a message will popup saying "'Hello, you've been bluejacked' has just been received by Bluetooth" or something along those lines. For most 'victims' they will have no idea as to how the message appeared on their phone. So, personalised messages like 'I like your pink top' and the startled expressions that result is where the fun really starts."

One bluejacker is quoted as saying: "not knowing whether the victim will react in an amused/confused or negative way gives me an adrenaline rush." That "the fun really starts" with the "adrenaline rush" seems to make my point above. [Note to self: communications revolutions, like armies, travel on their mental bellies.]

"By the way if, you're wondering where the Bluetooth name originally came from, it's named after a Danish Viking and King, Harald Bltand (translated as Bluetooth in English), who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Harald Bltand united and controlled Denmark and Norway (hence the inspiration on the name: uniting devices through Bluetooth). He got his name from his very dark hair which was unusual for Vikings, Bltand means dark complexion. However a more popular, (but less likely reason), was that Old Harald had a inclination towards eating Blueberries , so much so his teeth became stained with the colour, leaving Harald with a rather unique set of molars." [Source]

Even the name came from an impish impulse.