Bamblog

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On my way to Dresden, I made a quick stop at Erfurt and attended the ICA-preconference "After the mobile phone". The Get-together on Saturday was very nice (though the service at the restaurant "Paganini" had some potential for improvement), since the city also celebrated its "Krämerbrückenfest", a big festivity with medieval markets, music and food all over the historic town centre (which is beautiful by the way…).

On saturday morning I listened to a couple of talks, the most stimulating being the keynote by Richard Harper (of Microsoft’s Socio-Digital Systems Group) on ""After Talk and Sight: Communication after the Mobile". Amongst other things, he was talking about changing boundaries between private and public spaces - a topic which seems to be at the centre of a lot of current research on mobile communication. Another interesting concept, touching on aspects of relationship management, is that of the "intimate address book". The basic idea is that the owner of a phone can give special ’social rights’ to certain people in their addressbook - for example allowing them to always interrupt an ongoing call or (less obstrusively) send short and rather quiet sound messages (like a whispered ‘I love you’) while the partner is talking to another person. Yet another idea is to allow the caller to pick the ringtone that will be heard when s/he calls: Depending on my mood I might choose to call my girlfriend with a happy, sad or excited song.

Basically these ideas give the caller more options to control the initiation of the interaction - not only the ‘when to call’ but also the ‘how to frame the situation’. I’m not sure if people actually want to give away control over their phone in these ways, but it would at least lead to a lot of interesting and creative new practices - and a lot of potential pranks as well: Imagine a parent giving special rights to their kid who will then send an embarrasing ringtone (farting Jamba-Frogs or something the like) while mum or dad is in some public place….

In the afternoon I left for Dresden; I shared the train with a lot of Korean and French football fans on the way to their game in Leipzig. Again I was amazed at the friendly atmosphere between all those different nationalities. Only the group of middle-aged women with their rhinelandish (rhinish?) accent got on my nerves, because they kept on nagging and bragging about their respective illnesses.. ah well..

Sunday evening the DGPuK (the German Association of Communication Science), which held its own annual conference in connection with the ICA, had their get-together at the conference centre, so it was time for socializing with a lot of colleagues. A group of us ended up in a bar in downtown Dresden having a nightcup, and I was pretty glad that I didn’t have to give a presentation on monday morning..