Mobile: the 7th wonder

The idea of mobile as a media platform is both very modern — by defin­i­tion, it couldn’t have been con­ceived of before about 1985 and colour screens didn’t arrive until the mid-​​90s. But it’s also some­thing that people seem to have been banging on about for ages, without anything in par­tic­ular hap­pening. At the start of every year, we’ve been reading “this year mobiles become an enter­tain­ment and inform­a­tion hub” in everyone’s list of pre­dic­tions. At the risk of ridicule in a year’s time, I think it’s going to happen in 2011.

It was ori­gin­ally delivered as part of the Nokia Conversations newsletter.

Mobile is widely recog­nised as being the seventh mass media — after the web, tele­vi­sion, cinema, radio, print and sound record­ings. It’s also thought to eclipse each of those because of its unique advantages.

Mobile is more widely spread than any other media. There’s already far more mobile phones in cir­cu­la­tion than there are tele­vi­sions or radios. Mobile phones are found in places where they’ve never seen a newspaper.

It’s also a personal and per­son­al­is­able media channel. Your phone and what appears on it is yours. Many people form intense attach­ments to their phones, as we’ve dis­cussed before. And it’s always with you and — pretty much — always switched on. Increasingly, we’re dis­cov­ering ways that mobile content can be con­tex­tu­al­ised to the time and location in which it’s being viewed.

So it’s very powerful stuff. Potentially.

Sadly, though, when you look at what is actually avail­able, the exper­i­ence leaves a lot to be desired. Sites that aren’t readable on mobile devices. Sites that are, but have achieved this by strip­ping out everything that was inter­esting about the site in the first place. Web-​​connected apps that take ages to load and don’t do as much as the websites they rep­licate. Even the really, really good mobile sites offer an exper­i­ence that’s way behind the other ways that exist to engage with the media they present.

Why’s this? Partly, it’s because mobile is still very new — people haven’t developed the grammar of mobile media in the same way that con­ven­tions have been honed over time for other media. It simply takes time and experimentation.

Partly, it’s because of device frag­ment­a­tion. A mobile site that’s made with the Nokia N8 in mind probably won’t look so good on your Nokia 3210, and vice-​​versa. And that’s without people’s bizarre insist­ence on occa­sion­ally buying models from other manufacturers…

And partly it’s because mobile is still treated as sec­ondary by media owners. They’ve made a website — and it took a lot of time and money. Rather than starting again for mobile, they’d much prefer to repur­pose what they’ve already got.

Exactly the same thing happened when the Web arrived. Media owners took their existing assets, be it words, sounds or pictures, and dumped them into HTML files. It’s taken twenty years for even a handful of websites to start taking advantage of the inter­ac­tion and per­son­al­isa­tion that the Web offers, let alone to start devel­oping inter­faces that people can actually use.

So will it take another twenty years for mobile media to develop its poten­tial? Maybe. But the Web has matured a lot faster than it took tele­vi­sion to mature — about 30 years. And tele­vi­sion matured a lot faster than cinema — 40 years. We’re getting more adapt­able, I think, and the inev­it­ab­ility and oppor­tunity presented by new media is becoming welcome rather than feared.

I think that mobile mass media will start reaching maturity in the next two to three years. Exciting times ahead.

image credit: Kapungo

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