Moblogging Projects

Submitted by schwartz on February 13, 2006 - 11:56am

Moblogging is an instant, mobile form of blogging by means of smart phones and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Users send the text, imagery, audio, and/or video they capture using their phones to a special address. MMS software transforms that digital material into a blog on a special site. For more information on moblogs, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblog

Examples of moblogs:

http://hiptop.bedope.com/

Examples of moblogs:

http://talkingpics.busythumbs.com/

I designed the following two moblogging projects for my Spring 2006 RHE309M class:

Choose one of the below projects (or make up your own). Use at least two modes of communication, i.e., linguistic, visual, and/or aural. Write at least 750 words of text justifying your project from a rhetorical standpoint, a "remediation" standpoint, and a "materiality of writing" standpoint.

1. Digital Curation

Theory

A look at three examples of mobile composition should prove useful for instructors seeking to move student research, writing, and publication from the conventional spaces of composition to the site of the object. The first example involves the use of camera phones to create a museum of everyday life. Museums today penetrate everyday life through their use of web and mobile technologies to make their cultural and educational resources available to remote audiences. Reversing Sirc’s scenario of a “museum without walls,” where “the outside is let inside,” they let the inside outside. The problem, argues Konstantinos Arvanitis of the University of Leicester’s Department of Museum Studies, is that this use of new media fails to respond to the needs of what Eilean Hooper-Greenhill calls the “post-museum,” “a site of mutuality, where knowledge is constructed, rather than transmitted,” through a collaboration between curators and audiences (2005, p. 3). As part of his doctoral research, Arvanitis asked ten camera phone owners to capture and interpret through MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) three archaeological monuments in Thessaloniki, Greece. The goal of the study was to access and reveal the meanings that people make through their everyday encounters with ancient monuments. More broadly, the study aimed “to bring the voices [and objects] of the everyday into the museum” in order to create a “museum outside walls” (pp. 3, 7).

The MMS image-texts showed the extent to which the monuments had become integrated into the scenery of everyday life: values such as pedestrian convenience and political statement often overruled concern for the monuments’ cultural and historical significance. By collecting, preserving, and interpreting objects with a view to exhibiting them in the museum, the participants in Arvanitis’ study assumed the role of curators. But they differed from traditional curators in several important respects, thereby posing an alternative to the institutional discourse of the museum. Whereas the curator’s captions, wall texts, brochures, and catalogues center on exhibited objects, the MMS image-texts focused on their authors’ interactions with monuments in their original surroundings. Whereas the curator produces interpretive materials in an office or library, the authors composed their messages in the presence of the monuments. Meanwhile, their audience, Arvanitis, was absent from the museological sites, for recipients of MMS messages can view them online or with a compatible mobile device. Both the authors and the audience were mobile. Just as Arvanitis recuperated the curator for his post-museum purpose, writing instructors can appropriate the everyday curator as a figure for their own mobile composition assignments.

Further Reading

Arvanitis, Konstantinos. “Museums outside walls: Mobile media and the Museum in the
Everyday.” In Pedro Isaias, Carmel Borg, Piet Kommers & Philip Bonanno (Ed.), Mobile
Learning 2005 (pp. 251-255). Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference, 28-30
June 2005, Qawra, Malta. Retrieved November 14, 2005, from the World Wide Web:
http://www.le.ac.uk/museumstudies/ka43/kostas/publications.htm.

Project Details

Go out and find a museum-worthy object that belongs in a museum owing to its historic, artistic, or scientific value. Curate the object using text, imagery, and, if possible, audio and video. You may use any kind of camera: video camera, camera phone, digital camera, or film camera. If you use a video camera, make a video. If you use a film camera (even a disposable one), take it to CVS Pharmacy and get the images placed on a CD-ROM or DVD. If you use a digital or film camera, make a website. If you use a camera phone, make a moblog (mobile blog). To make a moblog, first get an MMS account with your phone company, set up a moblog (mobile blog) account, and send your digital curation material to your moblog address. Some moblog services are free; e.g., http://www.busythumbs.com. The free moblogs, however, may not allow you to include audio and video. If you want to include audio and video, you can send your message to my email address. For details about MMS, see http://www.mobilegprs.com/mmsfaq.asp#1.2.

The project’s rhetorical goal is to access and reveal the meaning that you make through your encounter with the object. What is the object? Where is it located? What are your immediate physical and emotional responses to the object? What is its immediate physical context? What are its broader historical, cultural, social, and economic contexts? How do these contexts shape its meaning? What was the object’s original function? Is it still serving that function? How has its meaning changed over time? For what audience was it originally intended? What new audiences has it acquired? How do these audiences help to construct its meaning? Which audiences do you have in mind for your digital museum?

Grading Criteria

Your project will be graded on how well you coordinate the multimodal elements (imagery, text, video, and/or audio) to achieve the above rhetorical goal and answer the above questions.

3. Journalist Moblog

Theory

The third example of mobile composition focuses on the moblog, a blend of mobile and blog. A moblog consists of text, photos, and/or video posted from a mobile device. The term is sometimes pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable – MOBlog – out of affinity with the ideas about social self-organization developed in Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs (2002). Rheingold predicted that advances in mobile technology would soon give everyone the tools to publish independent reports of news events in real time directly on the Web and other platforms: “Imagine the power of the Rodney King video multiplied by the power of Napster. . . . Putting video cameras and high-speed Net connections in telephones, however, moves blogging into the streets. By the time this book is published, I’m confident that street bloggers will have constructed a worldwide culture” (pp. 168-69). The proliferation of moblogs shows that the culture of street bloggers that Rheingold anticipated has sprung up in the real world. But these moblogs tend to focus on items of personal rather than public interest; e.g., photos of friends, the highway, the beach, sprinkled with links to other blogs. Since inputting large amounts of text is a task better suited to keypads and styluses, what text they contain is usually brief. Resembling an album of self-generated postcards, the typical moblog is a “record of travels in the world” (Justin Hall, 2005) characterized by quotidian details and superficial material interactions.

Thus the question remains whether journalism will be democratized by street bloggers and other practitioners of peer-to-peer news reporting. That is, whether mobloggers will form “smart mobs,” crowds of mobile technology users swarming to the same location in blogspace and/or physical space to break important news in real time. According to Rheingold, the answer is being formed today. “The important remaining ingredient of a truly democratized electronic newsgathering is . . . a species of literacy – widespread knowledge of how to use these tools to produce news stories that are attention-getting, non-trivial, and credible” (Rheingold, 2003). Like all blogs, moblogs are both collaborative (audiences often double as authors) and accretive (the process is the product). But mobloggers are unique in that they publish at the location of the object or, in Rheingold’s citizen-reporter scenario, the news event. Journalistic moblogs aspire to provoke as well as to inform. They promise an alternative to the institutional discourse of news media. Rheingold recuperates the street reporter and the mob in his forecast of mobile phone users converging on the spot to cover important news while (and even before) it happens. Writing instructors can appropriate them as figures for mobile composition.

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