information technology

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UDY: RESEARCHING MOBILE PHONE TECHNOLOGIES 1
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• Getting started
• Using Wikipedia
• Company websites
• Keeping your eyes and ears open

A common media debate concerns the impact of new media technologies. In this case study we will consider ways of accessing and using research material for such a debate. Depending on your course, you may be asked to give a short written answer to a relatively simple question or to explore a more complex set of questions in a longer essay in which you discuss your research methodologies. In both cases you will need to prepare by undertaking background research. Let’s begin by considering a relatively straightforward question:

Q How has the development of ‘text and image messaging’ on mobile phones affected the media industries and the media consumer?
• Academic research into phone use 8
• Googling 9
• References and further reading 10
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Getting started 14
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There are many ways to approach this kind of question
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(including using proprietary software packages to help
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you order your ideas) and you should use the way that
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suits you best. Here we will use a ‘spidogram’. The
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question is about ‘text and image messaging’, so we’ll
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put that in the centre. We want to know about its
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impact on two separate entities, industries/producers
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and consumers/users. In effect, the three are linked
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together in a kind of triangular relationship. Now we 24 can see a dynamic relationship between the three, 25 what will we need to do to explore how it works? 26
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audiences 28 history representation 29 definitions You may feel that you can get straight to grips with this question because you are probably one of those text and image messaging products 30
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consumers who have enjoyed using your mobile phone and have upgraded to get new features. However, if you want to answer the question effectively, you will need to stand back and ‘distance’ yourself from your own experience to make sure you take account of the wider question. You can then use what you know in conjunction with what you find.

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synergies institution 33
Figure 10.6 Spidergram of producers, consumers and texting. 34
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A definition of each of the three would be useful as 37 well as some further understanding of media industries 38
(ownership) and media consumers (how do we 39 describe/classify them?). The relationship will have 40 developed over time so we need to consider its 41
‘history’. We would expect all our key concepts to be 42
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important in some way so it would be good to check through ‘representation’, ‘audience’, ‘institution’, etc.
Our final spidogram (Figure 10.6) will give us a sense of the possible ground to cover. Some concepts may be less important than others, but it is useful to have a checklist to make sure we don’t miss any obvious points. Let’s look at how we might pursue one or two of these. We might be texting every day, but do we know what kind of technology it is, when it started and how it developed? We will need a workable definition of terms. Using Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a good starting point for definitions.
Type into the search box on
Wikipedia’s front page (i.e. the words inside the symbols). You should be taken to the page shown in
Figure 10.7. It won’t necessarily look the same on your computer because we have selected a ‘skin’ - a page design - that we find easier to read, but it should contain the same information. You could also get there by typing . Of course, Wikipedia is always being updated, so the page might change over time.
Even so, we can be confident it will give us some starting points.

The page tells us that the official term for texting is SMS (short message service) and it offers links to ‘mobile phones’ and to ‘GSM’ (global system for mobile communications) and ‘3G’ (third generation mobile phone technology) - we’ll decide if we want to pursue these a little later. It also suggests that the first text message was sent in 1992 to a phone on a
Vodafone network. The rest of the Wikipedia entry tells us something about which country has the most frequent ‘texters’ (Singapore) and about the swift growth of a valuable business. In 2004, there were
500 billion texts sent worldwide, a business worth around $50 billion. Several other related technologies are mentioned as well as some indication of news stories involving text messages. At the bottom of the page we find references and links, to both other
Wikipedia pages and to external sites. It might be useful at this point to follow the link for MMS
(multimedia messaging system). This reveals that there is a second set of technologies associated with sending images and video via mobile phones.
We need at this stage to summarise some of our findings: • ‘Text messaging’ and ‘image messaging’ are two separate technologies known as SMS and MMS.
• They work on widely available mobile phone systems such as GSM (Global System for Mobile

Figure 10.7 Wikipedia page
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texting).

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Communications) - digital telephony systems available worldwide.
• The idea of ‘messaging’ dates back to at least 1992.
• It involves telephone companies such as Vodafone.
• Messaging is a very widespread activity that has had impact on public and private life.
These are all important areas of research which refer to our original question. We haven’t yet looked at the history of the technology (i.e. from 2G to 3G) and we could make a decision at this point as to how much detail we need on both the history and the nature of the technology and its protocols (how it is to be used).
You will often have to make a decision like this since you could spend all your time reading background material and amassing more and more detail, without actually developing an argument and answering the question. Here, we will simply note that 2G technologies operating in GSM systems enabled the spread of the practices of texting and image messaging that the question requires us to discuss. We’ll now focus on:
• the telephone companies (‘telcos’) - which companies, how do they hope to make profits, how are their activities regulated?
We could continue to explore Wikipedia, but a better bet may be to use selected specialist websites associated with the telcos and the news organisations which report on consumer behaviour. We also need to bear in mind that we are interested in ‘messaging’ as a media form. This means that we are thinking about mobile phones as a new form of distributing and displaying both traditional media texts and ‘new media’
(‘texting’ could itself be described as new media).

Company websites
UK readers will know about most local phone service providers and it shouldn’t take long to find two of the biggest, O2 and Vodafone.
Vodafone’s website is at www.vodafone.co.uk and O2’s at www.o2.com (but don’t forget they may change website details). Just type or

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into any search engine and the company website 1 should come up in the first few hits. Both websites 2 have a similar design and the first question is where 3 to look to find some useful material. The sites most 4 likely to appear on search lists are ‘consumer sites’, 5 designed to give information and persuade potential 6 customers to sign up with the provider. A good start 7 for us might be to look at the menu for an ‘About us’ 8 or ‘About this site’ entry. This will often lead to a 9 corporate site where you can find details of the 10 ownership of the company, the size of its operation 11 and possibly a ‘Media Centre’ with press releases 12 announcing new products or services or changes in 13 the business operation. On these two websites there 14 is a great deal of information. The Vodafone site tells 15 us that in 2005 there are nearly 50 million mobile 16 phones in the UK and that Vodafone has 14.6 million 17 customers. O2 claims 14.38 million so we know that 18 we have found two of the biggest companies. What 19 else do we learn about the mobile telephony business? 20
• Both companies list their operations in other 21 countries - Vodafone has operations in ‘27 22 countries, across five continents’, making it a 23 global player (see comments on other similar 24 companies such as Telefónica in ‘Case study: 25
The media majors’. 26
• The major announcement about technology 27 involves the move to ‘3G’ and the new media 28 services this will make available. 29
Vodafone’s site provides a very sophisticated ‘flash’ 30 presentation which creates a future world of science 31 fiction-like communication. This will give us plenty of 32 ideas that we could follow up. Let’s stick with just two 33 aspects of this for a moment: 34
• How do the telcos relate to the media industries? 35
• Why are they discussing 3G? 36
If we go back to Wikipedia, we can find out pretty 37 quickly that O2 began life as part of BT, once British 38
Telecom, a public sector corporation that was 39
‘privatised’ in 1984. O2 is part of the much wider 40 process described in Chapter 7 and ‘Case study: The 41 media majors’, in which the newly privatised telcos 42
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1 started to look for investment opportunities in new
2 goods and services. Vodafone, on the other hand, was
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4 first licences to operate mobile phones in the UK in
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6 became independent in 1991 and has grown very
7 quickly through mergers and acquisitions. The
8 ‘application for licences’ refers to the UK situation
9 where a government regulator grants access to radio
10 frequencies used for all kinds of services. You could
11 follow this line of enquiry through Wikipedia, but it’s
12 easier just to ‘Google’ for .
13 This produces thousands of ‘hits’ but the first few are
14 likely to show in the brief description that Ofcom is
15 the UK regulator.
16 You might just be able to see from Figure 10.8 that
17 it is helpful if your browser has a ‘tab’ facility. In this
18 exercise we have used a new tab for Wikipedia, O2,
19 Vodafone and Google, so we can easily select the
20 site we need without having to trawl back through
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22 We can follow the Google link to Ofcom’s website
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25 etc., since Ofcom is now the UK’s ‘super regulator’
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looking after media as well as telephone services. Of course we don’t need to use the internet to make the connection between media and telephony via
Ofcom. The index in a book like this one will take us to appropriate chapters and case studies. So what is the important connection? Presumably it concerns G3, since G3 licences were the last to be awarded. If we return to O2’s site, we can find a press release announcing a trial in which sixteen television channels will provide material to download to O2 customers in Oxford. The companies’ websites will always want to promote their new services, but you should cross-reference what the companies say with
Google searches for comments by industry analysts
(and possibly ‘users’) to get a more distanced view on the claims being made.

Progress review
It is good practice to stop your research at regular intervals and review what you have discovered. So far, we have a rough outline of the developement of the technology for texting and image messaging. We know that the companies involved were formed as part of the ‘deregulation and privatisation’ of utilities in the 1980s and that they grew rapidly with the take-up of these new technologies. They are now hoping to capitalise on the next generation of phone technologies by selling media services such as video, digital music, etc. We seem to have established a basic argument around one side of the original question, but what do we know about phone users? This might be more difficult to research since material is unlikely to be collected on just one or two websites.

Keeping your eyes and ears open
You can find a great deal of information by intelligent internet searching, but you should use other starting points as well. In terms of the use of mobile phones, we might want to address questions of representation.
Who uses phones and for what purposes? How can

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we tie this to media use? Here are two examples of interesting observations that appeared in UK media in 2005.
• Mobile phones save lives and promote small businesses in Africa.
• ‘Texting’ is the most popular phone service for
‘teens’ - to the dismay of service providers who hope to sell much more lucrative services.
The first of these stories was broadcast on Radio 4’s
In Business programme (9 June 2005) - not perhaps the station most listened to by readers of this book, but it is important to note relevant stories whenever you hear them and try to check back to sources. (In fact, the importance of texting in Africa came through strongly on Radio 4’s ‘Africa Day’ in May 2005 when people from all over Africa were contacting the BBC.)
BBC broadcasts can often be tracked down via the
BBC website on www.bbc.co.uk, where you can find a programme home page. The programme in this case was actually ‘podcast’ and downloadable as an mp3 file.
Searching for the programme via Google also turned up this page: www.textually.org/textually/archives/ cat_mobile_phone_projects_third_world.htm. There are links to similar stories around the world that all refer to the same basic point. People in many parts of Africa, where there is a limited electricity supply, a lack of ‘landlines’ for telecommunications, etc., have been excluded from the supposed ‘global village’ and all that means in terms of telecomms and media (the ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor - see Chapter 15). To put landlines or any other physical infrastructure in place would be very expensive, but a wireless mobile phone system means much easier access. In Kenya the number of telephone users has increased dramatically since a mobile company started a network in 2001. Safari.com is a Kenyan company owned by Vodafone (40 per cent) and Kenya’s state- owned Telcom Kenya (60 per cent). Mobile users far outnumber those with landlines. The image of African street markets in which traders and customers are exchanging information about prices by mobile phone is not one we think of in the West. Growth is now

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actually faster in the rural areas than in the cities, since 1 people really need communication technology to live - 2 it isn’t a luxury related to extra consumer spending. 3
This is an interesting story, but is it relevant to media 4 use? We might need to think about it as an example of 5 the ways in which ‘users’ can change the perceptions 6 of industry planners. It could also be important for 7 broadcasters and other media producers trying to 8 reach audiences scattered across large countries with 9 a poor communications infrastructure. Let’s consider 10 the second story and see if there is a link. 11
A report on texting by teens worldwide was 12 used as the basis for an article in the Guardian by 13
Natalie Hanman (9 June 2005). The original report, 14 the Youth Report, came from: www.w2forum.com/ 15 view/mobileyouth_2005_report and included some 16 interesting facts and figures: 17
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Much to the chagrin of operators keen to see 19 early adopters of mobile technology hooked 20 on more lucrative functions, such as picture 21 messaging (MMS), mobile music and mobile 22 internet, teenagers are keeping things simple - 23 and cheap. . . . Among those teens who text the 24 most, boys outnumber girls by 3:1. 25
. . . After texting, the next most popular 26 mobile tool for teenagers - particularly girls in 27 their mid-teens - is taking photographs. But 28 instead of sharing these photos by sending a 29 picture message (MMS), young girls prefer the 30 cheaper option of comparing them in person. 31
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These findings question some of the stereotypes that 33 might exist (i.e. that girls text most) and they point to 34 a crucial problem for the telcos who have paid very 35 dearly for 3G licences (Chancellor Gordon Brown 36 auctioned these licences in 2003 and made a 37 considerable sum for HM Treasury). They hoped to 38 target the traditional ‘early adopters’ of new 39 technologies (usually older males with high incomes) 40 but instead are servicing younger consumers who 41 won’t pay for the expensive aspects of the service. 42
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ACTIVITY 1 0 . 5

Survey phone users
• Find out which of your friends have 3G phones and what they are prepared to pay for.
• Try and ask the same question of people in different age/gender groups.
• What conclusions do you draw from your findings?

Academic research into phone use
These two stories throw up leads which could be followed up by reference to other chapters in this book and other books and journals. Phone use has clearly changed dramatically since the mid-1990s. The new services and the new ways ‘consumers’ have discovered to use their phones have created new ‘media forms’. We can demonstrate:
• the convergence of technologies and organisations which exploit them in combined telecommunications and media industries
• phone use as an integral part of certain media texts - reality TV, gameshows, etc.
• new media products - streaming video, ringtones, etc.
We can safely assume that market research
(e.g. the Youth Report discussed above) and academic research is being undertaken into these developments.
How do we access this? Unfortunately, much of the research may be out of our reach because as valuable market data it is expensive to purchase directly or as part of a subscription. We might only be able to read headlines or summaries. But these will still be useful as starting points or guides. Academic research is more accessible, but even here there will be restrictions as to what is available to all users over the internet. Your college library should provide you with a selection of books and journals. Where will you look for recent publications which might provide source material? You could search through subject catalogues

looking for telephone technologies, telephone usage, etc. You could browse library shelves covering
‘communications industries’, ‘sociology of mass communications’, etc. (Check the Dewey Classification
System to find where these might be.) And you could look to see which academic journals and trade publications your reference library stocks. In university libraries these holdings should be extensive and you may also be able to use research databases which give you access to journal articles online. Access to these services is restricted so we can’t expect all readers to be able to use them. Instead, we’ll look at more limited searches freely available via the internet. FindArticles is an American web portal at www.findarticles.com. Its ‘front page’ offers the possibility of searching for ‘free articles’ in various categories or from a general search box. The articles in question come from general interest magazines, academic journals and trade publications - all with some kind of reputation as credible sources. When we searched on the site we found these articles quite quickly using search terms such as and :

‘Newspapers See Danger in Text Messaging’ eWEEK, May 2004, BAGNAIA, Italy (AP)

International editors and publishers warned
Friday that nontraditional communications - such as cell phone text messages - are rapidly outflanking radio, television, and print media because of their immediacy and proximity to the public. (www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_zdewk/is_200405/ai_n9519940) ‘Media: the rise of the people’s news’
David Edwards, New Statesman, 24 May 2004

Digital and internet-based technologies make participants in any event potentially irrefutable witnesses to what really happened. Backed up by

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websites and bloggers around the world, these
‘citizen reporters’ now represent a significant challenge to the compromised intermediaries of corporate journalism.’
(www.findarticles.com/p/articles/
mi_m0FQP/is_4689_133/ai_n6156736)

Both these articles refer directly to the new role of phone technologies in relation to news - in the first case, gaining access to news and in the second to the possibility that images taken on mobile phones by members of the public could challenge traditional reporting (the article deals with stories about the torture of Iraqi suspects by US military personnel).
This raises the question of whether we should be searching more widely for material on the internet - even if we must expect to question the authenticity of our findings. We’ll conclude our research by thinking a little more about using a search engine such as
Google.

THE MEDIA STUDENT ’S BOOK

Figure 10.9 Page of Google hits for ‘media studies’ ‘mobile phone’.

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Googling
Google is a general search engine or ‘crawler’. Rather a speedy crawler, it finds keywords on millions of pages in a few seconds. Enter in
Google’s search box and it will produce more than 65 million ‘hits’. Likewise, is not very useful with 21 million hits, most of which are irrelevant for our purposes. We can narrow the focus of the search with some simple techniques. Putting double quote marks around a phrase will search for the specific phrase, so produces a slightly more manageable list as we can see in Figure 10.9. The first few hits all look as if they could be helpful and in fact the second entry on the list is written by a UK media teacher specifically for AS/A2 media studies students. (You might wonder why, given the dominance of American websites, there are no US hits here. The reasons are straightforward
- American usage is ‘cell phone’ rather than ‘mobile phone’. Also, use of cell phones is less than in Europe

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We can also limit searches to ‘UK sites only’. 24
It looks as if our decision to use these phrases in 25 quotes will prove productive. But although the web 26 pages look useful at first glance, we still have plenty 27 of work to do and we won’t always be so lucky. 28
Depending on the keywords entered, you could be 29 faced with sites in other languages and also commercial 30 sites selling phones or media studies textbooks. You 31 can avoid some of this by using Google’s advanced 32 search facilities. Figure 10.10 shows how to limit the 33 search to English-language sites, specifically university 34 or college sites within the past year - effectively 35 filtering out many irrelevant hits and reducing the 36 results to 244, as shown in Figure 10.11. 37
You should be able to find something useful in 38 these results - the listing from Swansea University 39 actually takes you to a page advising you how to carry 40 out research, just as this case study does. The danger 41 of getting too wrapped up in your research is that you 42
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Figure 10.10 Google Advanced Search facilities. will go off into interesting tangents, spending time exploring all the fascinating things that people do with mobile phones. Don’t forget your original research question. Focus on what the question asks for and then find one or two good examples (mini case studies?) you can explore in more detail, using
Google’s Advanced Search facilities and seeking out library resources to complement what you find on the internet. Make sure you keep track of all your references and you should have enough material to write your essay.

References and further reading
For this case study, you should simply explore the various research resources cited and make sure that you know how to make the best use of them.
Figure 10.11 Revised page of Google hits.

ACTIVITY 1 0 . 6

Essay planning
Outline an essay plan for the initial question given at the beginning of this case study.
Use the research materials referenced here and decide which lines of research you would follow.

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References: and further reading For this case study, you should simply explore the various research resources cited and make sure that you know how to make the best use of them. Figure 10.11 Revised page of Google hits. ACTIVITY 1 0 . 6 Essay planning Outline an essay plan for the initial question given at the beginning of this case study. Use the research materials referenced here and decide which lines of research you would follow. 357