Page 292 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Mob le Med a | 1

In recent years, too, the camera function of cell phones has allowed vari-
ous forms of citizen journalism, or at least a contribution to the journalistic
process, with newsrooms soliciting and often using photos sent in real time
to them by everyday citizens. The most notable cases of cell phone journal-
ism was the stealth recoding of the assassination of Saddam Hussein, which
caused international embarrassment to the United States because of its sensitive
political nature and the perceived brutality of the recorded scene. Certainly, if
concerns over surveillance surround cell phones, the devices’ camera function
also allows a different form of surveillance, as users have employed cell phones
to record everything from unethical behavior by teachers, to police treatment
of protesters, to breaking news events. With YouTube and other social network-
ing sites allowing instantaneous and mass circulation, we may be entering an
era of do-it-yourself reality television and journalism, in which the cameras are
always potentially rolling.

ThE FuTurE oF moBiLE TEChnoLogy
iPods, introduced in 2001, are a distinctly twenty-first-century portable me-
dium and have none of the controversy surrounding cell phones. This is because
the iPod is fundamentally a one-way medium, the equivalent of the transistor
radio from half a century earlier, in which users listen to music obtained from
the Internet at times of their choosing. But iPods, handheld computers, cell
phones and now iPhones are becoming increasingly integrated in single devices
that do all the tasks of these previously distinct mobile media.
This enormous growth of mobile technology has taken a toll on older media,
ranging from public phone booths—disappearing rapidly from public places—
to paper telephone directories, neither of which is necessary when everyone has
a cell phone in his or her pocket. As advertisers seek space on every emerging
medium, shifting revenues to new media devices, critics worry about the intru-
sion of commercial messages into yet another personal space.
We can expect even more of this in the future, as older technologies continue
to merge into and be co-opted by new all-purpose mobile media—which may, at
some point, come to be implanted in our bodies, as the ultimate convenience or
intrusion, depending upon one’s point of view.

see also Blogosphere; Hypercommercialism; The iTunes Effect; Media Reform;
Online Digital Film and Television; Online Publishing; Paparazzi and Photo-
graphic Ethics; Surveillance and Privacy; User-Created Content and Audience
Participation.
Further reading: Agar, John. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. London:
Icon, 2005; Brin, David. The Transparent Society. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1998; Carlo,
George, and Martin Schram. Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age. New
York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 2001; Castells, Manuel, Mireia Fernandez-
Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey. Mobile Communication and Society:
A Global Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007; Glotz, Peter, and Stefan
Bertsch, eds. Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society. New Brunswick,