Mobile phone ownership presents users with the opportunity to regularly update others of their actions through the digital documentation and circulation of their experiences. There is a sense that an event is not complete until it is shared through text, voice or images. An empirical study of 35 users aged 18-30, conducted for the Smart Internet Technology CRC [3] revealed that when members of a social group cannot be together physically, circulating digitised accounts of an activity becomes an authentic way to share the event. Furthermore, the study indicated that with the convergence of 3G mobile phones, digital cameras and the Internet, users are taking advantage of the best of all three communication channels to create, circulate, distribute and archive content in new and dynamic ways. Through this process users are creating the 'ideal digital self' by which to communicate socially. However, the effectiveness of these new practices is eroded by specific design and technological limitations, thus a distinct set of user problems emerged. This paper illustrates how the Trophy Room scenario, which is a 3G phone and web application, was developed to address the user needs identified in the study

Satchell, Christine

Singh, Supriya

Zic, John

English

Queensland University of Technology ePrints Archive

This is the author-manuscript version of this work - accessed from   http://eprints.qut.edu.au  Satchell, Christine and Singh, Supriya and Zic, John (2005) Creating the Ideal Digital Self: 3G Mobile Phone Content Production and Distribution as Social Communication. In Proceedings Workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing · Ubicomp 2005, Tokyo.  Copyright 2005 (please consult author)  Creating the Ideal Digital Self: 3G Mobile Phone Content Production and Distribution as Social Communication  Christine Satchell Smart Internet Technology CRC RMIT University christine.satchell@rmit.edu.au John Zic CSIRO ICT Centre (Formally SITCRC) john.zic@csiro.au  Supriya Singh Smart Internet Technology CRC RMIT University supriya.singh@rmit.edu.au     ABSTRACT Mobile phone ownership presents users with the opportunity to regularly update others of their actions through the digital documentation and circulation of their experiences. There is a sense that an event is not complete until it is shared through text, voice or images. An empirical study of 35 users aged 18-30,  conducted for the Smart Internet Technology CRC [3] revealed that when members of a social group cannot be together physically, circulating digitised accounts of an activity becomes an authentic way to share the event. Furthermore, the study indicated that with the convergence of 3G mobile phones, digital cameras and the Internet, users are taking advantage of the best of all three communication channels to create, circulate, distribute and archive content in new and dynamic ways. Through this process users are creating the ‘ideal digital self’ by which to communicate socially. However, the effectiveness of these new practices is eroded by specific design and technological limitations, thus a distinct set of user problems emerged. This paper illustrates how the Trophy Room scenario, which is a 3G phone and web application, was developed to address the user needs identified in the study.  Keywords 3G mobile phones, convergence, content production, social communication, digital identity.  1. CREATING THE ‘IDEAL DIGITAL SELF’ A central theme in recent study by Counts and Fellheimer [1] Howard et al [2] Satchell et al [3] and Taylor and Harper [4] is that the importance young users place on expressing their social identities in the real world extends into the digital world. This was true for the participants in the user study with 24 users reporting that interpreting or reading other peoples’ digital identities provided a means of identifying what the other person was like.  As one user stated, “Their synthesized persona is quite revealing.” Furthermore, users indicated that they derive pleasure from creating a digital identity that reveals the persona they wish to convey.  This indicates that creating a digital identity is not only about how much information can be restricted but also what is revealed. From a design perspective this suggests that identity should not only be thought of in terms of how anonymity can be enforced, rather, it should also be considered in terms of the new dynamic ways that mobile phones allow users to express themselves, especially in social contexts.  The user study found that young people are taking advantage of 3G telephone systems and the Internet to produce and merge bits of data to create their ‘ideal digital self’ through which they communicate socially. This means that instead of voice or text, users are communicating through a hybrid of still and moving images, sound-bytes, symbols and logos. A user described how he wanted his online identity to be a pastiche of pictures, text and sound:  I merge lots of different pieces of data to create the one single identity for a specific purpose. That is what is good about doing things on the Internet, why just be text when you can be multi-media. I have just started becoming multi-platform too because I have got a picture phone and I email from it. The way in which I come across is really important to me. The study revealed that for young people their choice of how they send and receive a communication message is one of the most potent means by which they can express their identity to their peers. Furthermore, the choice of technology could convey as much as the actual content of the message itself.  For 24 participants in the study the choice of different modes of technological communication is not just to facilitate different activities; their choice of the technology is an expression of their identity. Furthermore, because identity is multiple and shifting rather than singular and static, the way in which the users want to express themselves relates to the context of the exchange, the environment they are in and the nature of the relationship with the person they are communicating with. As one user stated, “The type of message you send says as much as what's in the message”. This was supported by another user who described not only how he placed a lot of importance on how he constructed his own digital identity but also on the way he judged others by their ‘digital appearance’.  If I meet someone and get their email address and then get an email from them and they have a really bad email address or the set of their email looks really bad or it is full of emoticons – than I will actually think less of them. I think that if you can’t get your digital identity right than you are not going to be much in real life. As users are spending more time in virtual environments they are beginning to put more effort into how they appear in digital space. The introduction of 3G phones and the increasing convergence of mobile phones and the Internet has increased the pleasure users get in mapping their real life identity into digital environments. However, with these technological advances comes a new emerging set of user problems.   2. USER PROBLEM: DESIGN SOLUTION 2.1 Protecting Content User Problem: Capturing, creating and distributing content, such as digital pictures plays an integral role in users’ social interaction. However, a major concern with sharing content is making sure that only the intended people see it.  This means that while users want to communicate through home produced content, they are often reluctant to just send a picture or video out because once you do that you loose control over its distribution.  Design Solution: The Trophy Room provides ‘art gallery’ features for content archiving and display, so visitors can come and browse selected images/sounds/text without being able to copy and re-distribute them. It resides on the user’s mobile phone, although it can also be accessed via the Internet.   2.2 Controlling Access User Problem: The study indicates the importance of providing a space where users can display their content on their own network however, users indicated that it would be undesirable for visitors to access all the content. For example, there would be different groups of people with whom users would want to share different photos. It emerged that the idea of  providing free access for all would be highly undesirable because photos were often specific to an event and only people that were at the event should have access to the photos.  Design Solution: An important part of the Trophy Room scenario is that ‘selected’ others would have access to it or parts of it and amongst these selected others different visitors would be granted different levels of access. A set of hierarchical rules and policies for transfer of content is put in place for users to manage what content they reveal to different groups of visitors, and whether or not particular content may be transferred or even revoked from a visitor to someone else. New technologies and applications based on the Trusted Computing Group’s TPM [5] hardware that is currently available on many PCs may be employed here to enable such features.  2.3 Wrapping the Message in Content (Digital Tokens) User Problem: Users in the study were employing content as a form of social communication, for example, embedding a picture in the bottom of every email instead of a signature. Furthermore, users indicated a desire for this paradigm to be turned around – so that the dominant part of the message is the picture itself embedded with the social message. “What I like about my new (3G) phone is that I can send a picture that I have taken and that’s the message. I can add text too if I want.” Essentially, the content becomes the ‘wrapper’ for the message. It can be seen how for the users in the study digital communication can now be more dynamic; instead of traditional voice or text, a message can be a combination of multimedia data embedded in a single message or ‘token’. However, with this increase in the use of multimedia content comes the difficulty of managing all the bits of data. Users reported that they are mixing more and more bits of multimedia content together in a single message, reminiscent of the way a DJ mixes music samples together into a single track.  However, there is a distinct problem arising in that users are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the bits of data that constitute their digital content collection. “The problem is I can’t find things when I need them. Where did I put that photo, or keep that song, or the last thing that I mixed together.” This indicates that users’ need a more centralised place to keep their multimedia content from which they can gather together the desired elements into a single message or ‘token’. Additionally, digital content can be quite sentimental and users in the study report that content stored on 3G phones is particularly vulnerable to loss. Three users reported that their phones crashed resulting in content being lost, while the handsets themselves are vulnerable to loss or theft. This indicates a need for a remote backup archive, and although users can currently back up content from 3G phones on their computer, this content it is not easily retrievable remotely via 3G phones.  Design Solution: The Trophy Room provides a place to archive and display images, this makes it a logical site for content distribution.  Users can then ‘cut and paste’ the desired bits of content into a central token which they can then SMS, MMS or email to selected friends. Furthermore, users would be able to have a choice over what the tokens looked like. For example, the token could be a text message embedded with pictures, or a picture embedded with sound bytes.  2.4 Content Production across Channels  User Problem: The convergence of 3G phones, digital cameras and the Internet provides users with new opportunities for capturing and sharing experiences. For example, taking photos with their phone, downloading them to their computers, editing them on their desktop and then distributing them for free via group email. This is significant because as Counts and Fellheimer [1]  point out, both channels have advantages and disadvantages. Users in the study reported that there were many instances when spontaneity was of the utmost importance and that instantaneous sharing was a priority. A major user problem emerged in that the ability to share experiences that they have produced themselves via text, images and sound bytes is limited by technical problems such as the incompatibility of handsets. For example, a homemade multimedia message produced on a NEC phone cannot be transmitted to a Nokia handset. These limitations forced users to resort to channels where they can download, for a fee, commercially produced content. This is significant because for the users in the study there were times when the fun of producing their own content was sharing it instantaneously with friends. If users have to wait until they get to their computer to share their content the moment may be lost. This does not mean that users don’t still consume content rather they resort to downloading commercially produced content instead. Thus the ability for users to be creative content producers is limited.  Design Solution: For multimedia content sharing as social communication to be successful content has to be seamlessly distributed across platforms so that experiences can be shared instantaneously. Ways in which content could be carried across platforms included the use of MPEG21 and the use of instant messaging and peer-to-peer systems such as Jabber and JXTA.   3.  CONCLUSION 3G phones provide users with the opportunity to become creative content producers; however, this practice is restricted by fears that the privacy of home produced content cannot be protected, archiving difficulties and finally limitations such as the incompatibility of handsets. Users reported that these fears and limitations force them to resort to channels where they can download, for a fee, commercially produced content.  The study revealed a series of user problems that if not addressed have the potential to render users as passive consumers of commercialized ring tones and celebrity pictures. However, if these needs are met by design solutions such as those indicated in the Trophy Room scenario, users can move past the limits of current technologies. 3G mobile phones are dynamic artifacts which, if implemented in the right way, will afford users with the ability to broadcast their own personal experiences in new and creative ways.  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the Smart Internet Technology CRC and Telstra for their support.  REFERENCES [1] Counts, Scott, and Fellheimer, Eric. 2004. Supporting social presence through lightweight photo sharing on and off the desktop. In Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems: ACM Press. [2] Howard, Steve.,  Carroll, Jennie., Murphy, John and Peck., Jane.  2002. Using 'endowed props' in scenario-based design. In Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: ACM Press. [3] Satchell, C. Singh, S. Zic, J. The Trophy Room. (2004). 3G Mobile Phone Content Production as Social Communication. Paper presented at OzCHI. Australia 2004. [4] Taylor, A. S., & Harper, R. (2002). The Gift of the Gab: a Design Oriented Sociology of Young People’s Use of Mobiles. Paper presented at the Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, CHI 2002. [5] The Trusted Computing Group TPM Specification, available from http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/     

Supporting social presence through lightweight photo sharing on and off the desktop.

The Gift of the Gab: a Design Oriented Sociology of Young People’s Use of Mobiles. Paper presented at the

The Trophy Room.

The Trusted Computing Group TPM Specification, available from http://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/

Using 'endowed props' in scenario-based design.

Creating the Ideal Digital Self: 3G Mobile Phone Content Production and Distribution as Social Communication

Mobile phone ownership presents users with the opportunity to regularly update others of their actions through the digital documentation and circulation of their experiences. There is a sense that an event is not complete until it is shared through text, voice or images. An empirical study of 35 users aged 18-30,  conducted for the Smart Internet Technology CRC [3] revealed that when members of a social group cannot be together physically, circulating digitised accounts of an activity becomes an authentic way to share the event. Furthermore, the study indicated that with the convergence of 3G mobile phones, digital cameras and the Internet, users are taking advantage of the best of all three communication channels to create, circulate, distribute and archive content in new and dynamic ways. Through this process users are creating the 'ideal digital self' by which to communicate socially. However, the effectiveness of these new practices is eroded by specific design and technological limitations, thus a distinct set of user problems emerged. This paper illustrates how the Trophy Room scenario, which is a 3G phone and web application, was developed to address the user needs identified in the study

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Mobile phone ownership presents users with the opportunity to regularly update others of their actions through the digital documentation and circulation of their experiences. There is a sense that an event is not complete until it is shared through text, voice or images. An empirical study of 35 users aged 18-30, conducted for the Smart Internet Technology CRC [3] revealed that when members of a social group cannot be together physically, circulating digitised accounts of an activity becomes an authentic way to share the event. Furthermore, the study indicated that with the convergence of 3G mobile phones, digital cameras and the Internet, users are taking advantage of the best of all three communication channels to create, circulate, distribute and archive content in new and dynamic ways. Through this process users are creating the &#039;ideal digital self&#039; by which to communicate socially. However, the effectiveness of these new practices is eroded by specific design and technological limitations, thus a distinct set of user problems emerged. This paper illustrates how the Trophy Room scenario, which is a 3G phone and web application, was developed to address the user needs identified in the study

Satchell, C

Zic, J

Singh, S

RMIT Research Repository

Creating the ideal digital self: 3G mobile phone content production and distribution as social communication

Creating the Ideal Digital Self: 3G Mobile Phone Content Production and Distribution as Social Communication

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