David d'Heilly

Q1. Viewing from your standpoint, cultivated through your fieldworks concerning the situations about media cultures all over the world, what is the uniqueness in how mobile media is used in Japan and what is the culture arising from it?

David d'Heilly

Japan is excellent for intelligent and detailed systems integration, but apparently totally lacking any ambition to create cross platform standards of any sort for anyone else. This is one of the things that is exceptionally cool about Japan, though -- the Japanese seem more interested in making really smart gadgets than they do in some form of politically leveraged world domination. Japan will always be an interesting and innovative technological culture because of its agnosticism and attention to detail and love of seeing how things can be put together in really clever ways. I guess the downside to that is that people like the Americans are forever going to be reassembling and repurposing these innovations and leveraging standards worldwide and making a lot more money at it.

I often wish that more of the japanese mobile and on-line worlds could be communicated in real time internationally. I'm forever explaining some cool japanese techno culture to my friends from outside of Japan, but a lot of times you need the whole context to understand. But at least, and this is the most important thing for me, there is an intensely vibrant mobile and on-line community here, and it's part of what keeps this place so smart and keeps me interested in being part of it.

Q2. You also act as a video journalist. How is the mobile media useful for your own activities? What skills or senses do we need to expand into communication using video, not the current conventional text and still images, for the individuals who use mobile media? Please let us know your comments on literacy in a broad sense.

Video journalism, which is such an expanded field these days, is still down to the same essential tasks:

• 1. Stand in front of something interesting (without changing it) and shoot.
• 2. Don't be a creep about how you treat that footage.

I was always interested in shooting video because it was a great memory device for showing me details of where I'd been. Editing video, for me, was always a way of remembering in high-res, so I think that the fact of smaller, smarter, higher resolution technology out there can only be a good thing for any creator.

I think that the big problem right now is the encroachment into our privacy, that whatever shreds of privacy we still have are endangered. I think that people should have the right to send and receive the information that they desire, but beyond that, there is the question of if anybody has the right to not be seen. I've read about machines that can make automatic cameras ineffective, basically by confusing their focal systems. I think that we're going to be seeing a lot of stealth technologies in the future. I don't like the way Bluetooth, for example, makes everyone so transparent. But as your question suggests, I guess a well developed sense of media literacy is about the only defense we individuals have right now.

Q3. What kind of points of contact will art and mobile media have? If you know of any interesting art projects using mobile media, please let us know.

As I said before, I think that Japan has a really fertile techno-literate culture. I work a lot in the arts, and the first rule is basically that art doesn't come from where we expect it to. So for mobile media, I think it's really a question of somebody smart doing something that clarifies a new field of activity, which could be anything from hardware modification to unexpected applications of how mobile technologies are used, and a lot of people who are thinking ahead of the curve will leap on that movement and take our mobile lifestyles to a whole new place. I doubt if I'm competitive enough to initiate something like that, but I certainly am keeping my eyes open, and ready to get behind it when it starts.

Q4. A great deal of trial and error has been made by companies and people related to the mobile media, such as cell phones and PDA, to conceptualize a society in which such media is being widely disseminated. What do you think that a near-future society where mobile media is widespread will be? Please let us know in as specific terms as possible.

I think that spectrum will shift to a two-tier model, of subscription based (probably hardware dependent) higher-resolution interactive digital content, and ubiquitous computing environments throughout urban areas that are more based on text and sound and low-res stuff. Basically, the lower frequencies that have traditionally been used by tv and radio will become what is now being called web 2.0 user generated content areas.

I suppose that people will probably carry portable information devices which function to access all of the information that they want to carry. (texts, music, video, chat, voice, etc.) They will also have home terminals, but information in the home will be more like toilets and refrigerators that help you plan your diet, for example. Architecture will typically have some form of power generation within it, and electricity will be shared like people now use broadband internet.

Q5. How is mobile media used in the country (region) where you live? Please let us know the characteristics that you have noticed through your daily life or problems that your society has faced. How do you utilize mobile media?

I live on the road mostly. I have offices in NY and Tokyo, but I spend a month or more in europe each year, and several weeks a year Asia as well... which is to say that I've been on some kind of pan-continental airline flight every few months of the past 20 years.

What you notice in these situations is how inane it is that telephones are not universally usable via the internet. National telephony carriers haven't added value to the telephone experience in decades, if ever. Let's get free of that.

Also, telephone hardware needs to be smarter, and it needs to be software based. Now everyone is excited about handsets that use UNIX or WINDOWS mobile or Mac OS, but within a few years the idea of doing anything else will seem absurd. We'll wonder why we suffered for so long under this bizarre opportunity cost: Phones need to be in permanent multi-task mode, like we are.