Etienne Barral

Q1. You are a French man but quite knowledgeable of Japanese subcultures. Please let us know what if anything you feel or think about daily regarding the relationships between the subcultures and mobile media.

Etienne Barral

I am expecting some kind of interactivity between the virtual avatar of an individual and his/her real self. Mobile devices will eventually allow users to reconcile their real world existence with their virtual avatar. Until now, your virtual self is only "alive" when you are online, in front of a computer. In a not so distant future, users will be able to take their avatar wherever they go. The avatar will nourish the virtual world with real world experiences (pictures taken with the handheld device sent to other avatars instead of being sent to friends and family). The socialization process will have to take into account not only real world presence but avatars being taken around in real world surroundings.

Japan stands at the hedge in terms of mobile literacy and variety of functions offered through hand-held devices. The availability of MIXI on the user cellphone is the very first step of an attempt to connect a member of a virtual community (MIXI) to the real world through a hand-held device. This gives us a hint of what could become Second Life 2.0.

Once Second Life will be widely available in Japan, we could envision flash-generated content where the user's avatar will "inhabit" the cellphone version of Second Life so that the real life user will be able to interact with the virtual world anywhere and anytime.

The same kind of mobile content can be applied to World of Warcraft or any MMORG to make a truly 24 hours experience for the gamer, even outside his/her playing environment.

The possibilities of interaction between virtual game worlds, map-generated worlds (Google earth) and the real world for the user or his/her avatar are endless. I can foresee virtual gatherings of fans to a semi-real world event or, on the contrary, real world gathering of avatars from a game, meeting at Shibuya Station or Akihabara for a on/off virtual event.

Q2. Consumer generated media (CGM), such as blogging, Wiki and SNS, seems to encourage an endless and open style of expression through participation and conversations among many people in a society whose main stream of expression was the conventional media, like a package completed by a few people. These expression styles seem to have common features with communities or participation developed by otaku people. Meanwhile, it is true that there are various problems for contents born from such interpersonal expressions, like reliability and intellectual property rights of information. In an age where users themselves generate contents, what aspect will the culture have?

The intellectual property rights of information as we know it now is obsolete and cannot withstand the appetite for content of users, sharing information as a tool for communication. While speech and text has historically been the main communication tools, communication nowadays is also visual and audio based. People not only share thoughts through language but exchange visual and audio experiences to reinforce their peer-binding. The success of MySpace and YouTube are good examples of this worldwide trend. But not everyone is a Mozart or a Picasso. Audio and visual communication must not be the sole prerogative of a music literate elite or gifted visual artists. In a era of visual communication, every user should be allowed to express his/her personality through the borrowing/re-appropriation of works of art created by others. Peer binding through the common usage of a well known creative work (parody of a famous character such as Pikachu or Evangelion) should be tolerated by media conglomerates as a new form of expression rather than being considered and sued as illegal use of copyrighted content.

I personally believe that copyright protection is going too far. Technology allows to trace copyright ownership down to the very end-user. But should every sound and image that surrounds us in our daily lives be subject to copyright fees whenever used as reference or as communication tools. Words which are then put into sentences to express ourselves are not subject to copyrights. Why should images and sound, which are now part of our communication system, be treated differently? There is a duplicity from copyrights owners (big media corporations) who brainwash consumers on a daily basis with non-solicited publicity (TV CM, posters, CM Trucks, large Panels displays at busy crossroads) that can be considered real-life spam techniques, and the same copyrights owners going after individuals who used so-called copyrighted material to illustrate their blog or create a fan magazine (dojinshi).

Nonetheless, a new form of gentleman's agreement between users and artists or owners of copyrighted material has to be defined so that copyrighted content can be widely available to users for them to mix this content within their own production. Micro-payment might be the only solution to pay on an individual basis the copyright owner. Instead of adding DRM-type of code inside a song or a movie to control its usage on digital devices and prevent "illegal" copying, companies should consider a micro-payment system encoded into the copyrighted content on a pay-per-usage basis. Thus, whenever using a copyrighted-image to illustrate one's blog or amateur-site, a small fee would be paid automatically to the content owner, depending on the traffic of the blog, or a percentage of the affiliation revenues earned by the blog would be redistributed to the original content owners. This is basically the idea developed by Ted Nelson under the notion of transcopyright.

As far as reliability of the information is concerned, media-literacy is the key. The general public has to understand the need to cross-check informations and learn how to rate reliability of information according to sources. I personally would favor a search system that not only rate information according to its popularity (Google system) but also takes into account it's potential reliability. The problem is to define the educated authority able to rate the reliability of any content, in an age where information is ubiquitous and instantaneous.

Q3. This is related to the previous question, but if media with a high level of user participation, especially mobile media, would function as a tool for expression or creation by people, what kind of new literacy will rise within that? What do you think that education should be for people to acquire such new literacy?

I believe the question is now how to stay focused without being over-flooded by information and content. The real problem is less to gain access to information but rather how to gain instant access to relevant and coordinated information. Googling is becoming less and less relevant because everyone publishes about everything. It is all the less relevant since paying sponsors can outdo every other information provider thanks to their financial incentives. The cult of instantaneity makes one month old information obsolete even though it might still be the most relevant over a said topic. Everyone is generating media but no one is able to listen anymore, let alone to remember. It is like being in a concert hall with everyone in the public playing his/her own partition, without paying attention to Mozart playing on stage. Or maybe Mozart is in the audience, part of the cacophony as everyone else, but nobody is able to notice his talent anymore. Corporations are paying to get their artists onstage, talented or not, but no one is listening to them anymore either (Commercial Television as it is known today is probably a moribund media because it does not allow user-generated content nor interaction, which is the only experience the individual is interested in nowadays). Everyone is so much preoccupied by the self-rewarding experience of creating a blog that no one has the time to grasp the bigger picture. Digital Tools are so readily available that everyone has the fantasy to become Mozart or Picasso while nobody knows how to recognize real talent anymore. After literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, the most needed form of education nowadays might be "content literacy" and "time-literacy" so that people can not only distinguish "valuable" content but also value experiences over time, without being obsessed by instantaneous gratification.

Unfortunately, much as for sexual education, everyone is left in the dark as far as media literacy and future forms of content literacy are concerned. It is up to the individual to figure out how to manage these new content generating devices, through a trial and error process. Young people might seem the most gifted to make use of these new medias, but maybe are they in fact the most in need of an education to learn the grammar of communication, as much as they are taught in schools the basics of verbal and written language. Young people don't have the cultural background to put in perspective the capacities bestowed to them through their communication mobile tools. They have to invent a new grammar, new codes, all on their own and their cultural referent is now less their immediate social circle (family, school mates, local community) than people met online through mobile media. Their online communication is becoming more relevant than their real-life conversation, and interaction between virtual avatars might have more importance than skin-ship within their real-world community. My intention is not to seem overly conservative about this phenomenon but rather to identify the needs for a compromise. An interesting experience is actually gaining ground in Paris, France, focusing both on online networking and real-life geographical communities. People having the same interests can discover online the existence of similarly minded neighbors to get together and interact both online and offline. This might be the answer to an otherwise quite schizophrenic future.

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.

While (almost) everyone would agree nowadays that mobile media are an essential of our daily life, an extension of our selves lost in mega-urban world, I'd like to stress out here the need to guarantee users of their anonymous persona, even while using mobile devices. Technology makes it easy for the end-user to gather relevant informations through his/her mobile device, which is helping him/her to find his/her way in our mega-mazes.

But this handy device comes with a price: a perceived feeling of uneasiness of being continuously "traced" days-in - days-out. One does not have to be a crook nor a thief to feel this constant "bar-code" society pressure. One may wish to remain anonymous for daily activities, something that cannot be guaranteed anymore with our ever-stronger reliance to mobile devices.

In Japan, the perception of added-security is stronger than the feeling of loss of liberty, but in Europe or other western societies, end-users are not ready yet to rely on any all-mighty mobile device that would memorize and trace every of their whereabouts. Whenever the potential of these mobile devices are discussed in France, for example, everyone brings into the discussion the "prophetic" (?) novel "1984" from renowned British novelist George Orwell. From a practical point of view, mobile device makers should develop devices with several levels of anonymity, allowing the user to choose how far he/she wishes to be traced. People who don't mind being targets of online marketing could receive incentives in exchange for the gathering of their daily purchase routine while anonymity-conscious people could still use the digital way of life without feeling the perceived-threat of being traced. Until such an anonymous device is developed, allowing the same level of anonymous transaction as bills and coins, one cannot hope for a nation-wide spread of mobile devices.

Another issue pertaining to the ubiquitous model of a mobile device based society is how to guarantee users of their easy access to stored information in case of a theft or a failure of the mobile device. Real world examples in Japan show it is actually cumbersome to manage these data if the user's mobile device becomes temporarily or definitively unavailable. This issue has to be addressed to further promote a mobile device based ubiquitous society.

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?

In France, mobile devices are basically divided actually into two types of products: regular cellphones and a few PDA with cellphones and internet browsing functions like Blackberry, dedicated to the high end business elite.

Average users mainly use their cellphones to make phone calls, take pictures, listen to music or watch videos, and send SMS. Regular e-mail through cellphones is not a common use of cellphones in France, most users are satisfied with the 160 characters limitation of SMS messages. i-mode type of services were introduced rather late (November 2002) and are still only a small portion of users, thus, the concept of a cellphone dedicated mail address is still mostly unknown. Although the penetration rate of cellphones in France or in other european countries is high (81 percent in France, 110% in Italy), only the basic functions are widely used. Payments through the phone, access to gps related data and one-seg type of TV services are either unknown yet or in their infant stage of development. Low i-mode acceptance in France is commonly attributed to the reluctance of i-mode operator Bouygues Telecom to let open the gates of creativity to individual services providers. Every i-mode site has to receive prior authorization from Bouygues Telecom, and pay a license fee to the operator. There is a wide different between the older generation and young people when it comes to the way each category uses its mobile phone. While only 14% of mobile phone owners listen to mp3 music through their mobile phone, 59% of the 15-20 years old generation is regularly using the mp3 function of their handset.

Security seems a major issue in France, maybe more than in Japan. The newly nominated French government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has recently strictly forbidden the use of Blackberry for government related matters to all cabinet ministers and assistants, for fear of data theft or eavesdropping, citing security issues with these kinds of handheld devices.