Conference follow-up.
OK, finally back from Finland and the conference Interactive Man and His Future. And it's snowing in Bergen - the scenery is breathtaking beautiful and clean and stands out even more intruiging to my Danish city-scape accustomed eyes. I never get to watch this pure white landscape in traffic-infected Copenhagen....

I had expected to be able to blogg from the conference, but it turned out that they had only one computer onsite with a functioning internet connection - somewhere in a corner of a cafe in the same building as the conference. And I did not find it before late on the day the conference ended. - Obviously one asks oneself why an conference like this does not provide it's users with internet access? Well, in this case, the answer is simple: it is not because of bad planning, but because almost all attendees were Finnish and hence had a Nokia Communicator ;). They simply dont need clumsy, old, stationary computers to access the internet anymore...and it was striking to take a look over the conference audience: there were dozens of PDAs, mobile phones and Communicator owners amongst them and people had no qualms as to use them to communicate with people outside the conference, if the paper presented was boring.

Also the conference itself turned out to be very much themed around mobile phones and devices. Mobile phone use, mobile phone culture (example: "Mobile phone in social urban life"), mobile phones and children, and not the least, the latest buzzwood (e- is soo dead!) : mobile learning (soon to be known as m-learning?). So I now know that more than 80% of the Finnish population owns a mobile phone and that children down to the age of 4-5 years are given one, too - though they hardly know how to use it and are known to mistake if for a toy:). Teenage girls from Germany send 7 sms's a day, but boys only 5, etc etc.-

A presenter from Sonera, the national tele communications compagny, had one very interesting point on the Finnish "mobile culture": he thought that this widespread use of mobile phones were actually supporting the Finnish culture of silence! For instance, people dont have to talk to each other on the phone, they can just sms and they can see who is calling and just refuse to talk to them by pretending they cannot get to the mobile phone. And of course, mobile phones are switched to the silent mode most of the time, so you wont disturb any other people with the noise from the phones. Instead you will just see the odd Finn pulling out his mobile phone from his jacket ever so often to see if he got any messages...(last thing my own observation, I have been spending the last 5 days with an addict like that!). Furthermore, I personally think that this widespread use of mobile phones is also creating a somewhat anti-social culture: being in the physical compagny of some Finns, you will often find that they spend time sms'ing with friends or reading messages on their phone, disregarding the on-site social situation they are in fact part of in that very moment. I dont think this "anti-social" behaviour is restricted to Finns only (Im guilty of it myself sometimes, I admit), but it seems to me that "communicating out-of-social-context" is more socially acceptable than in other more "talkative" countries, where not taking part in the current communication is seen as a social flaw. While is my impression, it need not necessarily be so in Finland.

In general, it will be interesting to see how our mobile culture further develops. Will all the mobile phone using countries end up being inhabited by people who never concentrate on the people they are with in the now, but rather focus on the communication with people (and information) "elsewhere"? Will we actually be speaking less with each other "on site" and more with each other from a long distance? Will this mobile culture, as one speaker hinted, in the end render os more im-mobile due to the constant presents of gadgets, which makes us always be "at home", available to everybody and with the "homely" information always present at the tips of your fingers? What will happen if we can always find precise information about the place we are at? Will that mean that all the world becomes "familiar" to us and the use of imagination simply disappears?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:23