Why would you listen to a Walkman when you could read your phone instead?
– teenager, Co. Kildare, Summer 2000.

Getting it wrong
Communications devices since the telephone display slippage, quickly moving beyond their inventors' original intentions and towards leisure uses.

In the earliest days of the Bell telephone system, it proved difficult for the company to focus on the uses to which their technology would soon be put. It had developed a method for businesses to communicate across the United States, and the notion that private individuals might take up valuable switches exchanging gossip seemed simply incredible. But then, the company also failed to realise that women would have any use whatsoever for the phone. Yet within a few years, the non-business possibilities of the telephone became entirely obvious.

A similar blindness accompanied the advent of mobile technologies, with many telecoms servicing only business clients in their initial offerings. While there were many reasons for this oversight – including the attractive possibility of charging premium rates to businesses, and the fear that payment might prove harder to extract from individual mobile users than from land line customers – an examination of historical trends might have offered useful input in the development of commercial strategy.

These examples of businesses' initial failure to understand fully the uses to which its products might eventually be put, both point to the dangers of viewing technologies in a purely deterministic manner. In recent times, there has been a trend among academics and writers on technology to see things in a more holistic manner, an approach that could also prove useful to businesses.

In these approaches, which are generally more sensitive to the social and cultural dimensions of technology, it is a far too superficial view to suggest that technology will shape society. Rather, individuals will make use of technologies which, while encompassing the original intentions of their authors, will also involve inflecting and shaping them in unpredictable fashions. The nature of a certain technology may tell us something about the way in which it will be used, but only end users can fully define its eventual significance.

(This kind of view is outlined in, for example, Dynamics of Modern Communication: The Shaping and Impact of New Communication Technologies by Patrice Flichy, but Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Walkman edited by duGay et al also covers the arguments.)

Getting to the Net
The origins of the Internet in the exchange of information for military and academic purposes resulted in a network that followed an entirely different developmental path from its predecessors. Pathways cultivated for the exchange of information that were – at least in principle – free from monetary value, mapped very precisely onto what was necessary for communication as a leisure activity, even an entertainment. In fact, on the Net it was necessary to convince most businesses that there was any commercial potential in this hobby network.

The original structures of networked information exchanges, such as Usenet, included – and indeed promoted – exchanges of a phatic nature. People communicated for its own sake, for the pleasure it gave them. With the advent of mobile Internet technologies, this social aspect of the communication has taken a front seat. Following the well-documented surprise experience by mobile phone service providers faced with the popularity of SMS messaging in the late 1990s, much of the discourse around the marginally more advanced WAP involved the use of mobile devices for leisure communication. It was a shock for many, but phones were not always tools, they were to a great extent, toys.

(It is interesting, for example, to study the early mass market promotion of the Internet by companies such as Intel and IBM – which involved highlighting the business and educational aspects of Internet technologies – with the more recent strategies of mobile manufactures, such as Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola, which entirely neglect promotion of these two aspects.)

Over the 1990s, many companies came to appreciate that values adopted from the unwired world might not hold sway online. In the words of the title of one recent publication what was being experienced was, "The end of business as usual". Which is to say, the notion of the Net as simply the location for an online mall was exploded and an appreciation of some of the user-defined characteristics of the new marketspace gradually took hold.

Hagel and Armstrong's 1997 Net Gains: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities marked something of a watershed in the appreciation of Internet communities. It was not that this Harvard Business School duo were really talking about anything radically new, but for many companies on the Internet, reading this book brought home some notion of the character of the arena in which they had chosen to operate. Only after Net Gains did the notion of the radical alterations of business practice being wrought by connected individuals come into stark focus.

But of course, Hagel and Armstrong's work involved talking about the past as much as predicting the future. The interactions they considered novel and noteworthy were, by 1997, well-trodden paths and modes of operation for many on the Net.

Some of the earliest manifestations of the Internet involved functions that would currently be categorised under the heading of community features. Virtual communities had developed around Usenet as early as 1979, when the service was established between Duke University and UNC. While the administrators of the initial newsgroups aimed to siphon content into a limited number of categories, these soon became fragmented and an alternative set of groups (the "alt" groups), concerning themselves purely with "hobby" or leisure activities, came into being.

Also in 1979, the first MUDs (an acronym variously described as having its origins in Multi-User Dungeons, or Multi-User Dimension), the direct ancestors of today's chat and community sites, began to appear. Some have described these entities as "virtual reality experiments accessible through the Internet". In essence, what this meant was that large numbers of users could meet and interact, typing their communications on home, college or business PCs.

The model for this type of interaction was role-playing games. Many of those using these early MUDs took advantage of the form's inherent malleability to forge new identities, adopting character names, as well as "building" and extending the MUDs (which were in reality contained in databases) as they chose.

For many users the experience became more than emersive. It was an acceptrable substitute for social interaction in the face of the decline of civil societies and the disappearance of many of the gathering places of traditional communities. (These changes were chronicled by many commentators, such as Neil Postman in CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere, Ray Oldenburg in his The Great Good Place, and Robert D. Putnam in Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.)

Home, work and the third space
The importance of virtual communities as the location of a new third space, that is a place that is neither work nor home, is currently coming into greater focus. There are several possible reasons for this, including the increased penetration, at least in Europe, of the mobile/wireless phone. The general acceptance of the mobile phone has come to mean that, while previously individuals tended to enter a third space while they were in either the first or second space, mobile technology gives the third space a flexibility.

Despite the time expended on trying to determine what would be the most compelling content to lure users to the Net and drive sales of new hardware, software and services, the answer has been obvious for many years. The rise of SMS messaging is simply the latest indication that the most attractive "authors" of content are the users themselves.

Community is not simply the means to another end – frequently envisaged as sales – but a commercially desirable thing in itself. The early prophets of virtual spaces, such as Pavel Curtis, founder and programmer of LambdaMOO, while hardly operating with commercial ends in mind, have performed useful work for those entering the marketspace now, establishing a tradition in which sophisticated communication is synonymous with play.

Getting it right
But where exactly this will lead is what we have to work out now. The uptake of WAP phones has been far stronger in the under 25s than in the older business users. (Indications are that this may be because, while WAP services hardly compete with wired Internet services, they offer an incremental improvement on the text-only SMS services popular in this age group.)

So, while many businesses have traditionally targeted information and communication services initially to commercial users, new product launches to watch are in the consumer sector, particularly at the younger end of the scale.

The official end of American commerce's love affair with business-to-consumer B2C Internet services may yet turn out to be a blip, with some of the strongest, most promising offerings now appearing in the consumer communication sector.

Products such as the Cybico www.cybiko.com » which allows users to play games and communicate with the aid of a short range wireless device, and infrastructure businesses such as the Sticks network, may have some way to go before proving to be market-leading providers, but their products have a clear market.

Similarly, the development of hybrid devices, such as Ericsson's Handsfree MP3 add-on for their mobiles, and Motorolla's combination FM radio, mobile and WAP phone, are helping to change consumer expectations of mobile phones. But these devices, to some degree, are simply piggy-backing traditional entertainment devices on new entertainment devices.

It will, however, remain crucial to observe the ways in which consumer demand and usage moves at variance to the plans of manufactures. Despite sophisticated hybrid devices, the services that consumers find attractive may involve the functions that initially attracted them to mobile devices. Only services that are seen to usefully expand these features will have any chance of success.

Gradually, one-to-one communication through text messaging and voice will be expanded towards one-to-many communication, and as such will facilitate not just social/leisure organisation, but group play. Services such as Sweden's Incirco www.incirco.se/company/english.jsp which provides group voice messaging and group SMS messaging, popular on a range of sites, for example, www.sms.ac simply illustrate the latent demand for chat, discussion and message-like features on mobile platforms.

The introduction of G3 mobile/wireless technologies may have surprisingly little effect on the patterns of mobile usage. While the technology promises broadband mobile services, some industry analysts predict that the extra bandwidth may not, in reality, mean the advent of rich multimedia. Extra bandwidth may simply be soaked up by increased usage in the communication services already enjoyed by large sections of the mobile market.