In the UK we have a strange mix of traditions, which converge on each November 5 and we commonly call ‘Guy Fawkes Night‘. Although the name is a link to a foiled 17th Centuary plot to blow up Parliament, its roots go back to pagan times and ancient fire festivals. Today it is primarily a good excuse to see a firework show.
I’ve just got back from a local one at Woodford Community Centre, which although on the outskirts of the Greater Manchester area was still a massively packed event with long traffic jams for the 20 minute show.
Community Centre’s are not known in the UK for a rapid adoption of convergence technologies and this event was no different but it was interesting to see how mobile technology was being used by the different groups of friends and families to manage their participation in the event.
The main patterns of mobile usage were: telephone calls and SMS (aka texting) to manage co-ordination of people in the dark and the use of the device as a beacon.
Using mobiles to bring groups together are now part of the landscape at events in the UK. However, it was particuar interesting to note that tonight the mobile was mainly used for voice contact. I observed very few people texting. Given the noise level this was especially surprising as it was very loud but when a phone was spotted it was usually with someone deep in conversation shouting directions. This possibly suggesting a difficulty with conveying enough meaning in a text message?
The use of the mobile as a beacon was a kind of fun acknowledgment of its place as a modern totem. Not many, but some attendees were using it as a light beacon to attract other members of their groups, waving it in the air. This was particularly effective on the Nokia N95 with its lightsaber mode 
The event didn’t have a mobile website and the centre’s website only adapts to a certain extent on to Opera Mini (my preferred browser on my Sony Ericsson w890i). Much of the useful information on the website is lost in the page restructuring.
The lack of a mobile friendly website at such an event is not really surprising. However, the event would have benefited from considering how to use mobile technologies such mobile phone cameras etc.to consider how to capture shared community experiences and reinforce the community identity it was trying to evoke.
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- November 5th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
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