Advertisements for mobile communication products crowd the pages and airwaves, intended for the young. Whether these mobile communication devices are portrayed as cool accessories, work tools, tickets to new journeys, or enablers of rebellion, they project imaginaries both for mobile worlds and for mobile use. As teachers of written communication, we profit from knowing more about our students’ cultural positioning vis-à-vis mobile communication technology as we move into an ever more wireless world. Important to our positioning of technology and writing are questions such as: What worlds are being imagined through advertising for mobile communication products, who is depicted as using these products for communication, and how do they handle the communication that writing has handled? [1]*
More importantly to feminists, do these imagined worlds and mobile uses replicate the social structures women and minorities have experienced, or do they open new worlds and roles for women and minorities? In this webtext we focus on portrayals of women and minorities in print advertising for wireless communication products in order to begin a discussion of women and mobile communication technology. We interrogate recent print ads for mobile products, hopeful that the companies paying for these ads imagine new wireless communication worlds and expanded communication uses for women and others.
We have become interested in wireless worlds and communication at this time for several reasons: wireless adoption is increasing rapidly; mobile communication potentially restructures the relationships between speaking and writing as communication media; and of mobile communication may also shift or reshuffle the relationships of communication media. We are struck by the rapidly increasing adoption of mobile communication. As Castells et al. contend, wireless communication is the fastest growing technology in history. Not only had the number of mobile lines outdistanced the number of land lines globally by 2001, in 2004 there were 500,000,000 more mobile lines worldwide than land lines (8). Further, in the European Union (the world’s densest adopter of mobile phones), 85.8 out of 100 people had mobile phones in 2004. [2] While Europeans deem the U.S. backward in this movement, we still have 66 mobile phones per 100 people, and it is rare to see a college-aged student without a mobile. This means they are playing games, IM-ing, surfing, and emailing during our classes (discretely of course), and more importantly they are tethered to their friends and family [3] during college—an experience that previously diminished the hold of home over the 18-22 year old population.
Mobile communication potentially restructures relationships between speaking and writing, at least if we listen to the communication theory of Walter Ong. In The Presence of the Word Ong asserts that the “word is originally, and in the last analysis irretrievably, a sound phenomenon” (18). So, it comes as little surprise that in mobile communication, as sound reintroduces itself as a “new” communication medium, power may slide a bit toward the aural from the print at the same time as it is reinforced in a new way by moving-talking pictures. These shifts both in prime media for communication and also in desires of communicators/communicates leads to challenges for those who produce these mobile missives.
Mobile communication also sounds the possibility that communication media relationships are at least being shifted or reshaped. Henry Jenkins sees the move to mobilize and also the changes in hardware needed to support mobilization as part of the current Convergence Culture, a new territory where old and new media intersect, collide, and interact in new ways. Interestingly, Jenkins portrays himself as wary of the convergence mobile phones are enacting:
Call me old-fashioned. The other week I wanted to buy a cell phone—you know, to make phone calls. I didn’t want a video camera, a still camera, a Web access device, an MP3 player, or a game system. I also wasn’t interested in something that could show me movie previews, would have customizable ring tones, or would allow me to read novels. I didn’t want the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife. When the phone rings I don’t want to have to figure out which button to push. The sales clerks sneered at me; they laughed behind my back. I was told by company after mobile company that they don’t make single-function phones anymore. Nobody wants them. This was a powerful demonstration of how central mobiles have become to the process of media convergence. (5-6)
Clearly Jenkins’ mobile imaginary, at least as it refers to mobile phones, is functional—and in a way that looks backwards to an older technological age. He does see the current society as in media flux, as he goes on to point out that “convergence does not depend on any specific delivery mechanism. Rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift—a move from medium-specific content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communication systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content, and toward ever more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture” (243). Ultimately Jenkins argues that convergence culture allows more collaboration and participation in media by consumers as well as producers. Thus, as we think of media developments—particularly in light of his inability to buy a mobile phone that just acts as a phone—it becomes clear that writing instruction, as it moves into this developing multi-media and multi-channel world, must account for convergence.
Of course, our hope that mobile communication might change social structures in ways that improve society and marks us as Computers and Writing folk. Look at our history. Often we foreground emerging technology stories for which the landscapes are generalized and actions are heroic. Communication technology, as it emerges, fuels our democratic urges, then as that technology matures through use in writing classes, and concomitantly, as more new communication technologies emerge, critics point to the ways that the recently implemented technology has not delivered an egalitarian climate to those most in need—the poor, old/young, colored, nonmasculine, nonwestern. The moves Computers and Writing offers in these emerging technology stories are predictable, so we risk being perceived as offering a new and positive (sometimes utopic) technology story when we discuss women and emerging wireless communication technologies. Yet we proceed, in large part because we think it imprudent to ignore emerging wireless/mobile technologies even though it is not always clear how mobile communication technologies beyond the laptop connects with writing instruction.[4] In this wave of review, feminists often point out how this technology reinscribes a masculine-dominated state of affairs.[5]
In this webtext, therefore, we examine how women (and other others) are written into the emerging world of wireless communication. We turn to print advertising for evidence of these wireless worlds because many magazines feature ads about (or including) mobile communication devices and because magazine ads are an accepted pedagogical tool in composition classes. We also turn to them because we share Arthur Asa Berger’s contention that “Advertising has the power… to influence and, in some cases, shape people’s behavior, broadly speaking” (4). Admittedly the advertising effort for wireless devices is massive, with most ads targeted for the young, but even the older, more conservative magazines including a few in each issue. Magazine ads (and also television commercials) reflect an important societal trend, as the growth of mobile technology can be supported by wireless product shares of holiday gift sales, the proliferation of area codes and mobile phone towers, [6] and the increased numbers of passengers traveling with a laptop and/or an MP3 player. But, we suggest here that these advertisements do more than reflect wireless shares of product sales, as they urge us all to unplug ourselves [even through the irony that wireless devices need recharging]; they suggest new ways we can live. Further, these wireless devices are a part of our college students’ daily lives: few incoming students arrive without an I-Pod, a laptop, a digital camera, and a mobile phone. Often addicted to a variety of mobile devices, the students also are savvy about how those devices help them create the people they want to be.
In the nodes that follow we look closely at print advertisements of wireless communication products, and do so as feminists and writing teachers. How are women being portrayed in mobile product advertisements, we wonder? Past experiences of women with technology certainly lead us to expect that mobile technology presents a landscape for business as usual, with women positioned as secondary or limited because the unwired dimensions only provide new spaces for work to inhabit. But, since wireless devices have the potential to unhook everyone from traditional topographies (and even sound the death knoll of distance in a globalized world), the new sites and portraits merit an examination for possibilities that may unhinge traditional masculinist power structures. After all, there is memorable evidence of their power. Mobile phones were key to resistance and action on the hijacked airlines of September 11, 2001. Information gathered from family members and even phone operators helped flight 93 passengers know there was no bomb aboard (which helped them decide to rush the hijackers and ultimately crash their plane in rural Pennsylvania). The actions of those passengers demonstrated the power of the mobile phone for communication (and research). [7]
More directly for the teaching of writing, if more than 90% of students carry mobile phones at all times, as Rodger Desai of Rave Wireless contends [8], our students may already imagine and communicate their worlds through their wireless devices. A Pew study of mobile phone use released in April 2006 concludes that mobile phones “enable real-time action and engagement. . . ‘smart mobbing’. . . this technology allows people to pass along information, learn and act instantly on data that is important to them” (10). Most interesting for this discussion is the conviction that mobile phones blanket the country, encourage new communication patterns, and change the character of public spaces. Mobile phone use might lead us to the intimate details of a stranger’s life in the park, and that unsettles the notion of public/private division of life. Ultimately they conclude that mobile phones are so widespread in adoption that they may emerge as the “Swiss Army knife of media and communications” (11).
Mobility and its Interactions with Rhetoric and Composition
While mobile communication questions have not received much attention, emerging writing technologies intended for use in writing classes have been recognized in College Composition and Communication, [9] as writing teachers have continuously sought to discuss technology that is used directly in writing instruction. These advocates of using computers in the teaching of writing have rarely imagined how the technologies emerging in the wider society impact on the teaching of writing, choosing to focus on pragmatic connections to writing instruction. But, one imagining of future college life has been advanced by Chris Anson in College English in 1999. In his “Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology,” Anson spun a narrative of the Internet, distance education and the impact it might have on the future teaching of writing. Using a series of stories to examine the impact of virtuality on education, he focused on Jennifer, a college student who had considerable funding and was labeled by him as a “privileged, upper-middle-class student.” In the not-too-distance future, Jennifer, armed with a seemingly feather-light tablet, begins her day by downloading the multimedia lecture from her history course (presented by the physically distant but world- famous professor). A physically present “non-tenure track education specialist” picks up the slack for the world-famous historian, coordinating Jennifer’s section with two other sections of the course meeting on smaller, satellite campuses to facilitate a multi-class discussion and activity enabled by cameras and high-resolution monitors (266). Later the same day, Jennifer receives multimedia feedback from her Composition instructor—a part-time hired gun telecommuting from home—whose face appears on her screen. The face offers feedback as she clicks her way through annotated passages of her essay-in-progress; it’s a face she’s never seen in person. Jennifer’s next commitment, her psychology class, has been farmed out to a corporation with an accredited educational division and an exclusive contract with a world-famous psychologist (267). Anson’s narrative is a typical one, as he fears some of the implications for teacher labor in the ways that technology for distance education seems to make the teacher less central or important.[10] But, with the exception of her laptop and unlike our students, Jennifer carries little mobile technology.
Of course, Anson, Nold most other CCC authors who focus on computing and writing [11] are enthusiastic or resigned about technology’s potential in improving writing instruction. But, they also display a reticence tied, perhaps, to the possibilities multimedia and distance technologies offer today’s college students, for there are clear advances in multimedia and distance connections, now fueled by mobile distribution. These changes can mean that classes can be podcasted for students listening while they wander the quad at Duke, home of one of the first iPod initiatives in 2004 (“Duke University iPod” 2005). They can also mean that wireless networks can allow laptops in a networked classroom to become a “lab." [12] Will this potential reshaping of classrooms impact our writing classrooms? [13] And if such reshaping take place, will our students be prepared to accept female writing teachers as wireless agents? Such a question suggests that for women, the reticence may have a source tied to experience and reflected in feminist positions on gender in cyberspace. [14]
Mobility and its Interactions with Landscapes & Feminists
When thinking or landscapes, or imaginaries, in the frames of mobile technology, the social sciences have focused on the shrinking of distances, time and space compression, and the negotiation of boundaries. When David Morley’s comment, “It’s now a commonplace that the new networks of electronic communication, in and through which we live, are transforming our senses of locality/ community and, on a wider geographic scale, our senses of ‘belonging’ to either national or transnational communities” (435), becomes common thinking, a seismic shift is underway in that segment of the social sciences that considers space/place. Space as real, a given, a measurable quantity has become challenged, with space becoming less “reality” and more a “frame”. To use David Sibley’s way of discussing boundaries, space itself has become a zone of ambiguity—that place in the overlapping of the circles in a Venn diagram which in some ways belongs to each group and therefore must be articulated, fought for, secured, and policed.
Time, too, has impacted the landscape we “imagine.” In The Tramp in America Tim Cresswell argues that time and space are increasingly compressed: “the effective shrinking of the world by technologies of transportation and communication” (23), is key to understanding the “tramp” as a “shiftless, idle hooligan who avoids work at all costs” (40). Through his investigation of how society struggled to control the tramp in the railroad days of the United States, Cresswell finds that society developed a number of negative (and sometimes baseless) stereotypes about the most mobile group of the day. He thinks they were threatened by the mobility of the tramp and thus made laws and publicized conceptions of tramps that marginalized the group. Later, in “Theorizing Place,” he examines how “place” fits into an increasingly mobile and time-compressed world, noting that humanists have traditionally connected it to an authentic and rooted identity. Cresswell advocates thinking of both rooted identity as it is augmented by the nomadic, mobile identity, a viewpoint which makes identity and place more open and permeable.
Geographers tend to agree that in these territorial disputes boundaries are the key to understanding what groups are doing. But, mobile technologies displace the older rooted identity of place in ways that make boundary work for groups more difficult than in earlier, more geographically stable groups.
Boundary work as a tactic for examination of social relationships, one that destabilizes (and restabilizes) location/groupness has been important to feminists scholars as well. For at least the past decade, feminist sociologists, architects, and cultural geographers have articulated the ways that gendered spaces/places/topographies/social ecologies/etc. have reinforced gender inequalities in workplaces, institutions, and homes. Often working within a conception of public and private that cedes public spaces to men and holds private spaces for women, feminists have sought to describe and complexify gendered space. Daphne Spain, to voice one example, has linked gender, space, and status in historical architecture in Gendered Spaces. In that work she details how the growth of the great room in professional homes (and the denouement of gender and class restrictions in the home) was coincident with a successful suffrage movement.
For the most part, then, feminist scholars have focused their topographic work on the gender inequalities operating at work and at home. While this work needs to be rethought from the perspective of mobile communication technology, it offers solid tools for gendered analysis of social space. Christina Nippert-Eng’s Home and Work lays bare an analytic strategy, as she examines the everyday objects working women share or keep separated across work and home in order to discover to what extent the boundaries they constructed between home and work were shared, permeable, or distinct. She interrogates “home” and “work” as two realms that have relationships, even though those realms’ overlap ranges from highly segmenting to highly integrating. Nippert-Eng argues that a variety of ordinary objects signal the boundaries between work and home [keys, calendars, wallets, purses, food, money, talk, commuting practices, reading, verbal representations, phone calls, and so on], and that families, institutions, beliefs, and gender impact the ways that people massage the boundaries between their worlds of work and worlds of home. We agree that work and home are important to people and that they exist as separate, though intricately connected, realms—we are discussing them as domains of communication.
Yet, in the case of mobile advertising these home and work realms typically focused on by feminists are not the only settings for mobile communication products. Because our initial notion that mobile communication might become an untethering experience, a liberation from the day-to-day, we moved beyond feminisim’s normal work on home and work, adding the topographic categories of recreation, escape, and going between. We think that feminists need to expand their domains of analysis in order for topographies found in wireless/mobile technology advertisements to matter to feminist readings of those ads. First, these topographies help consumers imagine when and where and how they might use mobile communication products: they suggest imaginaries to the potential users. . . tell them how to be hip, for example. Second, the advertising may be opening up the range of gendered roles or reinscribing previous gendered roles in these emerging communication topographies.
Of course, before discussing magazine advertisements in detail, we need to admit that
feminists are not often fond of advertising, and for good reasons. As most research into gender and advertising finds that women are portrayed more frequently than men and almost always are portrayed more sexually. [15] Lauren Rosewarne’s research into outdoor billboards details some of the objectifying of women in advertisements. Rosewarne has studied outdoor advertising in Australia and found that images of women on those billboards are sexualized, public, and exclusionary for women.
There have been a handful of precedent studies about gender and computers in advertisements during the 80s but they have mostly limited their scope to computer magazines (Marshall and Bannon, Ware and Stuck). In 1998, Candace White and Katherine N. Kinnick took a broader approach, studying 351 prime time television commercials. Like their predecessors, White and Kinnick also found that advertisements are bad news for women. Narrators were overwhelming male. And while there were almost as many women as men depicted using computers at work in these commercials, the women were predominantly portrayed as secretaries, receptionists, and telemarketers. The roles of computer using professional, expert, and student were mostly reserved for men. So, how are women faring these days?
