All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

69
“Goin’ Mobile”: Designing for Mobility
in Networked Social Spaces
Thomas P. Mackey, Center for Distance Learning
A Review of:
Open Learning 25(3)
Special Issue
Mobile Learning: Using Portable
Technologies to Create New Learning
In 1971, the same year Empire
State College was established, Pete
Townshend sang about the freedom of
the open road in the rock anthem “Goin’
Mobile.” In the days of analog, when music
was organized by sequenced tracks, this
song was in a fixed position on side two of
The Who’s classic LP “Who’s Next.” Forty
years later, we remember or imagine what it
was like back then by listening to this disc
and recalling the sounds that dominated
FM radio for at least a decade. From the
minimalist synthesizer that opens “Baba
O’Reilly” to Roger Daultrey’s primal scream
that closes “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” this
album defined rock music of the 1970s. The
work itself emerged from the disconnected
pieces of an unfinished project, Lifehouse,
a proposed film that was intended to evolve
over time with collaborative interaction
with concert audiences (Atkins, 2000, p.
14). As a fragmented collection of songs
that developed from a failed project, “Who’s
Next” works as a postmodern song cycle,
defined not so much by the authority of
the author to create the narrative, but
as an open-ended piece constructed and
understood by individual interpretation and
collective memory.
The free form FM radio format of the ’70s
allowed for the play of multiple tracks from
this record, demonstrating the power of
randomness and sense-making, an idea that
re-emerged 40 years later in Apple’s iPod
Shuffle. This one track in particular, “Goin’
Mobile,” accelerated forward declaring
mobility as a way of life: “When I’m
drivin’ free the world’s my home.” Similar
in many ways to other Pete Townshend
compositions, this song asserts the power
of youth – a disenchanted and rebellious
youth, elevated and empowered by rock
music, while embracing nascent technologies
such as synthesizers and tape machines.
Thematically, this song demonstrates the
ability either individually or collectively to
envision a future and move freely on the
open expansive highway. In 1971, The Who
played some of these songs at the Saratoga
Performing Arts Center (SPAC), breaking
attendance records at this venue with nearly
The Who
30,000 fans, and providing a social context
for this music in Saratoga Springs and the
Capital District (McMichael and Lyons,
2004).
From Analog to Digital
The sense of mobility that is celebrated
in this song, even if told from the
perspective of a privileged rock star on
the road, reflects the revolution of the
era and the ongoing momentum toward
a shifting networked future. Forty years
later, the way we experience music has
transformed considerably from the analog
“tape machine” mentioned in the song, to
photo by peter j. corrigan
multiple portable devices such as the Nano
or Shuffle, smart phone, netbook, MP3
player or digital tablet, allowing access
to the Internet from anywhere, at times
convenient for the user. In the ’70s, records
and tapes were containers for music, and
now we experience the music itself as pure
information, less tangible as a thing found
within a sleeve on vinyl or cassette, and
now a transparent digital binary, easily
downloaded, copied, mashed up, and shared
though multiple digital devices. Listeners are
now active contributors, downloading and
sharing digital content in numerous formats,
ranking and reviewing tracks, and uploading
their own works as user-generated content.
From Digital to Mobile
Our understanding of mobility continues
to change as the cell phone evolves into
an all-purpose smart device for doing
much more than making a phone call, and
the laptop morphs into a digital tablet.
Mobile apps connect us to news sources,
radio streams, music sites, digital libraries,
interactive maps, search engines and social
networking resources such as Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and WordPress Blogs.
Through a collaborative social network, we
post, tweet, text, interact, read, write, share,
and produce information continuously and
interactively. According to Chris Anderson
and Michael Wolff (2010), the mobile
revolution has already taken place. In their
Wired article “The Web is Dead: Long Live
the Internet,” the authors make a convincing
argument that we have moved beyond
the Web browser as the primary mode for
connecting online, and toward increased
mobility with smart phones and apps.
Although we are comfortable accessing
the Web through a browser, Anderson
and Wolff argue that: “the Web is not the
culmination of the digital revolution” (p. 1).
The authors shift the focus from the Web
browser to the larger Internet, and how we
use it to communicate, create and interact
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011