Where We Are Is All In The Perception: The Identity of Mobility

“someone talk to me!!!! i can't handle this class any longer :(....booooooo)
Thursday [10/14/2010] at 2:08pm.”

This mobile transmission from Blackberry to Face Book was from my high school valedictorian-college honors- last year nursing student-daughter sitting in a lecture-based class. The first respondent was a high school friend, 1000 miles away. My daughter, according to Gitte Stald in the article “Mobile Identity: Youth, Identity, and Mobile Communication Media,” realized the liberation “from the constraints of physical proximity and spatial immobility” (p. 147). Like most adolescents and young adults, her mobile device did not get completely turned off as she survived her experienced boredom by allowing texting to take her somewhere other than her immediate physical space.

It is exactly this aspect of mobile reality that, as a high school classroom teacher, I cannot appreciate. For, not only is the student disengaged with the learning process taking place in a physically "real spatial existence," the student is attacking my self-perception as I am acknowledged as irrelevant. The reality of the face-to-face relationship is completely denied as the student perceives herself “to be in another space than the physical space, [and] the mediated situation is experienced as real” (Stald, p. 154). I cease to exist.

Before cell phones, there were daydreams that took one to a state of another existence. It was a private reality, shared only with the self. These daydreams transpired as self-reflections or “Walter Mitty” transformations. There was an essence of a thought process (though disengaged from the reality at hand). A teacher, or other face-to-face individual, could interrupt the daydream and once again become a part of a shared reality that was both spatial and conscious. This is not possible with technological mobility that actually engages others outside of spatial existence to unite in the new essence of place. Or is it?

Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) may have found a possible solution to this mobile “absence presence” (Staid,p.156).



Think of the possibilities placed from a podium or desk. The invasive possibilities…….oh, sorry, I was daydreaming.

Once the mobile device is under the (dare I say it?) control of the teacher, there are applications that I find exciting. Students are forever taking pictures on their phone. Now, a free service,
Yodio, http://yodio.com/, allows the addition of voice to the photos that could lead to the creation of meaningful, sequenced, storyboards. These storyboards can be created from a relatively inexpensive (as compared to a laptop) cell phone. The mobility of the technology allows the transport of the creation to other technical devices. Students can create and send projects directly to teacher or to a class web page. The “communicative function” (Staid,p.143) becomes a lesson integrating literacy, creativity, and technology. My self-perception has been restored.