On Thursday, I spoke on a roundtable at George Mason's 6th Annual Visual Cultural Symposium. The topic this year was called "Unthinking Television," and I was asked to discuss what "screen life" meant to me.
The other participants on the roundtable - including a video game producer and a social scientist of Second Life - came from diverse backgrounds, to say the least. I was there to speak about my experience as a mobile reporter for MTV's Street Team '08. (Read: Young Reporters, New Tools and Political Reporting in Harvard's Neiman Report).
The question posed to the roundtable was this: What is screen life?
For me, when I hear the word "screen" I immediately think of the screens that I grew up with. First it was the television screen, and of course the big screen for movies. Now, in my early adulthood, it is the mobile screen that dominates my life.
Tomi T. Ahonen, a blogger for Communities Dominate Brands, recently created a comprehensive report on the impact of mobile. He offered this bit of information: the world population is 6.7 billion people. Four billion of which have phone subscriptions, which means over 60 percent of people in the world have access to a phone. Also, 17 percent, or about 680 million people, are subscribing to get news on their phone.
At the GOP National Convention last September, I had the opportunity test out this medium on the Convention floor. I was one of the only reporters on the floor with live mobile-to-web streaming capabilities. My impromptu broadcasts were met with confusion and curiosity. The reactions reflected the monumental brink - and shift in communications, that we are standing before.
So what is screen life? For one, mobile screens and technology provides us all with immediate connectivity - much more than sitting at a stationary computer because we are filming/tweeting/texting from locations beyond the console. The dawn of the World Wide Web was ground breaking because it allowed us to connect instantly to people with common interests. But as the phenomenon unfolded, internet users became immersed, perhaps to a fault, because many substituted internet interaction with real interaction. Now, with mobile tech and the traveling screen, I wonder how that connectivity and interaction will unfold, in a way that supports an informed society.
Erica Anderson, Senior Digital Strategist
