Will insight lose out to inanity on the mobile web?

On the bus above my head, the new Vodafone ads tease me about Facebook on the move. I fight back despair and disapproval, and, instead, go on to learn more from conferences on mobile phones and new kinds of broadcasting.

 

At Osney Media’s youthful, hip, packed summit on Mobile Web 2.0, Tony Fish, chief executive officer at AMF Ventures, is eloquent. Unlike a TV but like a PC, he says, mobile devices know who you are and what you’re doing. From kitchen to shower cubicle, a handheld can track your movements, register what channel you’re watching, who’s in the room with you and how often you’re at that restaurant. A handheld won’t build you an identity, but it will build up a digital footprint of you ­ both as an individual and as part of wider communities. It will know who you’re interested in, what brands you like, what your usual intentions are. It will also build up an illustrated, location-aware record of your life.

That seems right, though I’m disappointed that Fish’s machines merely have a better context with which to understand your next move; in short, they simply supply you with ads that are more relevant than those of the past. Nevertheless, I like the Fish vision of handheld as Boswell to the user as Johnson. At work and play, we could all use a sensitive adviser and biographer.

If only that was the kind of dialogue today’s mobile users were actually engaging in. For according to Paul Goode of market research firm M:Metrics, four million people across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK now browse Facebook on the move; 2.5 million exchange messages through it and 1.5 million post written content on it. Male mobile users go uploading and watching videos on demand, while female ones send music by Bluetooth, and buy ringtones. Apparently, women aged about 30 do a lot of the buying.

These statistics make me sceptical of today’s oft-repeated calls for enterprise IT chiefs to adapt to the IT habits of young people. And at the BBC’s Media Futures conference, organised by Nico Macdonald, I encounter a similar and refreshing scepticism about whether broadcasters should incorporate the citizen as journalist.

For Charlie Beckett, a former TV programme editor turned founder of the communications thinktank Polis, conventional media will regain legitimacy only by ceding power to user-generated content, makers of mobile videos and all the rest. But for the University of East London’s Andrew Calcutt, this all amounts merely to the inane, feelgood call of “Come on in ­ … the participation’s lovely!”. As a result, we’re now in a news world of inclusives, not exclusives; and, sadly, that’s a world of inconclusive news.

Calcutt has it right. In the future of enterprise IT, downloads will be fat, but not necessarily brimming with creativity. Only scrupulous editorial leadership will be able to make sense of the jottings of hundreds of Boswells attached to employees. Users must be listened to, and then, if necessary, their impressionistic opinions discarded.

There’s one other thing. The 4G outside broadcasting device you find in your hand may need clever biometric technologies to let you into it. Why? Because for employees to create and manage content in the legally correct manner of tomorrow, those aspects of the handheld’s interface will not just be details.

Add a stylus instead of sealing wax, and even Boswell himself would be happy to own one.