Q: What is the Actual Utility of Mobile Technology?

A: It is difficult to say what the actual utility of Mobile Tech is -- atleast for me it is. However, I have a few ideas about the potential usefulness and future from following the movement.

For one, Mobile Tech provides us all with immediate connectivity - way more than sitting at a stationary computer can because we are filming/tweeting/texting from locations beyond the computer room. The internet is great because it allows us to instantly connect 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.

Enter Mobile Tech.

On Super Tuesday last February, MTV launched a LIVE mobile-to-web broadcast from 23 of the Street Team citizen journalists. (I represent D.C. for the Street Team.) The experiment was pretty ambitious and from the receiving end on the Street Team list serve I heard about all the technical glitches, stresses and unknowns the day brought for my team. At the same time, it was a huge undertaking and incredibly forward-thinking by the network.

Months later, as I look back and read coverage of MTV's mobile undertaking, I realize live mobile-to-web broadcasts will be something more networks will try if they want to stay with the curve.

For the Super Tuesday reports, the live feeds went directly to Flixwagon, a Mobile Web 2.0 service that allows users to publish live video from their mobile phones. Throughout the day, I watched as my teammates streamed live interviews from caucuses, polling places, churches and candidate rallies. Though the quality was not great, the immediacy of their reporting and relevancy was spot on.

In April, Michael Scogin, Executive Producer of MTV Mobile, was interviewed about the Street Team Super Tuesday program.

"One of the great moments of Super Tuesday that I remembered was watching the representative from New York at a Hillary Clinton speech and then also turning and watching the footage and coverage from CNN. We had a different view, different person, but it was as live as CNN's coverage was."

(Keep in mind we are amateur journalists, operating as one-man-bands and just as a guess, paid a significant amount less than the real deal. Not a bad test group for MTV to practice this technology on.)

Scogin went on to describe the interaction my New York colleague had after the speech ended."...She actually had one of the major networks camera people come up to her afterwards and say "What are you doing?" and she said "Well, I'm reporting." He answered, "With a phone?" And so she explained it to him. He was totally blown away."

I hope that gives new insight into one potential utility of Mobile Tech: connecting young people to politics and pushing civic engagement. I look forward to learning more about distribution and communication models for the mobile landscape on Tuesday.

Originally posted by EricaAmerica at MediaFutureNow.Blogspot.com on Monday, July 21, 2008