Contenu du sommaire : Les usages avancés du téléphone mobile

This article analyses the social and legal construction of an interactive advertising project. The project consists in sending multimedia content, via Bluetooth, to the mobile phones of users at stations in the Paris underground within a few dozen meters of the Bluetooth emitter. The legal qualification of the Bluetooth identifier and the modalities for obtaining users' consent to receive a commercial call are important and contested issues. They reveal the contrasting positions of actors from the technical, legal and commercial worlds, as well as the compromises that were reached as the project advanced, up to its submittal to the CNIL 1 for assessment with respect to potential privacy threats. This project exemplifies a more general tension between two different conceptions of the accessibility of mobile passers-by in urban public spaces, which also paint different pictures of urbanity and the public sphere: accessibility based on proximity, and accessibility based on connectivity and reachability through mediated communication.

Far from the intimate bubble in terms of which solitary activities in public are often interpreted, the many sensible anchorages of walking listeners show how they subtly and jointly manage moving around town and listening to music at the same time. This is revealed by an ethnographic survey on individuals' perceptive activities during their daily trips, while listening to music on a mobile phone. The author uses an ecological approach to perceptive activities in the urban public sphere, and an original ethnographic method, to explain the interactions between solitary activities in public and movement in an urban environment. The two end up producing full urban experiences, including musical ones in this case.

Based on video recordings, this study examines uses of personal mobile TV in situations of mobility. The author shows how, in urban environments, users delimit the “places” of use of personal mobile TV, around the availability of the telephone network, and consequently how they likewise re-delimit the places of use of older media. This type of engagement in media activities relates to a form of opportunistic attachment consisting in exploiting the opportunities of technological use of augmented urban environments. The author uses it to account for the renewal of media preferences through their anchorage in situations of mobility.

Mobile TV is used not only in situations of mobility but also, above all, in fixed places (home, work), for new content (music, sport, news). Whether immersive or multi-activity, it serves throughout the day as a support for nomadism. Due to the constraints and resources of both the context and the tool, it does not transpose uses of domestic TV; it completes them. Whether their use is individual or collective, routine or exceptional, it enables users to control their engagement, affording them the possibility to be in the background, to ease tensions, and to reconcile the collective and the individual. The articulation between mobile TV and communication functions (call, SMS, MMS) is difficult, as these functions are priorities that correspond to other contexts involving a distant other person, and thus interrupt its use.

In this article the authors analyse amateur video practices on mobile phones. Based on an ethnographic study of mobile phones, they argue that, under the joint effect of digital technology and uses of the mobile, these practices are currently experiencing the same evolution as photography. Making videos is increasingly part of everyday life, is often done spontaneously, and takes the form of a communication act in its own right. Moreover, the interval between taking and viewing videos is shrinking, while their circulation is intensifying.

In this article we analyse for the first time the uses of videophony on mobile phones in natural environments. The interaction differs from any other type of telecommunication-based interaction, mainly due to the manipulability of the cameraphone and the diversity of places in which videocommunication can take place. Even though the co-production of the (entire) portrait is the dominant interactional arrangement, at every moment of the mobile video conversation each participant has some degree of latitude in choosing the images that he or she produces and makes available for the scrutiny of his or her co-participant. One of the main preoccupations of mobile video users is therefore to solve the issues raised by the question “what to show”, in relation to the demands and opportunities that emerge during the call.

In this article the author studies the criticism levelled at the programme Loft Story, accused of being both contemptible and scandalous. He examines articles in the national dailies and identifies chronologically the appearance of the various themes and fields of interpretation that structured the denunciation. The authors of the accusations, liberally translating specific issues into general ones, made themselves the advocates of ultimate values and common principles. Claiming to write on behalf of society as a whole, they used Loft Story to condemn the excesses of an increasingly barbaric and inhuman society on the road to ruin. The denunciation discourse flowed over the pages of the dailies into society, in a complex, playful and ironic form. It grew into collective action undertaken on behalf of everyone, for their own good.

In football, communication on the field is usually reduced to the transmission of information. Yet in top-level games this accounts for only 12% of all interactions. Apart from those directly linked to the implementation of a task (passes, shoots, interceptions, tackles), the interactants use a “secret and complex code” to understand one another. The aim of this article is to reveal this “code”, that is, the physical signs constituting it and their possible articulation. To that end the authors closely examine the communicational behaviour of 40 top-level players. An understanding of the “code” affords stimulating prospects for both research and training.