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When a story calls: the narrative potential of mobile media

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When a story calls: the narrative potential of mobile media

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WHEN A STORY CALLS:
THE NARRATIVE POTENTIAL OF MOBILE MEDIA

by

Scott W. Ruston

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Scott W. Ruston

ii
Acknowledgements

While only one name appears in the author’s position on the cover page, this
project benefited from significant contributions from a number of people and
organizations, and I am grateful to all. What follows is but a short list.
First, I would like to thank my committee. Marsha Kinder’s advice and
guidance from my earliest days in the Critical Studies program have been invaluable,
and her own attention to the combination of theory and practice has been a model.
Her ability to provide rapid and insightful feedback was critical to accelerating the
completion of this work, and her patience while I found my voice much appreciated.
I could not have asked for a better committee chair. Tara McPherson’s energy,
enthusiasm and departmental leadership during important phases of my trajectory
through the program have been enormously helpful. So, too, has been her ability to
recognize and communicate to me my own strengths, particularly at the times when I
struggle to see or communicate them myself. I especially admire her ability to value,
support, and constructively critique my ideas, even when they are potentially in
opposition to her own. I would like to thank Scott Fisher making me feel welcome
in the Interactive Media division, where otherwise I may have felt an interloper. I
am grateful, too, for his unflagging support and willingness to devote his
department’s resources to the continued development of Tracking Agama after its
original genesis as a class project was a distant memory. As a group, these fine
scholars were the epitome of collegiality, making my interaction with them always
an enriching and enjoyable experience, and for which I am thankful. Additionally,

iii
Anne Balsamo and Ellen Seiter each played important roles in the early stages of
shaping my dissertation project and preparing for my exams. Their probing
questions and helpful suggestions broadened my horizons and enriched my
knowledge.
Next, I would like to thank the Tracking Agama team: Jen Stein, Will Carter,
Todd Furmanksi, Bradley Newman and Tripp Millican. No other project I worked
on had a greater single influence on the direction of my doctoral work. Our design
and production sessions opened my eyes to the potential of mobile media, and the
mobile phone in particular, and helped me narrow my focus. Plus it was just good
fun. I look forward to future collaborations with these artists.
A number of my peers deserve special mention. My dissertation writing
group, including Daniel Chamberlain, Heidi Cooley, Michelle Torre, and the virtual
Kristen Anderson provided invaluable assistance getting the ball rolling early on. I
am indebted to D.C., as well, for the reminder of the importance and value of
revision not to mention his wealth of “foodie” knowledge. Both Bob Buerkle and
Paul Reinsch provided rapid and insightful feedback on Chapter 5 in a moment of
panic before a critical deadline, and have always been a ready reference shoring up
the gaps in my knowledge of American film. My experience in this whole academic
adventure has been made immensely more enjoyable by the friendship of Karen
Beavers and Mary Jeanne Wilson. Elizabeth Ramsey patiently laughed off my
cynicism about “the dollhouse”, and I still owe Jorie Lagerwey another trip to
Father’s Office.

iv
During the course of my education at USC, I’ve had the great fortune to work
with and learn from a large number of individuals and organizations. Teaching
Assistantships in both Critical Studies and the Institute for Multimedia Literacy were
as much about my own education as that of my students. I learned much about
teaching from those I worked with in the classroom: Anne Balsamo, Miranda Banks,
Drew Casper, Tara McPherson and Boris Wolfson. In addition, my experience at the
IML was enriched by long talks about media, pedagogy and personal travels through
academia with Steve Anderson, Karen Beavers, Rich Edwards and Elizabeth
Ramsey. I am grateful for both the professional development and financial support
these teaching positions provided. An Annenberg Fellowship supported my final
year of work on this project, and I am thankful to my committee chair, the Critical
Studies faculty, and the division chair, Anne Friedberg, for nominating me for this
fellowship.
Finally, I am grateful to my parents, Barr and Marylen Ruston, for their love,
support and guidance. I only wish my dad could read this: after 37 years in the
telecommunications industry, he’d probably have something to say. My brother
Todd has been not only my go-to resource for late night computer troubleshooting,
but more importantly, the best of friends. I am grateful also for the support of my
uncle, William S. Anderson, whose many gifts included a TRS-80 many years ago
that started me on a path towards combining storytelling and technology.
Completing this dissertation marks the end of one phase of my journey, and
the start of a new. The newest member of my family, Andrea Tristen Sholer Ruston,

v
played no small part in this achievement. She, perhaps, bore the largest burden
during this process: reminding me of the forest I could not see for the trees right in
front of me, putting up with my grumpy responses born of a fascination with the
details of those trees, and generally bearing at least half the stress of this whole
endeavor. Three years ago she coined the term “October worthy” as exam deadlines
were fast approaching; two years later it became in even more precious term, on a
much grander scale. I am grateful for her support through this phase of my life, and I
look forward to our future journey together.

vi
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract vii

Chapter 1
Hello 1

Chapter 2
When a Story Calls: The Telephone as Narrative Device 28
Figure 1: Nodes and Intersecting episodes 60

Chapter 3
Dial ‘M’ for Mobisode 85

Chapter 4
Remediating Database and Narrative 133

Chapter 5
Case Study—Tracking Agama 177

Chapter 6
Call Forwarding: The Mobile Market and a Look to the Future 223

Bibliography 245

Appendix A:
Filmography—Telephone Films 259

vii

Abstract

Recognizing the transmedia migration of narrative, this project argues that
the mobile phone is particularly well suited as a platform for immersive and
interactive narrative entertainment. The analysis incorporates three mutually
informing vectors: an historical look at the narrative role of the telephone in film; a
critical and theoretical analysis of the “mobisode” as an example of the convergence
of television and the mobile phone; and an experiment creating an immersive and
interactive narrative project using mobile media. The telephone has functioned in a
prominent role as a narrative device in cinematic storytelling, while the mobisode
represents televisual narrative on the mobile phone. I contend that the mobisode
combines with the cinematic legacy of the telephone to lead toward mobile narrative
entertainment forms that exist at the intersection of storytelling, game culture and
mobile media technologies. The narrative potential of mobile media lies in
capitalizing on the interactive qualities and history of telephony, the networked
architecture of mobile communications, and the ubiquity of the mobile device to
create a narrative experience that bridges the real and the imaginative, the physical
and the virtual.

1
Chapter 1

Hello

“Hello?”, “Hello”, “Hello!” exclaim the clips, on and on for 32 different
cinematic variations of the typical American greeting until the sequence ends on a
slowly rotating gadget limned with the sci-fi glow of utopian technology. With this
montage of telephonic salutation, Apple ushered into the American cultural
consciousness a new era of mobile phone use, and I dare say launched American
culture into the integration of the promises of late 20
th
Century networked media, the
Internet and the oft-hyped concept of convergence, bringing an always-on, always-
connected 21
st
Century networked lifestyle to the forefront of popular awareness.
In terms of capability, the iPhone really offers nothing particularly new. It
combines a music player with a telephone, something other mobile handset
manufacturers had been offering for some time. It offers Internet access and web
surfing, also functionality long present in smartphones such as the Treo and
Blackberry. It has a camera, which by 2007 was a ubiquitous feature on even the
simplest and least expensive mobile phones. But, it offers these capabilities in an
easy to use format, offering similar functionality and ease of use as Apple’s
independent devices (the iPod music player and Macintosh personal computer) with
another not-exactly-new feature, the touch screen. Other touch screens existed, but
Apple’s was easy to use, required no stylus, and allowed for a larger screen size, as
the device did not need any room for a keyboard.

2
The music player function of the iPhone taps into the consumers’ familiarity
with Apple’s über-popular music device, the iPod. The iPhone accesses the iTunes
software and iTunes Music Store with equal familiarity and ease, and the Safari web
browser loads regular Internet web pages, not limiting the user to web pages
optimized for mobile handsets. Thus, it brings nothing tremendously new, just a
tremendous degree of ease of use, and smoothly fits into established consumer use
patterns. It is a smart phone for the average consumer, for Everyman—and herein
lies its most powerful influence: by smoothly integrating social practices of
entertainment (music) and information gathering (Internet), the Apple iPhone
changes the culture’s approach and conceptualization of the mobile phone not at the
level of the device but at the level of the people who use the device.
While Japanese mobile phones have been Internet capable since 1999 and
Europeans have been heavy text message users since the same time, mobile phone
usage in the United States, until very recently, has been almost exclusively for voice
calls. I describe this as a conceptualization of the mobile phone by U.S. users as a
telephone with an infinitely long wire—simply a telephone that can go anywhere.
Data usage (text messaging, internet, multimedia exchange, ringtone downloads, etc)
in the U.S. lagged Europe and Asia, at least through early 2007. More than anything,
Apple’s “Hello” commercial not only introduced a highly anticipated gadget, it
introduced a broadened conception of the role, purpose and capability of the mobile
phone as a communications and entertainment medium.

3
Also, the “Hello” ad brings together two closely linked technologies,
telephony and cinema, and unites them in the cultural imagination with the mobile
phone. While Apple’s primary interest in this advertisement is certainly the
production of desire for their latest consumer electronics product, I think that the
advertisement is more significant on a cultural level than its superficial commercial
goals, just like the iPhone itself is significant not for its technological advancements,
but rather for its cultural impact. Apple’s commercial capitalizes on the inherent
desire to know who’s calling as well as the implied introduction in the greeting
“Hello” and does so by a series of cinematic excerpts. This associates cinema with
telephony on multiple levels. First it showcases the telephone in film, and one of the
important roles the telephone plays in films is as a narrative device, which I delve
into in detail in Chapter 2. Secondly, it applies the telephony-cinema connection to
the mobile phone. The iPhone can store and replay videos and movies available for
download through the iTunes Music Store, thus transforming the iPhone into a
cinematic display device, which is one of the popular features Apple certainly
wanted to highlight (if implicitly). But more importantly from my perspective, the
commercial is not only a celebration of the convergence of telephony, cinema and
mobile media, a convergence that is central to this project and I think also central to
how early 21st century culture will incorporate the mobile phone as an artistic and
entertainment medium beyond its communication medium origins, but also a
celebration of “something new” warranting an introduction (even if the individual
features of the iPhone were themselves not new). Since the iPhone had been a

4
highly anticipated device, the integration of media player and mobile phone is not
the “something new” implicitly promised by this advertisement. Rather, the
“something new” is the anticipation, the wonder of “where will this go?” Or, in
terms of the advertisement’s vocabulary: “Hello, who’s calling?”
How will this convergence of media forms, including at least the computer,
the Internet, cinema, television and telephony, exhibit artistic and entertainment
uses? Some inkling can be drawn from a 2007 exhibit at the Contemporary
Museum, located in downtown Baltimore, entitled Cell Phone: Art and the Mobile
Phone. The show included sculptures, such as Videos Lustre (Beatrice Amrhein,
2006) in which a mobile of cell phones dangled from the ceiling each looping a short
video clip, and interactive installation pieces, such as Cell Phone Disco
(Informationlab, 2006) in which light bulbs on the walls of the room light up in
response to the proximity of cell phone RF signals. The exhibition also showcased
locative media projects involving soundscapes, such as Tactical Sound Garden
(Mark Shepard, 2004-2006), and cooperative games like Uncle Roy All Around You
(Blast Theory, 2003), discussed more deeply in Chapter 4.
1
As this exhibition
indicates, artists have put the mobile media to a variety of uses in a variety of
artworks, some playing off televisual capabilities, some off audio, and others off the
radio frequency emission of some mobile devices. The latter three examples also
incorporate an important aspect of mobile media, one promised by the common

1
http://www.contemporary.org/past_2007_01.html

5
theme of advertising of the whole range of Apple products, and that is the
interpenetration of media and life to achieve a “digital lifestyle”.
My primary interest, however, is in how the mobile phone will participate in
a narrative art or entertainment form. I am interested in identifying the narrative
potential of mobile media for two reasons. First, my examination here recognizes
the rise of the “digital lifestyle” as a hallmark of the early 21
st
Century, but I want to
be sure that any understanding of the digital lifestyle is not white-washed by a Wired
Magazine utopic zeal and recognizes the cultural history out of which this lifestyle
arises. Arguably, the dominant entertainment form of 20
th
Century American culture
has been the moving image narratives of cinema and television, and understanding
the narrative potential of mobile media recognizes and attempts to understand this
heritage and how it will effect the development of mobile media as a cultural form.
Secondly, narrative is a ubiquitous cultural form, extending across regions and
cultures and historical eras, thus a narrative art and entertainment application of
mobile media is almost a foregone conclusion (more on that in a bit).
It is my contention that the mobile phone is particularly well suited as a
medium for interactive narratives that bridge the real world of the participant with
the immersive world of the narrative. It does so by serving as a seamless interface,
both between participant and narrative information and between the physical world
and the virtual. It also capitalizes on the cinematic legacy of the telephone as a
narrative device and the convergence of the mobile phone with television. This
project, then, asks a very simple question (which gets complicated fairly quickly):

6
what form will narrative art and entertainment take when they begin to appear in
mobile media?
This claim is both somewhat bold and founded on certain assumptions or
premises that require attention. The two basic premises resident in my claim are: 1)
narrative migrates to all new entertainment-capable media and, somewhat less
obviously, 2) a tension exists in new media narratives between interactivity and
immersion, and the mobile phone as interface must negotiate this tension.

Transmedia migration
A casual survey of narrative forms and the history of storytelling reveals a
claim that is often invoked: that narrative is a universal concept. Roland Barthes, in
introducing the foundation of his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives” writes:
There are countless forms of narrative in the world…Moreover, in this
infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all
societies…all human groups have their stories, and very often these stories
are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural
backgrounds…Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical,
transcultural.
2

And, I would add: transmedial. Across historical epochs, new forms of narrative
arrive, often linked with new forms of media.
Sometime after the marks of business and commerce on clay bulla evolved
into the abstract form of writing on clay tablets known as cuneiform, sometime in the

2
Barthes, Roland. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6/2
(1975): 237.

7
second millennium B.C., the epic tale of the exploits of Gilgamesh was recorded in
the new medium of clay and stylus.
3
In Ancient Greece, religious rituals transformed
into theater, and with the introduction of dialogue on the stage, a new and different
art form appeared. The oral stories of Greek legends were recorded on paper and
assigned an author’s name, now synonymous with travel and war epic narrative:
Homer.
It is no coincidence that the novel and the printing press appear at the same
time. A detailed analysis of their complementary historical trajectory would fill
volumes and is not my intent here. But as an example of their relationship, one of
the greatest novels of all time, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha is,
to some degree, a parody of the romance genre and chivalric tales such as Sir
Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. But without the printing press and the greater
degree of literacy connected to its production of printed texts and codification of
spelling and grammar, the market of readers aware of the satirical elements would be
extraordinarily small.
With the invention of cinema in the late 19
th
Century we see a modern
example of the migration of narrative to a new media form. Tom Gunning sets out to
debunk “evolutionary” histories of film that suggest early films were unsophisticated
attempts at achieving cinema’s narrative “essence”, which could develop only after

3
See Denise Schmandt-Besserat Before Writing Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1992) for development of cuneiform; and Andrew George The Babylonian
Gilgamesh Epic Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (London: Oxford University Press, 2003) for
more information on this epic.

8
the introduction of new techniques and technologies.
4
As Gunning’s historical work
illustrating the “cinema of attractions” shows, along with the wide variety of
contemporary audio-visual spectacles lacking in narrative dimension, the cinema is
not an inherently “narrative” medium. But, no one can deny that cinema’s narrative
form has succeeded as a mass entertainment and sophisticated manifestation of
storytelling art.
Lumiere’s invention of the cinema was not invented for the purpose of
showing narrative feature films as we have come to know them. Rather, a complex
set of cultural, business and market forces contributed to the popularity of the
narrative feature film. The figure of D.W. Griffith, often regarded as the father of
narrative cinema (despite numerous other filmmakers preceding his work), illustrates
how new media are “always introduced into a pattern of tension created by the
coexistence of old and new” as Carolyn Marvin suggests in her history of late 19
th

Century media forms, When Old Technologies Were New.
5
With a prodigious output
for Biograph, a zeal for both experimenting with and borrowing camera and editing
techniques, and a passion for Victorian novels, Griffith represents both old and new.
Historian David Cook suggests: “In one sense, Griffith presents the paradox of a
nineteenth-century man who founded a uniquely twentieth-century art form, and this
tension between ages accounts for many disparities of taste and judgment that we

4
Gunning, Tom. “Spectacle and Excess” Velvet Light Trap 32 (1993): 3-12.

5
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communications in
the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 8.

9
find in his films today”.
6
This tension between new and old and across ages parallels
the present moment with regard to mobile media (hopefully absent Griffith’s
“disparities of taste and judgment”). Marvin’s insightful view on how new media
are never completely new as they must engage with established patterns and
traditions and replace traditional methods and social practices, will guide the inquiry
into mobile media as the new media of the late 20
th
and early 21
st
Century.
Radio and television, too, exhibit the migration of narrative. With the ability
to reach large numbers of people simultaneously over distance, both were invented
as broadcast communication media. But as the examples of The Amos and Andy
Show, The Goldbergs, Inner Sanctum, Gang Busters and many others show,
serialized narrative entertainment became popular on radio in short order. Television
adapted many of the radio serials, particularly the daytime soap operas, and
developed the unique formats of the hour-long drama and half-hour sitcom, among
others.
7

The penultimate technology in this survey of narrative media and narrative
forms is the so-called 3
rd
screen or personal computer. In 1976 when Will Crowther
coded a textual description of a cave navigable by user-input commands, he didn’t
know he was ushering in an era of narrative entertainment on the personal computer
that would develop into the genre now called “interactive fiction” including

6
Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 59.

7
See Abramson The History of Television, Federal Communications Commission “Historical Periods
in Television Technology” for development of the media; and Barbara Moore, et. al., Prime Time
Television: A Concise History for a capsule history of narrative entertainment forms on television.

10
landmarks like Crowther’s Adventure and Zork (Infocom, 1980).
8
Taking features of
the interactive fiction genre (usually all text based) and the audio-visual capabilities
of the arcade-type video game, the hugely popular Myst (Broderbund, 1993)
represents a significant development in the narrative entertainment form of
computational media.
With each development of communication media, from writing, to
publishing, to cinema, to television to the computer, a narrative entertainment form
has migrated to that media form. Born of previous media, shaped by cultural and
economic forces, as well as the unique features of the “new” media, narrative
constantly reinvents itself as one of the most powerful cognitive and cultural human
methods of organizing data and making sense of the world. The premise that the
transmedia migration of narrative will apply to mobile media, then, is sound. The
analysis in Chapter 2 of the narrative role of the telephone in cinema points towards
an artistic background influencing narrative on the mobile phone.

Zeal for interactivity: agency and meaning
The second premise of my argument is that the mobile phone is particularly
well suited to interactive and immersive forms of narrative entertainment. Why all
the zeal for interactivity? I know plenty of people who roll their eyes when the word
“interactive” comes out of my mouth describing a new media project, an avant-garde
stage performance, or a museum installation that I plan to see. “Sometimes we just

8
See http://www.ifarchive.org for more on interactive fiction, examples, history, etc.

11
like things to have a beginning, a middle, and an end” they tell me, or “we just want
the story told to us”. But ever since artists and scholars got their hands on
Hypercard, one of the first hypertextual authoring systems, critics and theorists such
as George Landow and Janet Murray (to name just two) have proclaimed the wonder
of electronic interactivity and its ability to tangibly materialize the reader’s agency
proclaimed by the poststructuralist turn in narrative theory. A whole range of
narrative arts, from the novels of Calvino and Cortezar to the films of Buñuel and
Rivette, raise the level of reader or viewer engagement through their proto-
hypertextual formats. These are the progenitors of electronic interactive works that
both confer and materialize in the medium the ability to navigate through a non-
linear text at the discretion of the reader, and to literally produce a different
experience with each separate and individual engagement with the piece, something
that was largely an abstract and theoretical idea prior to the advent of interactive
media.
The adverse reaction of my friends is encapsulated by literary scholar
Seymour Chatman, an oft-quoted synthesizer of narratological theory, as he
describes the value of narrative closure: “This sense of closure is important because
ordinary life seems so inconclusive or downright messy in comparison”.
9
And there
is certainly appeal to making sense and meaning from an organization of elements
that share the inescapable temporal logic that mirrors our life. Just as our lives
proceed from birth to life to death, the novel ends after a finite number of pages and

9
Chatman, Seymour. Reading Narrative Fiction (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 1.

12
the movie ends as the last frame of film slips out of the projector. Making complete
sense of a situation in that time can have great appeal, especially when compared to
our inconclusive existence of indeterminate meaning, as Chatman suggests.
On the other hand, the agency valued by contemporary theorists offers
another means of dealing with tension of the temporal logic of life and the disorder
of the middle section. The principle of agency, the opportunity “to take meaningful
action and see the results of our decisions and choices”
10
is another strategy to make
sense of the messy and inconclusive period between the initial and ultimate stages.
In her article “Hotspots, Avatars and Narrative Fields Forever”, media theorist
Marsha Kinder suggests that Luis Buñuel’s films offer a useful paradigm for
thinking through issues in electronic media. She writes in regard to the proliferating
possibilities of narrative directions in Buñuel’s films, “we are rarely concerned with
how the story begins or ends, a choice which always seems rather arbitrary”.
11
Just
as the temporal logic of beginning-middle-end mirrors birth-life-death (lending
significance to narrative closure as a contrast to the messiness of life), interactive
media confer a tangible degree of agency for taking meaningful action in this middle
stage. As Kinder emphasizes, this agency makes the middle of a narrative work, “a
field of force”—a locus of meaning production by reader or viewer activity.
12

Narrative in interactive media, then, balances traditional narrative structures of

10
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1997), 126.

11
Kinder, Marsha. “Hotspots, Avatars and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New
Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative” Film Quarterly 55 (2002), 12.

12
Ibid (quoting Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot.)

13
closure (that make meaning by contrasting order with the disordered experience of
our lives) with more open structures offering agency within an expanded middle that
allow for meaning through reader or viewer activity.

Zeal for immersion: to be “in” the story
The opportunities for meaning, both in the more traditional mode of a tightly
scripted narrative experienced in a more receptive mode or the participatory and
interactive mode, depend on achieving a state of experience outside of ourselves,
what Janet Murray describes as a “threshold” experience and is analogous to
narrative immersion.
13
This threshold experience, this narrative immersion,
however, is a fragile state that is easily disrupted by interactivity. That is why the
Holodeck from Star Trek is so valorized—it offers a safe, interactive narrative
experience safely outside oneself wherein actions have meaningful consequences
within the narrative diegesis, but only meaning and emotion and memory are taken
away from the Holodeck.
14

The disruption to the immersive quality of a narrative posed by interactivity
lies in the method of interaction. A hypertext requires physical manipulation of a
mouse, trackball or other control device and the pressing of a button or other trigger
mechanism, and each of these physical actions reminds the hypertext’s reader of the

13
Murray, 99-100.

14
The origin myth of USC’s Institute for Creative Technology, a research initiative funded by the
U.S. Army to develop training and simulation devices, is that the Army approached USC and said,
“Build us the ‘Holodeck’.” Taking that mission to heart, ICT’s offices were designed by one of the
set designers from Star Trek.

14
divide between his or her body and the text. This is particularly true of hypertext
because of the hand-eye coordination required, in contrast to the physical action of
turning the page of a book, which can be accomplished nearly subconsciously as
body awareness fades with cognitive and imaginative immersion into the story.
Avid game players might object to my characterization of a tension between
interactivity and immersion, citing how “in” to a game they become, to the exclusion
of awareness of the passage of time or extra-game stimulus. Nevertheless, playing a
video game with a d-pad controller or joystick or other control device grounds the
player’s presence in the real, physical world, and emphasizes the awareness of his or
her engagement in an activity (playing the game). Evidence often cited to support
contentions of immersiveness of video games and other interactive media are body
lean and other kinesthetic effects, as well as intense focus. These characteristics,
however, apply to the game as a physical and cognitive activity, albeit one with an
imaginative component, but not inhabiting the liminal space outside of oneself,
“upon which we can project our feelings” as Murray values in the experience of
narrative immersion.
15

The cultural imagination, as well as technological development, has
privileged optically immersive technologies as achieving the highest degree of
immersiveness (almost to the exclusion of narrative or other types of imaginative
immersion). The preeminence of technologies such as VR and Augmented Reality is
reflected in contemporary culture. Films such The Matrix (Wachowski brothers,

15
Murray, 126.

15
1999), television shows such as the Star Trek series, and novels like Ender’s Game
(Orson Scott Card, 1985) solve the interactivity/immersion tension by creating
technological means of fully simulating the player/participants life completely
eliding any awareness of an interface device from the media experience. Residents
of The Matrix, subjects in the Holodeck, and players in the Battle Room take no
actions outside of their simulated experience in order to control that experience, as is
required in today’s interactive media.
The strategy I propose for managing this tension between interactivity and
immersion is to capitalize on the most immersive environment available (the real
world) and use an interface device that operates identically in the real world as in the
virtual world. By operating identically and simultaneously in the real and virtual
worlds, the interface device does not call attention to itself as a technological
element existing outside the imaginative space and intruding on the liminal
experience. In essence, the interface device blurs the distinction between the
physical and the virtual, and I think the mobile phone is an ideal technology for this
purpose.

Approach
With the medium so new, and without a large number of mobile media
narrative projects available to experience, how can we examine this phenomenon? I
follow three approaches. First, I take a cue from social historian Carolyn Marvin. In
When Old Technologies Were New, she avoids what she calls “artifactual

16
communications histories” that are centered on a given technology, such as the many
communication histories that begin with radio and television. Rather, she looks to
their pre-cursors and also to the societal conditions in which the new media arose.
Since new media forms do not spring forth fully formed from the foreheads of
engineers and designers, but rather develop from within a complex soup of cultural
trends, social uses, technological capabilities and market forces, my own project
employs multiple modes of analysis to address the narrative potential of mobile
media. Following the lead of Marvin, I look to the cultural imaginary to explore how
the mobile phone and the telephone have been construed as operating with and in
narrative prior to and immediately following the advent of the mobile phone.
Second, also in line with Marvin, I explore the mobile phone’s engagement with
existing media forms, to more fully explore this idea of a tension between old and
new, especially in regards to how the new media form integrates and alters existing
use practices and the role of those practices in daily life. Thirdly, I extend beyond
Marvin’s methods of social history and embark into the realm of experimentation by
creating projects, based on the historical and theoretical groundwork, that test my
hypotheses.
Thus, in this project I incorporate three mutually informing vectors: a
historical look at the narrative role of the telephone in film; a critical and theoretical
analysis of the convergence of television and the mobile phone; and the design,
implementation, and beta-testing results of a practical digital media experiment

17
called Tracking Agama which creates an interactive narrative using mobile media. I
conclude with an eye towards the marketplace and the intersection of these vectors.
The first of these vectors recognizes that “new media” are rarely new, and
focuses on cultural representations and narrative employment of the telephone, the
technological and cultural forebear of the mobile phone. Part of my contention for
the suitability of the mobile phone as a platform for narrative art and entertainment
rests on the familiarity the public already has for the telephone as a key element
operating within narrative. Chapter 2 explores this role of the telephone in narrative,
as a narrative device in cinema. By exploring a range of cinematic texts and a range
of different examples of the telephone as a narrative device, I show that the narrative
role of telephonic devices is well established. These familiar roles serve a variety of
narrative functions, including interface and information control, spatial navigation,
cognitive signpost, and on-screen hyperlink, but are not necessarily familiar in a
obvious or conscious manner.
My analysis builds on the seminal work on the role of the telephone in early
film by Jan Olsson and Tom Gunning. In his essay “Framing Silent Calls”, Olsson
focuses primarily on the formal characteristics of cinematic telephone conversations,
and the cinematic techniques of split-screen compositions and parallel editing to
visually manage the navigation of space. Gunning also acknowledges how the
presence of the telephone on screen and in the narrative aided the viewer’s

18
conceptualization of spatial leaps.
16
I extend this idea of the telephone training the
viewer to understand cinema’s ability to condense time and move through space
within a narrative world to examples of the telephone offering an interpretive aid to
the viewer in comprehending narrative structures that would later become the
hallmark of new media narratives, such as hyperlink jumps and looping narratives
that reset with a click of a button. This chapter also explores the telephone’s role in
bridging worlds and collapsing time and space not only for the extradiegetic viewer,
but also for the characters within the story. This feature becomes another prominent
cultural and imaginative forebear of new media narrative strategies.
While Chapter 2 focuses on the role the telephone has played in narratives
and narrative structures, Chapter 3 reverses this arrangement and explores narratives
on the mobile phone, in the form of mobile television and short form video. By
offering close analyses of a number of mobile television and mobile video examples,
watched on a variety of video and television capable mobile phones in late 2006 and
early 2007, as well as an application of television theories, this chapter explores the
connection between medium, content, and everyday life. In so doing, the chapter
establishes a growing use and familiarity with the mobile phone as a site of narrative
reception/consumption, a tendency multiplied by the introduction of the iPhone. The
phone delivers narrative, just like the television set, the cinemaplex, or the book, yet
at the same time it maintains a potential to operate within the narrative as in the

16
See: Tom Gunning “Heard Over the Phone” Screen, 32/2 (1991), 184-196; Jan Olsson “Framing
Silent Calls” in Allegories of Communication, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Rome: John Libbey
Publishing, 2004), 157-192.

19
cinematic examples explored in Chapter 2. This is a critical tension in new forms of
mobile entertainment and explored more fully in Chapters 4 and 5.
Chapter 3 explores not only the consequences of the discursive relationship
of mobile video services with television (many are even branded with television,
such as Sprint TV, MobiTV, etc.), but the formal, industrial and theoretical
relationships as well. In coming to understand the “mobisode,” an enterprise not yet
undertaken to my knowledge beyond short pieces of industry press more attuned to
generating business-to-business hype, I explore the three most prominent
characteristics of brevity, seriality and episodic structure. Hand in hand with these
formal qualities are the industrial factors of an uncertain market, easy entry by
amateurs, and the strategy of repurposing deployed by major studios. The concept of
repurposing, particularly the industrial and economic factors, has been insightfully
probed by John Caldwell in the context of cable news.
17
He suggests that a suddenly
expanded supply of news media venues, including both cable television stations and
conglomerate-owned Internet web sites, caused an increase in demand for “content”
and led to repurposing. In this chapter, I extend this mode of analysis to the mobile
arena, and focus primarily on narrative programming.
My analysis posits the mobisode’s place in a media-saturated existence and
its participation in an always-on/always-connected networked lifestyle where our
real-world, physical existence is increasingly intertwined with and interpenetrated by

17
Caldwell, John. "Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the
Culture of Conglomeration" in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn
Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 41-74.

20
media. What part of our lives is not heavily mediated? We all have some aspect of
virtuality in our lives, whether quite literally with an avatar in Second Life or more
tangentially with a fan’s devotion to a television show. Mobile media is a prominent
player in this mediation, and mobile television/mobile video is one avenue of entry,
an avenue made familiar by its association and similarity to existing the media form
of television. Part of what mobile media entertainment, along with mobile media as
information and/or communication source, does is blur the distinction between
physical and virtual. Chapter 3 explores this mediation of our lives, the blurring
between physical and virtual or between mediation and reality (if there is a
distinction…)
Chapters 2 and 3 anchor issues of representation and established cultural
legacies for the telephone and mobile phone, Chapter 4 moves into capabilities and
combines narrative possibilities with issues of medium specificity. Chapter 4
explores new media practices, in the form of mobile media games and narratives, to
understand how these projects fit into the cultural and technological landscape, and
also how they represent a union of the “old” (linear narratives of novel, cinema,
television) and the “new” (non-linear narratives and navigable database structures).
The analyses of mobile narrative and game examples in this chapter account for the
computational heritage of the mobile device. With more computing power than my
TRS-80 from 1979, but fitting in the palm of my hand rather than clobbering an
entire desk, the mobile phone, from the simplest handset to the iPhone and its
smartphone cousins, is a very small computer, one capable of connecting to a

21
complex communication network itself consisting of arrays of vastly more powerful
computers. On top of that, the mobile phone is, let’s not forget, a telephone, one of
the most interactive media devices imaginable. A conversation is about the most
interactive form of communication conceivable, and the telephone facilitates
conversation. Thus, from two directions it makes sense that narrative forms of
entertainment developed for mobile media will be interactive in some sense. This
chapter explores how the computational architecture of the mobile phone, with the
database as the computer’s founding organizational model, manifests in participatory
mobile games that also have a narrative component. Thus, this chapter extends
debates around interactivity, computational media and narrative to the mobile media
context while simultaneously addressing how the constant presence of mobile media
affects an individual’s relationship to present location and community.
Which brings us to Chapter 5, which in some ways is the crux of this entire
project. Chapter 5 is a case study of a particular mobile media narrative
entertainment project, and represents a method of humanities research based in
creative production. The chapter describes a mobile media narrative project created
at USC by a team from the Interactive Media Division (which included myself) in
which we attempted to create an engaging story-based project that would contest the
dislocation from community and place commonly associated with mobile media.
Our project tests whether the implications of Chaps 2, 3, 4 are warranted. We
deployed the mobile phone as a narrative interface, both doling out what we as the
designers came to describe as “story nuggets” and operating as the portal by which

22
the participant entered the story world. By functioning in the same manner both in
the real, physical world as in the imaginative, diegetic or virtual world, I hypothesize
the phone became a seamless interface closely joining these two separate realms. It
thereby created an interactive and immersive narrative, one in which the interface is
unobtrusive so that the liminal border between reality and virtuality is broad and its
edges indistinct. By layering this narrative experience with a combination of history,
fiction, and locale, the project reconnected the participant with both space and place.
On one hand, the Tracking Agama project was an effort to design an
engaging work of mobile media entertainment, founded on principles of mobility,
interactivity and captivating storytelling. On the other hand, Tracking Agama was
also an experiment in pursuing theory through practice. It explored on a practical
level whether narrative theories developed for cinema are applicable to mobile
media. Lacking an established tradition of mobile media narrative entertainment
design upon which to frame the Tracking Agama project, the design team needed a
theory upon which to base the narrative structure of the project. I suggested Edward
Branigan’s Narrative Comprehension in Film as a theoretical model, which I had
previously found useful in probing the formal and ideological nature of fractured
narrative structures of films such as 21 Grams.
In Branigan’s theory I found an approach that I hypothesized would be well
suited to the type of interactive project we envisioned. Like Branigan, I see narrative
as a method by which we organize information and draw conclusions; hence, it is a
cognitive model for managing data inputs, one designed to generate meaning. And,

23
while Branigan’s theory was developed as an analytical tool intended to explain the
narrative processes in understanding cinematic narratives, I hypothesized it would be
suitably flexible to aid in the designing of a new media project as well. While
Branigan emphasizes cause and effect in his definition of narrative, the relationships
of events and components of the narrative are the viewers’ or participants’ to
organize and categorize, offering an approach to narrative that does not impose
meaning but illustrates how meaning is produced by the interplay of viewer and
textual components. Thus the theory is flexible and suitable for linear and non-linear
narratives. His theory both offers an explanation for the desire for and power of
narrative closure, but at the same time accommodates more open works and,
importantly, individual approaches to the narrative ‘text’.
I came to view Tracking Agama, then, as a proof-of-concept. It was an
experiment in capitalizing on unique features of the mobile phone as a medium for
narrative, including mobility, ubiquity, a networked and computational architecture,
and audio and text capability.
18
It was also an experiment in testing the suitability of
using a narrative theory developed to explain narrative comprehension in film as a
design aid for creating an interactive narrative for mobile media. In this way, the
project took theory off the page and out of the academy and literally into the streets.

18
The original design of Tracking Agama was created in the fall of 2004. While camera phones were
available in the United States, they were not the ubiquitous feature they are today. Additionally, very
few mobile phone users subscribed to data plans offering multimedia messaging, narrowing the field
of potential participants at that time. Subsequent iterations of Tracking Agama also eschewed an
image or video component in the interests of simplicity—texting proved hard enough to introduce to
many players.

24
Chapter 5 provides an analysis of the Tracking Agama project, and the lessons
learned from this experiment.
This period of experimentation, of which the mobile games and narratives of
Chapters 4 and 5 are a part, is not a phenomenon exclusive to interactive digital
media, but parallels the trajectory of previous new media. Again, as Marvin points
out, new media at the turn of the 19
th
Century “precipitated new kinds of social
encounters long before their incarceration in fixed institutional form”.
19
And these
new encounters came about through the introduction of the devices of the telephone
and electric light into peoples’ homes, and also through experiments with the
medium, especially the telephone as entertainment.
In 1881 the Paris Exposition Internationale d’Électricité put on such an
experiment. This event united performers in the Théâtre Français as well as the Paris
Opéra with attendees at the exposition who paid an admission fee to listen to the
performance on a telephone headset. “Beginning in 1890,” writes Marvin
“individual subscribers to the Theatrophone Company of Paris were offered special
hookups to five Paris theaters for live performances” bridging the distance between
audience and performance both in terms of geography and societal strata.
20
The
telephone became an entertainment medium. Throughout the years 1880-1912 all
sorts of entertainment uses of the telephone arose. The Theatrophone and the
SymphonyPhone were what we would later come to describe as broadcasts, a role

19
Marvin, 5.

20
Marvin, 209-210.

25
subsumed more efficiently by radio then television, as with Budapest’s Telephone
Hirmando a sort of telephonic news, sports and variety performance service.
21
As
the telephone became primarily a person-to-person means of communication and its
entertainment uses declined, even its suitability as an entertainment platform became
forgotten. With the exception of occasional uses such as rock band They Might Be
Giants’ Dial-A-Song or facilitating computer access to online games (BBS-hosted
role playing games, online chess, later MUDs, MOOs leading to MMOGs), the
telephone as an entertainment medium withered. Video and music capable mobile
phones revived the broadcast use of the telephone, and games such as Botfighters,
Supafly and Dodgeball extended the concept of video games out into the street.
These uses have reawakened the dormant conceptualization (the capability
has always been there) of the telephone as an entertainment medium. The mobile
phone is currently experiencing a period of rapid growth, market penetration, and
capability expansion very much like the turn of the century period 100 years ago
when experiments with telephone as entertainment, telephone as business tool,
telephone as policing tool, telephone as communications tool were ongoing. This
project dives into this incunabular stage of mobile-phone-as-entertainment in an
attempt to understand historical and cultural influences on our use and
conceptualization of the mobile phone at the current moment, as well as engage in
some speculation on future possibilities of artistic/entertainment practice using the
mobile phone. These speculations represent a combination of consideration of the

21
See also Asa Briggs “The Pleasure Telephone” in The Social Impact of the Telephone, ed. Ithiel de
Sola Pool (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1977), 40-65.

26
historical/cultural legacy of the telephone in film and television; the mashup of
database, narrative and game as structures of both cognition and artistic production;
and the creation of a narrative entertainment project designed for the mobile phone
Thus, to some degree, this project is an effort both to experiment with the
new encounters, social, artistic and technological, that the introduction of mobile
media as new media precipitates. At the same time, it is a recognition that we are in
the period of experimentation, prior to fixed institutional forms, and as such a
recognition, it is an attempt to come to greater understanding of the medium and the
socio-cultural influences to understand and participate in its developing trajectory.
While Chapter 5, of course, is a proof of concept of some of these theories
and analyses from earlier chapters, Chapter 6 tries to relate them (the theoretical,
analytical and experimental aspects of the preceding chapters) to the actual
marketplace, trying to tie more closely the sometimes abstract musings of humanities
scholarship to data of what consumers are actually supporting as participants and
consumers. Ithiel de Sola Pool, who has published two of the most in-depth surveys
of the telephone in society, asserts that technology assessment depends on market
analysis. In his technology assessment of the telephone, Pool states, “a technical-
economic market analysis is the place to begin in successful technology
assessment”.
22
While my goal here is primarily a cultural practice and artistic
assessment rather than the type of technology assessment commissioned by policy
makers and business executives that Pool provides, the importance of the market

22
Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Forecasting the Telephone (Norwood, NJ: ABLEX Publishing, 1983), 12.

27
should not be ignored. The market data available from the mobile media
entertainment industry will not illustrate the popularity or market success of mobile
narrative entertainment, because so few exist and those that do exist are small scale
experiments conducted by labs, universities, and art collectives operating well below
the radar of market tracking firms. However, evident trends in mobile entertainment
broadly, from game and ringtone downloads to video services and others, will help
us add an economic and industrial dimension to our cultural, historical and
theoretical analysis.
Read on, then, and when your mobile phone rings interrupting your sequence
of thoughts, think of it not only as a telephone with a variety of rings and an
infinitely long wire, but think of it as a portal to wherever you might want to go, in
this world or another.

28
Chapter 2

When a Story Calls: The Telephone as Narrative Device

Apple’s iPhone advertisement plays upon the telephone’s ability to instantiate
desire with its ring, starting with the desire to know and then the desire to connect
and communicate. “Who’s calling?” we wonder. But, it also indicates the important
and prominent role the telephone plays in film, both creating a desire to know and
establishing narrative lines of development. From the ominous Hitchcock zoom on
the phone that opens the advertisement to Mr. Incredible’s hopeful “Hello?” at the
end, each ring and greeting carries with it not only an introduction, not only a social
connection, but also a narrative implication: Hitchcock implants a question about the
significance of the phone call which later serves as the key to unraveling the murder
plot, and Mr. Incredible answers the phone looking for the story of his mid-life crisis
to take another path.
That this advertisement proceeds with no explanation, contextualization or
explication speaks to the ubiquity of telephonic communication and the universal
understanding and familiarity of the phone’s role in life and popular culture. Apple’s
advertisement associates all of the power, desire, joy and narrative drive implied by
the phone in these clips with the introduction of the iPhone, ready to open new
chapters in consumer’s lives.
With an eye towards the potential future of narrative entertainment and
popular culture that the iPhone and its mobile media peers share, I explore more
deeply this association of the telephone and cinema, in particular how the telephone

29
operates as a narrative device. I am interested in extending our understanding of the
role of the telephone beyond the important and insightful work begun by Jan Olsson
and Tom Gunning and continued by J.P. Telotte, David Crane and others.
23
As one
of the key technological advances creating the conditions of the modern society, the
telephone is most often analyzed in terms of modernity. Olsson and Gunning each
take up the role of the telephone in early film, Olsson concentrating on the formal
techniques used by filmmakers to present phone conversations while Gunning also
addresses the thematic operation of the phone within the story and as part of the
narrative structure. Building on both Olsson and Gunning’s insights, I want to take
this idea of the telephone in filmic narrative and explore its role across a range of
examples from film and television. My contention is that its narrative roles are
numerous and varied, and become as natural, frequent, expected, and multi-talented
as the telephone itself has become in everyday life. And, as society and culture have
shifted from the speed, concentration, and homogenizing systems of modernity to the
instantaneity, distribution, and rhizomic networks of post-modernity, the telephone
supports, implies and participates in narratives exploring these socio-cultural
formations. I think the versatility of the telephone’s narrative role on screen lays the
groundwork for future forms of narrative that take advantage of the telephone’s
capability as a narrative device.

23
Some additional detailed accounts of the telephone in its stylistic, generic, gendered and
psychological complexity include: David Crane, “Projections and Intersections: Paranoid Textuality
in Sorry Wrong Number,” Camera Obscura 51 (2002): 70-113; Tom Gunning “Heard Over the
Phone,” Screen 32/2 (1991) 184-196; Jan Olsson “Framing Silent Calls,” in Allegories of
Communication, eds. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Rome: John Libbey Publishing, 2004), 157-192;
Ned Schantz, “Telephonic Film,” Film Quarterly 56/4 (2003): 23-30; and J.P. Telotte “Tangled
Networks and Wrong Numbers,” Film Criticism 10/3 (1986): 36-48.

30
But what is a narrative device? The word device itself has a variety of
related meanings: the technological—“a tool or machine designed to perform a
particular task or function”; the abstract—“a way of achieving something, especially
a clever or dishonest way”; the literary—“something designed to create a particular
effect in a story or drama or to evoke a particular response from a reader, listener, or
viewer”; the symbolic—“an emblem, motto, or combination of the two, especially
when used in heraldry”.
24
While the third definition in this list might seem enough, I
think it is critically important to consider the others as well, for it is the
agglomeration of multiple functions that makes the telephone, and by extension the
mobile phone, such a powerful component of narrative art and a key player in
emerging new media narrative forms. The telephone itself is a tool or machine for a
particular task, voice communication, and it usually performs this function when it
appears in film. In the examples that follow, however, we shall see it operate as a
tool for tasks beyond communication while simultaneously creating particular effects
in the story. The commonly used term “plot device” is really a combination of the
abstract and the literary definitions, as these point to the artifice of a narrative, and
the symbolic or heraldic usage of the term applies to explanatory and directional aids
to narrative comprehension.
Film historian Kristin Thompson offers the following definition that expands
and clarifies the literary definition cited above: “The word device indicates any
single element or structure that plays a role in the artwork—a camera movement, a

24
Definitions from the Encarta World English Dictionary, 1999. Available online at
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/device.html

31
frame story, a repeated word, a costume, a theme, and so on”.
25
In discussing the
telephone as a narrative device, I will focus on how the telephone plays a role, such
as implied by Thompson and the dictionary definitions, in the narrative aspects of an
artwork. A relatively simple, non-telephonic example illustrates how an object
might accrue a multiplicity of these meanings. Frodo’s magic ring in the Peter
Jackson adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy functions as a
narrative device. It is a tool or piece of technology with at least one identifiable
function: it causes its wearer to disappear. Frodo uses this capability to extricate
himself, rather cleverly, from numerous inconvenient or dangerous situations. The
ring is also symbol of the antagonist’s power and designs on domination, which
forms the epic structure of the narrative. And, finally, it represents the narrative
engine driving the main plot and subplots forward. The destruction of the ring is
Frodo’s quest; its discovery is Sauron’s goal; and Gollum’s desire to repossess and
Boromir’s desire to use the ring’s power to obstruct Frodo’s path, providing the
necessary complications to expand the middle of the story.
26
Thus, one object
operates simultaneously exhibiting multiple definitions of “device” and operating on
different narrative levels. It is no accident or simple fan’s homage that I illustrate the
idea of narrative device with Frodo’s ring. Just as Frodo’s ring is emblematic of

25
Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 15.

26
Here I refer to Peter Brooks’ theory of the “expanded middle” of any narrative being the “field of
force” the reader proceeds through, as these narrative delay tactics forestall the end or metaphorical
death. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984),
47.

32
pure power, those who master the telephone as a narrative device, also achieve a
greater power of control, understanding and movement in the examples that follow.
Why do we care? The telephone has a special history and long association
with cinema. As Gunning and Olsson have explored, the telephone played an
important role in early cinema, training viewers to understand manipulations of time
and space. The telephone is also a ubiquitous device in American society, so
everyday and routine a part of daily life that its presence, and its nature as a
technology, are often overlooked until it fails to work. 94% of American households
have a telephone line, and 26% have multiple lines; there are 190 million telephone
lines in the United States and, as of November 2007, 250 million cell phone
subscribers.
27

In this chapter we will explore how this most familiar of communications
devices has a deep history of use as a narrative device, suggesting an equal
familiarity in this role. The narrative roles of the telephone at issue here go beyond
the obvious ability of the telephone to transmit friends’ stories to one another.
Rather, here, we will explore its function as a tool of the cinematic narrator, as a
symbol or motif, as the premise around which the narrative is built, and as the means
to bridge virtual and physical worlds within the story. By demonstrating the
versatility of the telephone as a narrative device, both within the story being told and

27
Statistics for American household: Blumenfeld, Jeffrey and Christy C. Kunin, “Local Competition
and Universal Service: New Solutions and Old Myths” in Telecommunications: Law, Regulation,
and Policy, eds. Walt Sapronov and William Read (Stamford: ABLEX Publishing, 1998), 116.
Statistics for number of landlines: Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian “How Much Information? 2003”
(Berkeley: UC Berkeley, 2003), http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-
2003/. Mobile subscription statistics: CTIA—The Wireless authority, http://www.ctia.org. Note that
while landlines represent places with telephone service, cell phone subscriptions represent people.

33
at the level of its telling, I establish part of the foundation of my overall argument
regarding the narrative potential of the mobile phone. As a familiar device within the
story and as a familiar device telling the story, the mobile phone is ideally suited as
the interface platform for new forms of narrative that explore the pressures of the
contemporary human experience, anxieties surrounding networked media, multi-
focal subjectivity, and our growing desire for more participatory forms of art and
entertainment.
During the early market development of any new media technology, there is a
period of instability in which the consumer is hesitant to dive headlong into using the
new technology and clings to familiarity. One might consider the important role of
word processing applications in the widespread acceptance of the personal computer:
while affording advantages of storage, formatting, error correction and a host of
other new features, a word processing application makes the PC seem like the very
familiar typewriter. As we will see in the next chapter, the idea of a telephone being
used for entertainment requires a component of familiarity for broad-based market
acceptance, and hence the rise of mobile television services. In the case of the
incunabular forms of mobile media narrative, which will be discussed in Chapters 4
and 5, I believe the component of familiarity is the telephone, and that familiarity
stems in part from its cinematic and televisual legacy. While the telephone is being
used in a seemingly new way (as game interface, weapon, narrative medium), it is
actually operating as a narrative device—a very familiar role.

34
The telephone has played this familiarity-breeding role before in the
introduction of a new media form. Both Gunning and Olsson suggest that the
telephone played a key role on screen in the development of narrative cinema,
particularly in establishing cinema’s capacity to bridge time and space. Olsson
analyzes in detail the early use of split screens and the later development of parallel
editing to connect locales on screen that are connected via telephone in the story.
Early on, a panel separating the conversationalists would imply distance between the
speakers. This depicted visually what the audience already understood
experientially: that the telephone connected aurally a person in one locale to another
person on the other side of the city. As cinematic narratives became more complex
and as viewers became more comfortable with transitions from one space to another,
the necessity for a static third panel in between the speakers implying or explaining
the distance between them receded. “By 1916, telephone scenes shot in split screen
had, in the main, either narrativized the mid-panel, or obliterated it using only two
panels,” Olsson writes. “The standard procedure was, of course, not to use split-
screen shots for telephone scenes at all, employing parallel editing instead.”
28
By the
late teens, audiences had been trained, in part through the telephone, to understand
parallel editing’s meaning and method of exploring separate spaces simultaneously,
and the necessity to show both spaces on screen abated.
“Early filmmakers incorporated recent technology into the plots of their films
to naturalize film’s power to move through space and time” writes Tom Gunning in

28
Olsson, 184.

35
his article “Heard Over the Phone” about the telephone in early film.
29
The
telephone assists in the naturalizing of film’s control of space and time and
reciprocally this cinematic representation naturalizes the telephone’s role in
controlling or modulating access to narrative information. Gunning’s fascinating
article offers a detailed analysis of the use of the phone in combination with
cinematic techniques in rescue melodramas from Pathé’s terrible angoisse (~1907)
to Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator (1911). These rescue melodramas follow a
similar basic premise: a wife or family is endangered, usually at their home, and the
husband learns of their plight by way of the telephone. In some versions, this
information is timely and the husband can return home or dispatch police to save the
family. In other versions, the husband is tortured by “distance and impotence”
30
and
the telephone only conveys the slaughter of his family. These are prominent early
films that employ the telephone as an explanatory device, making clear the story-
based connection between two separate locales shown on screen.
In his analysis of the telephone in the films of Fritz Lang, Gunning describes
telephone conversations that begin by showing the two parties talking by telephone,
later interspersed with scenes that depict the conversation that continues in
voiceover. Audiences already familiar with gaining conversational access to another
place began to comprehend the association of the depicted scene with the audio
track. Here, Gunning concludes that “early filmmakers used the telephone to make

29
Gunning “Heard Over the Phone, 187.
30
Ibid, 192.

36
experiments in the co-ordination of time and space intelligible to audiences.”
31
This
role of the telephone training the audience to comprehend the cinematic narrative is a
good example of the process of familiarization inherent in the development of new
media technologies. New technologies are often explained or introduced by a
connection to old technologies or familiar uses. I agree with the premise that the
telephone assisted early film audiences in understanding cinematic navigations of
time and space, and that role continues today.
Conversely, I think the long history of cinema using the telephone in the
operation and communication of the narrative has trained the audience to understand
and accept the telephone as a versatile narrative device. The capability and
utilization of the telephone as a narrative device goes beyond spatial navigation,
communication between characters, and construction of suspense. The telephone, in
fact, can be an interface device between narrative and viewer, a symbol, or a mental
signpost, all facilitating comprehension of the entire narrative. These functions and
this acceptance of telephones as narrative devices form a foundation of familiarity
for the development of new forms of storytelling using mobile media. Just as the
telephone was the familiar medium helping to introduce early cinema, cinematic
narrative techniques associated with the telephone will be the familiar component
training new audiences to understand, participate and feel immersed in new mobile
media narratives.

31
Gunning, Tom. “Fritz Lang calling” in Allegories of Communication, 24.

37
An important part of the narrative associations that the telephone has accrued
through the course of cinematic history is the fact that their narrative function,
whether structural or symbolic or narrational, is paired with their diegetic function as
a communication device. Thus, the phone appears on screen as nothing more than an
everyday piece of technology, yet on another level we begin to perceive and utilize
its presence and function to comprehend the narrative.
We often speak of artists (particularly filmmakers) “laying bare the device”.
In this context, “device” is synonymous with artifice—the constructed nature of the
story we the audience witness. And, in order for this artifice to be “laid bare” as an
artistic statement in some films, it must be concealed or at least undetectable in other
situations. I contend that the telephone, given its ubiquity and omnipresence in
everyday life, can take on important narrative functions yet remain concealed or
undetected as nothing more than merely a telephone on the wall, desk or in the hand.
And, in addition to these ‘behind the scenes’ functions of the narrative artifice, the
telephone can operate as a tool or technology within the story world, beyond
standard telephonic communication from something as simple as a weapon (a device
of violence, one with consequences in the direction of the narrative) or something as
complex as means of instantaneous transportation. In these cases, the telephone
operates as a “device” in two ways: first, a piece of technology used by the
characters in a narrative; second, as a function with narrative consequences.
In both cinematic techniques of parallel editing and split-screen, the
telephone, as a diegetic object as well as narrative device, works hand in hand with

38
the film medium to articulate the transfer of information and the function of
representation. This process leads to the naturalized assumption that if a character
wants access to some place in the story world, or if a character or participant needs to
control multivocal representations, the phone is the tool.

Tool of cinematic narrator—Control of Information
While the telephone serves to share information between characters in the
rescue melodramas, and thus establish the goals and conflicts central to these
narratives, the telephone can also play an important role sharing information between
the film and the viewer. Seymour Chatman offers a useful term to describe the agent
of the film narrative that communicates with the viewer. He calls this agent or
presence, which is very much aligned with the cinematic style and stylistic choices
of the filmmakers and not to be confused with voice-over narration, the cinematic
narrator: “The cinematic narrator is not to be identified with the voice-over
narrator. A voice-over may be one component of the total showing, one of the
cinematic narrator’s devices”.
32
While David Bordwell argues against any sort of
anthropomorphized narrator presence, I do not see the concept of a cinematic
narrator as incongruent with narrative as a cognitive process of understanding.
33

When we speak of the film implying something or the viewer interpreting something,
we are implicitly acknowledging the presence of the cinematic narrator. The process

32
Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990), 134.

33
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 62.

39
of understanding requires both the construction of narrative schema by the viewer in
response to the creation and presentation of the components, or the data, in a certain
way. “Cinematic narrator,” then, is a comfortable and suitably descriptive term to
identify this presentation of data. This cinematic narrator exhibits a variety of
strategies in the construction and presentation of the story and is in need of tools to
execute this narrational function. The telephone’s versatility makes it an often-used
narrative device or tool of the cinematic narrator.
A logical extension from the role of communication device to narrative
device exists in the case of the telephone as a tool of the cinematic narrator for
control of information. As a communication device, the telephone allows for
individuals to exchange information. When this sort of exchange occurs on screen,
however, the telephone becomes the focal point through which either the audience or
other characters have access or lack access to information. For example, in the 1966
television adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s one character play The Human Voice, Ingrid
Bergman’s character assumes her former lover is at home as she talks with him over
the telephone. A later conversation reveals this to not be the case, and the sudden
reversal changes the viewer’s understanding of the unfolding narrative. To manage
the narrative pace, comprehension and emotional sequencing, the film capitalizes on
both the capabilities and limitations of telepresence.
At the initial phone call, both the main character and viewer are at the mercy
of their own assumptions as to the location of the ex-lover. The cinematic narrator
conceals the location of the unseen lover using the artifice of the phone conversation:

40
the main character could have traveled to her lover’s home and discovered his
absence; or, the film could show both sides of the conversation using parallel editing
or split screens, as most early cinematic phone conversations did. Instead, in The
Human Voice, the man calls his former lover allowing both the main character and
the viewers to assume he is at home, equally full of despair. The scene progresses
without the benefit of hearing the lover’s half of the conversation and the camera
remains in the woman’s apartment, giving us access only to her voice, appearance
and locale, just as if we were in the room with her. By showing only half the
conversation, a situation made logical and reasonable and understandable because
the telephone explains the absence of the second character, the viewer is left to
wonder about the mental state, past actions, and intentions of the unseen and unheard
lover. The woman’s hysteria might seem misplaced, as her lover has called her and
even calls back after an early bad connection; or, it may be genuine. It may be a
result of her own desperation or stem from a sense of betrayal. And looming over
the entire conversation is the question of how close to suicide is she? These
questions, created in part by the control of information focused and presented by the
use of the telephone, provide much the narrative momentum of the first half of the
play. The black plastic of the telephone reveals little of the ex-lover’s character—it
is dark, impenetrable, mysterious. The viewer is left to speculate about their
relationship, and lacking any clues from another character, must wait with
anticipation for the woman’s next proclamation, exclamation or action.

41
When the connection is lost midway through the conversation, Bergman’s
character asserts herself and dials her ex-lover’s home reaching his roommate Henry.
When Henry reveals the lover is not at home and hasn’t been for sometime, the
viewer (and main character) receives a crucial piece of information via the telephone.
Following this revelation the viewer must reorganize the data of the story, create a
new hypothesis, and thus come to a new interpretation and state of comprehension.
In effect, the pace of the narrative increases at this juncture, changing from a
possible narrative of reconciliation to one of separation, and accelerates towards the
(permanent) severing of the connection.
The telephone also plays an important role in the climax and resolution of
these characters’ love story in addition to its narrational control of information. The
phone is a vocal connection between the two, but its distance, anonymity and
susceptibility to interruption represent the tenuousness of the relationship. In the
end, Bergman’s character begs her former lover to end the conversation quickly and,
in so doing, kill their relationship and any possibility of reconciliation. The sudden
dial tone indicates the end of the phone call, the end of the love affair and the end of
the teleplay.
While in The Human Voice the telephone controls narrative information
primarily through concealment or omission, the telephone can also serve as a device
providing information, access, and essentially serving as an interface between the
viewer and a complex narrative structure. The noir period offers a number of films
marked by multiple perspectives and frequent temporal shifts, and the telephone of

42
Sorry Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948) stands out as a method to manage this
complexity. J.P. Telotte identifies Sorry Wrong Number as a multiple narrator film
using a layered arrangement of voice-over and flashback to achieve an unstable
narrative of shifting vantage points.
34
Telotte focuses on the psychological
implications of the complex multiple narrator structure and how this structure
illustrates the “nightmare potential that always haunts the film noir world—the
potential of ambiguity, of multiple, indeterminate meanings, and of a self that is
subject to unseen, unsensed forces”.
35
These forces, their conspiratorial plotting and
the nature of narrative are the primary focus of David Crane’s investigation into this
film. His insightful analysis, “Projections and Intersections: Paranoid Textuality in
Sorry Wrong Number,” presents the phone’s power to communicate and
vulnerability to failure as a connection to “anxiety, hysteria, and paranoia”.
36
These
two essays use the telephone as a point of entry into the meaning of the film, and in
so doing illustrate my contention of the telephone’s versatility. Similarly, Ned
Schantz’s “Telephonic Film” focuses on meaning and the discursive role of the
telephone, particularly its negotiations of gender. However, my focus here is to
highlight how the telephone participates in and manages the multiple voice-over
narrators and triggers critical narrative components, thus operating as a tool of the
cinematic narrator. This function further exhibits its versatility, usefulness, and

34
Telotte. “Tangled Networks and Wrong Numbers,” 36.

35
Ibid, 47.

36
Crane, 72.

43
long-standing history as a narrational device—qualities that will be highly useful
when designing narrative interfaces for new media narratives.
In Sorry Wrong Number, the bedridden Leona Stevenson uses the telephone
to piece together her life and her illness, and to solicit aid once she overhears a
murder plot. The viewer has access to the narrative primarily through Leona’s use of
the phone, which initiates every narrative unit. In contrast to The Human Voice, both
sides of the conversations are usually shown, and many of these conversations
initiate flashback sequences illustrating more important narrative units. Whereas The
Human Voice is ultimately a story of disconnection and thus it is appropriate to be
witness to only one half the conversation, Sorry Wrong Number is a story of tangled
networks. Thus it is fitting that the telephone manages access to the variety of in-
story narrators and key vignettes. These narrative units may be significant plot
events, such as the discovery of the murder plot and the mafia take-over of the drug
smuggling ring, or other narrations that shed light on Leona and her situation.
In order to explore the importance of the telephone as a narrative interface, or
the means by which the cinematic narrator parcels out narrative information, it is
useful to bear in mind the cognitive process that is narrative comprehension.
37

Edward Branigan offers a clear and highly useful model in Narrative Comprehension
and Film. Branigan illustrates his narrative schema with a hexagon to emphasize
narrative’s open field, loose boundaries and the interrelationship of the schematic

37
To continue with the dual meaning of device as tool and technology, I rely here on the computer
science definition of interface: equipment or programs designed to communicate information from
one system of computing devices or programs to another—where the telephone is the equipment
communicating information (narrative units) from one system (cinematic narrative) to another
(viewer).

44
components. These components consist of: abstract/prologue,
orientation/exposition, initiating event, goal, complicating action,
climax/resolution/epilogue, and narration.
38
The first six occupy points on the
hexagon and narration occupies the region in the middle where lines connect the
other components. The process of narrative comprehension, then, is to receive a
narrative unit, propose a hypothesis for its proper place in the schema and continue
making connections between the narrative units, reordering them according to new
hypotheses as necessary as subsequent units are categorized. Each narrative unit
might be connected in a variety of ways, whether sequential in the film,
chronological within the diegesis, or linked by theme, style, motif or any other clue
aiding the viewer’s comprehension. Additionally, the schema always operates
simultaneously on a number of levels. Understanding Leona’s narratives (of
survival, of investigation, of controlling her husband) requires multiple schemas, as
does comprehending Henry’s narratives (his criminal plot and his attempts to break
free of Leona’s control), and putting the whole thing together. With such a complex
arrangement, an interface between the complexity of the data and the process of
understanding is necessary: the telephone.
Leona makes or receives all but one of the seventeen phone calls, and all but
one of the flashback episodes occur during one of these telephone calls with Leona.
39

38
Branigan, 17-18.

39
David Crane counts sixteen phone calls in his detailed account of the film. However, his count
omits the one phone call not initiated or received by Leona. Fred Lord receives a call from his
colleague Joe, advancing their investigation toward capturing Henry and the criminal ring. This
phone call takes place during the flashback episode that occurs when Sally calls Leona from the store.

45
With each phone call Leona receives or makes, we are introduced to a narrative unit.
The first phone call is the most straightforward example, and serves as both
orientation and the initiating event. The film opens with Leona hearing a busy
signal, having dialed her husband’s office. She requests the operator break into the
line, as she is sure there is a malfunction; but to no avail as the operator reports the
line is engaged. By means of this telephone call so far, the viewer is oriented to the
state of affairs: Leona is a sick woman, alone and bedridden; her husband is not in
his office nor at home as Leona expected. As the phone call continues, Leona’s line
is accidentally connected to another conversation between two men plotting a
murder. This part of the phone call constitutes an initiating event on two levels:
Leona develops a new goal of reporting the murder plot (a goal that encounters
multiple complications in the form of phone calls to the chief operator and the
police) and initiates an investigative or hermeneutic line for the viewer. This phone
call establishes the questions of “Who is going to be murdered?” and “What will the
connection be to Leona?”
The phone call Leona receives from Western Union, informing her of
Henry’s departure to Boston, is another example of the telephone delivering a key
component for the development of a comprehensive narrative schema. The phone
call more than simply complicates Leona’s goal of finding her husband and not being
alone. This phone call also brings Leona to the realization that she might in fact be
in the intended victim of the murder plot she overheard. The look of horror and
realization on her face as she holds the phone indicates that she has constructed a

46
narrative schema of her own, one with an initiating event of Henry’s trip and the
possible climax of her own death. Leona drawing this conclusion (or resolution)
illustrates the non-sequential nature of the hexagon. Leona does not yet know why
she is the subject of a murder plot, and thus her understanding of her own situation is
still a hypothesis. Her subsequent phone conversation with Dr. Alexander both
offers a complication to her method of controlling her husband (she’s actually not
sick at all), a complication to her goal of not being alone (the doctor refuses to come
treat her) and exposition explaining her husband’s state of mind.
The flashback during this call, in which Henry knocks Dr. Alexander’s phone
off the desk upon hearing that Leona won’t die naturally anytime soon, confirms the
viewer’s hypothesis that Henry intends to kill his wife. In fact, this scene also
represents an initiating event made evident by Henry’s violent twitch damaging the
phone. The diagnosis of Leona as healthy initiates Henry’s plan to have her
murdered. This important narrative unit comes to both the viewer and Leona by way
of her telephone conversation, and is emphasized by the part played by the telephone
within the flashback. Thus, we have the telephone operating as an interface as well
as an object of meaning.
This multi-layered role of the phone in this one sequence illustrates what
Branigan reminds us: that “narrative is a recursive organization of data; that is, its
components may be embedded successively at various micro- and macro-levels of
action”.
40
Bearing this in mind is important, as the levels of action and temporality

40
Branigan, 18.

47
in Sorry Wrong Number are dizzyingly complex with flashbacks within phone calls,
phone calls within flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks. The phone calls
trigger the initial flashbacks and thus deliver the narrative information both to Leona
and the viewer. In a recursive example, the flashback recounting Sally Lord’s
discovery of Henry’s criminal actions includes a phone call from her husband’s
colleague, informing Lord of the successful initiation of a sting operation to catch
Henry. In this case, the telephone delivers this important piece of narrative
information on two levels. Sally’s call to Leona motivates the flashback, and within
the flashback a phone call sends Fred Lord off in pursuit of Henry and the
accomplices. In terms of Branigan’s schema, this phone call will prove a
complicating action to Sally’s narrative goal of protecting Henry, Leona’s goal of
finding Henry, and Henry’s goal of breaking free of Leona’s confining ways.
Appropriate to its role as the narrative interface for the film, the phone
features prominently in both the opening and closing shots. In the opening, we see
Henry’s office phone off the hook, orienting the viewer to the state of affairs. The
final shot of the film, shows the killer’s hands hanging up the phone on Henry. The
line “Sorry, wrong number” confirms Leona’s death and serves as the resolution
component of the schema. Our entry into, our exit out, and our navigation of the
narrative during—all made possible through the telephone.

48
Polychronic Narrative and the Telephone—Managing and Disrupting Linearity
While the telephone serves a critical and complicated role as the narrative
interface in Sorry Wrong Number, it does so in an almost unobtrusive way. Ned
Schantz calls this effect the “Classical Hollywood Telephone,” drawing an analogy
between this unassuming and naturalized presence of the telephone with the classical
Hollywood editing paradigm operating seamlessly without calling attention to
itself.
41
Carried along by the information delivered via the telephone calls, the
viewer has a relatively simple task of ordering the events, motivations, and
consequences into the dark and tragic tale of Leona Stevenson. As Schantz, Telotte,
and Crane have all noted in one way or other, the telephone and its associated
network also serves as a lens through which to illustrate human connections, access
to power and being subject to unseen and uncontrollable forces. Conventional
wisdom attributes these themes to a combination of the post-war moment and the on-
going societal struggle with modernity.
The cinematic telephone is not limited, however, to the Classic Hollywood
Telephone operating in concert with the Classical Hollywood narrative, an
effacement of technology and artifice facilitating an ultimately linear narrative of
love or rescue or death. Numerous examples also exist of the telephone operating as
a narrative device to subvert linearity, assist in navigating and understanding non-
linear structure, and ultimately illuminating styles of narrative that will become more
common in interactive new media. Much as film theorist Marsha Kinder suggests

41
Schantz, 26.

49
that a re-examination of European art films can aid in conceptualizing narrative
strategies for new media, what I am suggesting here is that there are examples of the
telephone operating as keys, warp zones, hotspots, reset buttons and all manner of
computer game devices. Through its cinematic legacy, the telephone accrues
additional familiarity in this role—a familiarity that is important to my
conceptualization of new types of mobile interactive narrative that we will examine
in later chapters.
Two of these examples are contemporary reinvestigations of the noir style,
both extending and amplifying the complex temporal shifts characteristic of noir
films. In Sorry Wrong Number and its noir peers the temporal complexity exists in
the narrative structure—in the discourse—but the story world itself has a
conventional temporal ordering: in a bid for independence Henry turns to drug
smuggling only to run afoul of organized crime, and arranges for Leona’s murder to
cash in her life insurance; all of which Leona learns through telephone conversations
in her last two hours of life before being murdered by Henry’s mob associates. Both
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997),
however, explore the temporal shifts in both their discourse and in their story. Their
characteristics are similar to what David Herman terms “polychromic narration.” In
his analysis, polychromic narration applies to works in which a multiplicity of
temporalities are suggested. Rather than achrony, or a narrative without discernable
temporal structure, Herman says that “polychrony serves mainly to inhibit the
readers’ or viewers’ efforts to comprehend the (temporal structure of the) story world

50
exhaustively.”
42
Further explaining, he describes how his two prime examples, Anna
Seghers short story “Der Ausflug die toten Mädchen” and Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film
The Sweet Hereafter, “provide strategically vague cues for re-creation of their
respective storyworlds” and these vague cues allow for a multiplicity of options of
temporal ordering. While Memento, with its competing discursive temporalities, and
Lost Highway, with its convoluted and looping temporality, operate somewhat
differently than Herman’s examples, they both exhibit the same effect Herman
identifies for polychromic narration. He writes, “it is a narrative device that cues
interpreters to rethink the scope and limits of narrative itself—specifically, to rethink
its linearizing capacity viewed as both a discourse genre and a pattern of thought”.
43

We can examine these films for the use of the telephone as a narrative device either
mitigating or triggering the polychrony of these films.
In the first example, Memento, the telephone serves a stabilizing and
orienting function. The film’s structure, echoing the main character’s damaged
mind, involves a confusing combination of sequential and non-sequential elements.
The main action of film progresses in reverse chronological order, with each
sequence interrupted by a black and white scene of Leonard on the telephone telling
his interlocutor the story Leonard’s experience with Sammy Jankis, a similarly
amnesia-afflicted individual. As Leonard’s phone conversation progresses, the
viewer learns more and more about Leonard’s condition, his strategy for dealing with

42
Herman, Story Logic: The Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002), 220.

43
Herman, 220.

51
it, and also begins to understand the narrative strategy of the film. Essentially, these
phone conversation scenes give the viewer the key to unlocking the narrative
structure of the entire film.
In offering a key to deciphering the narrative strategy by providing a
comfortable, familiar and well-understood format for explanation (the telephone
call), these scenes address the primary concern Branigan lays out for the narration
component of the narrative schema. He writes “The narration is constantly at work
seeking to justify implicitly or explicitly (1) why the narrator is competent and
credible in arranging and reporting these events and (2) why the events are unusual,
strange or worth of attention”.
44
As Leonard describes his condition and his
strategies for living with it and pursuing his goals, we are explicitly shown why
Leonard is an unreliable narrator. The combination of the straightforward black-and-
white telephone scenes and the full color action sequences itself is unusual and
worthy of note. With the explicit demonstration of Leonard’s unreliability via the
telephone, the viewer can hypothesize about the developing narrative in the event
sequences, including an implicit unreliability in Leonard’s tattoos (which are overtly
presented as incontrovertible truth.) Thus, as we learn of Leonard’s condition, we
learn that his version of events may be suspect, and we begin to develop a strategy of
recognizing the connections and disruptions between the film’s form and content,
Leonard’s actions and intent, truth and memory, cause and effect.

44
Branigan, 18.

52
Another neo-noir from the 1990s that aggressively disrupts any insistence,
adherence or predilection for linear narrative is David Lynch’s Lost Highway. In
Lynch’s film, identity, memory, jealousy and psychosis all blend in a surreal tour de
force defying convenient categorization and easy comprehension. Here, Lynch uses
the telephone not as a device guiding and explaining spatial shifts, but rather as a
trigger instigating some of the disruptive temporal twists and surrealistic jolts.
Rather than explaining or contextualizing shifts of locale, and thus aiding the film in
progressing smoothly and invisibly, the telephone shocks the viewer into the
realization that something unusual is going on. Lynch does not foreground the
artifice of cinema in quite the same way as, say Godard in Weekend turns the camera
on himself and other productions. But nevertheless, the viewer is jolted out of any
expectation of a standard detective story crafted in the style of conventional
Hollywood realism when a garishly made up Robert Blake hands Bill Pullman’s
Fred Madison his cell phone to call Fred’s house, only to have Blake’s Mystery Man
answer, seemingly existing in two places at once.
This telephone call, which occurs early on in the film, presents a number of
interesting aspects. First, the telephone is presented as evidence of location.
Standing right in front of Fred, the Mystery Man says “I’m at your house right now.
Call me”, implying that telephonic evidence, used in countless thrillers from Pathe
through to the Scream franchise, will trump the visual evidence right in front of Fred.
When Mystery Man answers Fred’s call, we are left to conclude that either this
film’s story word does not play by the same rules of our physical world or that the

53
Mystery Man operates beyond the spatial and temporal limitations of the natural
world, or both. In any case, the telephone is the touchstone that triggers this initial
realization. Second, whether bridging multiple parallel universes, or warping the
boundaries of space and time in our natural world, it is interesting to note that the
Mystery Man uses a cell phone. This makes Lost Highway one of the first films I am
aware of to use the cell phone as a bridge between rational and supernatural worlds.
This artistic presentation of the cell phone suggests a simultaneous connection of
different types of worlds, prefiguring a 21
st
Century lifestyle that brings the world of
business into the space of leisure and the world of news media onto the sidewalk and
the world of entertainment media into the palm of the hand. Thus, the phone
operates as a touchstone that initiates disruptive junctures in the narrative, and in so
doing also represents an alternative to the logic linearity and discrete spaces.
The Mystery Man appears three times and each time his phone presents a
disruption of time and space outside the bounds of conventional reality and on the
borders of comprehension. These jolts force the viewers mind away from
comprehending the immediate cause-and-effect narrative chain, and launch the
viewer to another level of comprehension at the level of theme, symbol, and
meditation. Thus it is a narrative device of another sort—device of psychological
torture for Pullman’s character, device of psychological play for Lynch, and a device
of recognition and reconsideration for the viewer.
Our minds absorb data and keep in mind events occurring simultaneously and
at different locales; but this data needs organization whether in the form of lists,

54
clusters, catalogues, associations or other schemes. Narrative is one way of
organizing that data, and as Branigan’s schema suggests, it is not necessarily
sequential. Lost Highway, in its exploration of psychosis, foregrounds this
alternative form, presenting a distinctly non-linear narrative that contests our notions
of logical sequencing and cause and effect in our own mind and perceptions. With
the concluding scene looping the narrative back to its beginning, we are left to
contemplate how we understand our own lives and our own selves.

Reset Buttons, Loops and Hotspots--The Telephone Channels New Media
The looping structure of Lost Highway can be read in terms of mental distress
of the main character Fred Madison or as a dream, with Fred trying to escape his
own self-torment. But, given the repeated line “Dick Laurant is dead” and Fred, or
at least a Fred-avatar, roaring off at the film’s end, the film can also be read as a
narrative set to be replayed perhaps with different components, different outcomes.
This idea of the replay brings to mind a central feature of contemporary video
games: the reset button. From the earliest of text-based adventure games like
Adventure and Zork to the most popular of side-scrolling action games like Super
Mario Brothers to heavily narrativized games like Myst and Star Wars: Knights of
the Old Republic, an unsatisfying or poor performance or catastrophic mistake could
always be redressed with a flick of a switch or push of a button or selection of a
menu item: “reset” or “play again” or “start over”. The association with video
games is particularly important for two main reasons: first, video games compete

55
with film in the mass entertainment marketplace and for preeminence as a societally
significant cultural form; and, second, video games increasingly incorporate
storylines, explorable worlds, cinematic “cut scenes” and are developing into a
distinct medium of narrative entertainment.
While the temporal manipulations in noir films like Sorry Wrong Number
certainly predate electronic interactive media, they illustrate an attempt to explore
mental configurations of time, space and causation with the available characteristics
and features of a chosen medium. David Crane notes screenwriter Lucille Fletcher’s
intent to adapt her radioplay into a story that took advantage of the features of film.
The aural dominance from the script’s radio origins remains in the multiple voice-
overs paired with the cinematic technique of the visual flashback, all of which
motivated, instigated and controlled by the telephone. Part of the success and critical
interest in this film is because of its adroit use of a method to adapt radio features
with cinematic techniques. Thus the film becomes an intersection of three media:
the established media of film and the telephone, with the somewhat newer
entertainment medium of radio. The example of Sorry Wrong Number, and to a
greater extent the examples of Lost Highway and Memento, illustrate how media
adapt and incorporate features of their competing forms. Historian Carolyn Marvin
points out that new media are “introduced into a pattern of tension created by the
coexistence of old and new”.
45
The loop structure and spatial-temporal disruption

45
Marvin, 8.

56
created by Mystery Man’s telephone in Lost Highway are examples of a collision of
film form with new media navigation.
Tom Tykwer’s 1998 film Run Lola Run foregrounds this tension between old
and new, particularly in terms of cultural associations. The prologue, including
quotations from a famous German soccer coach, alludes to conceptualizing and
organizing the inputs and data of life, not into a linear cause-and-effect narrative, but
into a game with various possibilities of action and outcome. As a film (a temporally
and linearly bounded medium) that, both literally and figuratively, plays with the
story it tells, it is an excellent example of Marvin’s pattern of tension of old and new
media. And most significantly for my purposes, it exhibits the telephone in a role of
narrative control, and also of database or game control—the telephone functions at
the nexus of the competing and complementing linear narrative and game-like
cognitive structures. Exhibiting the remediation cycle at work in ‘old media’, Run
Lola Run is example of narrative cinema refashioning itself in response to the
challenge of video games and computational database structures.
46

The ringing red phone in Lola’s apartment initiates each of three similar
vignettes, and as the second vignette begins, the viewer knows that the ringing phone
represents a resetting of time and place to the origin point. With the ringing phone
the viewer expects a new sequence of events and set of obstacles for Lola to
surmount in her effort to save her boyfriend Manni. To return to Branigan’s

46
Here I refer to remediation as explained by Bolter and Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New
Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 15: “in which [new media] refashion older media and …
in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.”

57
component schema, the ringing phone is the initiating event that “alters the present
state of affairs”.
47
Each time the phone rings and the camera focuses on the red
handset we are offered another of the many possible outcomes of Lola and Manni’s
situation. However, at the same time, the ringing phone serves as a sort of “reset
button” thus fulfilling the abstract and orientation function—with the overhead shot
of the ringing phone we know right away that we’re repeating the same conditions
and state of affairs. Thus, the phone simultaneously capitalizes on its inherent
hermeneutic associations (“our gossipy desire to know” as Ned Schantz describes it)
and on a new function within the realm of new media navigation and video games,
the replay button. Also, the landline telephone of Run Lola Run, in contrast to the
mobile phone popular in Germany even in 1998, participates in the film’s negotiation
of a tension between modern technology (failed transportation and communication)
and personal solution (Lola’s run).
Film theorist Marsha Kinder describes films, like Run Lola Run, that expose
“the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories” as
database narratives and argues that such films “reveal the arbitrariness of the
particular choices made, and the possibility of making other combinations which
would create alternative stories”.
48
In Run Lola Run, this arbitrariness is highlighted
by seemingly insignificant items such as the delay caused by the dog in the animated
sequence or the obstacle of the baby stroller, or the more significant choices of where

47
Branigan, 18

48
Kinder, Marsha. “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel's Legacy for New
Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative,” Film Quarterly 55/4 (2002): 6.

58
to obtain the necessary sum of money—which change both Lola’s path to Manni
through the streets and the story we experience. Visually and structurally, the
telephone in Run Lola Run serves as a sort of ‘reset button’ or ‘run’ command—a
function common in video games and databases initiating the procedural algorithm.
The film both illuminates the cycle of remediation and provides further evidence of
the telephone’s suitability for controlling, delivering and resetting access to narrative
information in a computational environment.
As mentioned above, Kinder bases some of her theory of database narratives
on her analysis of European art films by the likes Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Jacques
Rivette and others. In her analysis, these films emphasize arbitrariness, openness
and possibility, rather than a singular and closed narrative system. She suggests
these qualities are the very qualities inherent in interactive new media, imbuing the
user with a greater sense of agency to navigate the narrative field and construct
unique meaning. As my ultimate goal is to construct an argument illustrating the
appropriateness of the mobile phone to participate as medium, interface, navigation
mode and cognitive orientation device in new forms of interactive narrative
entertainment, examples of the telephone executing these functions in film support
my contention that the mobile phone executing these functions really isn’t all that
new. The mobile phone, in my argument, becomes the familiar and comfortably
manages Marvin’s tension between old and new.
The “reset button” illustrated by Run Lola Run is one excellent example, one
in which the same state of affairs is repeated to identify slightly different outcomes.

59
This example highlights cause-and-effect, arbitrariness and repeatability—all
components that exist within the intersection of database and narrative that is also the
domain of interactive media. Operating as a “reset button” positions the telephone in
a role of narrative control, and establishes a precedent for telephonic control of
interactive narrative. In addition to its naturalized role as a control mechanism for
narration, the telephone also has been used as a nodal point in narrative progression,
representing at least two paths of action for the character. In terms of new media,
this function might be characterized as a hyperlink or a hotspot, whereby the user
might select the path to follow creating an open narrative that resists closure and is
unique to each traverse through the narrative field by a participant.
Luis Buñuel’s 1974 film Phantom of Liberty shows the phone in this manner.
The film is structured as a series of episodes in what Edward Branigan would
describe as an unfocused chain. For Branigan, an unfocused chain “is a series of
cause and effects but with no continuing center. For example, character A is
followed for a time, then character B, then character C”.
49
In an unfocused chain,
any sort of association or motif can serve as a transition to the next episode. In
Phantom of Liberty, each episode proceeds along its narrative vector until an
intersection with another episodic vector takes the film in another direction. These
intersections are not causal, but rather are associative. With each episodic vector
interrupted by another, none progress towards narrative closure on screen. Rather,
the viewer is left to speculate on the direction any given vector might develop, thus

49
Branigan, 19.

60
foregrounding the idea that traditional cause-and-effect narratives often contain and
restrict possibility, and that a variety of narrative directions and lines of development
always exist. The intersection points are nodes in the narrative network, and a
figuration of the lines of narrative development of this network, rather than the
contained hexagon of Branigan’s schema, might look like this:

In this illustration, each vector represents an episode, but lacks the complete schema
of a narrative—those components are left to the viewer to supply.
The nodes represent the points in the narrative development that a new vector
ventures off in another direction. Buñuel uses a variety of elements to serve as
nodes: a nurse interrupting a doctor’s examination, a card game, and a dinner party,
among others. In one memorable sequence, the vector of the police commissioner
playing dominos and chatting up an attractive woman is interrupted by a phone call.
Indicating two possible paths, the police commissioner initially refuses to take the
telephone
Figure 1: Nodes and intersecting episodes

61
call in order to continue his conversation with the young woman. He ultimately
takes the call, sending the film on a new vector from the bar to a graveyard and an
incident with police officers that do not recognize their commissioner. This is
illustrated in the figure above by the new vector moving off in another direction from
the nodal point of the telephone call. In thinking about this sequence, we can apply a
computational media concept to understand function of the telephone. Essentially,
the telephone acts as a hyperlink: it serves as a conduit for narrative distribution and
connection of the two episodes (or lexia). It does so in a manner consistent with the
diegetic world, making its hyperlink function natural and invisible.
What these examples of non-sequential, non-Classical Hollywood narrative
cinema show us is the rich variety of narrative possibility and how the common,
everyday object of the telephone can help unlock narrative strategies, orient the
viewer to a temporal pattern, or adroitly reorder the direction of narrative
development. From the narrative interface of Sorry Wrong Number to the narrative
disjunctions of Lost Highway to the reset button and hyperlink functions of Run Lola
Run and Phantom of Liberty, these examples primarily illustrate how the telephone’s
presence within the story world serves the narration, or discourse or sjuzhet. In order
to develop a complete picture of the telephone as a narrative device in film and
television, we need to also look at examples of its function closer to the story, or plot
or fabula, as well as its role aiding a narrative’s construction meaning through a
symbolic role.

62
Telephone and Meaning—As motif/symbol
The motif can be an important part of a narrative, both in the overall
construction of meaning and also supporting the cinematic narrator. Remember that,
according to Branigan, the narration constantly seeks to assert its competence and
credibility, as well as assert the events’ worthiness of attention.
50
One method, or
device, to establish attention and meaning simultaneously is the motif. As Kristin
Thompson summarizes, “Films tend to use visual motifs that become emblematic of
an important idea,” and offers the repeated close-up on the velociraptor claw as
emblematic of Professor Grant’s hostility to others in Jurassic Park.
51
As we watch
the film and develop hypotheses that are consistent with Grant as a surly workaholic
we both come to recognize that the events are worthy of attention because of the
danger in the park and the developing relationship between Grant and the children.
As the viewer constructs a narrative schema enhanced by this motif, the narration
succeeds in establishing its credibility as well.
Given the telephone’s power to instantiate desire and interrupt events with its
ring, as well as its power to deliver or conceal critical information, it is an ideal
motif, particularly when the important idea the motif represents is connected to the
narration or narrative structure. Film and literature critic Seymour Chatman suggests
that the cinematic device of the close-up is particularly apt for kick-starting narrative
momentum. He writes of Hitchcock’s close-ups: “They present, in the most

50
See Branigan, 17-19.

51
Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003), 25.

63
dramatic fashion, that abiding narrative-hermeneutic question: ‘My God,’ they cry
out, ‘what next?’”
52
When the close-up is combined with the telephone, this
question is doubly powerful.
The reset button of the red phone in Run Lola Run is a visual motif reminding
the viewer that the story is about to begin again. It is emblematic of the ideas of
loops, chance, consequence and alternate possibilities that lie at the heart of
Tykwer’s film. The ringing phone asks the viewer, “How will it go this time?” In
Point of No Return (John Badham, 1993), the ringing phone fills the viewer with
dread.
53
The phone’s ring harbingers another assassination and more torment for
Maggie/Claudia/Nina, and in so doing establishes the events as worthy of attention
as the narrative of conscience versus training and obligation plays out. A close-up on
Claudia’s telephone recalls her, as her alter ego Nina, to her first mission and
establishes the motif, only to be re-emphasized by the telephonic manipulations and
triggers within the mission itself. The motif returns to interrupt Claudia making love
with J.P., an interruption of both their passion and the developing line of Claudia
resuming a somewhat normal life. The ringing phone draws the camera away from
the lovers, just as it draws Claudia away from J.P. to resume her duties as Nina the
assassin. In this way the phone serves as a narrative device on multiple levels: it
interrupts a line of development; it delivers a narrative-hermeneutic question; and as
a motif it represents the government agency’s control of Nina and Claudia’s

52
Chatman, “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),” Critical Inquiry 7/1 (1980):
129.

53
A Hollywood remake of Luc Bresson’s Nikita (1993), the motif of the ringing phone initiating
another assassination mission and triggering Maggie’s moral distress is more prominent here.

64
obligations as Nina, constantly interrupting her development of a normal life,
constantly in conflict with Claudia’s morals.
In addition to introducing narrative-hermeneutic questions and operating as a
recurring visual motif, the telephone can operate on a broader level as a macro-
narrative device symbolizing the entire narrative structure. J.P. Telotte identifies that
Sorry Wrong Number constructs a paradox: “On the one hand, it shows the
individual longing for an order of control over the events of his life, desiring to be
the ‘narrator’ of his own story; but on the other, it reveals how that dream is
repeatedly disrupted by alternative visions or competing forces, suggesting powers
beyond his control”.
54
I see the telephone as a symbol of this paradox and thus
emblematic of the entire narrative strategy of the film. Telotte’s paradox has two
poles of control and disruption, and, appropriately, phone calls generally have two
participants. And, in Sorry Wrong Number, the poles of the narrative are themselves
managed, pursued and introduced by the telephone. Leona seeks to control her
husband, the police, her doctor with her phone calls and her life is disrupted by way
of the telephone, such as the overheard murder plot and Waldo Evans’ revelation of
Henry’s activities. Both Telotte and Crane emphasize the role of the telephone
system as steadfastly resistant to control, contributing to the paranoia of this noir
narrative. Whereas I do not disagree with their contentions, I think it is also
important to focus on the telephone as it is used in the film, in conversation between
two people. We can see a dialogic tension between the competing individuals and

54
Telotte, “Tangled Networks”, 39.

65
competing poles, symbolizing the paradox Telotte identifies at the heart of the
narrative structure of the film. Thus, the telephone operates again in support of the
narration, aiding comprehension of the narrative schema by emphasizing that which
is worthy of attention and representing how the narration functions. These motifs
and emphases on the telephone serve as narration providing information,
commentary, and meaning. Thus, more than simply a cinematic device, these
telephones are used in this way as narrative devices.
In other cases, however, I think the telephone can metonymically represent its
larger system, and in so doing participate in a narrative’s broader social commentary.
Tom Gunning suggests that the films of Fritz Lang consistently use the telephone as
a symbol of modernity, with its components of systems, technology, speed and
abridgement of space and time. “Lang’s vision of modernity is bitter,” Gunning
writes. “Systems exist most often as a means of deception and entrapment”.
55
The
symbolic role of the telephone and telephone system is not limited to modernity,
though. While modern systems are Fordian processes, reduced to component parts
and without individuality, we can look at post-modern systems as interactive, driven
by databases, relational and interconnected and requiring skills and tools to
manipulate and master. From the opening split-screen sequence connecting a cell
phone, computer network and geo-synchronous communications satellite to images
of terrorists detonating nuclear weapons by cell phone to hero Jack Bauer’s near
constant telephonic connection with CTU, Fox Television’s 24 creates a narrative of

55
Gunning, “Fritz Lang Calling,” 33.

66
a networked society with the hacker-as-hero mastering the network and maintaining
the upper-hand through his cell phone. Purported to be a “real-time” narrative, 24’s
most striking visual design feature—the split screen—was introduced to manage the
multiplicity of telephone calls.
The cell phone gains its symbolic power from both its frequent foregrounding
in the show’s signature split screens as well as its frequent utilization as the device
by which characters take action, advance the plot or extricate themselves from
dangerous situations. An extreme example of the telephone’s role as a device of
action and (sub)plot resolution appears in the second season of 24 when Jack Bauer
kills Gary Matheson by telephonic proxy. Matheson employs Jack’s daughter Kim
as a nanny, but turns abusive and violent towards both his own daughter and Kim,
who seeks assistance from her secret agent father by calling him at CTU. Turning
the dark de Lorde rescue melodramas on their head, the phone becomes the device
by which Jack can both save his daughter and continue to prosecute terrorists
simultaneously, rather than a symbol of the father’s inability to help. In the climactic
sequence that resolves this iteration of the Kim-in-danger subplot (a distraction
frequently employed by 24 to pack more crises into the hyperkinetic narrative), Kim
has gained the upper hand in her struggle with Matheson, knocking him down and
taking custody of his gun. Projecting himself and his pre-emptive strike mentality
into the scene by way of his telephonic connection to his daughter, Jack coaches her
through the shooting of Matheson. We can read the first shot, perhaps, as self-
defense and Jack Bauer’s telephonic exhortations as merely support during a

67
traumatic event. But the second shot, delivered at Jack’s urging, ensures not just
incapacitation but the execution of this cop-killing wife-beating psychopath. Now,
we realize that Jack Bauer has completely taken control of the situation, using the
phone to turn Kim Bauer into his telephonic avatar.
56

In this example, and countless others like it throughout the series, Jack Bauer
depends on his cell phone to allow him to be in two places at once. In this regard,
the phone works as a device on multiple levels. First, at the level of narration, it
unites two separate places for the viewer, just as cinema has been doing since the
early films Gunning and Olsson describe. In fact, 24 takes this function of the
telephone to extremes, using it to connect desks separated by a mere 10 feet in
CTU’s headquarters as well as the director’s elevated glass office, and provide
access to the Oval Office, White House and deepest recesses of bomb-proof bunkers.
Second, the telephone functions as a plot device allowing for Jack to eliminate
threats (as above) and solve conspiracies, such as the authenticity of the “Cypress
audio” of Season 2, thus moving the story along. In this latter example, Jack Bauer
projects himself and his collected evidence into the Situation Room in the White
House, aiding the President in averting an unwarranted military strike. In both cases,
the phone, as a piece of technology (or device), serves as a tool of action for Jack
Bauer and facilitates the resolution or continuance of the plot. Finally, it is this
emphasis on the phone as a technological device, executing its everyday and
expected function of communication, which makes 24’s cell phones particularly

56
24. Fox Television. Joel Surnow and Robert Cochrane, executive producers. Season 2, Episode
“5:00am-6:00am” (2003).

68
interesting. They dispense their tremendous diegetic and narratological power while
maintaining their everyday and ubiquitous nature. This ability to absorb critical
diegetic and narratological functions into its everyday usage is a key characteristic
that makes the cell phone such an ideal choice for an interface for mobile interactive
narratives. The cell phone is a device, a tool of technology, expected to
communicate and connect, and at the same time it can function as an aid to
developing a plot, and can function in the development of a narrative structure.
These are the capabilities we will explore in greater depth in Chapters 4 and 5.
In addition to serving as a narrative interface, a cinematic connection
between two spaces, and as a tool of action for the protagonist, the telephone has
become a narrative device building suspense and serving as a film’s premise. In
short, it has become a generic device, particularly of the thriller genre; and thus,
narrative devices as generic conventions aid in the construction of narrative
hypotheses by the viewer. In the case of a techno-thriller, like 24, it is a weapon and
tool. It is occasionally quite literally a weapon in suspense thrillers like Detour or
Hitchcock’s war era short Bon Voyage and slasher movies like John Carpenter’s
Halloween (1978), in which women are strangled with a telephone cord while
talking. Sorry Wrong Number, of course, uses the premise of the over-heard phone
conversation to kick-start its plot, a premise used also in the horror-thriller Long
Distance (Marcus Stern, 2005). Here, the ominous fast busy signal of an off-hook
phone implies foul play even before the camera pans over sheets, blood splatters, a
knife and the phone.

69
As a generic device in the horror-thriller, the phone imbues the narrative with
suspense. When the telephone rings in When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979),
we are on edge wondering if it signals aid from the police or parents, or heralds
doom for the babysitter and children. The killer’s question “Why don’t you check
the children?” constrains the movement of the babysitter Jill to the downstairs level,
as she doesn’t want to give in to her fear. This constraint, of course, inspires our
desire to know the condition of the children and increases our fear when the pattern
of events plays out for a second time in the film. These concerns become focused
and channeled into the telephone such that its ring triggers alarm bells in our own
minds. By specifically not showing the children, by not connecting the downstairs
living room to the upstairs bedrooms, the film leaves the condition of the children to
our imagination as we construct hypotheses to comprehend the developing narrative
and the significance of the developing events.
This idea of the phone as a constraint of sorts governs two modern
reinterpretations of the early phone rescue melodramas. In Phone Booth (Joel
Schumacher, 2002) the villain traps the anti-hero Stu in a phone booth, rather than a
country villa. Constructing a narrative premise in which the action and camera
hardly ever leave the trapped Stu, the phone subjects him to immobility and
impotence, recalling Gunning’s attribution of the de Lorde melodramas torturing
their husband/father characters with knowledge but also “distance and impotence,”
57

and creates the conditions for Stu’s confessions and wallowing in his own

57
Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone” 192.

70
weaknesses. With Stu characterized as always on the move and always with a
telephone-assisted anonymous lie at the ready to deceive either his wife or mistress,
the film requires a pretense to keep him stationary while probing his immorality, and
it is fitting that the phone booth becomes both his confessional and potential coffin.
While the film was a only a modest box office success and generally poorly
reviewed by the critics, it does demonstrate the versatility of the phone as a narrative
device, particularly in this reversal of the typical conceptualization of the telephone
as a device for expanding one’s mobility into distant places.
Phone Booth writer Larry Cohen’s penchant for telephonic thrillers appeared
on screen again in 2004, with a seemingly opposite utilization of the telephone as a
narrative premise. On its surface, Cellular (David R. Ellis, 2004) seems quite
different from Phone Booth’s immobility, but it equally constrains its hero. Once
hero Ryan agrees to help kidnapped Jessica Martin, connected by way of another of
cinema’s fateful wrong numbers, he is constrained by his cell phone’s signal and
battery life. These two limitations of cell phone technology substitute for boundaries
and deadlines, common plot devices to enhance dramatic stakes. For example, when
Ryan attempts to ascend to the fourth floor of the police station to solicit aid, the
signal fades forcing him back downstairs and to continue without police assistance.
Here, an everyday occurrence (at least to those who use cell phones regularly)
operates as a plot device constraining the hero from collecting allies with which to
save the heroine.

71
With a damsel in distress making telephonic contact with the outside world,
Cellular is quite directly a 21
st
century version of the rescue melodrama, made
mobile. In contrast to Griffith’s The Lonely Villa, in which the telephone can only
inform the hero of the damsel’s plight, here, just as in 24, the mobile phone is an
agent of justice. In addition to connecting the hero and damsel by phone and
delaying rescue by all manner of telephonic obstacles, the film also uses the
computational and electronic information capabilities of the mobile phone to bring
the villains to justice. The kidnappers real goal was to recover an incriminating
video, which Ryan supplies as an exchange for Jessica Martin; unbeknownst to the
villains, however, Ryan has transferred the video onto his cell phone ensuring the
successful prosecution of the villains.

Telephone: As both narrative premise and technology of travel
What these two very similar films illustrate is the ability of the telephone to
function seamlessly as a device of narrative constraint, either confining the hero in
order to explore his character or providing deadlines and boundaries to amplifying
the narrative pace. Cellular’s added usage of the technological capabilities of the
mobile phone to facilitate the resolution of the plot suggests another angle to focus
on to fully understand the wide variety of telephonic narrative devices. In keeping
with an awareness and an emphasis (where it exists) on the power of the dual sense
of the term “device” I want to turn now to explore how the telephone might operate
as a device, in the sense of the premise of the plot, and as a device quite literally and

72
physically allowing a person to access distant places. In the first example, this travel
will be from place to place; in the second, travel in time. These two examples
demonstrate the telephone’s cinematic and televisual history as a device of
teleportation, if you will. But the last two examples will be perhaps the most
important association of the telephone as we conceptualize the capabilities and
connotations intrinsic to the telephone that will shape the very nature of narrative
entertainment on mobile media.
In Phone Booth and Cellular, the telephonic premise at the core of the
narrative is a phone call. In the former, Stu answers a ringing public phone; in the
latter, Ryan answers his cell phone, misdialed by the imperiled Jessica Martin. The
technology of the phone, whether its literal capabilities or especially its imagined,
fictional capabilities, can also serve as the premise upon which a story is founded.
This function takes the phone beyond serving as a tool of the cinematic narrator
delivering informing, framing the narrative, and controlling its pace and further adds
to its legacy as a tool for action. An episode of the 1950s era The Adventures of
Superman illustrates the phone and a fantastical adaptation of it used as the premise
of the episode. In “The Phony Alibi”, Professor Pepperwinkle’s invention provides
the complication and mystery at the heart of the story. His invention allows a
telephone to transfer a person or object, via the telephone lines, to the destination
telephone dialed, and this transfer takes the same amount of time as a telephone
connection. When the thug Clippy uses the device to travel to Kansas City
immediately following a bank robbery, the telephone becomes both a component of

73
the criminal plot and the key component of the entire story. This simple story
literalizes the idea of telepresence, the virtual presence implied by telephonic
connection. In a small way, this television episode reveals a cultural desire for the
connection established by the telephone to go beyond aural and mental, for the
telephone to have the capacity to teleport us into distant places and possibly alternate
worlds.
Of course, the most interesting applications of the telephone as a narrative
device occur when the phone operates simultaneously as a tool within the diegetic
universe as well as outside, either as a tool of the narrator, as a symbol aiding in the
viewer’s interpretation and understanding, or both. Surprisingly, the otherwise
dreadful Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure utilizes the phone successfully on these
multiple levels simultaneously. It is a mode of transportation through time, as the
film sends the eponymous characters on an irreverent jaunt through the highlights of
Western Civilization history by way of a time-traveling phone booth, but also
symbolic of navigating narrative. And perhaps coincidentally, the film also launched
Keanu Reeves’ career—a career that has (so far) peaked with a starring role in The
Matrix trilogy, perhaps the most well-known and far-reaching telephone film of
recent years.
The choice of a phone booth as Bill and Ted’s historical conveyance is apt
and worthy of note beyond the obvious homage to British sci-fi hero Doctor Who’s

74
time travel device.
58
First of all, the navigation method of punching a code into the
touch-tone keypad recalls the long association of telephone numbers with geographic
locations. Film titles such as BUtterfield 8, Call Northside 777 and Transylvania 6-
5000 (itself a play on the song “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” by Glenn Miller) remind us of
the exchange name system of dialing, whereby phone numbers were grouped and
identified by their local, geographically bounded, exchange. Here, in the film,
punching a code takes Bill and Ted to a specific time and place, just as dialing the
telephone connected a user to a specific location. (Increasingly, dialing a number
connects a user to a specific person as mobile phones are not linked to a location and
the exchange name system recedes from memory.) In this way, the telephone dial
operates as Bill and Ted’s method of spatio-temporal navigation within the story
world, and the phone booth itself the vehicle that transports them to their desired
destination.
In the early cinema split-screen telephone conversations Jan Olsson
describes, a mid-panel illustrating or implying the distance between the callers was a
common early cinema convention. Bill and Ted’s also employs a visual strategy that
further emphasizes the telephone as a device for navigating and understanding
narrative. As Bill and Ted’s phone booth zooms off to its next destination, we see it
traveling along lighted paths through dark ether. Their guide Rufus (George Carlin)

58
In the long-running British series Doctor Who, The Doctor travels through time in a space/time-ship
known as the Tardis, which resembles an old British police box. As the telephonic connection stops
there, I have elected to omit a detailed discussion of Doctor Who and the Tardis from my exploration
of the telephone, teleportation and bridging worlds. A police box had a direct line to the local
precinct, creating a singular connection and the Tardis’s interior and controls have no connection to
telephone design nor telephonic circuits.

75
explains, “These are the circuits of history.” History is here visualized and
conceptualized as telephone circuits: multi-stranded, navigable, parallel, intersecting
and networked. It is no great conceptual leap from history as phone circuits to
applying this same visual and conceptual metaphor to narrative, given the well-
known connection of history and narrative. What is important in this case, then, is
the association built between navigating narrative circuits and the telephone. Bill
and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in a more overt, literal and visual manner than a film
like Sorry Wrong Number establishes the telephone as a narrative interface.
When Bill and Ted lose control of their phone booth because of a broken
antenna, they become trapped in the circuits of history, condemned to a continual
loop without destination, resolution or meaning. Since it can be worthwhile to look
back to cinema for lessons in conceptualizing new media narratives, I think this
episode within Bill and Ted’s is worthy of note. Without a guidance system, much
like an interactive narrative system without guidance or navigation or boundaries, the
user/participant is lost like Bill and Ted, traversing the circuits of history or
narrative, but doomed to make no sense of it all until reaching a destination. This
lesson will become more apparent in Chapter 5’s analysis of an experiment in
mobile-media-based interactive narrative.

Telephone as Tool: Bridging Worlds
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure sees its protagonists travel to other times
and return to their high school with representatives from each of the time-locations

76
they visited. All time-travel narratives exist somewhere within the genre of science
fiction or fantasy, whether rendered comic as the case of Bill and Ted’s or more
dramatic like the most recent iteration of the Doctor Who series on BBC. Whether
comedic or dramatic, the science fiction element imaginatively envisions another
world, one that plays by another set of rules. To some extent, this genre literalizes
the liminal space of all narrative—that cognitive process of constructing, in a
separate space in the mind, an interlocking set of rules, events, and agents that makes
sense and meaning out of that set of information. That separate space of the mind is
the imagination, which can also be termed ‘virtual’ as it has no physical
manifestation, constructed through the mind’s perception. Thus, all narratives
involve a connection between the physical and the virtual.
To conclude this discussion of the various ways in which the telephone
functions as a narrative device in cinema and television, I want to focus on two
examples of the telephone in a central role bridging two separate worlds, one
physical and one intangible, imaginative, virtual. The vision that these films express
expands on the long association of electronic media with parallel dimensions.
Legends abound regarding phone calls from beyond the grave, such as the call
received by actress/director Ida Lupino from her dead father locating lost financial
documents.
59
From the surreal—in Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty the telephone call
redirecting the narrative is placed by the police commissioner’s dead sister—to the

59
See Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) for a thorough and fascinating analysis of the connection
between the electronic media, the occult and paranormal. See chapter 11 of E. Randall Floyd’s In the
Realm of Ghosts and Hauntings (Augusta: Harbor House 2002) for further accounts of telephone
calls from the dead.

77
exploitative—in Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street the villain Freddy Krueger
reaches from his dreamworld into his victim’s lives through all manner of portals
including the telephone—films have capitalized on this perceived link between the
intangible world of the dead or supernatural and our physical world. Lost Highway
brought this supernatural association to the cell phone.
The aptly-titled, Korean paranormal thriller Phone (Byeong-ki Ahn, 2002)
presents a comprehensive employment of the mobile phone as a narrative device, and
in particular as a bridge between the supernatural and natural worlds. The opening
scene initiates the function of the phone as a narrative device, showing an
unanswered ringing phone that triggers suspense and the natural questions of “Who
is calling?” and “Why is the frightened woman not answering?” As the film
continues, it uses the phone as a device to establish ambiguity between rational and
supernatural explanations, thus perpetuating an ambiguity between the horror and
thriller genres. Indicating its comprehensive and multi-layered use of the telephone
as a narrative device, the phone also serves as a plot device extricating the main
character Ji-Won from almost certain death.
In establishing genre, the film depends on both the phone’s connection to the
technological, and thus rational, and to the aforementioned paranormal. While
investigating the death of a taxi driver, the driver’s boss tells Ji-Won “Maybe the
phone killed him.” As the car crash scene plays out, the boss is most likely correct—
clearly the phone is involved. But, does a rational explanation apply, such as the
horrible sound the taxi driver heard on the phone distracted him causing him to

78
crash? Or does a paranormal explanation apply, such as the phone is possessed and
can attack victims? Earlier in the film, Ji-won’s niece experiences extreme pain and
trauma after holding the phone to her ear with the same screeching noise audible
during the taxi driver’s crash. On the other hand, Ji-won’s niece is already likely
traumatized by her pedophile father (a connection not realized until near the end of
the film). In balancing these two possible explanations for events, the phone
becomes a central device supporting alternate hypotheses that explain the available
data in a comprehensible narrative. The ambiguity that exists between a rational and
supernatural explanation for events, fomented by the device of the ‘haunted’ cell
phone, increases the uncertainty and thrill of the narrative as a whole as the viewer
struggles to complete a viable narrative schema. In my view, the first half of the film
uses the phone to establish the fantastic, that boundary area between the rational and
irrational. Thus, it is an example of the phone’s capacity to bridge two worlds and
function as a generic device supporting the overall narrative.
Tipping the interpretation of events towards the supernatural and further
emphasizing the mobile phone as a portal between the two worlds, Ji-won is saved
from a stalker’s attack by her possessed cell phone. The stalker has incapacitated Ji-
won on a stairwell, but pauses to answer her ringing phone. In the sense that this
phone rings at just the right time, and that the supernatural power of the phone
dispatches the attacker allowing Ji-won to continue her investigation of the phone, its
past owners and the ailment her niece suffers, this instantiation of the phone could be
seen as a plot device of the most convenient and contrived fashion. However,

79
reading the film fully as a ghost story, and recognizing the narrational use of the
phone as a means of building suspense and forestalling the resolution of the central
enigma, renders the ringing phone in this scene not as convenient and contrived, but
rather in line with the goals of the jilted lover/ghost possessing the phone. By saving
the journalist Ji-won, the ghost of Jin-hee steps from the netherworld into the
physical world in order than her former lover (the little girl’s father) can be
prosecuted in the physical/rational world. Thus, we see the phone as a conduit
between the physical and the supernatural, as a device of salvation for Ji-won, and as
a device of revenge for the ghost Jin-hee.
While Phone’s multi-layered use of the cell phone, particularly in its
capitalization of its dual associations with the rational/technological and the
supernatural/paranormal, is sophisticated and interesting, there could be no more
suitable film to consider in terms the telephone’s role as a narrative device both at
the level of narrative strategy and diegetic transportation and world bridging than
Andy and Larry Wachowski’s 1999 mega-hit The Matrix. In this film, the phone as
motif, the phone as plot device, and the phone as the gateway between the virtual and
the real combine to create a world that William Gibson called “arguably the ultimate
‘cyberpunk’ artifact”.
60

Obviously phones abound in a futuristic vision of what the Internet, a
medium we access today through telephonic connections and one increasingly
dominated by simulations of life, could become. The visual motif of the ringing

60
Gibson, William. Electronic blog. 28 January 2003.
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp#90244012

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phone instigates the hermeneutic code. In the opening scene, the ringing phone asks
“What next?” When Neo prepares to visit the Oracle, the ringing phone in the
middle of a room forecasts his entry into the Matrix, and that something portentous
will soon happen. A cell phone delivered by way of a FedEx envelope offers the
same questions as a ringing phone: who is on the other end? Of course, this phone
rings, connecting Neo with Morpheus and functions as Neo’s means of escape from
his office, until he drops the Nokia model cell phone, condemning himself to capture
by the Agents, and necessitating another rescue by Morpheus’ team—another
complicating device.
The Matrix makes an interesting distinction between hard-wired phones and
cellular phones. Only hard-wired phones operate as portals between the real,
physical world of Morpheus’ ship and the virtual world of the Matrix. This
distinction inherently acknowledges the computational, more highly networked, and
more inherently virtual nature of the cell phone, both in the story world of the film
and in 21
st
century human history. While the landlines and telephone network
connecting today’s homes and offices are highly automated and computerized, their
navigation and control by discrete number dialing, the visible and physical wire
connecting the device and the opaque plastic of the phones themselves suggest a
tangibility, and a more direct connection, one less mitigated and managed by highly
complex computers. Our cell phones, on the other hand, offer a variety of modes of
communication and information exchange (text, Internet, voice), receive regular
updates from the mediasphere, are constantly connected in an invisible manner and

81
place more than 20 times the computing power in our pockets than was available on
a home desktop computer in 1987.
61
Cell phones have an inherent mystery of
operation, an inherent intangibility—they simply connect, passively, to a vast
network of information and of possibility. Thus, cell phones are used for
communication within the Matrix, while transfer out of the Matrix requires a hard-
wire line, where ostensibly a purer and cleaner signal can be maintained, rather than
one filtered through the complex algorithms and exchange protocols implied by
digital cellular technology, all of which are in the control of the Matrix.
This distinction also serves a specific function of narrative strategy: the
necessity of finding a hard-wire phone gives the characters goals to achieve,
obstacles to overcome; it expands the narrative middle of episodes; and it provides
for a spatialization of the otherwise amorphous Matrix. In the opening scene,
Trinity’s goal is a phone at the corner of Wells and Lake streets. This episode,
exemplary of all the races for “an exit”, positions the phone as salvation (from the
pursuing Agents) and a goal (to exit the Matrix). As Trinity successfully reaches the
phone and exits the Matrix, the camera zooms in on the receiver, suggesting her
escape to a second world. Thus, at the same time that the phone operates as a
narrative device managing the pace of the narrative, it also operates as a tool within
the story to transport between two worlds, much like Bill and Ted’s time-traveling
phone booth, or the human-transmitting telephone in The Adventures of Superman.

61
By way of comparison, the Palm Treo 680, a current ‘smartphone’ has a 312mHz processor and
32MB of RAM; the Macintosh II introduced in 1987 had a 16mHz processor and a then-astounding
1MB RAM.

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Phoning new narratives
As the ultimate cyberpunk artifact, The Matrix puts together a telephonic
tour de force. The phone is a tool of action, a technology bridging worlds and a
strategic device at the level of narration. All of these functions are wrapped together
in a story about telecommunications technology gone awry and one that navigates a
physical and virtual world. Nothing could be more fitting as a cinematic springboard
towards new conceptualizations of new media narratives that build upon the unique
features and cultural associations of the hard-wired and mobile phone.
The ubiquity of the telephone in society contributes to its unassuming yet
powerful function, in all the different ways described above, as a narrative device in
film and television. Seymour Chatman suggests that a ringing phone screams “My
God, what next?” and I agree that a ringing phone is loaded with narrative potential,
loaded with pent up desire. But at the same time, these associations are not front and
center. Viewers don’t leap out of their seats in the movie theater and shout, “My
God, look at what the phone is doing!” Despite assertions of Jack Bauer’s impotence
without his trusty cell phone, popular commentary on the phone in 24 is far more
likely to center on the infrequency of Bauer’s cell phone losing signal coverage or
battery charge. Thus, its empowering function and its agency of action proceed
without conscious attention. The narrative power and narrative functions of this
device operate on a subconscious, almost intuitive level. Even in films intended to
disrupt the viewer’s smooth acquisition of a straightforward narrative, such as Lost

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Highway or Phantom of Liberty, the phone executes its navigational control
smoothly and seamlessly, not interrupting the spell of the cinema. In short, the
viewer remains in that liminal state of narrative that I think is implied with the term
immersion. Beyond perceptual immersion of IMAX theaters and VR goggle-and-
glove setups, a more powerful type of immersion occurs when viewers and readers
become absorbed cognitively and imaginatively into the stories unfolding in the
pages of a book or on the cinema or television screen. The goal of the VR setup is to
create a technological interface that delivers information to the participant and
allows for the participant to control actions within the virtual world, with the
technology receding from the participant’s awareness allowing a total focus on the
virtual world. This description parallels exactly how I have described the
telephone’s performance as a narrative device in cinema. It serves as an interface,
delivering narrative information.
Just as the slasher film exploits the telephone’s deep connection to our sense
of community and safety, I think the telephone is deeply connected to our sense of
narrative structure, development, and progress. Thus, the telephone as narrative
device has such a wide, varied, and long cinematic and televisual history, I think the
phone has accrued these characteristics as part of its essence—what makes a phone a
phone. These characteristics are not always tapped, but they are always there and
that makes the telephone a powerful tool around which to design a new type of
narrative, one that seeks to engage with our always-on/always-connected 21
st
century
lifestyle, our lifestyle that seems to grapple with a sense of spatial and temporal

84
dislocation instigated by media penetration into our everyday lives. The long history
of the phone navigating space and time and narrative and narration make it an ideal
platform for narratives that exploit or contest or engage with spatio-temporal fissures
of contemporary society.

85
Chapter 3

Dial ‘M’ for Mobisode

Having explored the telephone’s cinematic and televisual history and the
telephone’s function as a device within a film or television program’s narrative
structure, we turn now to televisual narratives on the mobile phone, with the goal of
understanding the developing phenomenon of the “mobisode” and the television-for-
mobile landscape. These two combined features of the mobile phone—its historical
use as a diegetic narrative device and its new capability to receive televisual
narratives—position the mobile phone as an ideal platform for new types of narrative
experiences that blend the virtual or imaginative with the physical world.
As the forces of convergence and connectivity hurtle us forward and force a
shift in our understanding of media and our relation to them, so too must the
structure and form of narrative, long a mode of understanding our experiences and
our world, change to accommodate the new situation. Noting this transformation,
Mark Poster laments the obsolescence of analog media claiming, “the screen-
network interface of living online absorbs these earlier media, restructures or
remediates them into the realm of the virtual.” My contention is that mobile media
also restructure and remediate prior forms (such as cinema, television, radio and the
telephone), but not into the exclusive realm of the virtual; rather, mobile media unite
the realm of the physical and real inhabited by the user with the realm of the virtual
and imaginative. Poster goes on to posit a techno-noir assessment of the human
relationship to convergence and connectivity: “the subject position of the user has

86
become a human-machine assemblage and a node, a cyborgian point in a global
network of collective intelligence.”
62
While Poster’s invocation of the cyborg carries
overly bleak connotations, he accurately notes the key role connectivity plays in the
postmodern experience. Televisual narrative on the mobile phone will serve as a
stepping-stone, offering a familiar media experience, during a turbulent period of
transition as both industry and audiences grapple with distributed, participatory and
networked media content. As I see it, the mobile television narrative helps the
viewer understand and become familiar with co-present worlds, united through the
media and narrative.
The last few years have seen an explosion in the capabilities of mobile
phones for uses other than traditional telephony—email, text messages, pictures,
casual and pervasive games, and, showing dramatic growth between 2005 and 2006,
television and video. Lagging behind most of Europe and Asia, most of the major
mobile phone companies in the United States began to offer mobile video/mobile
television services by 2005. For example, Sprint PCS offers PowerVision and
Verizon offers V*Cast, both services providing television and video content over
these companies’ 3G networks.
63
Similar to television, this content takes the form of
news, sports, weather and entertainment programming, and a broad sample includes
clips excerpted from well-known television shows and films, news summaries hosted

62
Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006), 117.

63
“3G” stands for third generation digital cellular network technology capable of broadband quality
data transfer rates. While mobile video is technically possible over 2G networks, transmission delays,
latency, and slow data rates make it an unsatisfactory user experience.

87
by an in-studio anchor as well as amateur videos supplied by Internet video websites
such as YouTube.com and Revver.com. News, sports, weather and movie trailers
make up 45-50% of the mobile video content watched in the U.S.
64
Much of the
studio-produced content I’ve just described could be considered “repurposed”
content—originally produced for use on conventional broadcast television and
repackaged for distribution on mobile phone video services like PowerVision and
V*Cast.
However, a considerable amount of original programming for the mobile
phone exists. Approximately 8% of mobile viewing is short form video (drama and
comedy), while 20% is amateur video (or, User Generated Content).
65
In a highly
publicized example, in 2005 Verizon partnered with Fox Television to offer V*Cast
subscribers 24 one minute micro-episodes, or “mobisodes,” of 24: Conspiracy, a
spin-off of the popular Fox Television thriller 24 starring Kiefer Sutherland. With a
reported budget of approximately $500,000 for the 24 episode series, 24: Conspiracy
is an example of a major studio effort in developing mobile video.
66
Major original
enterprises by the studios such as 24: Conspiracy are relatively rare, and most
original content is distributed by aggregators such as Fun Little Movies, Thumbplay,
Motricity and others. Fun Little Movies supplies approximately 100 videos from its

64
M:Metrics. Quarterly Briefing—Q3 2006.

65
Ibid.

66
Compare with the $4 million budget for the parent show’s pilot. See also Carey, Jonathan and
Lawrence Greenberg, “And the Emmy Goes to...A Mobisode?” Television Quarterly 36/2 (2006): 3-
8; Kevin Fitchard, “Verizon Takes Mobile Prime Time” Telephony 246/2 (2005): 6-7; Debra
Kaufman, “Married to the Mobisode” Hollywood Reporter 393 (2006): 19-22; Dan O’Shea, “The
Watcher” Wireless Review 22/10 (2005): 32.

88
library of 2000+ titles to Sprint’s PowerVision service and Verizon’s V*Cast. As an
aggregator, Fun Little Movies seeks out, licenses and distributes content from small,
independent producers, as well as their own productions such as their top
(2006/2007) made-for-mobile comedy series Love Bytes, a sitcom set at the
corporate offices of an Internet dating website.
67
At $70,000 for 19 episodes, Love
Bytes is far more than an amateur video shot on a home video camera, but it
demonstrates the modest budgets that can be successful for independent producers in
the mobile marketplace. These examples also demonstrate the mobile phone’s
increasing incorporation of existing televisual content and modification of televisual
formats, as producers, network operators, consumers and artists all explore the
possibilities of this developing technology.
These video content to mobile phone services, along with the growing
number of video-capable Personal Media Player (PMP) devices, illustrate one way in
which these new media technologies adopt aspects of prior, established media—a
process Bolter and Grusin refer to as “remediation”.
68
As they define the term,
remediation is a formal logic “in which [new media] refashion older media and … in
which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media”.
69

In this chapter, I will use the idea of remediation to explore the ontology and

67
By way of a television industry analogy, Fun Little Movies constitutes its own “channel” on service
provider Sprint’s lineup of channels, just like TNT would be one of cable service provider Cox
Cable’s offerings. Selecting FLM reveals a menu of folders containing individual mobisodes for
download.

68
The proto-typical example of a PMP device is the video iPod which allows users to download
television episodes, movie trailers, amateur videos and soon full length movies to a handheld, portable
device for on demand viewing.

69
Bolter and Grusin, 15

89
aesthetics of short-form televisual narrative on the mobile device (primarily the
mobile phone) by examining it in relation to its closest ‘old media’ cousin,
television. In the course of understanding the nature of “mobisodes”, their visual
aesthetics, their narrative structure, their institutional qualities and their culture of
production, I will conclude with a discussion of how this new technology and
entertainment form fits in with the postmodern subject’s negotiation of the world as
mediascape and the blurring lines between media, imagination and reality.
Before defining more precisely what I mean by the term “mobisode”, I would
like to make some preliminary comments on why such a small element of audio-
visual culture, and narrative entertainment more specifically, warrants such close
attention. As of the end of 2006 only 6.2 million people in the United States,
approximately 2.7% of all mobile phone owners, subscribed to a video service on
their mobile phone.
70
Thus, mobile video/mobile television may seem like a minor
phenomenon. However, industry tracking company Telephia reports that mobile
video viewership grew by 80% in 2006, thus indicating that the impact of this form
may be considerable in the near future.
More intriguing, perhaps, is the slippage of terminology that occurs when
discussing mobile video services. In the course of speaking with mobile video
producers, industry professionals, handset sales personnel and customers, the term
most commonly used to describe video content service on the mobile phone is
“mobile TV.” In fact, the largest content aggregator and supplier to the mobile

70
Shapiro, Levi. “The Business of Mobile Video”. Lecture. (Los Angeles, 12 January 2007).

90
network operators, with 1.6 million subscribers, is called MobiTV, which offers both
downloadable and live streaming televisual content to its subscribers. Sprint uses the
“PowerVision” trademark to refer to its broad package of 3G services, including
high-speed data, messaging, and Internet access along with its video service.
However, to select the video service on a Sprint handset, the menu option is “Sprint
TV.” Furthermore, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
announced in November 2005 a new Emmy award for original programming for
non-traditional televisual devices (be they mobile phone, personal media player,
personal digital assistant, etc.)
71
While a broadcast format is available on the mobile
phone (a single transmission received simultaneously by many users), unicast, or
one-to-one streaming or video file downloads, systems are both more common and
more popular. Both industry professionals and consumers tend to overlook these
differences and refer to all mobile video services as mobile TV. On both a
subconscious level on the part of individuals, and on a strategic marketing level by
mobile service providers, a link is forged between the dominant cultural force of the
late 20
th
century, television, and this growing media format.
From the outset, then, these mobile video services declare an association with
television, rather than a more technologically accurate comparison to Internet video.
Jeffrey Sconce observed in 2004, despite the rapid growth and hype of the cultural
influence of the Internet, television remains king:
…statistics indicate that while hours spent on the net fluctuate, television
viewership remains steady, suggesting that despite the interactive potential of

71
Carey and Greenberg, 3.

91
the cyberage, most media viewers prefer (for better or worse) to be
‘captivated’ by stories on the tube.
72

The study of mobile video then becomes important for two reasons: first, to
understand how it remediates television, how it participates in those immersive
stories referred to and celebrated by Sconce; and second, to hypothesize that perhaps
this remediation of television, the aspirations and associations with those captivating
stories on the tube, in combination with the cinematic, televisual and social history of
the telephone discussed in Chapter 2 and the nascent field of mobile narratives and
mobile games to be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, will yield, in part, the “interactive
potential of the cyberage.”

Mobile video services
The mobile video and mobile television arena in the United States is a
quickly changing and complicated market place. Verizon’s V*Cast service offers
four major categories of televisual content, all of which in early January 2007 was
pre-recorded and available for download. In early January 2007, Verizon did not
offer any live television capability, though test markets were established in March
2008 for a broadcast service offering programming from CBS, Comedy Central, Fox,
MTV, NBC News, NBC Entertainment, and Nickelodeon. The four categories of
unicast content on the V*Cast service are: News, Entertainment, Sports and

72
Sconce, Jeffrey. “What If?: Charting Television's New Textual Boundaries” in Television after
TV, 95. Despite the growth of Internet and mobile markets since 2004, the television industry still
dwarfs both. Consider: YouTube’s 40 mil. viewers per month vs. Lost’s 16 mil. per episode, or the 24
and 24: Conspiracy budgets.

92
Weather. Within each category the user can select from various channels, some
affiliated with broadcast or cable television channels, such as NBC and CNN in the
News category, and others affiliated with well known websites, such as YouTube
and Revver in the Entertainment category. The Weather category only has two
options, Weather Channel and Accu-Weather, while the Entertainment category has
over twenty channels. Rather than indicating a consumer preference for
entertainment over weather, this disparity reflects the dominance of the Weather
Channel and Accu-Weather services and the chaotic terrain of entertainment field
where the form and format of mobile narrative has yet to coalesce.
73
Selecting any
given channel reveals a list of available sub-categories or individual video files for
download (in the case that the channel is not further sub-divided). For example,
during the week of January 7-14, the V*Cast Showcase channel in the Entertainment
category contained 14 sub-categories including a fictional, serialized program
(telenovelas associated with the ABC program Ugly Betty also available on the ABC
channel in the Entertainment category
74
), excerpts from magazine shows like Extra
and Access Hollywood, and comedy offerings ranging from the animations of JibJab
to stand-up comic routines to the Tonight Show with Jay Leno monologues. Access
to all of the content described above is included with the V*Cast service

73
Telephia cites the Weather Channel as the most accessible mobile video channel; M:Metrics reports
U.S. access of weather information via mobile video doubles that in the U.K. where weather is
delivered via broadcast; in the U.S. it is on-demand only (M:Metrics, 2006).

74
In Ugly Betty, Ignacio Suarez, the father character, regularly watches telenovelas, and very brief
scenes of these diegetic telenovelas often punctuate commercial breaks during the regular broadcast of
the program. Extending the narrative universe of Ugly Betty, ABC has developed these telenovela
clips into a serial program distributed on the mobile phone.

93
subscription, though each video file includes a price ($0.00) indicating premium pay-
per-view content may exist.
The Sprint TV service includes a combination of free and premium
subscription downloadable content, as well as offering live streaming television. The
menu format is similar to V*Cast, with the Sprint TV service offering the following
categories: Sprint TV, Music & Radio, Sports, Cartoons, News & Weather, Stylez
[sic], Movies & Shorts, and Entertainment. Each category contains both free
channels as well as channels available with an additional subscription (usually
between $4 and $6 per month). The Entertainment category, for example, offers for
free a Warner Brothers Channel (previews of movies) and a Broadway Channel
which contains clips of plays and a Tony Awards recap; premium channels include
E!-Wild On!, Comedy Central, Hollywood Insider and a channel containing amateur
content called Varsity Mobile. The Movies & Shorts category consists exclusively
of premium channels, all of which are content aggregators (meaning they collect and
package content from a variety of sources for distribution through a network service
provider like Sprint). Fun Little Movies and BlipTV are two examples, each channel
containing eight to ten folders of content. The BlipTV lineup includes sub-
categories such as Flipped Blip (spoofs and remixed television clips), Blipisodes
(episodic material) and Top Picks (indicating some degree of editorial oversight.)
Fun Little Movies offers slightly more clarity in assigning sub-category names with
choices such as Fun Funny Films (six different comedy oriented series), Romantic

94
Antics (three romantic comedy series), and Lampoons Dorm Daze (an episodic
comedy series from National Lampoon).
This dizzying array of content choices illustrates the convergent nature of
mobile media. With content primarily available on-demand via download, the
mobile phone acts more like an Internet access device than a television; yet, with the
heavy influence of branded content affiliated with broadcast and cable television
stations, the landscape of content looks more like television than the far more diverse
and almost infinite Web. The mobile arena offers conventional television programs
another venue to extend their textual reach. As Jeffrey Sconce observes in relation to
the expansive textual universe of many popular television shows, “Television, it
might be said, has discovered that the cultivation of its story worlds (diegesis) is as
crucial an element in its success as is storytelling.”
75
Whether the backstory in the
Lost Video Diaries, the colorful flavor of telenovelas of Ugly Betty, or the intrigue
unfolding at the Washington, D.C. CTU office of 24: Conspiracy, these episodic
series offer two things: first, ubiquitous access for the fan to an expanded narrative
world, be it mysterious island, working class home, or government agency; and,
second, extra material that cultivates and fleshes out, making more believable and
immersive in the process, these story worlds. Not only do mobile media video
services contain the branded content and captivating story worlds of television,
original made-for-mobile content also follows television’s narrative strategies of

75
Sconce, 95.

95
episodic and serial structure in the creation of new, unique and potentially absorbing
stories free of the strictures of the television schedule.
Here, then, is one critical aspect of the narrative potential of the mobile
phone. As I will explore, the mobisode brings the rich immersion of television
narrative to the mobile phone, whether in the form of original content, spinoffs, or
excerpts. And, unleashed from television’s close association with domestic space,
the narrative entertainment on the mobile phone bridges the boundaries of public,
private, domestic, work and leisure through this ubiquitous and on-demand narrative
entertainment of the mobisode.

What is a “mobisode”?
The term “mobisode” is a portmanteau word drawing from “mobile”, as the
mobisode is intended for viewing on the mobile phone, and “episode”, the common
term for a single installment of a serialized television program. In this regard it
shares etymological origins with “webisode” (episode for viewing on the World
Wide Web), which itself replaced “intersode” (episode for viewing on the Internet),
the latter term applied by Digital Entertainment Network in 1998 to describe its early
foray into producing and distributing an Internet-based episodic televisual series.
76

From its origins at Fox Television, the term “mobisode” has rapidly become
an accepted part of both the wireless and entertainment industries’ lexicons.
Between 2005 and 2006, telecom and entertainment industry press reports of mobile

76
Parks, Lisa. “Flexible Microcasting: Gender, Generation, and Television-Internet Convergence” in
Television After TV, 150.

96
video content moved from using the term as a marker of something new and
different to a term no longer requiring explication. Reporting in January 2005 about
the impending launch of Verizon’s first original video programming for its V*Cast
service, Kevin Fitchard of Telephony announced the “new TV service using
groundbreaking ‘mobisode’ content from News Corp.” and goes on to explain that
the “one-minute ‘mobisode’ was written, shot and produced for distribution via the
carrier’s 3G network.”
77
By September 2005, the term requires no explanation or
neologism-indicating quotation marks in the entertainment industry press.
78

Daniel Tibbets, former head of the Foxlabs division of Fox Television, and
Mitch Feinman, News Corp’s vice president of digital strategy, are the executives
responsible for the development of Fox’s first original series for the mobile phone
and are generally credited with coining the term. In an October 2005 interview in
Wireless Review, Feinman remembers, “I made up the name ‘mobisode’…I think it
was a name we were working with internally…we decided on the term as a way of
describing [a short, original series] and we took it out there.”
79
Between 2002 and
the launch of Verizon’s V*Cast in 2005, Feinman and Tibbets oversaw the
development of three original series: Love & Hate (a reality show), Sunset Hotel (a
drama) and 24: Conspiracy (a spinoff of Fox Television’s popular thriller 24).
Twentieth Century Fox holds a trademark for the term “mobisode”, but the rapid

77
Fitchard, “Verizon Takes Mobile TV Prime Time,” 6. News Corp. is Fox Television’s corporate
parent.

78
See, for example, Wolff, “Stream Catchers” B1; Fitchard, “The Making of the Mobisode”;
Kaufman, “Married to the Mobisode.”

79
O’Shea, 32. See also, Fitchard, “The Making of the Mobisode,” 42.

97
adoption by the press, mobile and entertainment industries and fan community
makes it likely the term will move quickly into the public domain. Fox’s
trademarking of the term ‘mobisode’ is indicative of the intense drive to monetize
every conceivable component of the mobile entertainment arena, and indicates how
unstructured the environment is with all potential players/contributors attempting to
extract maximum value at every turn. Fox’s trademark, according to the United
States Patent and Trademark Office, offers a broad conception of the term, covering:
Entertainment services in the nature of programs featuring action, adventure,
drama, comedy, documentary, sports and children's entertainment transmitted
via wireless communication devices, namely, cell phones, personal digital
assistants, computers and wireless handhelds.
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Specifically absent from this definition are news and weather, two of the most
popular types of mobile television content, which concurs with common usage of
“episode” in referring to television—rarely does one speak of an “episode” of news.
The trademark definition also indicates an emphasis on the entertainment capacity of
mobisodes, connecting this type of content to the vast array of entertainment
television of the various genres listed in the definition. While this definition makes
no mention of narrative per se, it is implied given the nature of most of the genres
listed, and it is narrative mobisodes that build their own story world or extend the
depth and breadth of a television program’s story world that are of interest here.
Common usage of mobisode generally refers to series programming, such as
Fox’s 24: Conspiracy, Prison Break: Proof of Innocence, and Bones: Skeleton Crew.

80
United States Patent and Trademark Office website.
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=ukmufb.2.1

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In fact, sometimes the term is used specifically limited to these Fox series, perhaps in
deference to the trademark ownership. In my own usage of the term, I will remain
truer to the definition submitted to the USPTO: entertainment programs specifically
distributed on wireless communication devices such as mobile phones. This opens
up the definition from a limited focus on specific series produced by major television
studios, to a broader cross-section of available televisual content that is
entertainment oriented and exhibits narrative form (if only slight, in some cases).
Thus, I include everything from the independent produced sitcom for mobile phones
Love Bytes to a collection of short films spoofing the popular Apple Macintosh
commercials featuring Mac and PC characters to individual and unrelated narrative
short films collected and provided by content aggregators such as Fun Little Movies
and Blip TV. This makes the term mobisode applicable to the types of televisual
content that fit my broader point of expanding the breadth and depth of program’s
textual reach as well as the mediascape more generally, as well as how this type of
content forges connections between the viewer and the mobisode diegesis.

Types of mobisodes: serials, series, short films, excerpts
Fox’s 24: Conspiracy is perhaps the proto-typical mobisode series.
Launched in 2005, the approximately one-minute episodes were released weekly
with each installment available for download and viewing for the following week.
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The series consists of 24 mobisodes set in the Washington, D.C. office of the

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All 24 mobisodes of the 24: Conspiracy series are available from Fox Home Video on DVD in the
Bonus Materials disc of the 24 Season 5 collection.

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fictional law enforcement agency Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU). This series
extends the narrative universe of its parent show 24 (which is set in CTU’s Los
Angeles office), with new characters, a new setting and parallel plotlines. Over the
course of its 24 episode run, the lead character Martin pursues his lover (former CTU
agent Susan Walker) for murdering a government agent, uncovers a conspiracy
centered in the CTU office, and ultimately teams with Walker to thwart the
conspiracy plot. Like 24, the mobisode show is a series/serial hybrid with each
individual mobisode containing key elements of the developing narrative structure.
In fact, the series’ structure distributes the component schema, explained by Edward
Branigan in Narrative Comprehension and Film, across multiple installments. Thus,
rather than having a complete set of narrative schema present in each episode, as
most episodic television does (even the highly serial 24), 24: Conspiracy, owing to
its very short episodes, offers only some schema in each mobisode.
Branigan suggests that our ability to comprehend a narrative results from the
identification of elements of the text and assigning them roles in the narrative
schema. In Narrative Comprehension and Film he identifies these component
schema as: abstract, orientation, initiating event, goal, complicating action, and
climax/resolution.
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It is important to recognize that these components need not
appear sequentially, nor does the viewer need to assure himself of one
scene/component correlation before understanding the others. As I see it, the viewer
constantly plugs in possible scenes or shots or sequences into the component schema

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Branigan, 17-19.

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in constructing the picture of the whole narrative. This process may require repeated
reassignment of components until the viewer achieves satisfactory comprehension.
While Branigan’s model was developed for a discrete text such as a film, the process
of narrative structure and understanding can be applied to a more open text such as a
serial mobisode program to help elucidate unique aspects of the form.
The first two episodes of 24: Conspiracy illustrate the interdependent nature
of the narrative in this mobisode series. “Minute 1” opens with a couple entering a
hotel room, followed by the woman murdering the man then scanning the dead
man’s handprint into a computer. In typical thriller fashion, this narrative begins in
media res leaving the viewer to wonder about why this murder has taken place and
the identity of the mysterious woman. On a micro-level, this mobisode contains an
initiating event (off-screen the couple has met in a hotel bar), a goal (for the man, a
tryst; for the woman the hand-scan which the viewer doesn’t realize until the
climax), a complicating action (for the man, his death; for the woman, the
assumption of his reticence to submit to a hand-scan), and the climax/resolution of
the murder. Thus, it is a self-contained simple narrative, which Branigan defines as
an episode that collects the consequences of a central situation (murderer’s encounter
with victim), shows change (from seducer to murderer), put together as a focused
chain of the cause and effect of a continuing center (the mysterious woman). This
entire mobisode, though, becomes recognizable as an initiating event, and as an
episode in a larger focused chain, upon viewing “Minute 2”.

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This second episode consists almost entirely of abstract and orientation
elements of the narrative structure of the whole series. The characters of Martin and
Sutton are introduced, and the numerous close-ups of clenched jaws and
disapproving scowls implies a tension between them orienting the viewer to their
relationship and sowing seeds of suspicion. The episode (accurate with respect to
Branigan’s model as the two men’s relationship becomes increasingly tense
throughout the scene) concludes with the revelation of security camera footage of the
woman from “Minute 1.” As no cause and effect has been illustrated, the “Minute 2”
does not constitute a simple narrative in and of itself, but as it contains the abstract
and orientation elements of the series narrative structure it plays a crucial
interdependent role.
Episode “Minute 18” further illustrates this interdependent design of the
series and increasing complexity. The episode opens with Martin and Walker (the
murderer in “Minute 1” now revealed as a former CTU agent) walking down a
hallway toward an office with a man sitting at a computer. This segment, consisting
of three shots, serves as an orientation to the episode’s events, allowing the viewer to
recall her pattern arrangement of story data so far. This orientation scene connects to
the goal of this episode which was revealed in Minute 17 when a decision was made
to seek out a computer specialist to access some encrypted codes. Two complicating
actions occur simultaneously: the discovery of the computer specialist assassinated
in the office obstructs the agents’ goal of extracting the information; the murderer’s
presence in the office shooting at the agents impedes the original goal and initiates a

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new goal (defend themselves). This second micro-narrative resolves itself with
Martin shooting the unidentified assassin, which offers a small climax within the
context of the single episode. The two complicating actions (dead computer
specialist and now computers damaged by stray gunfire) create new goals to carry
forward into subsequent episodes.
While each installment of 24: Conspiracy is highly interconnected with
regard to narrative components, a trait it shares with its parent 24, each episode does
not necessarily offer the same degree of resolution and closure individual episodes of
24 offer.
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It also departs from the multiple storylines (utilized to an excessive
degree in 24) that are identified by Sarah Kozloff as one of the defining features of
television narrative: “The strategy of proliferating storylines diffuses the viewer’s
interest in any one line of action and spreads that interest over a larger field.”
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We
shall see later that a larger field of interest exists for mobisodes, but that it takes a
different form than multiple on-going storylines. In 24: Conspiracy, only the CTU
mole story is carried out, virtually ignoring the pursuit of a romantic storyline with
ex-lovers Martin and Walker, the tension between Martin and Sutton, connections to
the plotlines of 24, or any other of many possibilities. Each individual mobisode
takes one small step in advancing the conspiracy story, and leaves the viewer with
one lingering question as a hermeneutic incentive to download the next installment.

83
See Chamberlain, Daniel and Scott Ruston, “24 and Twenty-First Century Quality Television” in
Reading 24, ed. Steven Peacock (London: IB Tauris, 2007) for a more complete discussion of serial
openness and episodic closure.

84
Kozloff, Sarah. “Narrative Theory and Television” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed.
Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 75.

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This smaller focus and more limited scope of the mobisode is one of the
format’s defining features. Another series that exhibits the small scale, yet
interconnected narrative strategy is the independently produced Love Bytes sitcom
available on the Fun Little Movies Channel on Sprint TV. Love Bytes features the
staff of a dating service arranging dates for a series of unusual clients, including
God, the Dali Camel and Howard Stern. Love Bytes shares the common features of a
television sitcom in that the characters seem to have no memory, finding themselves
repeatedly making the same mistake of not listening to their clients and making bad
choices of dating partners. The hapless staff matches up God with “May Phisto”,
Howard Stern with nemeses Kathy Lee Gifford and Dr. Laura Schlesinger, and the
celibate Dali Camel (punning off of the Dalai Lama) with a porn star.
Occupying a middle ground between a purely episodic series in which each
installment stands alone and the highly serialized 24: Conspiracy example, Love
Bytes develops a storyline with a single client over the course of three mobisodes,
then introduces a new client. The three mobisode format neatly incorporates the
component schema into a convenient three act structure, with each mobisode
consisting of a resolved episode, itself part of the focused chain of the three act
vignette. For example, “Oh My God-Part 1” presents an abstract of the situation
(God pursues a date), an initiating event (God’s arrival at the dating firm) and orients
the viewer to the situation, setting, and bumbling staffers. The first mobisode
concludes with God proving his existence to a skeptical staff member. “Oh My God
Part 2” contains the complicating event while pursuing the goal of companionship:

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the staff has arranged a date for God with the Devil. The revelation of their shared
love of cheesecake in “Oh My God-Part 3” serves as the turn that resolves the
complicating event and leads to the resolution of the narrative: God is happy and
replaces the storms and calamities he invoked in Part 1 with an end to world hunger.
Each mobisode is critically dependent on its vignette partners to create a complete
narrative, but each mobisode also has a degree of resolution or closure like a
traditional television series: in Part 1, God arrives at the dating firm; in Part 2, God
discovers the identity of his date; in Part 3, God discovers love.
The narrative universe of Love Bytes is somewhat less intricate and extended
than that of 24: Conspiracy, largely because it lacks the extra-textual connection to a
broadcast television program. However, Love Bytes episodes are slightly longer,
from one to four minutes in length, and along with a substantially less complex plot,
these longer mobisodes offer more time to develop the characters—a strategy
common to television programs, particularly sitcoms. Kozloff suggests that because
of the repetitive plot structure of most television programs, they shift audience
interest “from the flow of events per se to the revelation and development of
existents,” where existents are characters and settings.
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For example, in the “Dali
Camel-Part 1” episode we learn that Rachel Reed, the leader of the dating firm,
ironically has considerable trouble finding a date for herself. We also see a recurring
motif of Rachel winning bets off of co-horts Leesha, Marcy and Fabrizio that also
serve to enforce office rules; this motif develops over the course of the entire series.

85
Kozloff, 75.

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While this type of character and motif development occurs incrementally, it can be a
source of pleasure and interest and immersion in the mobisodic series. Just as the
exclamation greeting Norm’s arrival on Cheers comfortably settled the viewer into
the friendly venue of the Boston bar where everybody knows your name, Rachel’s
bleak social life and pecuniary office discipline, along with Leesha’s snide
commentary and dominatrix-inspired outfits, draw the viewer into the slightly
quirky, slightly sarcastic world of Love Bytes.
Whether it be a brand new world such as in Love Bytes or the expansion of an
existing story world such as in 24: Conspiracy, the series and serial mobisodes
revisit the same narrative universe in each installment. Another type of mobisode,
short films, exist as single texts, each one creating and resolving its own narrative
problematic in its own unique story world. Owing perhaps to the extremely short
nature of these mobisodes (ranging from less than one minute to slightly over three
minutes), few, if any, short film mobisodes are dramas.
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In almost all cases, the
short film mobisodes are comedies, developing a set of conventions with the climax
consisting of a rapid disruption of the conventional state and usually concluding with
a resolution segment.
The smooth camera movement and careful composition demonstrated in
“Coming Home” (Greg Bensen, 2006), a BlipTV “Top Pick” category mobisode,
distinguish it above the rest of the independent and amateur content collected by

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There is an enormous range of individual, single text content (i.e., not part of a series) that is not
comic, but these videos are either not narrative (sports, pranks, home videos) or not entertainment
despite some degree of narrativization (news, weather).

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content aggregators like BlipTV. “Coming Home” offers a very simple narrative: a
distracted and weary gentleman returns home from work, discovers the front door to
his home ajar and unexpectedly finds a couple making love in the bedroom.
However, the story reveals he has entered his neighbors’ house, resolving the
narrative in a humorous commentary on cookie-cutter suburban architecture and
Wisteria Lane inspired anxieties of marital infidelity.
As a single, stand alone, amateur-produced video, “Coming Home” has more
in common with Internet videos on websites like iFilm.com and the iTunes Music
Store (which sells films, television shows and distributes short videos for download
to computer or iPod). Thus, while it is available for mobile device (both phone and
media player), it lacks either a corporate, textual, or aesthetic connection to
television, making the “episode” half of the mobisode portmanteau potentially in
doubt. Why then do I include the short film as a type of mobisode, something that
the Fox trademark doesn’t account for (it specifically mentions “programs” implying
series and serials) and the entertainment industry press doesn’t use? Two reasons:
first, including them expands the term “mobisode” to include both the television
context of “episode” but also the narratological meaning of the term; second, the
existence of a vast array of individual cinematic/televisual texts accessible via office
computer, home computer or mobile phone constitutes a vast and omnipresent
mediascape, one that the mobile phone keeps at our fingertips.
In its simplicity and its brevity, a short film like “Coming Home” fits
Branigan’s definition of an episode, which collects the “consequences of a central

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situation” and, importantly, “shows change.”
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The change, of course, occurs in our
expectations of the course of events and the realization on the part of the gentleman
of his mistake. Branigan’s definition of a simple narrative strings episodes into a
focused chain, but in the case of “Coming Home” and its siblings, there is no focused
chain for this episode. As such, it is purely an episode, containing narrative
components, understandable through application of component schema, but it is
distinctly and individually an episode. As such it does not have the immersive reach
of the textual octopus of television and its new media arms, nor does it have the
recurring allure of the episodic series, but, as we shall see later, its short form, its
existence in an array of hundreds or thousands of similar short videos, and its
comedic tone make it as much a part of the mobile video phenomenon, and thus a
“mobisode”, as any serialized program.
The final category of content that warrants description constitutes the vast
majority of the branded content available provided by major television studios to
mobile network operators—repurposed excerpts, clips and sequences. Tonight Show
and Jimmy Kimmel Live monologues, The View excerpts, and clips and behind-the-
scenes footage promoting popular series such as Numb3rs, NCIS, Lost, and The O.C.
far outweigh original made-for-mobile programming such as 24: Conspiracy from
the major networks. A simple economic reason explains the presence of so much
repurposed content: it is very inexpensive for the studios to provide. In Visible
Fictions, John Ellis describes the fundamental textual unit of television as “the

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Branigan, 19.

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segment, a coherent group of sound and images, of relatively short duration that
needs to be accompanied by other similar such segments”.
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Ellis comes to this
conclusion based on an analysis of news and entertainment programming as well as a
conception of the viewer as distracted and able to digest small bits of information at
any one time. Since television programs already consist of short segments and the
perceived mobile viewer has only a short time to watch, excerpting them and
reformatting for the mobile screen presents little challenge to the studios for large
potential value.
A short excerpt from the CBS program NCIS entitled “What are you
wearing?” and available in early January 2007 on the CBS To Go channel of
Verizon’s V*Cast service provides an example of this type of mobisode. The one
and a half minute segment, part of that week’s broadcast episode, shows the tardy
arrival of a young, junior investigator named McGee. McGee’s co-workers remark,
both favorably and critically, on his odd choice of clothing (tweed jacket, turtleneck
sweater and pipe). The segment concludes with a snide remark from Abby,
suggesting they all return to work and presumably reorienting the course of the show
back to the plot at hand. The excerpt works as a self-contained unit for those fans
familiar with the characters and McGee’s usual style of dress. But the segment is not
important for its narrative qualities or lack of narrative depth. Rather, the segment
represents an important feature of convergence era television. Numerous scholars
have illustrated that the television text extends beyond the individual program

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Ellis, John. Visible Fictions (London: Routledge, 1982), 116.

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episode or series season. With websites, novelizations, fan fiction and product tie-
ins, the textual universe extends beyond the television in the living room.
Nick Browne’s idea of the supertext, a concept that “consists of the particular
program and all the introductory and interstitial materials—chiefly announcements
and ads—considered in its specific position in the schedule,” still applies to some
degree to the televisual text.
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However, the preeminence of schedule position, as
well as the text/supertext as a temporally bounded or defined unit changes.
Televisual content is part of a mediascape available to the viewer at home or on the
go and on the viewer’s demand. The mobisode text may be defined, in part, by its
singularity as a downloadable file, or it may blur into a fragmentary array of textual
pieces—supertextual satellites moving around the mediascape. Mobile video
participates in the disruption of structured social rhythms highlighted by Browne’s
supertext. This change is part of the shifts brought about by current trends of media
convergence and their ideologies of customization, personalization and participation.
The NCIS example illustrates two forms of the expanding televisual textuality
that John Caldwell identifies in his discussion of the culture of production in
convergence television. As an excerpt from the broadcast text edited and
reformatted for mobile media, the clip is an example of “ancillary textuality”, the
term Caldwell uses to describe repurposed content that the studios use to populate
new media venues. This clip participates in “marketing textuality” as part of the

89
Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text” Quarterly Review of Film
Studies 9/3 (1984): 176. See also: Brooker, Will “Living on Dawson’s Creek” in The Television
Studies Reader, eds Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (New York: Routledge, 2004);; John Caldwell
“Convergence Television”; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006);
Jeffrey Sconce. “What If?: Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries”; among others.

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branding function of the CBS To Go package of content.
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The slogan of CBS To
Go is “Take it with you!” indicating a clear goal of CBS to extend their brand
awareness and their product beyond the television screen, to be available at all times
wherever you go. This extension of the television landscape from the television to
the mobile device is precisely the function of these mobisodes that is of particular
interest and importance. The CBS To Go clip brings a piece of the NCIS universe to
the viewer no matter his location, and not only injects the NCIS story world into the
space of the viewer, but keeps him connected to the entire menu CBS story worlds
and the mediascape of television in general.

Historical precedents
John Caldwell sees the rise of repurposed content as a result of the
simultaneous convergence of broadcast, cable and Internet distribution as well as the
consolidation of media companies into large conglomerates in the mid-1990’s. This
time period saw a proliferation of channels and networks, such as the conglomerated
outlets of the NBC/Microsoft partnership that included NBC (broadcast), CNBC and
MSNBC (cable), MSNetwork and NBCi (Internet), all of which had more available
airtime than programming. Industry executives preached “the gospel of ‘repurposing
content’ and ‘migrating content’ to this or that ‘platform’” with an emphasis on news
programming. Caldwell explains, “With a much lower cost to produce per minute

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Caldwell, John. "Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the
Culture of Conglomeration," in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition: 41-74.

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than that of dramatic or entertainment programming, news production on videotape
proved to be the perfect vehicle for this new corporate focus on repurposing.”
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A similar cycle is at work in the mobile arena where a convergence of both
technology and business is taking place. As the mobile phone, the Internet and
television converge, and Fox swallows up MySpace and Apple Computer produces
cell phones, a scramble to lock in brands to attract loyal viewers is at hand. A
considerable amount of mobile television content is news, repurposed in the same
manner as the cable-internet explosion Caldwell analyzes. However, the repurposing
of content, evidenced by the NCIS example (one of hundreds), is not limited to news
programming. For the same economic reasons, but also because of the brand new
marketplace where content providers do not yet know what the audience really
wants, the studios and network operators need as much content as possible as quickly
as possible.
It is tempting to read the predominance of news clips and short form content
as a technological necessity of bandwidth limitations combined with the economic
advantages of repurposed content. Also, the presence of amateur-produced video
and channels siphoning from YouTube and Revver might be construed as savvy
plays by network operators to capitalize on faddish trends to garner more
subscribers. However, these overly general insights would overlook the complex
interplay of technology, culture, history and embedded social practices. Carolyn
Marvin, in her social and cultural history of late 19
th
Century new media When Old

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Caldwell, 49.

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Technologies Were New, points out that new media are “introduced into a pattern of
tension created by the coexistence of old and new.”
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There are multiple sets of old
and new at work here. The first is the shift from Western culture’s single reference
point representation of space and subjectivity to one born of multiple inputs. News,
for example, no longer comes from a well-established news bureau; rather multiple
television, cable and Internet feeds are available, and their sources might be a variety
of anonymous bloggers as well as traditional reporters. Importantly, this news is also
available constantly, whether through a wireless laptop connection or on the mobile
phone, changing the role of any given space as well as the individual’s perspective
on that place. And as a culture’s sense of space, time and subjectivity change, so too
will the methods, such as narrative, by which individuals organize data to generate
understanding about their world. Thus, it makes sense that the new media format of
mobile media will experience a confused landscape of narrative content, formats and
styles as the pattern of tension plays itself out.
Another set of old and new exists at the level of the medium. Television is
more than a box with a receiver and a screen; it is the broadcast schedule, cable
lineup, the vast array of programming, as well as the viewing practices of the
audience. As television-like content and television-like viewing migrates to the new
media of mobile phone, we can observe a combination of familiar styles, forms and
practices coexisting with new aesthetics and new viewing practices. In explaining
the variety of movie promotional content available on cell phones, Lucasfilm senior

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Marvin, 8.

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vice-president Jim Ward explains the difference from traditional television
commercials: “The new moviegoers digest media in a different way that isn’t that
passive, and the cell phone is a much more active way to engage people.”
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Internet
sites like YouTube and Revver demonstrate that the 21
st
Century media consumer is
often a producer, or is at the very least interested in what his or her fellow amateurs
produce. This new type of viewer/content relationship explains why a considerable
amount of independently produced and amateur content is available on mobile video
services adjacent to non-traditional television content. Clips of the Tonight Show
monologue and scenes from the week’s upcoming episode of Grey’s Anatomy utilize
the new medium to satisfy the old viewing practices and old conception of television.
These examples of ancillary and branding textuality keep the viewer informed and
interested in the upcoming show and produce loyal television viewers, just as
advertising promos and entertainment magazine shows on traditional television do.
The series such as 24:Conspiracy and Love Bytes depend on and cater to not only
textual or diegetic familiarity, but also on a model of television viewership in which
the viewer is encouraged to return at regular intervals for an entertaining experience.
Despite their minor accommodations to the prevailing practice of on-demand
viewing on the mobile device, these series still follow in the tradition of their
television forbears. At the same time, the content aggregators offer to the active
searcher and amateur producer the opportunity to “program” individual viewing
sessions or contribute new content.

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Idelson, Karen. “Hollywood Calling,” Variety, September 26, 2007, B2.

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In their seriality and their participation as supertextual satellites, mobisodes
maintain a close connection with television. For a new technology and site of
reception, this familiarity is important for the tentative, ongoing experimentation
with market forces, technological limitations, and consumer behavior. At the same
time, mobile video embraces the new: a heavy emphasis on participation (user
generated content) and a growing separation from scheduled to on-demand
entertainment, selected by the user from a database. As these newer elements
become more and more familiar, mobile video’s televisual roots will blend with the
medium’s ubiquitous, on-demand and locative qualities, and shape the development
of new narrative forms. These new narrative forms will combine their televisual
legacy with their interactive and database foundation to bridge the physical and the
virtual. This blend is evident in the conceptual, aesthetic and thematic registers of
exemplar mobisodes.

Bridging worlds—conceptual register
Debuting during the 2006 Superbowl broadcast and continuing throughout
the year, the cable sports network ESPN ran a television campaign called “Sports
Heaven” promoting the launch of ESPN’s own branded mobile phone service.
Playing on the ideals of convergence technology such as connectivity and
simultaneity lauded throughout contemporary media, the ESPN commercial also
offers a visualization of another important aspect of mobile television and mobile
narratives: the capacity to bridge the physical world the viewer moves through with

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a virtual world, be it imaginative, diegetic, televisual or informational. And, in an
important distinction with bridging fantasies of print, cinema and television in which
the viewer is transported into the virtual world, in the commercial’s representation of
“Sports Heaven” the virtual world comes to life within the physical world.
The commercial follows a young man walking through an urban landscape
completely engrossed by his mobile phone screen. Around him, various characters
engage in all manner of sports, from Formula One race cars crossing his path, to
tennis players hitting tennis balls at him as he walks along a sidewalk, to basketball
players dribbling around him as he approaches a bus stop. In a broad sense, the
commercial appeals to the sports fans that already watch ESPN’s television shows,
especially the signature sports news and recap program “Sports Center”, and conveys
the notion that life will be so much more pleasant with a constant connection to
sports information. In fact, as the commercial tells us, it would be heaven.
The basic message is typical of the marketing that surrounds the convergence
of news providers and new media technologies: an ESPN branded phone connects
the user to the world of sports and sports information constantly. What is interesting
about the commercial, though, is how this connection is imagined. As the viewer of
the commercial, we never see the information on the mobile phone screen; rather, we
have a privileged view of the type of experience the protagonist is having. What we
see is an individual navigating without disruption or interference the urban
landscape, but sharing this conventional urban landscape with a host of figures from
the world of sports. In contrast to theoretical models of television viewing in public

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that suggest a divided attention, the mobile television viewer represented in this
commercial seamlessly integrates walking in the city with his media experience.
Anna McCarthy, in her study of the television outside of the home Ambient
Television, posits this divided attention of the viewer of television in a public place.
Observing some baseball fans simultaneously watching a basketball game in a
portable television in their seats at the baseball stadium, McCarthy states “Such
bipolar spectator positionings are not only possible but frequent in public spaces,
making the spectator a multimedia product of many different visual and spatial
ideologies.”
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This theorization postulates a hapless viewer, an individual without
agency, and one subject to the address of the surrounding media. What I am
suggesting is at play in the bridging of the physical and virtual at the heart of mobile
narratives (something that mobile television participates in as well) is the production
by the individual of a mediascape for their own entertainment, information and
experience. What this commercial imagines, however, is not a bipolar positioning,
oscillating between a public spectacle (live baseball game in stadium) and a
private/domestic experience (watching TV) in a public place. Rather, the mobile
television experience imagined here is a unified experience where the individual
viewer seamlessly integrates his experience of the physical world (walking through
the city) with his experience of the world of sport, as sprinters, gymnasts, bowlers,
motocross riders, skateboarders and others run, tumble, bowl, ride, skate and perform
next to him down the sidewalk. This is more than simply the protagonist retreating

94
McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001), 119.

117
into some sort of private space by virtue of a media technology. Rather, he has
mapped the world of sport onto the public space he navigates. Automobile traffic
becomes Formula One racecars, NASCAR stock cars and top fuel dragsters; fellow
pedestrians become sprinters, uniformed base-runners, and gymnasts; corner florists
become feted racing victors and sidewalk marketers become ring girls.
It is important to note that we, the audience of the commercial, don’t see the
mobile phone screen, but rather full (TV) screen images of the sporting actions. The
experience being sold by ESPN is not a perceptual or optical immersion in the
sporting activities. The tiny screen of the mobile phone, buffering delays, latency,
and the slower frame rate (most mobile video services use 15fps compared to
television’s 30fps) make high quality televisual images of sports an impossibility.
Rather, we see the mobile television user’s imaginative experience. So, the mobile
media immersion works more on the level of connection to a broad universe, one
created in part by information, in part by media content, but also in large part by the
individual’s own imagination and production of a text/textual world. Rather than
being hailed, interpellated or positioned by some media monolith, the viewer actively
constructs his or her own mediated world. Having television constantly available,
whether in the form of news and sports like ESPN’s network or episodic series like
24:Conspiracy and Love Bytes, becomes an aspect of being connected to the
information society and blending the information with one’s own experience,
through the individual’s genre of choice (news, comedy, sports, fictional narratives,
viral videos, etc.)

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This combination by the viewer of information, image, location and
imagination is consistent with and extends Margaret Morse’s conception of
television as consisting of levels or “stacks” of reality: “Television formats then
amount to particular ways of conceptualizing and organizing ‘stacks’ of worlds as a
hierarchy of realities and relationships to the viewer.”
95
For Morse, the layers
include the diegesis of a show, the position of the program in the network schedule,
the diegesis of an advertisement, the advertisement’s existence/status on a different
level as part of the commercial broadcast economic system, station promos, etc. The
discursive structure of a news broadcast illustrates at least two of Morse’s levels or
stacks. A given news report, whether delivered by field reporter or in-studio anchor,
exists at one level, while the framing by the anchors of the entire set of reports
throughout the broadcast constitutes another level. Morse identifies these levels as
part of the creation of the “nonspace” of television—features that construct “an
enclosed world” that distracts from and replaces a connection to the world we live in
(an effect television shares with the mall and the automobile on the freeway.)
96

Later, by considering Morse’s own assessment of the viewer’s ability to deal with
these stacks within the visual field and injecting the mobile television experience
back into Morse’s non-space of the mall, I will suggest that mobile television
participates not in a separated and enclosed locale of distraction, but rather a blended
mediascape of virtual and physical realities. But first, we turn to the visual qualities

95
Morse, Margaret. “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television”
in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 206.

96
Ibid. 208.

119
of the mobisode and their characteristics consistent with Morse’s identification of
levels of reality.

Aesthetic register
While the ESPN commercial offers a vivid picture of how this blend of the
physical and virtual or imaginative works on a conceptual level, we must also
address its function on a formal and aesthetic level. As mentioned above, this
operation does not occur through optical or perceptual immersion, as attempted by
competing new media forms such as virtual reality or as some film theory conceives
of cinema. Rather, as I see it, the individual viewer constructs an immersive
experience from the available informational, aural and visual material. Morse’s
conception of how the television visually presents layers of realities is instructive:
The representation of copresence of multiple worlds in different modes on the
television screen is achieved via division of the visual field into areas or via
the representation of stacked places which can be tumbled or squeezed and
which, in virtual terms, advance toward and retreat from the visual field of
the viewer… changes of scale along the z-axis of spatial depth indicate a
proxemic logic of shared space of conversation with the viewer.
97

Morse’s observation is consistent with the common sense logic that a close-up shot is
more intimate and available for viewer identification than a medium or long shot.
The close-up direct-address of many television commercials aims to draw a close
social and consumer connection, following Morse’s identification of a proxemic
logic, between product and viewer. We can also interpret the three-camera,
proscenium style staging of most sitcoms as consistent with this logic. Generally

97
Ibid. 206-207.

120
speaking, the sitcom exists at a state of some remove or distance, allowing the
viewer to observe and laugh at the characters’ predicaments. Consider, for example,
Friends: virtually all of the physical movement, conversation, and plot action takes
place across the x-axis, whether across Monica’s apartment, Joey and Chandler’s
apartment, or across the characters’ favorite couch at the Central Perk. Even the
intimacy of close-ups, such as the coffee shop scenes in Seinfeld, is tempered by the
x-axis orientation of the shot-reverse shot conversation sequences. By way of
distinction, the location set and substantial z-axis orientation of a show like
M*A*S*H contributes to creating a greater sense of identification between viewer
and characters, and an increase in the social and political relevance of the themes on
display.
98

The predominance of close-up shots and tight framing makes the z-axis the
primary orientation for mobisodes. Whether diegetically motivated, thematically
motivated, or a response to the compositional challenge of the tiny mobile phone
screen, this dominance of the z-axis orientation contributes to a close connection
between the diegetic world of the mobisode and that of the viewer. In 24:
Conspiracy we can see how the “proxemic logic of shared space of conversation
with the viewer” works enrich the experience of watching the series and thus connect
the viewer more closely with the world of CTU.

98
For a thorough discussion of three-camera proscenium vs. single camera on-location production
modes in television see David Barker, “Television Production Techniques as Communication” in
Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb, 6
th
edition (New York: Routledge, 2000) 169-
182.

121
Appropriately, our first example from 24: Conspiracy that illustrates the role
of the z-axis in contributing to the “shared space of conversation with the viewer”
depicts a conversation—and even more appropriately, a mobile phone conversation.
Morse notes that the embedded stories within a televisual text, such as conversations,
often take place primarily in an x-y orientation, with the plane of the z-axis
remaining static. Even with the disparate locales united by the telephone, phone
conversations usually follow the same shot-reverse shot pattern lacking z-axis
movement described by Morse. In the case of this mobisode, “Minute 7”, brief
camera zooms serve to clarify information and manipulate sympathy and allegiance
on the part of the viewer for the characters. The first thirty seconds of the episode
consists of mobile phone conversation between the field agent Martin and his
colleague at CTU, Kelly. All shots during this sequence are either close-up or
extreme close-ups of the two characters, interspersed with occasional shots of
Kelly’s computer. When Kelly balks at a request to research the background of a
former agent, Martin barks, “Just do it!” As he does, the camera zooms out slightly
and abruptly, increasing the distance between the character and the viewer. The
scene cuts to Kelly surprised at the implied accusation of a former agent; in this shot
the camera slightly and abruptly zooms in on Kelly, bringing the viewer literally and
figuratively closer to Kelly. The zooms in these two shots serve both as punctuation
(particularly in the case of Martin’s exclamation), and as a subtle manipulation of
viewer identification, understanding and allegiance. The zoom out distances the
viewer from Martin, creating a feeling analogous to Martin’s difficulty in dealing

122
with the requirement to investigate his former lover, as well as emphasizing the
tough and demanding side of his character. The zoom in of the following shot
increases sympathy for Kelly, the deskbound staffer subject to Martin’s brusque
orders. It also creates a suspicion of Susan Walker’s innocence for the viewer and a
sense of viewer allegiance with Kelly (later exploited by the story.)
24: Conspiracy “Minute 7” also uses changes of scale on the z-axis to
contribute to the viewer’s comprehension and connection to the narrative universe.
Near the conclusion of the episode, Kelly and Martin discuss a lead while the camera
zooms in on Kelly’s computer displaying a photograph of the subject of Martin and
Kelly’s conversation. This zoom has the simple purpose and effect of introducing a
new character, the minor villain Oliver Krakowski. The zoom is important in
distinguishing him, because as the shot opens the image on Kelly’s screen looks very
much like Martin. The zoom, then, brings this new character into the awareness and
proximity of the viewer, and, in effect, brings the viewer into a conversation about
the identity of this new villain, his connection to Susan Walker, and the nature of the
conspiracy.
While “Minute 7” uses the z-axis to bring the pieces of information into the
viewer’s conversation, action sequences in the z-axis dominate “Minute 10”,
including a climactic fight between Martin and Susan Walker. Eight of this
episode’s fourteen shots exhibit either camera movement or character action along
the z-axis or both. The episode opens with Susan Walker moving through a
storeroom towards the camera, and Martin attacking her from behind. This sequence

123
brings the action to the viewer, and as the fight continues, the z-axis action
consistently moves toward the viewer, establishing closer and closer “degrees of
‘nearness’.”
99
As Martin gains the upper hand in the fight, the camera pulls back to
show both characters. This pull back returns the scene one degree of nearness farther
away, allowing for a more detached consideration of Martin’s line “Now I have
some questions that need answers” and the direction the story might take from this
point. Martin has questions for Susan, which the viewer shares. But on other levels,
other “stacks” of reality, the viewer may have questions about whether this line
concludes the episode, questions about the series’ structure more broadly, or
questions about the availability date of the next mobisode. These ever closer
sequences, coupled with the detached perspective of the concluding question, appeal
to the same ideal as the ESPN commercial: the viewer shares in the intricacies,
events and actions of the diegetic world, yet remains simultaneously grounded in the
real world.
In addition to the z-axis, other formal features are important: the tight
framing, dependence on close-ups and vague detail of settings contributes to merging
the viewer’s world with the virtual world. The mobile phone screen, at three inches
by four inches at the very largest, occupies a very small percentage of a human’s
field of view. Thus, the viewer’s own location dominates the background of the
mobile phone. And since the backgrounds are vague at best (e.g., non-descript office
sets in Love Bytes, generic and barely visible urban, industrial and commercial

99
Morse, 207.

124
settings in 24: Conspiracy, and a plain white background of the “Mac Spoof” shorts),
the viewer’s background becomes the background for the mobisode. The
mobisode’s layers of reality become part of the real world’s planes of distinction.
Morse notes that “televisual representations may include several layers in the same
visual field, simultaneously.”
100
Why is this limited to the televisual representation?
The simultaneous existence of several layers is, in fact, a characteristic of both
reality and television, and in neither case exclusive. The small size of the mobile
phone screen simply magnifies the opportunity for overlap of the various layers
within the same visual field—a blend.

Thematic register
Not only do mobisodes offer the viewer ‘degrees of nearness’ to layers of
reality through the formal characteristics of the image on screen, but mobisodes also
achieve this thematically, playing off the ontology of the medium. If the ontology of
television is ‘liveness’ then the ontology of the mobile phone is ‘connectivity.’ As in
its broadcast television parent 24, the central technology of action and information in
24: Conspiracy is the mobile phone. Both Agent Jack Bauer and Agent Martin get
criminal background and location information, share field reports, and organize sting
operations all via mobile phone. Both exercise their hero status in part through their
cell phone and its connection to a broad network of allies and information.
Connectivity is so crucial, in fact, that a bad connection leads to Martin’s death.

100
Morse, 206.

125
Martin’s first point of contact with his CTU network, the ‘operator’ character on the
other end of his mobile phone conversation, is the character Kelly, later revealed to
be the villain. Having manipulated Martin and Susan Walker with false information
and capitalized on their detective work, Kelly has corrupted Martin’s access to the
network, his connectivity. Dramatically illustrating the idea of a networked self,
Marin himself is killed when he confronts and kills Kelly, essentially destroying his
primary point of access to the network.
More than any other piece of personal media technology, the mobile phone
contributes to an always-on/always-connected and on-demand lifestyle of the 21
st

Century. The association of mobisodes with television figures into the tension
between old and new media practice: television (old) is wrapped up in the
structuring of daily life; mobile television works this way in part with the scheduled
release of mobisodes (such as the Fox examples) and with the live television
broadcast streams available on Sprint TV and launching on V*Cast in 2008. Yet, the
on-demand feature of mobile video, which dominates the landscape, is in line with
the formulations of new media.
Greg Bensen’s “Coming Home” is a salient example of playing off the
ontology of connectivity. While 24: Conspiracy’s plot hinges on a corrupted network
interface, “Coming Home” extends its connection between diegesis and viewer
beyond a shared formal emphasis on action and camera orientation along the z-axis,
to the thematic level. If the ESPN commercial discussed above represents the
heavenly ideal of constant connection to the world of sport, “Coming Home”

126
revolves around the anxieties of not being connected and continuously co-present
with the domestic sphere. In this simple narrative, a man returns home from work,
stops to collect his mail and notices the front door ajar. He enters his otherwise
unremarkable suburban home to find a couple making love in the bedroom. Shocked
the man recognizes his best friend, only to subsequently recognize his best friend’s
wife and realize that he has entered the wrong house. Now, the joke depends more
on a cynical view of the cookie-cutter similarity of suburban housing developments
than anything else. But, the source of the dramatic tension of the piece, and the
association with the ontology of connectivity, lies in the anxiety of what happens in
the domestic space when one member of the relationship is gone for a period of time.
As the story unfolds, the viewer is powerless to warn the lead character of his
impending discovery, and in fact shares the same state of partial knowledge of the
character: concerned by the open front door and the giggles from down the hall,
both viewer and main character wonder what is going on in the bedroom. When the
shot cuts to a surprised man in bed and the main character exclaims in shock and
anguish, “My best friend!” we share the pain of the discovery of marital infidelity.
In a world and media marketplace that constantly tells us we can be and should be
connected at all times to our office, to news media, even to the world of our leisure
activities and fan cultures, “Coming Home” draws on an absence of this connectivity
and co-presence for its dramatic power. It then, of course, subverts the anxiety and
anguish of marital infidelity in its snide commentary on the homogeneity of

127
suburban homes with the main character’s realization “…and my best friend’s wife!
I’m in the wrong house!”
Appropriate to our analysis of new media being introduced into a place of
tension between old and new (both in terms of technology, social practice and artistic
imagination), “Coming Home” exemplifies both a new story and an old story. It
shares its cinematic roots with the de Lorde rescue melodramas discussed above. In
those films, the telephone serves sometimes as an agent of rescue, but more often a
device of anguish as the male protagonist is helpless to intervene in his wife’s plight,
made an impotent participant-observer by the telephone’s ability to bridge the
geographic distance but the impossibility of taking action. Here, the initial fear of
criminal activity (implied by the shot of the open front door) is supplanted by the
sounds of giggles from the bedroom into an anxiety of adultery (a cousin to the de
Lorde melodrama’s rape anxiety). In this case, though, the viewer is the powerless
figure observing the situation, all the while concerned about his or her own possible
experience of a similar scenario. The story is also a new one, as it plays on the
expectation that we are viewing these events while on the move and not in a
domestic space ourselves. Whether we are commuting, shopping or working at the
office, this story unites our presence in such a non-domestic environment, the same
environment the main character had just traveled from, with latent societal fears of
betrayal. In this way, the mobisode bridges the world of the viewer and the narrative
world, at least in part, through an ontology of connectivity.

128
It is this ontology of connectivity, and the implied activity of the viewer
accessing, posting and retrieving information from the network that pushes the
mobisode and mobile televisual narrative to something beyond Morse’s conception
of the non-space of television. Morse suggests that the segmentation, repetition and
distraction at the core of television (as well as the mall and the freeway) combine to
recreate the world they disconnect from and replace—“a disengaged and enclosed
world of the home, the automobile, and the mall.”
101
The mobisode, however,
injects a layer of televisual distracted non-space into the distracted non-space of the
mall, and brings its ontology of connectivity, its network link to physical spaces,
mental spaces, people and information. This mash-up is not of separate and distinct
spaces; rather, they play off one another, and burst the notion of an enclosed non-
space. The formal and thematic connections to the viewer, who holds both the portal
to the virtual/imaginative/televisual and the landscape of his environment in his
visual field, create bridges between these layers of existence, comprehension and
imagination. The virtual world of a constructed narrative is no longer unique and
enclosed within the home or mall, and thus the medium requires a new conception.
Rather than the television’s separate and enclosed essence of distraction, mobile
media and its televisual narratives, combining an ontology of connectivity with
formal characteristics playing on degrees of nearness, participate in a blurring of the
layers or stacks different versions of reality(s), bridging the physical and the virtual.

101
Morse, 208.

129
Conclusion
What then, ultimately, does it matter that the mobile phone can function as a
device for the reception of televisual narratives? The answer lies in the capacity of
the mobile phone narrative to bridge worlds between the user’s location or space and
the diegetic world. This importation of diegetic world and entertainment into a space
previously structured by institutional strategies alters the space from one of strict
boundaries to one of freer play for the individual. Thus, the mobisode, especially
considering the pervasive edgy and transgressive tone to many original mobisodes,
operates on the tactical level (in the face of institutional strategies) in Michel de
Certeau’s conception of social practice in space: “strategies are able to produce,
tabulate, and impose these spaces, when these operations take place, whereas tactics
can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces.”
102
De Certeau refers to tactics
such as la perruque, the practice of using company time and/or resources to create
something of personal value. For example, institutional strategies intend for
company computers to increase productivity, but a worker might use it to plan a ski
trip—a tactical use of the computer altering the office from a space exclusively of
work and institutional efficiency to one of personal space and leisure planning. The
mobisode works similarly, importing leisure activity into any kind of space (that has
the necessary signal). A fictional, narrative immersion diverts any space from its
strategic intentional use into something altogether different. This tactical disruption
may be minor, contained solely within the imagination of the mobile phone user, and

102
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 29-30.

130
may be as brief as the duration of the mobisode. In the next chapter, however, I shall
explore a new kind of narrative project, capitalizing on the capabilities of the mobile
phone, that elevates the scope of tactical intervention into space.
As I mentioned earlier, this ontology of connectivity implies a greater degree
of viewer action or participation than traditional models of television and cinema
viewership. Jeffrey Sconce’s assertion that “most media viewers prefer (for better or
worse) to be ‘captivated’ by stories on the tube” captures the conventional
conception of the television viewer: passively subject to television’s flow, absorbing
the stories washing over him. However, the mobisode viewer must be a far more
active viewer, and the metaphor of flow breaks down when applied to mobisodes.
They are discrete textual units, requiring the user to navigate cumbersome
hierarchical menus to select and retrieve. Thus, at both a cognitive and physical
level, conscious action is required on the part of the viewer to watch a single
mobisode or to engage in a session of watching mobile videos. This aspect of
mobisode viewing is also decidedly more active than that brought about by other
new technologies in television. William Uricchio seeks to update the flow metaphor
in relation to new viewing practices brought on by the adoption of the remote control
and the TiVo. In the case of the remote control, Uricchio suggests that flow becomes
“ a set of choices and actions initiated by the viewer” and that the flow of TiVo is
one of adaptive profiling by the technology’s artificial intelligence.
103
In both these
cases, however, a constant stream of televisual images still flows over the user who

103
Uricchio, William. “Television's Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow” in
Television After TV, 170.

131
simply alters the stream’s content with effortless navigations. Most distinctly, in the
case of mobisodes, specific conscious effort and selection must take place resulting
in significant interruptions in the viewing experience. Therefore, rather than
analogous to dipping into a stream, watching mobisodes is more akin to cherry-
picking: reaching out to select a small, self-contained piece, enjoying it while
moving along, then seeking another, but all the while enjoying the walk through the
orchard.
This greater sense of conscious effort in the activity of watching mobisodes is
an important aspect of the participatory nature of the experience, and is part of the
tension between old media practice and new. Whether conceptualized in Marvin’s
terms of old and new or Bolter and Grusin’s term of remediation, part of what is
going on is the consumers’ desire for familiarity in some aspect of their media
consumption experience. Writing in Telephony, Kevin Fitchard cites a study by
research firm A.T. Kearney which polled consumers about what type of content, of a
broad range of possible types, they would like to watch on their mobile phones:
“consumers overwhelmingly reached for the familiar, choosing the brands and
programming they see on their TV and theater screens.”
104
With a new device
(mobile phone handset), new location (anywhere), and new method of access
(hierarchical menu slowed by data transfer delays), the user reaches out for familiar
content.

104
Fitchard, “Verizon Takes Mobile TV Primetime”, 7.

132
This new introduction of conscious choice and physical action to access
narrative content will merge, I think, with another sort of viewer participation that
exists at the nexus of new media technologies, media consumption and media
production. Over the past twenty years, scholars such as Henry Jenkins, Constance
Penley, William Booker and others have studied fan cultures and their immersion in
the imaginative worlds of their favorite films and television shows through
extensions of the textual universe. Jeffrey Sconce notes that “the ‘metaverse’ of a
television series allows for an intensity of investment and depth of immersion well
beyond that of any current virtual reality technology.”
105
Mobisodes such as the
Ugly Betty telenovelas, 24: Conspiracy, and Bones: Skeleton Crew expand what
Sconce refers to as the ‘metaverse’ and I have described as the textual (or I should
say intertextual) universe, offering opportunities for the viewer to tap into the
narrative world. In subsequent chapters, I will explore new types of narrative
experiences, ones that capitalize on these features, of active retrieval of small story
components and a participatory immersion in narrative worlds, that are now
tentatively entering into the tension between old media practice and new. Linking
these forms of activity and participation to the most familiar form of narrative
entertainment, television, effectively prepares and trains the interested consumer for
new developments in narrative entertainment, easing the unfamiliarity of new
technologies and new media forms.

105
Sconce, 110.

133
Chapter 4
Remediating Database and Narrative

Sitting in a parking lot or coffee shop or walking to work, the player of the
mobile game Botfighters (It’s Alive, 2002-2006) furiously types commands into his
phone in response to alerts indicating an opposing player is near. Within six or
seven text messages, the encounter is over: one of the players’ virtual robots
emerges victorious or both retreat to fight again in a virtual battle that takes place on
the streets of European cities. By using the phone as the method of instigating
diegetic action and also as the site of reception of for narrative information,
Botfighters combines the two ideas presented in the preceding chapters: the phone
operating as a device in narrative and narratives presented on the phone. In so doing,
Botfighters is an example of mobile entertainment projects that aggressively and
intentionally blur the boundary between the real and the virtual, and indicate the
narrative potential of mobile media.
If part of my contention is that the mobile video/mobile television explosion
prepares the way for the audience to conceptualize the mobile phone as a platform
for new forms of narrative, what are these new forms, how do they negotiate
narrative form and the unique aspects of the mobile medium, and how do they
remediate earlier combinations of telephone and narrative? Exploring these
questions is the business of this chapter. This argument of preparation and
remediation extends the initial premise introduced in Chapter 1: the transmedia

134
migration of narrative. A logical path proceeds from cinema’s adoption of narrative
from novel and stage to television’s adaptation of narrative from cinema and theater
to digital technology as another medium for textual and audio-visual narrative.
Digital media’s introduction of a computational element, however, appears as an
apparent deviation in this trajectory of transmedia migration because of their
distributed, modular, mutable and participatory nature. Digital media ‘texts’,
whether hypertext or video game or interactive DVD-ROM, offer a substantially
different experience for the reader/viewer and sparked questions about whether these
forms actually represent something entirely different from narrative.
In theorizing the difference of digital media from its analog predecessors,
Lev Manovich suggested in The Language of New Media that the modern age
“privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression” and that the computer
age replaces this structure with that of the database.
106
Identifying what he perceived
to be an irreconcilable tension between these forms, he argued: “Competing for the
same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out
of the world”.
107
Alternatively, Marsha Kinder has argued that reconsidering the
more open narratives of European art films with the concept of the database as a
metaphorical model illustrates that the two concepts are not necessarily
incompatible. She described films that expose “the dual processes of selection and
combination that lie at the heart of all stories” as database narratives, and that such

106
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 218.

107
Ibid, 225

135
films “reveal the arbitrariness of the particular choices made, and the possibility of
making other combinations which would create alternative stories”.
108
Thus, Kinder
suggests that the concept of the database is useful for recognizing that any given
narrative presented in a text is but one of many possibilities, and that the open
narratives of art films offer lessons for conceptualizing interactive digital media.
Since, I believe that narrative is an intrinsic part of the human experience, and is
sufficiently flexible and powerful to provide the means to explore, understand and
critique the human condition and human creations in all of their various
manifestations, the concept of the database and computational capability can be
accommodated within narrative form. We shall see in the ensuing analysis that
mobile narratives draw from both sides of what Manovich had positioned as a
competitive binary, suggesting that rather than an exclusionary relationship, these
two methods of cultural expression exist in productive tension.
Advocating for the productive combination of computational media and
narrative, Janet Murray uses the fictitious “Holodeck”, popularized by the various
Star Trek television series, as the ideal model to keep in mind as she analyzes
nascent digital and interactive narrative forms in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck.
Writing before the proliferation of mobile media, Murray adroitly blends film and
literary studies with computer programming experience to produce a work that is
applicable to the operation of narrative within any computational medium. Murray’s

108
Kinder, Marsha. “Hotspots, Avatars and Narrative Fields Forever,” 6. See also Kinder’s
“Narrative Equivocations Between Movies and Games,” and “Honoring the Past and Creating the
Future in Cyberspace”.

136
premise is that the computer of the 1990’s is much like the movie camera of the
1890’s: “a truly revolutionary invention humankind is only on the verge of putting
to use as a spellbinding storyteller”.
109
My contention is similar: the particular
computational medium well suited to operating as an immersive storyteller is the
mobile phone. In my view, the mobile narrative does not depend on a wholly
electronic virtual world created by pixels and sound effects and text. Rather, it
immerses the participant in a hybrid world intersected and layered with media
content, imagination, and narrative structures, all of which enrich the connection
between art and life.
Murray’s examination of the entirely virtual digital environments, and her
attention to key features of interactive media such as agency and immersion, offer
productive insights to understanding how interactive digital media are reunited with
narrative, and how narrative can operate in the mobile experience. The recognition
that narratives are produced through a process of exchange between the text and the
reader/viewer/participant accommodates for the modular, mutable and participatory
elements of computational media. The cognitive and interpretive agency already
resident in the narrative process becomes materialized in the narrative form of
interactive media. At the same time, much of new media aims for a sensory
immersion in a storyworld, attempting to draw these interactive forms level with the
imaginative absorption (what Murray calls a liminal threshold experience) of the
novel or cinema. Mobile media activate these features, and thus Murray’s ideas

109
Murray, 2.

137
about the Holodeck will be useful tools to help analyze different types of mobile
games and narratives.
Mobile media, and especially the mobile phone with its tradition of sharing
stories of everyday life and its cinematic heritage, illustrate the compatibility and
productivity of database and narrative. Most simply, the mobile phone’s technical
infrastructure is a series of connected databases that facilitate conversations between
people exchanging and producing verbal narratives. On a more complex and less
familiar level, mobile projects like Yellow Arrow (Counts Media, 2004-) generate
databases of cultural knowledge accessible by participants who can select and
combine, either arbitrarily or by their own design, components to construct their
understanding of a series of locations and associated data. Demonstrating the
potential for agency in interactive media, participants in Yellow Arrow can contribute
their own places and anecdotes to the overall database, thus making a meaningful
contribution to the human experiences captured in specific places and contributing to
subsequent participant’s experiences.
If one means by which mobile narratives negotiate any potential tension
between the database and narrative form is through their activation of the principles
of agency and immersion, the second and related method is through their specific
and literal connection to place. Narrative has always had a close relationship with
the spaces and places of human experience. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is
an illustration that memory and identity are tightly interwoven with the locations of
shaping events. Not only is the character of Leopold Bloom explored by means of

138
his perambulatory itinerary through Dublin, but Joyce also wrote the novel in exile
from his native city. Thus, both the process of narrativizing themes of identity,
loyalty, heroism, masculinity, and art, and the resultant narrative are activated by
spatial associations. In this way, Ulysses could serve as a prime artistic example for
Philip Ethington’s spatial theory of history. Ethington contends that history is not, in
fact, resident in a temporal sense of the past (a cognitive concept that only exists in
the present), but rather exists in locations and this link transforms these locations
from abstract spaces to places of lived experience.
110
In the critical domain, both
Stephen Mamber and Franco Moretti have argued for a spatial dimension of
understanding narrative. Mamber offers an approach to understanding film
narratives through a process of “narrative mapping”, suggesting that a spatial
dimension is useful in comprehending the nuances of a particular narrative. Moretti,
also employing a technique of mapping, offers a macro-level view. His distant-
reading illustrates the close ties between culture, narrative, trends and geography.
Mobile media narratives, for their part, activate all of these spatial
associations with narrative. By taking place within specific locations, they represent,
connect and contribute to the lived experiences of places; their distribution over
space and their geographic traces contribute to the constant process of development
and exchange that is narrative. Therefore, to understand the narrative potential of
mobile media requires an understanding of their relationship to place in combination
with their computational and database formulations.

110
Ethington, Philip J. “Placing the Past: ‘Groundwork’ for a Spatial Theory of History” Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11/4 (2007): 465-493.

139
Given the convergence of cinema and television with the cell phone and this
concept of place, theories of human geography can combine with film and new
media theory to help us begin to understand how mobile media devices can offer
narrative experiences. Thomas Elsaesser, writing in the January 2003 PMLA,
suggests that film theory is at a crossroads in attempting to deal with changing
modes of representing presence and experience: “film theory is attempting to draw
level with the multivocal surround immersion of space” offered by television and the
internet, in contrast to the traditional “monocular, unifocal, perspectival projection of
space, to which…our subjectivity is said to have been in thrall.” Elsaesser offers that
the rapid and universal acceptance of the mobile phone, “nudges film theory
more”.
111
The mobile phone offers instant and on-demand access to other spaces,
places and times; the mobile phone makes any space a mediated space intersected
with layers of information and data.
The discourse of human geography, and in particular its theorization of place
in combination with the introduction of technologized mediations into human
experience can combine with narrative and film theory to help negotiate mobile
media. Geographer Tim Cresswell offers that “mobile finance capital and new
forms of transportation and communication produce time-space compression and
thus the dilution of place stability”;
112
a statement that echoes the changes Elsaesser
notes in terms of film and media. The loss of perspective and the instability of place

111
Elsaesser, 122.

112
Cresswell, 15; my emphasis.

140
yield a confused landscape. Cresswell goes on to suggest that “the way forward is
signposted by theories of practice which serve to destabilize notions of place and
space…places are never complete, finished or bounded but are always becoming—in
process”.
113

How can the networked mobile phone, itself part of the time-space
compression, the dilution of place stability and the disruption of perspective, also
operate as a practice of becoming and a structure of understanding? By nudging
Edward Branigan’s notion of narrative, proposed in the context of understanding
film, to mobile media we can theorize how the mobile narrative experience also
operates as a “distinctive strategy for organizing data about the world”— a world
characterized by fragments of information coming from many directions in need of
organization and comprehension.
114

As part of the remediation cycle, this connection between the mobile media
narrative and the role it plays in contemporary life loops back to considerations of
another new media form, at another time—that of early cinema. Tom Gunning’s
analysis of early narrative films suggests, “the newly emerging forms of filmic
narration display a relation (simultaneously thematic and structural) to the way
technology structures modern life”.
115
This chapter shares similar goals, seeking to
understand the structure of mobile narratives. We will look at how they exhibit the
remediation between database and narrative, and the particular ways they do so with

113
Ibid, 20.

114
Branigan, ix.

115
Gunning, “Heard Over the Phone” 187.

141
an eye towards the mobile phone’s televisual heritage, and how this history affects
the computational and participatory part of the narrative in a section devoted to
interactivity/interface. In addition, we will explore the role the mobile phone and
mobile narrative plays in determining and experiencing place, and the engagement
with a blend of physical and virtual space brought about by a constant connection to
a vast and omnipresent mediascape.

Notions of Place
Since part of my contention about the power and potential of mobile media
narratives is their ability to bring the agency of interactivity and the power of
immersive narrative off of the page and out of the theater or living room and into the
world, I will start with an understanding of place and our capacity to participate and
intercede in space and place. There is a considerable body of work devoted to
exploring the distinction between these terms and their philosophical and
phenomenological implications.
116

My use of the terms “space” and “place” is consistent with their valence
within the fields of human geography as well as collaborative systems design in
computer science. In the most simple of terms, space refers to that which can be
defined by boundaries and dimensions—it is an abstract concept, one of mathematics
and coordinates. Place, on the other hand, refers to locations imbued with the human
experience. Preeminent human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues that “what begins as

116
Consider, for example, the work of Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Tim Creswell,
David Harvey and Michel de Certeau, among many others.

142
undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with
value” and that “place is an organized world of meaning”.
117
Right away we can see
a close connection to narrative and thus the usefulness of this distinctive use of
“place”. Taking the concept of place a step further, I have already invoked
geographer Tim Cresswell’s assertion that in our postmodern era “places” are not
fixed but are continually in the process of production, affected by “time-space
compression” and a “dilution of place stability”.
118
This, too, connects the notion of
place closely with the concept of narrative, which is also a process of meaning
production. Thus, space refers to the physical (or metaphorical in the case of
cyberspace) dimensions and location, a concept with physicality and distinctiveness;
place refers less to the physical characteristics, but to the unique qualities imbued by
human experience.
Not only does this distinction between space and place associate narrative
with place in particular, it is consistent with conceptualizing computational and
networked media. In theorizing optimal collaborative systems designs, designers
Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish argue that “place” involves a set of “cultural
understandings about behavior and action” and in their design principle “space is the
opportunity; place is the understood reality”.
119
This latter distinction becomes
particularly relevant when considering the capability of mobile media to activate the

117
Tuan, Yi-Fu Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1977), 6 and 179.

118
Cresswell, 15, 20.

119
Harrison and Dourish, “Re-Placing Space”

143
narratives of alternative histories associated with particular locations, transforming
abstract spaces, of downtown Los Angeles for example, into places with layers of
realities.

Precursors—site specific art
A brief look at an example of large-scale site-specific art will help introduce
the exploration of place in art and offer ideas regarding the potential for mobile
narratives. In his analysis of Richard Serra’s large scale works, James Dickenson
notes that Serra’s goals were to “rediscover and reengage the broad audience that had
been lost with the ‘escape’ of art to remote and exotic places” and that his art “aims
both to reveal the physicality of the site to the viewing subject and to enhance
awareness of the fundamental relation between self and place”.
120
In their game-like
qualities, their frequent use of personal anecdotes, and even the penchant for raunchy
humor in mobisodes, we can see a deliberate trend in mobile narratives away from
the abstract and exotic, as in more esoteric forms of digital media such as net-art,
installation pieces and the general abstractness of cyberspace.
Another of the goals of site-specific art is to alter the subject’s perception and
behavior, and to “expose the hidden forces that shape everyday life”.
121
Dickenson
describes the example of Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981-1989) placed at the Federal Plaza
in New York City. The large steel arc altered pedestrian traffic flow, sightlines, and

120
Dickenson, 48, 51.

121
Dickenson, 57.

144
even the patterns of snowdrifts in winter. In so doing, the sculpture revealed the
influence of architecture on everyday life and human behavior, the buildings’
channeling of wind and snow, and conceptions of beauty and appropriate style of art
in particular places. Pedestrians walking from building to building were forced to
navigate around the giant sculpture and snowdrifts that accumulated in unexpected
areas. Depending on their orientation, pedestrians could not see beyond the
sculpture. The subsequent removal of the sculpture from the plaza reveals the
hidden forces of politics and taste. All of which illustrate how this sculpture in this
location contribute to “understood realities” of place. In a similar way, mobile
narratives reveal the hidden forces of topography, architecture, history and politics.
This combination of forces, made evident to the audience member or
participant while on the move through space, is the focus of media artist Janet
Cardiff. A pioneer in mobile and narrative art, Cardiff creates “soundwalks” that she
describes as “a strange attempt to join our separate worlds through a mediated one, to
create a symbiotic relationship between the participant and my voice and body but
also to heighten the senses so that you can experience or be part of the environment
in which you’re walking”.
122
Cardiff’s work, through a combination of narrative bits
and highly immersive binaural sound, creates an evocative soundscape associating
emotions, ideas, memories and identity in particular places. Her piece Her Long
Black Hair guides the participant through Central Park offering a narration of sights
that simultaneously parallel and potentially contradict what the walker actually sees,

122
Egoyan, Atom. “Janet Cardiff” Bomb 79 (2002): 65.

145
as well as offer narrative fragments that pose questions about the park and the
possibilities of the place.
Site-specific or location-based mobile narratives privilege the place of their
telling and of their reception, and participate in the production of place as a
meaningful physical, social and psychic construct. The participant of Her Long
Black Hair produces a new understanding of place as he or she hears, interprets and
absorbs the story in particular locations. Imagination and speculation about the
characters combine with the richly recorded ambient sounds and the operatic
overtures (connecting to the Orpheus myth), suggesting themes and associations
between narrative, person and place. Rather than a dislocation or sense of “no more
here”, the participant in a mobile narrative like Her Long Black Hair produces a new
here, not merely occupying a generic space, but involved in a particular place. As
Cresswell notes, “rather than viewing place as an outcome of our subjective
appropriation of space...we should view place as a precondition for the very
possibility of subjectivity.”
123
In this way, the mobile narrative experience is
particularly well suited to commenting on and exploring the intersection between
place and subjectivity.
Michel de Certeau discusses moving through the city as akin to the speech act
or the act of language. The pedestrian writes his or her route, contesting the
institutional frameworks guiding him or forcing his hand with each turn away from a
planned thoroughfare, each jay-walking traverse across traffic and street, each

123
Cresswell, 7.

146
conscious avoidance of advertising and well constructed entrances designed to draw
in the passing customer. Such movement through the city transforms its spaces into
places for the pedestrian. The places exist on at least two levels: that produced by
the pedestrian’s practice and the level produced by other social practices intersecting
the space. The Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, for example, is a
tourist place produced by visitors everyday marveling at its skylights and wrought-
iron railings. Architecture, however, is one practice that transforms the space (four
walls and a ceiling on Broadway Avenue) into a place; the practice of filmmaking
(Bladerunner, DOA, and others) enriches the place and motivates some of the
tourists; a legend citing the building designer’s occult connection offers a further
layer. The levels exhibit de Certeau’s “polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or
contractual proximities” that enriches a place.
124

Mobile narratives bring additional levels of practice into existing spaces and
places. The pursuit, perception and engagement with the mobile narrative is itself a
cultural practice that transforms a space. The deserted and dilapidated streets of
downtown Los Angeles come to life with tablet-PC-toting art patrons experiencing
34N118W (Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman, 2004). As they do
so, they produce a new set of experiences intersecting with the space; they also listen
to a representation of the practices of imagined inhabitants of the neighborhood,
requiring a shifting back and forth between an identification with a fictional place
and a recognition of present place. This shift mirrors the shifting correlation

124
De Certeau, 117.

147
between the 1905 era map represented on the PC screen and the current layout of
streets and buildings. 34N118W co-designer Jeremy Hight suggests that “narrative is
an agitated space” as is a city, that both become agitated in the course of being
read.
125
In the reading process, the layers of narrative (or the layers of the city) are
stirred up in the process of narrative comprehension. I suggest that this activity
simultaneously represents places (locations of lived experience) and contributes to
both the recognition of given locations and transformation into places. Because a
place is constructed through a process that binds a cultural practice to the physical
space, the experience simultaneously transforms the space into place and this process
becomes part of the practitioner’s subjective experience, inextricably linking the two.
Understanding place and subjectivity, then, requires a recognition and an
experience of their “interconnection rather than their reduction…their complexity
rather than their simplification”.
126
Narrative, with its capacity for constructing an
aesthetic and potentially transformative experience and its capacity to be a method of
understanding, can both express this complexity and further produce connections.
The participant of 34N118W experiences a small area of downtown Los Angeles as
an engaged student of its history, as a visitor complicit in a history of community
displacement, and as a reader connected to stories, secrets and histories available to
him should he wish to simultaneously engage in a pedestrian act of producing
meaning, a cognitive act of understanding, and an aesthetic act of identification.

125
Hight, Jeremy, “Narrative Archaeology” Streetnotes (2003).

126
Malpas 38.

148
Together, these various positions and activities produce an intertwined notion of
experience as place.

Narratives and databases
This concept of layers of narrative embedded within the layers of a city
suggest to Hight that “place becomes a multi-tiered and malleable concept”.
127
The
multi-level structure and malleability also suggests a database and brings us to the
second half of our analysis of the key components of mobile narratives. Mobile
media’s ability to activate the connection between narrative and place contributes to
its suitability as a narrative platform and, as the Cardiff example points towards, also
enhances its capacity for immersiveness. At the same time, mobile media narratives
remediate their cinematic heritage, their role as a site of televisual narrative
reception, and the database architecture of computational media. In so doing they
create opportunities for participant agency and offer a seamless interface into their
blend of virtual and real worlds.
It is important not to confuse my usage of the term “virtual” with two genres
of new media that seek also to create an immersive media experience. I use the term
broadly to refer to an alternate reality to the physical world we see, hear, touch and
move through. In my usage, this alternate reality might be realized through screens
large and small, audible sound effects and narration, or text on a page activating the
mind and imagination.

127
Hight, “Narrative Archaeology”.

149
In much new media and technological discourse, “Virtual Reality,” or VR,
refers to a fully perceptually immersive experience (meaning that sight, sound, touch
and even smell are fabricated by the VR system to create the sense of presence
within a world.) VR systems employ a variety of devices, including helmets or
goggles, headphones, gloves and even media “caves” to completely separate the user
from the physical world and replace all of his or her sensations with those generated
by the system. In this sense, the term “virtual” refers specifically and narrowly to the
electronic representation of a world that the participant perceives through the VR
equipment. Throughout this chapter, I will use the designation “VR” to refer
specifically to this type of virtual reality technology. Similarly, “Augmented
Reality” refers to a type of media experience, one that also depends on electronic
imaging devices. In a typical AR project, data in the form of text or image is
superimposed on the participant’s perception of the real world by means of some sort
of imaging device (special glasses, holographic projections, etc). In AR, the
electronic input tends to be informational in nature and is intended to supplement, or
augment, the user’s knowledge about the present location. The user is not isolated
from the real world in AR as he or she is in VR.
Mobile media researcher Adriana de Souza e Silva coins the term “hybrid
reality” in her article “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of
Hybrid Spaces” and it is a useful concept to begin theorizing the nature of a certain
type of mobile media experiences. To de Souza, a hybrid reality borrows in part from
augmented reality in that both digital information and the physical environment

150
overlap, but has specifically mobile and social dimensions: “It is exactly the mix of
social practices that occur simultaneously in digital and physical spaces, together
with mobility, that creates the concept of hybrid reality”.
128
For de Souza, the
overlap of the physical and digital occurs primarily because of a social, multi-player
component to the hybrid reality project in which one set of player-participants
operate in the physical world while another set operate primarily in a digital on-line
world. De Souza cites the Blast Theory project I Like Frank as a prime example of
constructing a hybrid reality. In this project, street players are immersed in the
physical environment and connected by mobile phone to on-line players navigating
the hypermediated environment of the Internet.
De Souza’s formulation is valuable for emphasizing the social component of
these projects and the interaction between players. My emphasis, however, is on the
intersection of narrative, interactivity and immersion at the point of the mobile
phone, a particular immersion that I think creates immersive experiences more
closely tied to place than the hybrid reality in which the distinct experiences of the
separate groups are linked through the abstractness of cyberspace.
In what I call mobile narrative entertainment we see the double logic of
remediation at work, the simultaneous hypermediacy and immediacy that Bolter and
Grusin note as a hallmark of new media (characteristics also found in AR, VR and de
Souza’s hybrid reality). But, we also see mobile media capitalizing on the social,
cinematic and televisual heritage of the telephone to yield new forms of

128
De Souza, “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces” Space
and Culture 9/3 (2006): 265.

151
entertainment and documentary experience rooted in past forms but taking advantage
of unique characteristics of the mobile phone. Mobile narratives are not
incompatible with the concept of hybrid reality; in fact they are quite
complementary. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre, de Souza emphasizes the social
dimension of hybrid reality: “social spaces are not material things but rather a set of
social relationships both between objects and objects and people. The logic of
hybrid space mediates this set of relationships of mobile technologies”.
129
Mobile
narrative entertainment may or may not energize this social dimension, as the mobile
narrative is primarily a cognitive, emotional and aesthetic phenomenon and may be
experienced with a social dimension or may be entirely individual. Botfighters
players formed clans and roamed the cities in groups, seeking protection and strength
in numbers; the experience of 34N118W is largely individual intersecting map,
physical location, and audio content through headphones.
I see the potential of mobile narrative entertainment to blend the physical and
virtual seamlessly at the point of experience of the participant, more so than the
equipment-burdened AR and VR, and the divided spaces of de Souza’s hybrid
reality. The mobile narrative creates a liminal experience, supplementing a fully
immersive environment (the physical world) with artistic and imaginative
enrichment. I think this is important because the always-on/always-connected
lifestyle is a connection to an abstract space, one held largely as a mental and not an
exclusively electronic state—the omnipresent mediascape. The mobile narrative

129
Ibid. 271.

152
engages with this phenomenon both in its format and as part of its artistic
commentary on contemporary culture and produces close ties with place.

Mobile Games, Mobile Experiences—Narratives or Navigable Databases?
As I discussed earlier, the computational element of digital media posed an
apparent detour in the transmedia migration of narrative. Lev Manovich accurately
points out that video games (an often cited example of narrative in computational
media) are essentially spatialized visualizations of databases, but lack narrators and
central characters that exhibit growth and change (key features of narratives for
Manovich). Rather than debating whether games are narratives, though, I am
interested in how computational media can exhibit narrative traits and execute
narrative functions. The mobile narrative experience remediates computational
entertainment, such as computer games, and thus it is instructive to begin with
mobile media versions of that genre.
Beginning in 2000, It’s Alive! produced in multiple European countries
various versions of Botfighters, garnering an estimated 40,000 players.
130

Botfighters is an action/strategy game in which robots battle in a futuristic world.
Locations in this futuristic world map directly onto the real world, and the robots’
movements through the fictional world correspond to the movement of the players’
mobile phones through the real world. Players control their robot by commands
submitted via text message. (Essentially, the player is the robot and the robot moves

130
Dee, 2006.

153
through the game world as the player moves through the city). The location-aware
phones alert the player when other players are nearby, and “battles” take place via
SMS-text message. An online component manages logistics (re-outfitting the robots,
views of large scale maps, etc.) and offers access to the narrative backdrop as well as
introducing missions for the players to conduct. Narrative information is delivered
periodically, in the form of “episodes”, organizing events into comprehensible
patterns motivating the players’ subsequent actions. Structurally, this project is very
similar to Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), such as
World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies, that offer multi-player capability, a
general fictional world in which to operate, and a narrative backdrop offering loose
motivation for specific actions through missions.
As a physically immersive fictional experience, Botfighters calls to mind the
“holodeck” of Star Trek fame in which the participant joins an electronically
produced, explorable 3-D aural, visual and tactile simulation of a story of the
participant’s choice. Janet Murray uses the fictitious holodeck as the ideal model of
interactive narrative. While in my view, the mobile narrative does not depend on a
wholly electronic virtual world created by pixels and sound effects and text, I think it
has the capacity to generate a similarly immersive and interactive experience as the
Holodeck. Thus, Murray’s examination of the entirely virtual digital environments
offers productive insights to understanding how narrative can operate in the mobile
experience.

154
Botfighters offers an example of the type of digital environment Murray
describes in Hamlet on the Holodeck, suggesting the computational basis of the
project. Murray identifies four characteristics of the digital environment in which
narrative might operate: procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic.
131

These characteristics are useful and embody the remediation process of narrative and
database in digital environments. Narratives have an underlying logic the reader
tries to ascertain, and databases sort, retrieve and index their data according to
defined algorithms (procedural). Narratives are produced in the act of reading and
databases yield their contents in response to queries (participatory). Maps, for
example, are spatial representations of databases of information, and the example of
Ulysses and the work of Stephen Mamber and Franco Moretti remind us of the
spatial qualities of narrative. One need only think of the depth of detail and allusion
in Ulysses, also, to see the encyclopedic capacity for narrative.
In Botfighters, an array of computers tracks player location, manages SMS-
message battles, and computes the results through a complex set of procedural rules.
In addition, players comprehend missions revealed within the online updates.
Additionally, Murray asserts that the participatory and procedural characteristics
constitute the interactive component of an electronic narrative. Botfighters is highly
participatory: players participate in actions that have consequences within the world.
Murray further explains that the spatial and encyclopedic characteristics provide the
immersive quality, which we will later discuss as a key component of the narrative

131
Murray, 71-83.

155
aesthetic experience. Botfighters inventively sidesteps the screen limitations of
mobile devices by making the real world the set for the imagined future world, and
as the game world is coincident with the real world, the game suggests its
environment contains equal breadth and depth.
While the encyclopedic dimension to Botfighters may be implied, the game’s
mission summaries suggest that the game lacks the same “wealth of detail” and
“scope and particularity” as other digital narrative environments like the game Zork
(Infocom 1980) or the ideal Holodeck. (The existence of player forums, however,
indicates that the social dimension maintains a wide scope.) Drawing on film
theorist Edward Branigan’s description of narrative and alternative organizational
schemes for perceived data and experience helps us understand how Botfighters
exhibits some narrative-like components, but resists description as a comprehensive
or complete narrative. Branigan suggests that a “simple narrative” consists of a
series of episodes put together as a focused chain. An episode collects the
“consequences of a central situation” and, importantly, “shows change”. A focused
chain involves cause and effect of a “continuing center, whether that center be a
character, place, object or theme”.
132
Botfighters might be construed as a
combination of “episodes” and “unfocused chains” (which have no continuing
center). The backstory develops in episodic form, within which some player
experiences (missions) will effect or observe change within the world, but many
experiences (unexpected battles) will be at random. Botfighters would fail the

132
Branigan, 19-20.

156
Branigan test as a narrative structure in the whole, though the episodes and
unfocused chains of events are certainly narrative-like. Botfighters represents an
example, similar to many video games, in which a computational structure works in
tandem with narrative-like components to create the complete experience.

The British group Blast Theory has produced their pervasive games in the
U.K., Canada, Japan and Australia. Uncle Roy All Around You (2003) and I Like
Frank (2004) team online players with street players seeking the eponymous
character. The online players have access to a map identifying the location of key
items and where the street players operate; the street players can move physically
through the space in pursuit of key items. Street player location is provided by
location-aware capability of their mobile phones; street and online players
communicate via SMS. The game requires cooperation between the two classes of
players, and progresses similarly to a semi-cooperative treasure hunt (impediments to
player cooperation must be overcome). The projects share a similar orientation to
Murray’s digital environments as Botfighters, though the games take place over a
short duration (60 minutes) rather than days or weeks. Uncle Roy All Around You
added an additional element of the participatory and authorial: street players found
postcards asking them to write a brief note about someone who never leaves them.
The postcards appear on the Uncle Roy All Around You website and range from the
touching, “My Mom”, to the confused “I am waiting in room 817 waiting for
something to happen” (Blast Theory 2005). Viewed in terms of Branigan’s methods
of organizing data, these two projects might be described as “focused chains” in that

157
there is a continuation from event to event (cooperation and seeking objects), but the
development and change critical to episodes and narratives does not exist.
While these three projects give a taste of how the mobile phone has been
appropriated for uses beyond traditional telephony, their form, structure and market
placement all emphasize their status as games. In terms of remediation, we see the
new cultural form of the computational medium refashioning components of
narrative to offer context, motivation and detail. To continue my examination, then,
I will address a mobile media project that, first, is not immediately identified as a
game, and, second, exhibits a more equal balance and cooperation of database and
narrative characteristics.
34N118W is a mobile experience in which participants navigate the streets of
a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood with a GPS-equipped tablet PC and listen to
stories through headphones connected to the PC. While 34N118W does not make
use of mobile phones, it is nevertheless indicative of the principles and concepts at
play in mobile narrative. The tablet PC displays a map of the area, circa 1905, with
an icon representing the participant’s position (moving in accordance with the GPS
signals) and icons representing hotspots that trigger audio content (unmarked
hotspots also trigger sound effects for unexpected results). The audio content
consists of characters’ soliloquies, recorded by voice actors from a script written by
co-creator Jeremy Hight. The characters are persons who might have lived or worked
in the area during its heyday as a railhead. At one location, the participant hears a
man reminisce about a job clearing the rail tracks of dead bodies; at another a Latina

158
cook speaks in stream of consciousness about the weather, the lunches she makes,
and the correspondences in the rhythms of the two activities. The participant hears
these soliloquies while simultaneously processing the modern day appearance and
layout of the physical landscape (new buildings, missing buildings, vestigial train
tracks, etc.) with the information provided by the 1905 map, as well as any surprising
sound effects encountered. As there is no set path, each participant’s experience is
unique, offering different set of sequential juxtapositions of the audio/spatial
combinations with each iteration.
Very quickly we can see the database structure of 34N118W. The grid of the
downtown area offers access to the data set—a combination of recorded speech and
visual correlations. The participant serves as the search engine, walking through this
grid of data elements, encountering them in the sequence of his or her own choosing.
In this way, 34N118W shares the characteristics of the digital environment outlined
above in terms of the mobile games. The tablet PC executes a regular series of
procedural functions to properly depict the participant’s location on the map, as well
as play the audio elements at the appropriate place. The participatory and spatial
elements exist physically in terms of perambulation, metaphorically in terms of
searching this database, and interpretively (what Hight might call “archeologically”)
in terms of considering the told and untold stories relating to the place. If, as
Manovich writes, “all new media design can be reduced to…either constructing the

159
right interface to a multimedia database or as defining navigation methods through
spatialized representations,” then 34N118W achieves both.
133

If the project is an excellent realization of database structure and new media
design, does it also “achieve something that new media designers and artists still
have yet to learn—how to merge database and narrative into a new form”?
134
If a
simple narrative consists of episodes collected as a focused causal chain, then
identifying the episodes of 34N118W is important to understanding and assessing its
narrative structure. One possibility is that each audio vignette is an episode. An
episode, according to Branigan, collects “everything that happens to a particular
character in a particular setting” and “it shows change”.
135
Some of the audio
vignettes and their characters meet these criteria; however, each vignette is isolated,
lacking any connection to the other vignettes, except through the choices, actions,
and imagination of the participant. Together, the vignettes are more accurately
described as an unfocused chain of episodes, continuing with Branigan’s
terminology, making the experience more like reading an anthology of poetry than
the comprehensive narrative structure of a novel. This is not to say that either
anthologies or novels should be privileged; rather, that the process of reading an
anthology bears a similarity to the process of retrieving information from a database,
in that a selection process occurs, should be recognized. In this way, 34N118W is a
database-narrative hybrid, one that is more about a proactive reading process than

133
Manovich, 215.

134
Ibid, 243.

135
Branigan, 19.

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about the discovery of cause, effect, progress and change. It is physically engaging
and spatially immersive, but it lacks the encyclopedic element that Murray identifies
as an important component of digital narratives that seek to achieve that liminal,
threshold experience of narrative immersion.
Reorienting to focus on the participant as complicit in the authorial process
suggests the possibility that he ‘writes in’ the causal connections between the
episodes. I think this is not the case. Considering the first-hand experience of the
participant as a narrative legitimately raises the question about whether a first-hand
experience can be a narrative or if it only becomes narrative when narrated.
Branigan turns to Roland Barthes for assistance parsing the roles of narrator and
author: “‘the one who speaks (in the narrative) is not the one who writes (in real life)
and the one who writes is not the one who is’”. Thus, “statements about an
embedded fiction [the participant constructing a causal connection] cannot be made
from within the fiction itself” where the narrator resides.
136
Manovich also opposes
the idea that the simple traversing of a database of records constitutes a narrative:
“The author also has to control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their
connection so that the resulting object will meet the criteria of narrative”.
137

This analysis of 34N118W illustrates the complementary nature of database
and narrative forms. While not a comprehensive or complete narrative, at least in the
traditional sense, the project taps into narrative components (episodes) to work with

136
Ibid, 87-88.

137
Manovich, 228.

161
a database structure in order to explore and comment on the human experience and
condition of downtown Los Angeles. Apropos to a human epoch governed not by
clear cause-and-effect sequence, but one more attuned to connections, the project
presents a range of datasets; offers points of cognitive, emotional and aesthetic
connection; and leaves the participant to construct appropriate correspondences, in
the same way that the always-connected, multi-vocal, media-saturated, 21
st
Century
life proceeds.

Interface: Balancing Interactivity and Immersion
What does it matter if new media forms exhibit a tension between database as
primary structure and narrative as the primary structure or if they exhibit both? The
example above indicates they can be cooperative and complementary. And to what
end? The computational element introduces the possibilities of interaction by the
viewer/reader/participant, and the power this confers on this individual is the holy
grail of new media. From the proto-hypertextual novels of Calvino and Cortazar to
the fanciful dreams of Star Trek’s “Holodeck”, interactivity has brought with it the
ideal of agency, empowering the reader or viewer or participant “to take meaningful
action and see the results of our decisions and choices”.
138
Within the cooperation of
computational operation and narrative structure lies the capacity to realize this
agency in material forms, and for those seeking this goal the tension lies not in the
computer versus narrative, but finding the ideal combination of the interactive and

138
Murray, 126.

162
the immersive, offering both the exercise of control and an emotional and aesthetic
experience. As mentioned before, the conventional view of narrative is that it is
dominated by its temporal logic. This temporal logic relates to that of human life:
birth, life, death is the inescapable logic of human life. But, with the advent of
highly interactive and computational narrative projects, participants have the
opportunity to take control, exert agency over, this chronologic element of narrative
and explore the age-old “what if” question of reliving or changing an experience.
Murray discusses narrative as a “threshold experience” offering “something
safely outside ourselves…upon which we can project our feelings,” but one that is
fragile. This “liminal trance” can be interpreted as the principle of narrative
immersion—that fragile state of being “in” the story. Traditionally, the strategy to
protect and maintain the fragile liminal experience “has been to prohibit
participation”.
139
Logically, then, introducing interactivity and agency into this
liminal space can disrupt the fragile balance and that is the tension for interactive and
narrative new media. Murray offers a potential solution, one that is evident in both
Tracking Agama and 34N118W, suggesting that a maze-like structure of the piece
can offer an interactive avenue. She writes, “the key to creating an expressive
fictional labyrinth is arousing and regulating the anxiety intrinsic to the form by
harnessing it to the act of navigation”.
140
In this arrangement, the act of navigation,
which in a project like Tracking Agama combines both the mental act of solving

139
Ibid, 99-100.

140
Ibid, 135.

163
puzzles and the physical act of walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, offers
an avenue for the participant’s “meaningful action” while still parceling out narrative
material at a controlled rate, maintaining the fragile liminal state of immersion.
Thus, the forms of interaction, from walking the streets and using the mobile phone,
are part of the diegetic immersion—these actions are the same in the story world and
in the real world. Tracking Agama becomes an experience intertwining the narrative
entertainment and aesthetic immersion with an interactive/participatory experience.
In so doing, Tracking Agama blends fictional, historical and contemporary worlds,
offering different lenses to understand our relationship to our media, to our cities and
to our history.
An additional solution to balancing interactivity and immersion appears in
the report of an MIT Media Lab group working on physically interactive stories.
Their report suggests that physical interaction, given its connection to ritual, theater,
charades and other miming games, is a natural mode of interaction that brings the
participant into the story.
141
Games like Botfighters capitalize on physical movement
to enhance the sense of urgency and thus immersion. Tracking Agama, as
mentioned, uses physical movement as well, but also, importantly, uses the phone to
manage access to narrative content in exactly the same manner the phone operates in
the real world. We will return to the role of the phone in Tracking Agama shortly.
Building from Murray’s invocation of the Holodeck, Marie-Laure Ryan
analyzes VR as offering the possibility of immersive, interactive narrative and vice

141
Pinhanez C.S., J.W. Davis, S. Intile, M.P. Johnson, et.al. “Physically Interactive Story Elements.”
IBM Systems Journal. 39, ¾ (2000): 438-455.

164
versa. Mobile narratives include most of the eight aspects of VR that Ryan identifies
in Narrative as Virtual Reality. Both Tracking Agama and 34N118W include active
embodiment (the participants are taking action in the space), a spatialized display
(the real world!), sensory diversity (audio, visual, text, graphics) and offer the
experience as art. Tracking Agama also employs a transparent medium, in that the
mobile phone interactions exist seamlessly as if their operation was in real life.
(With a tablet PC displaying a digital copy of a 1905 map and headphones,
34N118W cannot achieve this transparency of the medium.) Neither work achieves
the Holodeck-style dream of natural-language-responsive, artificially intelligent
characters since all components are pre-scripted, nor do they achieve alternative
embodiment, as the participants are always themselves. Nevertheless, by
incorporating a number of VR characteristics these mobile narratives make
significant strides in uniting interactivity with immersion, refashioning the
computational to achieve the liminal.
Importantly, as the example of Tracking Agama illustrates, complicated
equipment is not required to achieve this liminal experience. Augmented reality
researcher Norbert Braun cites one of the problems of augmented reality (a hybrid
that juxtaposes electronic graphical information over the real world by means of
special eyeglasses capable of projection/display as well as transparent viewing of the
surrounding environment):
The main problem of wide-spread usage of Augmented Reality systems is
certainly found in the limited availability of Augmented Reality Equipment—

165
from AR viewers to AR interaction possibilities, to simple problems like the
limited amount of AR-usable graphic models and animations.
142

Projects like Botfighters and Tracking Agama takes advantage of the simplest and
most ubiquitous interface, the mobile phone, while still aiming at an augmented-
reality-like effect: layering and blending the real world with artifacts and evidence
from the virtual or imaginative world. By successfully achieving this aim, the
mobile phone narrative experience sidesteps Braun’s concerns about the possibilities
of augmented reality.
In addition to the maze structure suggestion, Murray also recommends that
the actions and behaviors required of the reader/user correspond to those in the
diegetic world.
143
Most hypertext, for example, would violate this principle for the
action of mouse clicking has nothing to do with actions in the diegetic worlds of
most hypertext stories, and serves as a reminder to the reader that he or she is
operating a computer. A racecar video game, however, with a steering wheel control
follows this principle of mimicking diegetic action with the interactive interface.
Tracking Agama follows this principle in that the interactive actions involve phone
calls and text messages, which duplicate the actions within the story world (the
participant accesses AgamaNotes in exactly the same manner Agama would have
done so, and communicates with Shufelt in the same manner as communicating with
any person).

142
Braun, Norbert. “Storytelling in Collaborative Augmented Reality Environments” WSCG Short
Papers Proceedings, 2003.

143
Murray, 106.

166
Centering the interactive activity, and the narrative information received
through that activity on the phone, in Tracking Agama brings up the special
relationship the phone has to narrative and interactivity, rooted in the phone’s
interactive exchange of personal narratives in conversation and desire for action.
Ned Schantz, writing in Film Quarterly, describes this connection of narrative and
desire resident in the phone: “Our gossipy desire to know becomes a desire for the
phone to ring, or to place a call ourselves”.
144
Tracking Agama, as an example of the
potential of mobile narratives, accesses both of these desires, and connects the
mobile narrative to a long history of cinematic and televisual incorporation of the
telephone as a seamless and naturalized narrative device.
I have focused the majority of this discussion on a small number of examples
of mobile games and mobile narrative experiences, because of they specifically
exhibit the remediation of both computational and narrative elements. The range of
mobile projects that incorporate narrative components is much broader, of course,
and each type contributes to the trajectory of transmedia migration of narrative and
contributes to the “pattern of tension created by the coexistence of old and new”.
145

There are two sets of old and new at work here. The first is the shift from Western
culture’s single reference point representation of space and subjectivity to one born
of multiple inputs, alluded to above. News no longer comes from a well-established
news bureau; rather multiple television, cable and Internet sources are available, and

144
Schantz, 27.

145
Marvin, 8

167
their sources might be a variety of anonymous bloggers as well as traditional
reporters. Importantly, this news is also available constantly, whether through a
wireless laptop connection or SMS text updates to the mobile phone, changing the
role of any given space as well as the individual’s perspective on that place. In
Elsaesser’s analysis, the “Where were you when…” question (referring to
comprehension and memory of a major media event) no longer requires thought to
piece together the delay between the event’s actual occurrence and the individual’s
exposure to media coverage. The ubiquity of media devices brings the place/time of
the event coincident with the individual’s place/time, and brings not one perspective
but an array from which to choose. This disruption in the fixity of place is the ‘new’
formulation in contrast to the ‘old’, wherein any modulation of space and time took
place under controlled circumstances and in specific locales. As film historian Anne
Friedberg describes, “The cinema provided a virtual mobility for its spectators,
producing the illusion of transport to other places and times, but it did so within the
confines of a frame”.
146
These types of mobile projects respond in simultaneously
thematic and structural ways to the tension between singular, scripted and controlled
narratives situated in space and time and those that are constantly available,
assembled from many fragments, and navigable.
Mobile art and entertainment projects that incorporate to a significant degree
a narrative component generally fall into one of the four following categories:
Spatial Annotation Projects, Location-Based Games, Mobile Fictions, and Mobile

146
Friedberg, 186

168
Narrative Experiences. I have also included a brief description of Casual Games
which may or may not incorporate a significant narrative element.
147

Defining Spatial Annotation Projects
Spatial annotation projects comprise the majority (to date) of mobile art
projects that incorporate a narrative component to a significant degree. As the name
suggests, these projects add information to a space, either in the form of text, audio,
image or video. This content is accessible by the visitor via mobile device (usually
cell phone or PDA). The projects often have a participatory/contributory component
in that audience members are invited to add to the annotations at a given space, also
through text, audio or otherwise.
Yellow Arrow (Counts Media, 2004-) is perhaps the best known spatial
annotation project and uses bright yellow stickers in the shape of an arrow to identify
a space of significance.
148
Any individual can place an arrow sticker, which contains
a unique pre-printed code, and upload a text message about the location or landmark
the arrow identifies. Subsequent individuals encountering the yellow arrow sticker
can send the code via text message to the Yellow Arrow service number, and receive
the stored message. Participants can upload an additional message, and in so doing
each space marked by a sticker collects layers and layers of anecdotes, illustrating
the simultaneous existence of the near and far, side-by-side network of intersections.

147
Because of their lack of a connection between the place of engagement and the content of the
game, I do not consider them as significant factors in furthering the concept of a bridge between the
physical and virtual.

148
See: http://global.yellowarrow.net

169
The Canadian project [murmur] (Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, Gabe
Sawhney, 2003-) operates similarly. The project designers “collect and curate”
contributors’ stories, memoirs, anecdotes regarding specific areas of the city.
149
The
inaugural [murmur] was first deployed in Toronto and has expanded to Vancouver,
Montreal, and San Jose with versions planned for Edinburgh and Dublin in the near
future. The oral stories are recorded and given a code assignment. In the space of
the city, visitors notice green signs with the [murmur] logo indicating audio stories
associated with that location are available and dial the number displayed on the green
sign to listen to the stories.
Participating in the spatial annotation project, either as reader/listener,
recorder or both, can be the social or cultural practice that produces place out of a
space. This practice links the mobile narrative with the particular place in the
formulation and understanding of both the experience and of the self that undertook
that experience. The San Jose version of [murmur], for example, includes an
anecdote about a neighborhood’s transformation of a blighted street corner into a
park. While at the location, the visitor might see the park as a place of leisure,
beauty and play marked by a playground, grass fields and manicured landscaping.
Accessing the personal anecdote, however, reveals the park also to be a place of
community concern, cooperation and action.
150

149
See: http://www.murmurtoronto.ca

150
Audio available at: http://sanjose.murmur.info/place.php?427626

170
As these examples illustrate, the typical spatial annotation project is a
collection of personal, individual anecdotes and memories. In the case of Yellow
Arrow, these are very brief (text messages are limited to 160 characters; the
[murmur] stories in the San Jose version average two and a half minutes in length.)
The narrative structure of the individual pieces depends on the individual authors,
while the project as a whole becomes a sort of collaboratively authored anthology.
The spatial annotation projects draw on memory and detail to enrich the location in
which the participant stands, as well as allowing the participant to create connections
of meaning between other annotated locations.
These types of spatial annotation projects proliferated in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, in part as the growth of mobile phones, PDAs and other mobile media
devices exploded, and also in part because of their relative technological simplicity.
All that is required is a database of content and associated codes, a script to correlate
the input codes with the proper response, and a server to handle the input and output.
Examples include Yellow Arrow, [murmur] (Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, Gabe
Sawhney, 2003-), Urban Tapestries (Proboscis, 2004), and Media Portrait of the
Liberties (Valentina Nisi, Ian Oakley, Mads Haahr, 2004).
A subset of the Spatial Annotation category is the mobile media tour.
Companies such as Audissey Tours and Untravel Media, among others, produce cell
phone and iPod tours of cities, museums and historic districts. Using audio or a
combination of audio and image, these tours generally focus on history and trivia,
though often through the lens of a particular narrator. For example, hip hop poet

171
Kevin Coval narrates the Chicago Audissey tour, lending a particular perspective to
commentary on public transportation and the rhythms of Chicago life, in addition to
pointing out the location of the famous Billy Goat Tavern. By sharing anecdotes and
historical vignettes, the city tours combine the storytelling aspect of a guided tour
with a degree of user choice with regards to pacing and sequence.

Defining Location-Based Game
A variety of mobile-media based games exist that utilize and/or exhibit a
substantial narrative component. Some of these games are location-based games, in
which the location of the mobile phone (ascertained through cell tower triangulation
or by GPS technology), and therefore the assumed location of the phone user, is a
key part of game play, game world navigation, and narrative structure. The now-
defunct game Botfighters is an example of such a game, in which the player’s mobile
phone represents a robot in a futuristic world that is mapped onto the real world.
Players engage in “battles” via SMS text message with other players they find on the
streets. The games of Blast Theory, including I Like Frank and Uncle Roy All
Around You, also use location-aware cell phones allowing the online players to know
the location of the street players, and facilitating these two groups’ cooperation. The
narrative components of these games contribute primarily to creating a richly
detailed game world and providing player motivations and goals. In addition to
those already discussed in detail, examples include Supafly, in which players seek to
collect cool points rather than kill opposing robots, and Can You See Me Now?,

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another urban chasing game. Glofun’s Raygun uses a simple narrative backdrop
(ghost-hunting) to characterize a type of mobile phone tag.
Another type of mobile game is the Alternative Reality Game (ARG), which
utilizes real world media (mobile phone, email, fax, etc.) to communicate game
world information blurring the distinction between the game and real life. These
games generally have a significant narrative component which operates on various
levels: first, a narrative world of characters and settings (“existents” to borrow
Chatman’s term) exists; second, a plot, usually with a central mystery or governing
set of goals/missions; and often, third, some sort of meta-game discourse (such as a
blog or website) that encapsulates events serving to narrativize occurrences that the
individual player may have participated in or was completely unaware of. Two
prominent examples are I Love Bees (created in part as a marketing stunt for the
release of the video game Halo 2) and The Beast, associated with the film A.I.

Defining the Mobile Media Fiction
Mobile media fiction projects are generally pieces of prose fiction divided
into small components and delivered via text message to the subscriber’s mobile
phone, allowing the reader to read the novel or story bit by bit, during the interstitial
moments of the day. Harlequin mobile novels and the Virgin Mobile SMS short
story “Ghost Town” are examples. (I see these projects as very similar to e-books,
readable on laptops and PDAs, and not significantly different than their printed
cousins.) One attempt to link the mobile fiction with a location-based project

173
architecture is Chris Caines’ Go This Way. This project is a mashup of geocaching,
where an item or “treasure” is hidden (or “cached”) at a specific point expressed in
latitude and longitude. Seekers collect the “treasure” utilizing a GPS device. In Go
This Way, the “treasure” is a brief story about a specific location identified by its lat-
long coordinates, making it very similar to a Spatial Annotation Project.

Defining Mobile Narrative Experience
What I am calling a “mobile narrative experience” is a type of project that
utilizes a mobile media device, such as cell phone or laptop or PDA, as the primary
interface for accessing a story and the participant accesses this story while moving
through space. The projects may have a game-like component, such as puzzle
solving or spatial navigation, but the emphasis is on immersion in both a place and a
story. The story components may be delivered by audio, image, video, text or any
combination. Unlike the Spatial Annotation Projects, the mobile narrative
experiences have a more comprehensive thematic and narrative structure. They
usually have a core narrative authored by the project creators and depend less on
contributions from participants. These projects vary greatly in terms of their
narrative structure. In some cases, such as 34N118W, short vignettes comprise most
of the fiction content while deeper connections between place and story and theme
are left to the participant to construct. In other cases, such as Tracking Agama, a
multi-layered narrative exists, including the mystery of the title character and the
participant’s pursuit of him. Important, too, in my definition, is that the narrative

174
components link in some way to the location the participant moves through.
Additional examples include HopStory, Backseat Playground, and Songs of the
North.
The soundwalks of Janet Cardiff, such as Her Long Black Hair, are a form of
mobile narrative experience. In contrast to 34N118W and Tracking Agama, the
participant is led on a path rather than choosing his or her own path. An interactive
element remains with the participant’s engagement with the environment and piecing
together connections of soundtrack, narration and environment.

Casual Games
One of the fastest growing segments of the mobile media content market is
casual gaming. According to CNET News, the market for casual games in 2006 was
$281 million in North America, and this market is projected to increase to $1.15
billion by 2011.
151
Conventional wisdom attributes this growth to broad appeal
(men, women and children play casual games as opposed to the action video game
market that skews younger and heavily male), and to the suitability of the games to
the mobile platform. The games fill idle time easily and because of their simple
formats and low resolution graphics they require minimal system memory and
processor power. This simplicity allows for accurate replication on the mobile
handset from their PC-based origins. A key feature of the casual game is its
simplicity and ability to fill idle time with minimal player investment of time or

151
“Casual Games Get Serious”, CNET News,
http://news.com.com/Casual+games+get+serious/2100-1043_3-6071465.html

175
mental energy. Thus, the word, puzzle, board and card games that dominate the
genre have little capacity or need for complex narrative components. Tetris is the
best example of a casual game: an addictive exercise in spatial orientation and visual
puzzle solving. The card game Solitaire is another excellent example of a casual
game.
While casual games can be addictive and even immersive to the extent that a
player ignores his or her surroundings, they rarely contain a narrative dimension.
152

And, while they engage the player deeply, there is little correspondence or
association between the virtual arena of the game and the context of the player.
Thus, casual games do not exhibit the feature that I think is most important about the
role of narrative in mobile entertainment: the capacity to blend the physical world of
the participant with the virtual or imaginative world of the game or story. I include
this brief discussion of the casual game to give a clearer picture of the entire field of
mobile media entertainment, and to suggest that future intersections of narrative and
casual gaming could lead to exciting possibilities.

Conclusion
In two key ways, mobile media combines computational and narrative
elements to forge a powerful union, one that continues the trajectory of transmedia
migration established earlier. Operating on a database infrastructure, the mobile

152
Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests that Tetris is a narrative that speaks to the hectic
lifestyle of the late 20
th
Century. While Tetris, perhaps the ultimate in casual gaming, might embody
the frenzied quality of contemporary life, it does not do so in a narrative form, with episodes of
characters exhibiting change and so forth.

176
phone in particular offers an interactive component granting the participant the
capability to take meaningful action in the course of the narrative. In so doing, the
participant activates the second component of mobile media: its presence in the
hands of the participant and its ability to connect the participant’s activity (including
the agency just mentioned) to the present location. Mobile media narratives enhance
their immersion, an immersion that already takes advantage of the real world as its
sensory environment, by activating the union of narrative and place. In the next
chapter, we will discuss in detail the design, creation and experience of one such
mobile media narrative, one that capitalizes on the familiarity of the phone as a
narrative interface to locate narrative components in particular places and thus create
a bridge between the physical world of Los Angeles and the imaginative world of
narrative.

177
Chapter 5
Case Study in Creating a Mobile Narrative: Tracking Agama

Can a non-sequential, locative media, database structure be combined with a
narrative structure rooted in the principles of cause-and-effect, along with character
growth and development? Could this hybrid of database and traditional narrative
structure be delivered to the participant via mobile phone, bridging the physical
world the participant explores with the virtual and imaginative world of the
interactive narrative? This combination of database and traditional narrative
structure within new media lies at the heart of the student project Tracking Agama, a
mobile narrative experience in which participants access pieces of the story by
mobile phone, using both voice and text message capabilities while exploring
various downtown Los Angeles locations.
I selected Tracking Agama as a primary case study of mobile media narrative
for two reasons. First, there are few extant examples of entertainment products that
combine the unique medium characteristics of the mobile phone with storytelling as
their primary form (spatial annotation and games dominate). Second, Tracking
Agama represents an example of a practice-based research methodology critical to
my approach and my understanding of narrative and mobile media. From
performance studies to media studies there exists in the humanities a growing
advocacy for uniting theory and practice—for combining an older model of
“objective” forms of knowing based on the extant text with the more ephemeral,

178
embodied, and participatory modes of knowing borne of practical engagement and
creative production.
153
In order to remain relevant to human experience, the
humanities must engage with new technologies and new media because the human
experience the discipline seeks to understand is increasingly technologized and
mediated.
Thus, this chapter looks to the future in a speculative manner, exploring how
mobile media will reshape narrative form. This is not wild speculation, but rather
speculation grounded in historical analysis of previous narrative forms, theoretical
considerations of both narrative and media, and practical experimentation with these
theories and the medium of the cell phone. I make no claims of objectivity, and I
recognize the potential lack of “critical distance,” since I was a key member of the
design team and continue to develop the project. However, the concept of critical
distance need not be the sole litmus test for academic validity and knowledge
production. Cultural theorist and technologist Anne Balsamo argues, “A trained
technological imagination is the critical foundation required by the next generation
of technologically and culturally literate scholars”.
154
Academic publishing venues
such as Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular
embrace this sort of technological and critical combination for scholarly projects.
Research initiatives such as USC’s Labyrinth Project and MIT’s Media Lab and
Media Lab Europe combine critical theory with creative practice to explore future

153
See, for example, the work of: Anne Balsamo, Dwight Conquergood, Marsha Kinder, and Tara
McPherson, among others.

154
Balsamo, Designing Culture: A Work of the Technological Imagination, excerpt available:
http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/balsamo-taking-culture-seriously

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direction of narrative (Labyrinth) and cultural uses of media technologies (Media
Lab). My work also exists at the intersection of theory and practice, whereby I put
theories developed through analysis into practice to explore their validity in
addressing how technology, media and culture actually influence human experience.
When combined with an analytical component, practical exercises such as Tracking
Agama offer a pathway to technological and cultural literacy and a more informed
understanding of the intersections of media, art and lived experience. My own
thoughts about narrative and interactivity have been significantly informed by my
experiments with digital media, including both desktop multimedia narrative projects
and this experiment with mobile media. This chapter will include both a summary of
the design approach and an analysis of the project in order to explore this
intersection of theory and practice.
This chapter also includes a description of the Tracking Agama project,
necessary for analysis of so many new media projects that lack the easily and
permanently stored artifactual format of a book, film or digital disc. This is doubly
true in the case of Tracking Agama, as the computer server hosting the weblog, file
database and running the computer script suffered a catastrophic and unrecoverable
failure in 2006. The description is provided not only to offer a report and
documentation of the project’s existence, but also to provide at least a rudimentary
understanding of the project’s method of operation to allow for greater understanding
of the ensuing analysis. The chapter will include a summary of the design goals and
intent of the design team, and my analysis of the project we created. In the course of

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the discussion, I will try to make clear those elements that were a collective
contribution, and those that are my own analysis. Suffice to say in general, though,
that the design of the project was a wholly collaborative effort; the subsequent
analysis, however, is mine and I alone am responsible for any oversights, faults and
flaws of judgment.

A note on testing
As with any media project intended for public release, a testing program is an
important element of the production process. This is especially true in the case of
experimental projects, exploring new uses of media and new means of audience
interaction and enjoyment. Prior to a catastrophic hardware failure, Tracking Agama
went through two separate periods of testing, one in late fall 2004 and one in late
summer 2005, in addition to on-going testing by the development team. In total
there were 14 beta-testers; they participated in Tracking Agama in small groups of 2-
4 people accompanied by design team members who observed, took notes and
assisted the participants as necessary (technical troubleshooting, identifying handset
features, solving inscrutable puzzles/clues). Of the beta-testers, three admitted to a
complete unfamiliarity with text messaging and four did not self-identify as
“gamers.” These four were of particular interest, as the design team debated about
the appeal of our project to an audience less invested in participatory forms of media
entertainment.

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While this group was quite small, their experience and feedback were
valuable and informative nonetheless. Given the scale of the testing program,
conclusions about the broad market appeal of the project are not appropriate, but the
testing program assisted in identifying components in need of improvement,
particularly in the areas of technical performance and overall user experience.
Because of the limited scope of beta-testing, the majority of my analysis later in the
chapter is interpretive and based on the design and creation of Tracking Agama, less
so on its reception by participants.
One area in which the beta-testers’ feedback coincided with our own
anxieties was in the area that game designer Tracy Fullerton calls the “invitation to
play.” The invitation to play of an electronic game combines both the narrative
“hook” into the game or story world and an introduction into game play elements.
Ideally, it excites the potential player and motivates him or her to take the initial first
step and participate. Our invitation to play used a blog, purportedly written by the
Agama character. The blog contained entries in which Agama alludes to a
supernatural artifact, and a post by another character describes Agama’s telephonic
voice memo system, his disappearance and requests assistance finding Agama. A
third of the beta-testers reported confusion about what to do after reading the blog
and listening to two initial voice memos. The connection between the artifact,
Agama and the participant’s next action was not immediately clear for these players,
concealing the project’s pleasures of unlocking the secrets of Los Angeles while

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exploring downtown locations engaged in a first-person connection with the main
character.

Description of Tracking Agama
In general terms, Tracking Agama is a mobile, interactive, narrative
experience. But, since this category is one that I made up to describe Tracking
Agama it needs some explanation. To my knowledge, there are no other “mobile,
interactive, narrative experience” projects, or certainly none that conceives of mobile
media, interactivity, and narrative in quite the same way. This, of course, was part of
the intent of the design team that created Agama—to create a project that engaged
with mobile media and narrative entertainment in a way that had not yet been done.
To describe Tracking Agama in the vernacular of the Hollywood pitch, whereby a
writer describes his project by its similarity to existing films or genres, one might
describe Tracking Agama as part scavenger hunt, part radio play, part mystery story,
and part Alternative Reality Game.
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What follows is a detailed description of the
Tracking Agama project and the events a player might experience, in order to
provide a common reference for further discussions of design goals and results.
Players begin their engagement with Tracking Agama by visiting the
Tracking Agama website (http://www.trackingagama.net).
156
In line with the
conventions of the ARG genre, the website appears to be a personal blog—in this

155
An alternative reality game is one by which game content appears to the players as real life
events—faxes, phone calls, web pages, etc. The most famous ARG was The Beast, a game created
and managed by Microsoft and affiliated with the film A.I.

156
The website is no longer active.

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case the personal blog of the main character “Agama”. Agama is an aspiring writer,
who has moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of this career. Like many weblogs, the
trackingagama.net website contains its owner’s thoughts on daily life, places visited
and the like organized in chronological order with the most recent posts at the top of
the page. Many of the entries deal with locations in Los Angeles of interest to
Agama, either as settings for his fictions or as related to the urban legends he sought
to understand.
An astute player will notice that the most recent post is authored by an
individual named “Shufelt”, and is written as a direct address to all readers of the
blog. Shufelt reports that Agama has been out of contact (corroborated by the
chronological gap between Agama’s last post and Shufelt’s), and implies that Agama
has discovered something of great value, has been acting erratically, and is possibly
in danger. Shufelt reports that he is immobile and solicits the player’s help in
finding Agama. To aid in the player’s search for Agama, Shufelt provides a phone
number and explains the operation of Agama’s voice memo system. According to
Shufelt, Agama recorded his thoughts about locales, urban legends, fictional story
ideas and the like via cell phone to an audio database, a system called
“AgamaNotes”. Agama assigned each recording a keyword that Agama used to
replay the linked recording whenever he wanted to review his earlier thoughts when
visiting a given location. Dialing Agama’s voice database phone number and
speaking the keyword would result in playback of the associated audio file. Shufelt
has figured out two keywords, which he shares in his blog post along with Agama’s

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phone number. He suggests that Agama chose keywords that are visible in the
location about which Agama recorded information, and that the only way to find
Agama would be to follow the trail of his research—through the earlier blog posts
and the audio recordings.
Shufelt also offers his assistance through text messaging. He requests that
the player text the keywords to him after successfully listening to each AgamaNote.
In terms of the storyworld, Shufelt can then listen to each AgamaNote himself and
help find Agama. From a design perspective, this element offers a failsafe
mechanism whereby the system can aid ailing players who have difficulty discerning
the relevance of any information or deciphering Agama’s clues.
If a player dials the phone number and speaks the first keyword Shufelt
provides (“Red Line”), he or she will hear Agama’s voice calmly speaking about the
excavation history of the Los Angeles Metro Red Line subway, including the tragic
deaths of two construction workers, and speculating about setting a ghost story on
the Red Line. This exchange introduces the player to the “AgamaNote” system and
establishes Tracking Agama’s mixture of fact (workers’ deaths) and fiction (ghost
story). The second keyword (“Mirror”) triggers another AgamaNote, one in which
Agama’s frantic voice describes a mysterious mirror and a threat to his possession of
this item. The player also hears Agama exclaim, “I’ve unlocked the secrets of L.A!”
The AgamaNote concludes with Agama reporting that he will hide the mirror in a
public artwork in Union Station where it will blend with other artifacts, and that he
will record more information assigning as the keyword the title of the artwork.

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This AgamaNote introduces the player to the pattern of discovery contained
in most of the AgamaNotes: each audio file contains some story information, such
as the existence of a mirror that allows Agama to “see the past clearly,” as well as
clues to other keywords. At this point, the player must travel to Union Station
(located in downtown Los Angeles) and explore, looking for a piece of artwork that
contains artifacts. Near the eastern entrance to the Red Line is a sculpture,
containing bottles and crockery and other artifacts uncovered during the excavations
under Union Station. The sculpture, by artist May Sun, is entitled “Riverbench”, and
this title is another AgamaNote keyword. Here again, Tracking Agama exposes the
participant to lesser known histories (Union Station sits on the site of the original
Los Angeles Chinatown), art and architecture of public spaces (Agama notes the
intricate skylight), and fiction (Agama is assaulted or kidnapped). The AgamaNote
also alludes to another AgamaNote recorded in this same location and players are left
to continue their search.
In all, there are eight keywords at Union Station and five other locations for
the player to explore including Angel’s Flight, the Bradbury Building, the Central
Library and the Roosevelt Hotel. One and a half miles west and south of Union
Station, Angel’s Flight is located on Hill Street between 2
nd
Street and 3
rd
Street, at
the base of Bunker Hill and near the Pershing Square Metro Red Line station. The
Central Library and Bradbury Building are within four blocks of Angel’s Flight, in
nearly opposite directions. From the top of the Angel’s Flight railway, the Central
Library is 3.5 blocks away, downhill; from the base, the library is four blocks away,

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mostly uphill. The Roosevelt Hotel is eight miles away on Hollywood Boulevard,
most conveniently reached by Metro Red Line, bus or car. The distances and
topography are an important element of Tracking Agama, as Agama’s thoughts are
influenced by the landscape and a player’s physical engagement with the topography
affects his understanding of Los Angeles history, urban legends, and Agama’s
fictions.
In addition to the audio files, players receive clues from Shufelt by text
message in response to their submissions of the keywords they have found. These
text messages offer hints as to the location of additional keywords, such as “the three
fountains in the library courtyard” or “Check inside, surely there has to be more
notes on his research than these.” The text messages from Shufelt assist the player in
interpreting the AgamaNotes and filtering the important information contained
within, and thus either direct players to keywords or simply help in their discovery
and identification.
Once this pattern is firmly established, the player unexpectedly receives
phone calls from Shufelt and Agama. Delivered in an agitated style, these phone
calls from the characters are short and offer no opportunity for conversation,
concealing their pre-recorded nature. The information in these calls is contradictory,
presenting to the player the possibility that neither Agama nor Shufelt is a reliable
source. These revelations open up the mystery of Shufelt’s identity and serve to
heighten the intensity of the pursuit of Agama, as he seems to be alive and certainly
in need of assistance. From this point forward, players experience both a present

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tense engagement with Agama, through additional phone calls, as well as the past
tense engagement of the AgamaNotes.
The narrative concludes with the player’s discovery of the origins of
Agama’s supernatural mirror. If a player follows Agama’s instructions from the first
phone call, he will learn of Agama’s interest in ghost stories, his desire for fame, and
his theories about what really happened to a minor historical figure named Warren
Shufelt and a bizarre Los Angeles urban legend. These discoveries, and the thematic
link of ghosts to Hollywood as a soul-sucking enterprise, lead the player to the
Roosevelt Hotel, itself a central figure in multiple Hollywood ghost stories.
Successful discovery of the AgamaNotes linked to keywords found in this area
results in a final phone call from Agama. This phone call is a soliloquy on fame,
ghosts, madness and desire and is essentially an audio suicide note, spoken in real
time. A train’s horn blares, seemingly confirming that Agama has killed himself.

Design team and process
At this point, in the interests of full disclosure, it is appropriate to briefly
explain the nature of the project and the design team. At its core, Tracking Agama is
an experiment in utilizing the mobile phone as a narrative medium, to explore if and
how the medium might be capable of a narrative art/entertainment experience
analogous to that of film or television (accessible to a wide audience, exhibiting the
rich narrative depth, not limited to the generic straightjacket of video games), while

188
at the same time being a new form of art/entertainment suited to the unique aspects
of the mobile medium and to the heavily mediated 21
st
century culture.
The interdisciplinary team consisted of Will Carter, with a background in
electronic music and computer programming; Todd Furmanski, with a background in
physics, 3-D modeling, immersive spaces and virtual worlds; Tripp Millican, with a
background in web programming and creative writing; Bradley Newman, with a
background in the visual arts and electronic media; Jennifer Stein, with a background
in communications and cultural theory; and myself, offering a film studies and
narrative theory background and project management. The initial brainstorming
regarding medium characteristics, technical operation, and game design was a
collaborative effort by all team members. We sat in a computer lab on the USC
campus and threw ideas back and forth seeking points of intersection between story
elements, artistic goals, technological capabilities and anticipated user abilities; we
retained those in which we could see intersections and we discarded others by mutual
consent. For example, a primary design goal was to create a project that contested
the social and spatial dislocation created by the mobile phone “privacy bubble.” We
often observed mobile phone users ignore the people and places around them while
on the telephone, and so we decided to construct a project that closely tied story
elements to user exploration of specific location. Like many of our decisions, we
arrived at this one rapidly with equal contribution and unanimous agreement.
Each member was then tasked to identify and research a specific place to
serve as a location for a vignette and report back to the group. The Bradbury

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Building (Bradley Newman), Union Station (myself), the Central Library and
Chinatown (Jen Stein) were the initial locations. Todd Furmanski reported back with
details about an urban legend involving lizard people, buried treasure and
underground tunnels. With Tripp Millican’s early character ideas of a neurotic or
unbalanced writer/researcher, we discovered that our core elements coalesced around
history and urban legends in the downtown area.
Our early technical strategies were developed in a similar collaborative
fashion. Early group brainstorming generated a range of technologies to build upon,
including text messaging, picture messaging, moblogging, and GPS location
identification, as well as agreement that we wanted to appeal to the broadest
audience possible. This desire for a wide audience dictated technical solutions that
would work across all carriers and across the majority of mobile handsets. Thus, we
eliminated GPS, image functions (both picture taking and picture messaging), and
moblogging.
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We focused on audio (using the mobile phone in its familiar
telephonic role) and text messaging. Will Carter, who oversaw most of the hardware
and technical issues, researched various methods of information exchange between
user and system, and recommended a combination of Interactive Voice Response
(IVR) and text message. The IVR system allowed us to depend on the mobile
phone’s more familiar mode of utilization, thus reducing the unfamiliarity of the
project in general (exploring downtown locations to discover keywords and reveal

157
The initial design process was conducted in the fall of 2004, before camera phones were
ubiquitous; even texting was not commonplace in the United States at this time.

190
pieces of a story was hard enough to conceptualize for many potential players/testers
we spoke with.)
Each member also made contributions to the “script” and conducted
historical research on locations or urban legends. For example, Jen Stein explored
the archives and historical monographs at the Central Library for information
regarding race riots and forced displacement of the Chinese community from the
original Chinatown location (now Union Station). Todd Furmanski, Jen Stein and I
accessed the California History clippings files at the Central Library to read period
accounts of Warren Shufelt’s efforts to uncover the secret treasure of the lizard
people. Each location-centered vignette was written independently, then brought to
the group for discussion about how to integrate player activity, connect to other
locations and incorporate the character developments primarily authored by Tripp
Millican. After group decision making about suitability of plot, character and
location, management of the disparate story elements fell to Stein, Newman and
myself (dubbed the “narrative wranglers”). Areas of responsibility, whether in terms
of location or character or technical solutions, arose organically rather than by pre-
assignment. This meant that each participant played a significant role in contributing
ideas to what elements were necessary, as well as having an investment in the
direction any component was developed. Writing the script “by committee” was the
most contentious aspect of the development process, as each member had different
ideas about narrative structure (particularly linearity vs. non-linearity), what makes a
story interesting, and the likely puzzle-solving skills of our anticipated audience.

191

Tracking Agama Design Goals and Background Theory
Our first design goal was to identify and incorporate the characteristics we
deemed inherent to the medium of mobile phone. So, while part of our motivation
was to create a project that would showcase the mobile phone as having uses and
capabilities far beyond simply convenient telephony, we felt the telephonic
characteristics were an essential characteristic to design the project around. The
project would be dialogic or conversational in some way, establishing a connection
to common social usage of the landline telephone, and would utilize the voice
features of the mobile phone. These choices would capitalize on the telephonic
nature of the medium, and package the medium’s characteristics as a miniature,
portable, networked computer within the familiarity of telephonic usage. Since we
identified the American public in general as slow adopters of text messaging and
other networked communication capabilities of the mobile phone, we created
Tracking Agama as a sort of Trojan Horse, simultaneously introducing and
disguising text messaging and entertainment platform capability within the familiar
context of telephony. This strategy was to use the appeal of the story and novelty of
experience to counteract any reticence on the part of potential participants to engage
with unknown and unfamiliar capabilities.
Despite our identification of text messaging, picture messaging, and
information services as underutilized mobile phone capabilities in the US

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marketplace, we felt these were essential components of the medium.
158
We
concentrated on text messaging as another primary design element for three reasons.
First, we felt it was an essential component of the mobile phone medium as a hybrid
of the telephone and the computer, representing a combination of networked,
computer-like communication (similar to email) and dialogic and interactive
communication like a telephone call. Second, we expected that text messaging
would become more mainstream, and by incorporating text messaging we would be
on the forefront of a cultural wave.
159
Third, text messages offered a means of either
overt or covert computer control commands, as they are (relatively) easily parsed by
a computer script to identify keywords and trigger file transfers and other events.
Thus, in terms communication mode we felt the medium called for a dialogic
and interactive quality; in terms of technological features, we would concentrate on
voice and text message capabilities. The final area of medium specific
characteristics we addressed was in terms of the ontology of the medium, as part of
the always-on/always-connected 21
st
Century lifestyle, particularly as embodied in
the always-with-you quality of the mobile phone. Because of the ubiquity and
portability of the mobile phone, we identified location-awareness as a salient feature
to explore. Groundbreaking projects such as Urban Tapestries, Uncle Roy All

158
See, for example, Paul Kedrosky’s “Why We Just Don’t Get the (Text) Message” in Business 2.0
(CNNMoney.com, October 2, 2006), citing low text message usage in the United States as late as
2006.

159
An assertion proven accurate with the FCC reporting a near doubling of SMS messages sent in
December 2006 (18.7 billion) from the amount sent in December 2005 (9.8 billion): FCC Annual
Report. The initial design of Tracking Agama occurred in late 2004 and continued to develop through
various iterations until summer 2006.

193
Around You, Botfighters (discussed in greater detail in the previous chapter) all
capitalized on location awareness and were inspirational in our design. The common
experience of overhearing a phone conversation in a public place such as the
sidewalk or café, not to mention the advent of mobile media based information
services, illustrated the increased interpenetration of media into the rhythm of
everyday life. If television brought the world into the home, and the mobile phone
brought the world to wherever you were, what relationship did the medium, the
message and the location have? This question drove our intent to incorporate the
relationship between the user and the location as a key aspect of our project.
Given our identification of the mobile medium as inherently dialogic and
sharing characteristics with networked computers, we determined that the narrative
project we were to design would also have to be interactive. “Interactivity” may be
the most over-used and vague term in new media, and thus warrants greater clarity
for the particular mode of interactivity we incorporated. Dissatisfied with the
branching narrative structure of many text-based and cinematic “interactive
narratives”, we sought to experiment with modes of interactivity less focused on plot
and more on participant action, and also how the story was told rather than simply
what the story told. Having settled on the mystery/detective genre as part of the
story, the discovery and exchange of clues for more story pieces became one key
aspect of the project’s mode of interactivity, and this mode built on the dialogic
nature of the medium. An additional question was whether this mode would enhance

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narrative engagement by increasing the personal investment and contribution of the
participant.
In addition to the clue-exchange economy of the project, we aimed to unite
the interactive mode with the emphasis on medium and location. We did this by
requiring participants to visit and carefully explore multiple downtown Los Angeles
locations, as well as navigate the distances between the locales, setting up a physical
and experiential component. Most forms of interactive media have a physical
component. Hypertext stories require manipulation of a mouse or other input device,
DVD’s require pressing buttons on a remote control, and video games have
sophisticated controllers requiring a high degree of digital (literally) dexterity.
Beyond a kinesthetic experience, such as the body lean observable in players in
racing and flight simulator games despite feeling no actual g-forces, or haptic
feedback through the video game controller, most interactive media do not create a
parallel between their mode of physical interaction and the representational context,
nor do they incorporate the physical mode of interaction into a broader meaning-
making structure.
160
A kinesthetic response is evidence of the intensity of focus and
absorption into the gameworld, but it is not generally a mode of meaning
construction; and the physical motion resulting in the mouse clicks that advance a
reader through Afternoon (Michael Joyce, 1990) or The Princess Murderer (Deena
Larsen and geniwate, 2003) do not relate directly to diegetic actions in the narrative
being explored. In our project, the participant must physically explore locations to

160
The Nintendo Wii, introduced in December 2006, begins to offer this type of parallel action.

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unlock story vignettes, and both this physical effort (considerable in the hilly
sections) and details of the physical location mesh to color the meaning of each
vignette, as well as the participant’s experience as a whole. In addition, the use of
the mobile phone in the game mirrors the use of the phone in real life. Both the use
of the phone and the physical exploration mirror the actions of the Agama character
in the fictional world, drawing a close connection between the participant and the
representational context of the story world.
An additional reason for incorporating “interactivity” by the methods of
exchange and physicality rather than plot control was to be able to maintain a
narrative structure more akin to popular film and television, than the open-ended and
more amorphous narratives of interactive new media. Recognizing that new media
forms and new technology forms both spring out of established use patterns, we
applied this same concept to entertainment forms. In order to introduce new
technologies and medium possibilities, such as text messaging and the idea of a
mobile phone based narrative, we sought to include as much familiarity as possible.
Thus, we chose to create a hybrid of two established genres (detective mystery and
ghost story), a style closely associated with Los Angeles history (noir). We created a
story exhibiting cause and effect, and achieving narrative closure, at least in
accordance with the genres’ conventions.
The application of narrative theory offers a key element by which Tracking
Agama’s suitability as digital humanities research becomes evident. Since our goal
was an interactive narrative, one involving participation, suitable to the mobile

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medium, and exhibiting a contained narrative structure, we were in need of a
theoretical model. Could a mobile, interactive narrative achieve similar levels of
cognitive engagement and imaginative immersion as cinema, television or literature?
I proposed we consider Edward Branigan’s theory of narrative
comprehension as a model with which to help us conceive of whether and how a
narrative proceeding by investigation, discovery and physical exploration might
proceed. Branigan’s theory is an explanation of the process of narrative
comprehension, not a prescription for narrative construction or authorship. Existing
models of narrative writing guides were either too rigid and prescriptive (such as
Robert McKee’s Story), or focused on autonomous, on-the-fly computerized story
systems (such as Chris Crawford’s Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling), or
didn't allow for the type of interactivity we envisioned. Also, Branigan’s model does
not demand or prescribe closure—though there is clear implication that closure
significantly adds to meaning in narrative.
Another characteristic we considered as critical to the ontology of mobile
media was brevity: SMS text messages are limited to 160 characters; service plans
are charged per minute or offer a set number of minutes per month making each
minute of airtime valuable and costly. Thus, we sought a narrative theory that could
accommodate a micro-episodic structure and a database backend of discrete units,
yet yield full narrative comprehension. I highly doubt Edward Branigan foresaw his
theory of narrative comprehension of film used in this way, but it offers elements
which match our project needs: parsing of discrete units (schema components) and

197
recognition of individual action by the viewer (participant) to order the components
for comprehension.
We implemented Branigan’s idea by creating a micro-episodic narrative
whereby the audio vignettes and text messages were components of the narrative
schema and the connections would be made cognitively by the participant’s
interpretation and physically by the participant’s traveling from place to place. As
I’ve discussed in earlier chapters, Branigan illustrates his schema for narrative
comprehension with a hexagon diagram, each of the points representing one of the
schema components: abstract, orientation, initiating event, goal, complication
action, and climax/resolution. Branigan notes that “one can move through the
hexagon in a myriad of ways and any number of times” applying the schema on
multiple levels.
161
While Branigan intends this description as metaphorical of a
cognitive process, I thought: why not try to apply it literally? Why not have the
participant move from place to place to discover keywords and unlock the audio
vignettes. This physical action would parallel the cognitive activity of ordering the
information in the vignettes into the appropriate component.
In this way, Tracking Agama was a test-bed for narrative theory with a three
part hypothesis: 1) Edward Branigan’s theory of the narrative comprehension of a
film could apply as a structural model for a narrative realized in mobile media; 2) the
visualization of the process of comprehension as navigating a hexagon could be
manifested in a physical manner and 3) the effort required to traverse the hexagon,

161
Branigan, 18.

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affected by the terrain and transportation modes of the participant, could add another
dimension of meaning to the narrative.
In addition to exploring narrative theory, Tracking Agama’s design also
presented an experiment with the mutual influence of immersion and interactivity.
Much of the focus on immersion in new media discourse and marketing involves a
privileging of perceptual immersion: particularly electronic rendering of the
complete optical field of view, but also to include surround sound and haptic
response. Video game designers tout the realism of their graphics and take
advantage of increasing home television and computer monitor sizes. A review of
Gran Turismo HD, the latest version of a popular Formula 1 automobile racing
game, exhorts “With visual quality claimed to be 12 times higher than that of Gran
Turismo 4…this is the game to get for racing game fans who want frenetic action
mixed in their dose of F1 realism”.
162
In addition to racing games, flight simulators
and first person shooters such as Unreal and Half-Life 2 are designed to take
advantage of multi-screen technologies that make peripheral vision part of the game
play experience.
163
Organizations such as USC’s Institute for Creative
Technologies, commissioned to develop story-based training simulations for the US
Army, have entire departments focused on developing high-fidelity, realistic
graphics for theaters equipped with 270 degree wrap around screens, surround sound
and olfactory simulators, all in the interest in placing the trainee in the field and

162
Leung Wai-Leng, “Games People Play” The Straits Times 15 May 2006.

163
“The Ultimate Game Gear”, The Economist 6 September 2007.

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making him feel as if he’s really there.
164
While our goals were not to create a
training device suitable for installation, we had a similar goal of achieving a close
connection between our participant and his surroundings. But, rather than depending
on large electronic screens or multi-channel speaker systems, we utilized the most
immersive environment we could think of: the real world.
In order to access this world, we incorporated the interactive elements of
discovery, exchange, and transportation. As the ensuing description will illustrate in
greater detail, close examination of the locales together with careful consideration of
the story elements were required to unlock successive story elements and gain access
to the entire narrative. This model of interactivity incorporates both Brenda Laurel’s
well known definition of interactivity, “the ability of humans to participate in actions
in a representational context,” and Janet Murray’s definition of agency “to take
meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”
165
but
incorporates them outside of their most common implementation. These are the
definitions often cited to suggest that an interactive experience is one under the
control of the user, and when applied to interactive narrative that means control over
event outcomes, over causes and effects, and thus over plot. However, “control”
need not be understood quite so literally or applied so broadly. Does not the reader
of a book have the control to close it at any time? Can’t the moviegoer leave the
theater at any time? These are extreme and only rudimentary control functions—we

164
See http://www.ict.usc.edu

165
Laurel, Brenda Computers As Theatre (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 35. Murray, 126.

200
sought a middle ground between complete unfettered, unbounded control of many
new media art projects and the very limited control over book or theatrical film.
Tracking Agama requires effort and action on the part of the player to unlock the
story components, both the physical action of exploring the locales and the mental
action of interpreting the story nuggets and solving puzzles. The player must also
interact in a very real and physical sense with the story world. Rather than moving
from location to location by the turn of a page or by the space collapsing power of
parallel editing or the virtual teleportation of a VR environment, the player must
walk or drive or ride a train from location to location. Some of the locations,
Angel’s Flight being an extreme example, lie on hilly terrain necessitating a degree
of physical exertion that cannot (we hoped) fail to impact the interpretation of events
and story and individual experience.
Related to our approach to interactivity and immersion is the concept of
interface. The video games that tout a high degree of immersion through graphical
realism, such as Electronic Arts’ Crysis which advertises “the most realistic
environments, spectacular special effects, physics game engine, lighting system, and
enemy Al”,
166
undermine their approach (immersion through realism) by a control
interface that consists of a handheld device with directional pads and multiple
buttons. Players’ physical inputs into the controllers are unrelated to the actions
intended in the game world by anything other than industry convention and the game

166
Crysis, Electronic Arts. Video Game. 2007.

201
engineer’s code mapping buttons to commands.
167
Similarly, the interface method of
the DVD remote control for interactive films such as P.O.V. and Scourge of Worlds
disrupts the narrative flow of these films. This disruption makes these films less
about an engaging and absorbing narrative that captures the viewer’s imagination
than about an exercise in identifying the effects and plot alterations associated with
particular choices; the narrative becomes less a unified construct with depth of
meaning, and becomes a tree-diagram of choices and consequences. This results in a
very different type of narrative experience, and counter to the type of narrative
immersion we sought in Tracking Agama.
Another way that Tracking Agama is an experiment in understanding digital
media and the entertainment capabilities of the mobile phone, then, is in the realm of
the interface. The telephone is already a familiar means by which people share their
stories of everyday life.
168
Could then it be an effective interface device for an
immersive narrative experience? We aimed to experiment with this possibility, by
positioning the mobile phone as the access interface to the story. As the interface to
the story, the phone would be used in the same way as in everyday life—voice calls
and text messages. The narrative world control and interface actions would be the
same as the real world actions on the part of the player, ideally concealing the
artifice of Tracking Agama.

167
The Nintendo Wii is designed so that the player’s control action mimics the desired in-game action
and represents a new development in video game that contests my claim that most interactive
interfaces disrupt a sense of immersion.

168
In addition to Marvin and Pool, see also: Michele Martin, Hello Central? (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1991) and Lisa Rakow, Gender on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992) for discussions about the telephone’s social use in sharing stories of everyday life.

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The layering of the familiarity of the device and its common use (dialing and
texting with a mobile phone) with an unfamiliar mode (as narrative interface for a
mobile narrative) was important for two reasons. First, as mentioned earlier, new
technologies are put into practice by people within a tension of old and new, and we
recognized that incorporating the old and familiar would ease the uptake of the new.
Secondly, we sought an interface that would contribute to immersion within the
narrative experience and contribute to a layering of the physical world with the
imaginative world. In their discussion of “immersion” and “engagement” in
interactive media, J. Yellowlees Douglas and Andrew Hargadon describe the anti-
immersive characteristics of playing sports video games with control interfaces
designed for the first-person shooter genre of video games. They suggest that
immersion is enhanced when “story, setting and interface adhere to a single schema”.
Furthermore, they claim, “Interactive games fulfill their promise as immersive when
they offer us an obvious schema for narrative structure and interface, and when they
offer us predictable, tightly scripted interactions enabling us to enjoy virtual
experiences that are either unattractively risky or denied to us in everyday life”.
169

Tracking Agama follows this model of maintaining a single, universal schema for
story, setting and interface. The player follows the same steps (literally and
figuratively) of Agama, using the mobile phone in the same manner as an interface
as it is used in the narrative setting. That this usage is also the same as the use of the
mobile phone in real life adds to the union of virtual space and real space.

169
Douglass, J. Yellowlees and Andrew Hargadon. “The pleasures of immersion and engagement:
schemas, scripts and the fifth business,” Digital Creativity 12/3 (2001): 158-9.

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In addition to our design goals around medium specificity, media theory and
narrative theory, we had certain artistic design goals as well. These are less directly
examples of experimentation with media theory, but both their intent and their
implementation represent driving questions at the core of the digital humanities—
how do digital media impact the human experience, how is the human experience
expressed in digital media, and how are social interventions and commentary
rendered in digital media?
Our first artistic goal was to contest the use of the cell phone as a privacy
bubble in public spaces. Following in the tradition of “Social Mobiles”, an art-
technology project investigating the social disruptions induced by mobile phone
use,
170
we sought to intervene into the growing trend of mobile phone usage as a
dislocation from surrounding space and community. Our focus on re-engaging with
space and place also manifested a desire to facilitate our participants’ re-engagement
with the overlooked places of Los Angeles. Through our physically interactive,
exploratory and dialogic narrative, we intended to create an experience that layers
participant awareness of locale, history and story. Additional goals were to provide
an experience that encouraged (or, for some, introduced) the use of public transit,
and to design a project that demanded a minimal technological barrier to entry.
Thus, we eschewed picture messaging or video services that were new and had not
reached widespread acceptance in the marketplace at the time of our original design;

170
Jones, Crispin and IDEO. Website at
http://www.ideo.com/case_studies/social_mobiles/menu.html

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the only required device was any cell phone capable of SMS text message (the
project was designed to be independent of any particular wireless service provider).
Finally, let me be clear about the nature of the Tracking Agama project and
how it relates to practical research in the digital humanities. We did not, originally,
intend to develop a test-bed for narrative theory and modes of interactivity—our
original goals were not in the realm of media theory or critical studies (I introduced
those as the project developed.) Rather, we wanted to create an enjoyable narrative
experience that tapped into the salient features of the mobile phone. As far as artistic
intent is concerned, we were originally far more interested in achieving the social
goals (contesting the privacy bubble, encouraging public transportation) than testing
academic theories. We did, however, need a model by which to base our narrative
structure, and we wanted to incorporate a degree of interactivity but avoid the
banality of a branching plot. As the project developed, it had a significant impact on
my own considerations of narrative theory, medium specificity and interactivity and
conceptualization of how to conduct humanities oriented research that addressed
interactive digital technologies, cinematic traditions, and narrative implementations.
And I saw that what we were doing, in part with specific intent and in part simply by
the nature of our work, was putting theory into practice; and what we were doing,
above and beyond whatever design and development progress we achieved, was a
practical engagement in the very concerns of media studies.

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Analysis (Narrative)
Given my role in designing the Tracking Agama project and its nascent
evolution, it is certainly not my place to declare here its success, either in terms of
design or theory or in the marketplace. (This latter category is simple to disavow, as
the project has not yet been released for widespread public participation.) With
further development of the project ongoing, however, I do feel it appropriate to offer
an analysis of the project we designed and the beta-tests we completed. This analysis
has the dual purpose of highlighting the process of creative media production as a
mode of digital humanities research, particularly in terms of design considerations,
narrative structure and media theory as well as frame a range of considerations for
further revisions of the Tracking Agama project.
Simple, yet valuable research questions exist within the Tracking Agama
project. Given the conscious adoption of Edward Branigan’s theory of narrative
comprehension as a model upon which to base the narrative structure of the project,
one simple question is how does the project reflect the influence of Branigan’s
model? Or, how does the narrative work? And, how does it intersect with the
interactive and immersive design? And, ultimately, what does this experiment in
interactive, mobile narrative reveal about the medium and the medium’s future?
To answer the first question, I’ve removed my “design hat” and donned by
“critic hat” to assess the project in terms of narrative theory. In Branigan’s view, a
simple narrative consists of “a series of episodes collected as a focused chain.” A
focused chain is a series of causes and effects with a continuing center (character,

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theme, action, etc) and an episode “is created by collecting together the
consequences of a central situation,” such as the events of a character in a particular
setting.
171
Applying Branigan’s models, we see the AgamaNotes as collecting
Agama’s experiences, thoughts and sometimes events (such as when a kidnapping
interrupts Agama’s recording) in a particular setting. The calls from Shufelt in
combination with the tasks completed by the participant reveal the causal
connections between the episodes, and successive episodes depict the growth and
change of the characters (such as the revelation that Shufelt, initially positioned as a
friend of Agama, is in fact his enemy). For example, the player learns Agama has
found a valuable artifact and has been kidnapped. The player’s pursuit of Agama’s
audio research notes reveals his interest in ghosts, culminating in the player visiting
the Roosevelt Hotel, where, legend has it, the ghost of Marilyn Monroe appears in a
mirror.
Above and beyond the simple narrative of a series of episodes arranged in a
focused chain, Tracking Agama exhibits a complex narrative structure with a not-
necessarily-sequential arrangement of Branigan’s component schema, including
abstract, orientation, initiating event, goal, complicating action, and
climax/resolution. In the above example, the player’s chronology of discovery and
the chronology of Agama’s actions intersect but unfold in different sequences.
Untethered to a seat in the cinema or in front of a television in the living room, the
player is free to explore Los Angeles in whatever order he or she desires and feels

171
Branigan, 19-20. Original emphasis.

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appropriate. In Agama’s story, he researches Marilyn Monroe, finds a piece of
broken mirror at the Roosevelt, experiences supernatural events, hides the mirror,
and then is kidnapped. Players, however, learn of the mirror and its hiding place first
(from the blog), then the kidnapping. Depending on their success in discovering
keywords they may learn of Agama’s research into Hollywood ghost stories prior to
visiting the Roosevelt Hotel. Without this background information, a player may or
may not piece together the significance of the Roosevelt, Monroe and Agama’s
broken mirror. Thus, on one level, a focused chain of episodes involving Agama and
the mirror is evident. On another level, the player may encounter pieces of this
narrative non-sequentially and must apply the component schema to come to
understanding, which may also require return visits to locales identified with specific
components.
As a player accumulates narrative information, the schema are applied any
number of ways and any number of times and on any number of levels until the
reader/viewer achieves comprehension to his or her own satisfaction.
172
In the case
of Tracking Agama, as the participant acquires more and more story nuggets, he or
she experiments with assigning them to these functions. For example, the
kidnapping of Agama might initially be assigned the function of complicating action
because it will disrupt Agama’s unlocking the secrets of Los Angeles. On another
level, the kidnapping is an initiating event, altering the present state of affairs and
launching the participant in the pursuit of the main character. The narration, the

172
Branigan, 18.

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component that seeks “to justify…why the narrator is competent and credible…and
why the events are unusual, strange or worthy of note”
173
consists of the participant’s
accessing of the various story nuggets and piecing together the complex temporal
structure that incorporates historical events, recent fictional events (such as the
complicating action of Agama’s sighting of ghosts), and developing fictional events
(such as Shufelt’s requests for research and detective assistance). Unlike the
34N118W project discussed in the previous chapter, in which growth, development
and causation must come from the participant, a narrative consisting of these
elements exists, waiting for discovery in Tracking Agama.
The process of discovery in Tracking Agama is different than that of a
conventional film, television or novel. In linear media such as those, the episodes
are presented to the reader/viewer, and the reader/viewer need only to assign each
narrative unit (whether episode or vignette or lexia) into the appropriate component
category and reassign as necessary as further episodes are revealed until a suitable
understanding is reached. In Tracking Agama, however, the player must take both
physical and mental action to access the narrative unit (what we called the “story
nugget” given the associations of searching or prospecting) and only after discovery
categorize the information into the appropriate schema components. At Union
Station, an AgamaNote is linked to the title the “City of Angels” mural. At the level
of comprehending the events surrounding Agama, this AgamaNote serves as
narration. In it, Agama hints at the mirror’s supernatural qualities and muses on the

173
Ibid.

209
presence of ghosts in the city. His thoughts contribute both to broader themes and
also why the events involving him might be unusual or worthy of note, as Branigan
defines the role of narration.
At the level of the player’s process of both discovery and comprehension,
however, this AgamaNote also represents a goal by introducing a clue. “Can you
ascend to Heaven in LA, or have all the angels fled?” asks Agama and cryptically
concludes, “Follow the angels.” Having collected all the other available
AgamaNotes in Union Station, the player must determine the clue and meaning
within this AgamaNote and travel to the Angel’s Flight railway in downtown Los
Angeles. The clip also includes a suggestion for how to travel, given its proximity to
the Red Line, a subway line that has a stop in the vicinity of Angel’s Flight. In broad
terms, the subway ride from Union Station to the Pershing Square stop is the
physical manifestation of travel across Branigan’s hexagon from intimating event
(the predominant feature of Union Station AgamaNotes) to orientation/exposition
(the predominant feature of Angel’s Flight AgamaNotes). One beta-tester reported,
after ascertaining the Angel’s Flight clue through a text exchange with Shufelt (itself
more narration, as Shufelt’s texts aim to establish him as a source of reliable
information), that she did not know what Angel’s Flight was, nor how to get there.
Thus, this AgamaNote became a complication for her experience, effectively
preventing further acquisition of narrative units and navigation of the narrative
schema.

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In addition to the physical and mental activity required to access any
narrative unit and position (or reposition) it appropriately within the developing
schema, there is a temporal element at play as well. Again, unlike a film, the
experience of Tracking Agama is not finite and consistent. While players might
spend an entire afternoon exploring downtown, depending on their initiative, skill
and interest they may or may not complete the entire experience. During beta-
testing, no group followed all the clues, listened to all the AgamaNotes and
completed the entire experience. One group of testers visited downtown Los
Angeles twice for a total of six hours. While this group consisted of testers who had
the least experience with gaming and with mobile technology, their frustration at the
pace of narrative acquisition revealed a flaw in our design.
Tracking Agama’s design attempts to maintain a temporal ambiguity in order
that some players may play through on a single occasion, while others might explore
periodically. In the chronology of Agama’s world, the AgamaNotes all predate his
kidnapping, which itself has occurred prior to the player’s entry into the story. Thus,
tracking down Agama’s research involves no deadlines, though familiarity with
mystery and thriller genres might imply expediency increases the likelihood of
saving Agama. In their second session, the frustrated testers reported forgetting
details from their first, contributing to their lack of interest in the narrative. They
declined an invitation for a third run through the story, indicating that our goal of
designing to accommodate episodic access of the story was unsuccessful. While we
considered each AgamaNote to be micro-episodic, we did not follow the model of

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television whereby each episode (or in our case, each location) incorporates
significant repetition of key story elements.
174

Though this group provides only a small amount of feedback upon which to
draw any conclusions, their feedback corresponds to our own anxieties about our
design. During the design process we debated about whether to intentionally design
for a single two or three hour experience, or make it more open-ended allowing for
multiple shorter visits (I advocated the latter). In trying to do both, I think we
accomplished neither as well as we might have had we focused on one model. In
addition, we learned that delays to accessing the story detracted significantly to the
narrative intensity of the experience, whether because of stretching out the narrative
experience over multiple days or unfamiliarity with mobile media and puzzle-
oriented games.
Another piece of feedback related to the issue of time in our project came
from an early beta-tester, who reported difficulty in finding motivation to get started.
The substantial investment of time required to travel to downtown Los Angeles and
spend hours exploring locations was a deterrent for this tester. He identified the lack
of a deadline or other temporal motivator within the story, as a potential reason for
his delay in participating. Had there been a clue that would disappear or expire
(deadline) or piece of evidence available only to the first person to discover it
(reward), he felt he would not have hesitated to start.

174
It should be noted, however, that repeat access to any AgamaNote is possible as a refresher.
Dialing Agama’s number and speaking keywords from previously visited locations would replay the
associated AgamaNotes, even if the player were to start in a new location.

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Where does this narrative take us? Essentially, the narrative (and, I contend
later, the nature of this project and mobile media narrative in general) constructs
layers: layers of experience and layers of meaning. It is not a singular experience
with a dominant meaning, but rather like complex films, novels and television
programs it offers a multifaceted experience with layers of history, story and locale
for each participant. In the example above, the player listens to the audio clip about
angels while standing in front of the “City of Angels” mural, which is mounted
above the stairway leading down to the Red Line subway and which depicts angel’s
wings falling like leaves. The player is left not only to order this story nugget into
the appropriate component, but also to consider this mural and its slogan along with
the bits of history discovered in Union Station. And, by virtue of the portability of
the mobile media, the player has this experience in Union Station, not watching a
representation of Union Station adding another layer of experience.
Hayden White, in highlighting the inherently ideological nature of narrative
and history’s inability to offer purely objective summaries of events, suggests,
“Arising, as Barthes says, between our experience of the world and our efforts to
describe that experience in language, narrative ‘ceaselessly substitutes meaning for
the straightforward copy of the events recounted’”.
175
Tracking Agama highlights
the fallacies of historical accuracy and the interpretive nature of narrative, drawing
the participant into Agama’s life, bits of history and leaving numerous gaps for the
participant to fill in. The AgamaNotes capture Agama’s efforts to recount his

175
White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity” in On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2.

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experiences, construct his own stories, and reconcile urban legends, themselves a
form of history. The player’s pursuit of Agama creates first-hand experiences
juxtaposed with Agama’s accounts of events and ideas, as well as the player’s
growing awareness of the unreliability of both Agama and Shufelt.
Indulging in both layers of meanings and gaps in information, Tracking
Agama in fact emphasizes the agency of the individual in constructing meaning.
Ironically overlooking the interest in alternative histories he displays in AgamaNotes
regarding the fate of the original Chinatown and late 19
th
Century race riots, Agama
claims to have found the means to “see the past clearly” and know the truth of Los
Angeles urban legends. At the same time, Agama is a highly unreliable character
(and possibly narrator, depending on participant interpretation), reporting seeing
ghosts and ostensibly killing himself. Agama’s story contests the conventional
wisdom that Warren Shufelt lapsed into obscurity after a failed attempt to uncover
artifacts buried beneath Bunker Hill. It becomes each player’s role to combine
Agama’s accounts of history and Agama’s description of his haunting by a ghost,
with the insights gathered by following Agama’s trail through downtown Los
Angeles and make whatever meaning is available. One beta-tester concluded that
Agama and Shufelt were one in the same, drawing a parallel between an individual’s
struggle with identity and a larger municipal history of varying identities. Another
beta-tester’s narrative, arising between his experience of the project and its
recountings of Los Angeles history, eschewed conclusions regarding the story or
assessments of historical insights. Rather, he found the value of the project and its

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exploration of sites like Angel’s Flight, the Bradbury Building and Union Station lay
in “opening up a city you’ve lived in all your life yet know nothing about”.
176

Aiding and supporting this layering of meaning and experience is Tracking
Agama’s association with noir. One beta-tester, himself familiar with the multiple
narrators, temporal manipulations, and dark tone characteristic of noir narratives,
found following the story and understanding his role in discovering Agama’s path
relatively clear. Two other beta-testers, not well-versed in noir conventions,
reported confusion with regard to the story told out of order. These results suggest
that, from a design perspective, tapping into familiarity with old media tropes can aid
in the adoption of an otherwise unfamiliar format.
Tracking Agama extends beyond the traditional film noir genre, however, as
its multiple levels of narrative and multiplicity of meanings participates both in the
isolation of the individual (Agama) but also in the reconnection of the player to place
(as the above beta-tester’s quote illustrates). J.P. Telotte suggests that the multiple
narrator approach to films such as Citizen Kane and Sorry, Wrong Number presents a
theme of the “multiplicity” and “elusiveness” of meaning which serves to isolate the
individual because of an inability to master these multiple meanings. “The
individual seems,” he writes “cut off from any hope of ordering or controlling his
world, as he comes to resemble but another signifier in a disturbingly rich and
confusing language system, one narrative line in a confusing tangle of story”.
177

176
Todd Ruston, interview.

177
Telotte, “Tangled Networks” 47.

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This statement accurately applies to Agama, a character swallowed up by his own
hubris and the juggernaut of Hollywood. But as Thomas Elsaesser noted, the
reader/viewer’s subjectivity is no longer in thrall to one “monocular, unifocal,
perspectival projection of space”,
178
one narrative line containing all meaning, but
rather we inhabit a proliferation of meanings and a deluge of information from a
variety of media sources.
Mobile media, and mobile phones in particular, are pitched to control this
information, and Tracking Agama’s close association of information and location
allows for intersections and layers, rather than dislocation, isolation and resultant
tangles. For example, the process of discovery of Agama’s keywords at Union
Station requires close examination of public art and public space. Accessing the
story unlocks not only the initial components of Agama’s story, but also reveals a
history of community displacement. The courtyard fountain, brick demarcation line
and Riverbench sculpture all speak to the forced displacement of the original
Chinatown community to make way for the construction of Union Station. Standing
in the courtyard, listening to Agama speculate about the riots that occurred on that
same ground 130 years earlier, the player occupies simultaneously a vacated space
and an enriched, layered space. The courtyard is empty of all traces of Chinatown,
except for a commemorative brick installation and the artifacts embedded in the
Riverbench statue. Yet, the player’s engagement with Tracking Agama returns this
history to the very spot, bringing at least the player’s mind and narrative imagination

178
Elsaesser, 122.

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into contact with aspects of the locations history, transforming a largely empty space
into a lived place. This pattern, in which discovery of Agama’s story offers a portal
into deeper layers of Los Angeles history as well as exploration of public space and
urban topography, repeats throughout the project, layering and intersecting stories,
history and meaning and reconnecting these to their places.

Analysis (Interactivity/Immersion)
As an “interactive narrative,” how does the interactivity operate and what
does it add? While the Tracking Agama project does incorporate interactivity and
offers to the player a degree of agency, it does not, as mentioned above, conceive of
this interactivity and meaningful action in terms of plot events. Rather, Tracking
Agama introduces a mode of physical interactivity and a mode of exchange
interactivity, and these modes are facilitated by the medium of the mobile phone.
The inherently interactive and dialogic nature of the telephone offers a seamless
means of exchanging keywords for audio story nuggets; the portability and ubiquity
of the mobile phone facilitates the physical dimension of Tracking Agama. Being
part of the media interpenetration into everyday life, mobile media narratives can
exploit the database-navigating features of interactive media, the imaginative
constructs of narrative, and unite these with points within the physical world
contesting the dislocation commonly associated with contemporary culture’s heavy
does of mediated spaces.

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As discussed in the preceding chapter, Lev Manovich contends all interactive
media involve navigations of a database. Tracking Agama adroitly blends both
database and narrative forms through a combination of physical and exchange
interactivity. At least three datasets are available for access, and they require the
very meaningful actions of physical exploration and information exchange to
navigate. The first dataset is the collection of story nuggets, literally arrayed in a
database and available for retrieval by keyword. Accessing this dataset requires both
physical interactivity, in the exploration of the locale to identify the keyword, and
exchange interactivity, in the submission of the keyword to retrieve the piece of the
story. The second dataset is Los Angeles history, pieces of which are available in
sight at various locations, revealed by Agama in his voice memos, and researched by
interested players. The third dataset is the grid of Los Angeles, accessed by foot, car
and public transportation introducing unique aspects to each encounter with the
project. During one beta-testing session, this database unexpectedly provided an
informative maintenance man educating the interested players about other works of
public art in Union Station (adding further layers to the narrative experience).
During another, the physical exertion required to ascend the Angel’s Flight stairs
deterred any geographic backtracking by the player, effectively eliminating
exploration of one location. These examples demonstrate how individual action
taken by the player results in different and possibly unique narrative experiences.
This project, in its physical materialization of the acquisition of the narrative schema
components, combines the cognitive process of database navigation with the physical

218
process of city navigation, supporting the narrative functions of layering history,
fiction and locality. The combination of a physical component and the discovery-
reward structure of the exchange element serve to both expose the player to the
layers of history, story and location and draw the player in, enhancing the immersive
quality of the project.
From a design perspective, however, there were flaws to the interactivity
enhancing player engagement with the story. Approximately twenty percent of the
beta-testers, particularly those testers who did not self-identify as gamers, reported
frustration with the physical and exchange interactivity component of the project.
These players were hesitant to further invest time and physical energy to proceed
from one location to another without an assurance that they had exchanged all the
relevant keywords associated with their present location. This condition was a
consequence of the physical investment and unfamiliarity with the necessity for
individual action to reveal the remainder of the story. In contrast to a theatrical film
wherein the narrative progresses regardless of the input of the viewer, the narrative
experience of Tracking Agama effectively stops without the participation of the
player.
Subsequent research has uncovered that the Irish Higher Education Authority
funded project Media Portrait of the Liberties, a project with a similar basis in
location-specific vignettes, encountered similar concerns. In this project,
participants navigated the Dublin’s Liberties neighborhood by a map displayed on a
PDA. At appropriate locations, the PDA played re-enacted videos telling stories of

219
the community’s history. Participant feedback in this project indicated both
enjoyment with the treasure hunt aspect and frustration with a fragmented and
disjointed overall narrative.
179
This assessment mirrors our experience with
Tracking Agama and indicates an area for further study for design. Whereas the
exchange and physical modes of interactivity have the capacity for unique
experience and to draw meanings closely associated with the locale and the story,
further research is necessary into the appropriate incorporation of boundaries,
guidelines and failsafes to ensure the majority of viewers can proceed without their
sense of investment and immersion disrupted by frustration in accessing and
comprehending the narrative.

Conclusion
What did we try to design? We designed an entertainment project that sought
to capitalize on the mobile phone’s unique or intrinsic characteristics, and in so
doing intervene in the social/spatial dislocaton commonly associated with the cell
phone, reconnect participant with locale and history, through story. What did we
get? A reincarnation of the telephone as an entertainment medium, a new type of
narrative form suitable for the 21
st
century: it combines narrative and database; it
combines participation and story structure; it combines an immersion with an
unobtrusive interface; and in so doing it bridges the physical and virtual. If one of

179
Nisi, Valentina, Ian Oakley and Mads Haahr. “Inner City Locative Media: Design and Experience
of a Location-Aware Mobile Narrative for the Dublin Liberties Neighborhood,” Intelligent Agent 6/2
(2006).

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the conditions of postmodernity bemoaned by philosophers and cultural theorists is a
disconnection from history, a dislocation from community and a morass of relativity,
then Tracking Agama, as an example of mobile media narrative, engages particularly
with the first two conditions. Tracking Agama taps into history and contests social
and spatial dislocation. It does so through linking location-specific keywords that
unlock story vignettes that offer perspective on locale, art, history and urban legend.
In the years since the initial design decisions were made for Tracking Agama,
the landscape of the mobile market has changed significantly. Text message,
imaging and video are all on the rise in the United States, and the major networks are
rapidly deploying their 3G networks that can support a wide array of data
applications. I think the core of the Tracking Agama project remains relevant, in
spite of technological advances. The new game CSI: The Mobile Game has
incorporated a feature by which characters from the show call the player to deliver
clues useful for playing the game—a simple, not-technologically-advanced feature
that plays a prominent role in Tracking Agama. Growing incorporation of GPS (or
similar location aware capabilities, such as the Apple iPhone’s Google Maps
application) into mobile handsets could be exploited for future mobile narratives.
This technology would provide for easier navigation, constant location tracking by
the system, and an overall picture of geographical and topographical relationships for
the player. It would afford greater opportunities for covert activity on the part of the
system, such as unexpected calls, unique character behavior, and awareness of
nearby fellow participants. At the same time, however, incorporating this

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technology brings a host of technical challenges, starting with carrier compatibility
and handset operating systems. The ability to incorporate real-time awareness of
fellow users’ proximity is a very fruitful future possibility. One of the features
lacking in Tracking Agama is the means to develop a closer sense of community
amongst the users. Having the system drive the players towards each other, by
combining narrative elements with location awareness, as well as changing the blog
into more of a social networking space are attractive options for future incorporation.
Tracking Agama contributes to a re-conceptualization of the mobile phone as
an entertainment medium above and beyond simply an alternative screen size for
viewing television or as a small handheld video game console. For over one hundred
years, the telephone has been almost exclusively a medium for person-to-person
communication. Projects like Tracking Agama reconnect to the telephone’s early
years as not only a medium of communication, but also as a medium of
entertainment. Furthermore, as both an entertainment and artistic product, Tracking
Agama engages with the always-on/always-connected 21
st
Century lifestyle I’ve
discussed in previous chapters. The cell phone brings the interpenetration of media
to all aspects of life and overlaps formerly distinct worlds of social engagement.
Home life intersects with work as in the “Coming Home” video discussed in Chapter
3; news and sports enter into pedestrian travels, envisioned in the ESPN “Sports
Heaven” commercial; and the fiction of a story enters everyday life and locale,
imagined in David Fincher’s The Game, and realized in new projects like The Beast,
Majestic and Tracking Agama.

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Tracking Agama incorporates the characteristics of the telephone, including a
dialogic nature and a long-standing cultural history of use as a narrative device. At
the same time, it capitalizes on the mobile phone as part of a networked computer
system, including its ability to be always-on and always-connected and to access
databases of information. In so doing, Tracking Agama presents an engagement with
contemporary cultural forms (narrative and database) and how we relate to our
world. It does so through its remediation of a variety of media and entertainment
forms. In terms of media, it remediates cinema, capitalizing on the phone as a
narrative device; television in its growing acceptance as an entertainment
distribution/reception site; virtual reality in its ability to combine fiction with sensory
immersion; and the telephone, reconnecting with the telephone’s entertainment past.
As an entertainment form, it reinvents the episodic narrative of old radio and
television serials, and combines it with the fastest growing entertainment form in
American society, the interactive video game. Taken together, the mobile narrative
experience offers an engaging, participatory, immersive narrative bridging physical
and virtual space.

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Chapter 6

Call Forwarding:
The Mobile Market and a Look to the Future

In January of 2008, both Time Magazine and the New York Times reported
that 3 of the top ten selling novels in Japan are keitai shosetsu, or so called “cell
phone novels”, written on the cell phone and read either by cell phone, PC or printed
versions.
180
The novels are written in installments, usually by young female authors,
and uploaded via mobile phone to the author’s webpage (similar to a blog). They
can be read on the web by personal computer or cell phone (most of Japan’s mobile
phones use i-mode, an always-on connection to the Internet), and publishers have
collected the installments and published them as conventional printed novels.
181

While much of the reason for the cell phone novel’s success has to do with
particular aspects of Japanese youth culture, this example nevertheless further
illustrates the wide-open field of experimentation and the transmedia migration of
narrative currently at play in the mobile entertainment arena. Cell phone novels,
mobile video and mobile television, video games and walking tours are all highly
remedial forms of content that vie for both marketshare and “mindshare”, the latter a
commodity that could potentially create or cement markets, trends and establish

180
Day, Lara “Tone Language” Time, January 9, 2008.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1702111,00.htm; Onishi, Norimitsu. “Thumbs
Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular” New York Times, January 20, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html.

181
Other novel based forms of mobile narrative entertainment include: romance novel publisher
Harlequin’s “Harlequin to Go” service on Sprint and Verizon in the United States (subscribers pay
$2.49 per month to receive 500 word chapters pushed to their cell phone each day), and the Telenor
(Norway) published crime thriller titled The First Time I Died by Andreas Markusson, which is
available exclusively via mobile phone as an audio book in 10-20 minute “lit-cast” installments
costing 20 Norwegian Kroner (approximately $3.80) each.

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cultural, social and business practices. Wireless carriers, in concert with large
media/entertainment companies, seek to advance mobile video as the natural
culmination of the teleology of convergence. At the same time, this incunabular
phase of the mobile media industry has also seen experiments with entertainment
forms, such as mobile narratives like Tracking Agama and 34N118W and location-
based games like Botfighters, that more aggressively capitalize on the salient mobile
and networked characteristics of mobile media. Though lacking the financial and
marketing support of major entertainment corporations and wireless carriers, I would
argue that the mobile phone based narrative experiences and games, in particular,
connect more directly into the cultural imagination, given the cinematic and
televisual legacy explored here, and thus have a significant claim to mindshare as
well, if on a more subtle and even subconscious level.
The fractured and uncertain nature of this market is reminiscent of the early
stages of other once-new media forms, such as the phonograph and the telephone. In
Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman describes the halting development of the
commercial applications of the phonograph, and its unanticipated emergence as a
mass entertainment medium.
182
Its inventor Edison and his investors foresaw the
device as a tool for business correspondence, as a dictation tool. Despite numerous
demonstrations to develop interest in this usage, the public gravitated to the device as
a device of entertainment and the music recording industry was born. As Amy
Lawrence carefully details in her study of women’s voices in cinema Echo and

182
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. 12-13, 59.

225
Narcissus, the shifts in the marketplace were influenced by industrial production
considerations, consumer behavior, and reveal gendered assumptions about who and
where speech, song, and music were performed and recorded.
183

Similarly, both Asa Briggs and Carolyn Marvin describe entertainment-
oriented implementations of the early telephone by entrepreneurs before the regular
use of the telephone for person-to-person communications became standard.
184
In
the years following Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 invention and before radio, the
Theatrophone and similar setups brought opera and drama performances, the
precursor to sportscasts, as well as political speeches to subscribing individuals and
commercial booths rigged with a telephonic receiver.
These examples from the early days of now commonplace media reveal that
current use patterns were not always so firmly established, and that they developed
over time—as Gitelman observes, “Media and their publics coevolve”.
185
Both
Gitelman and Marvin argue that rather than springing to life fully formed with a
defined set of business, cultural and usage practices, new media and their use are
shaped by the intersection of social, economic and technological influences. And,
they come to their conclusions through their insightful histories of media forms at
their point of newness, at the turn of the 19
th
century for Marvin, and both the 19
th

183
Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 9-15.

184
Briggs, Asa. “The Pleasure Telephone” in ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool The Social Impact of the
Telephone. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977, 40-65. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies
Were New. New York and Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 1988, 209-214.

185
Gitelman, 13.

226
century history of the phonograph and the mid-20
th
century history of the Internet in
the case of Gitelman’s work.
My work here benefits from their critical distance; this project is less a
history, though it has some historical elements, and more an assessment of potential
with a decidedly forward-looking angle. Benefiting from the wisdom of these
historical analyses, I have emphasized the cultural forces, particularly in the
representation of the telephone on screen, and the cross-influence of the cultural and
the technological, in the medium specific qualities of mobile media, and its
intersection with narrative and database as cultural forms. I would be remiss,
however, if I omitted a consideration of the marketplace, as economics is a powerful
agent of media development. Gitelman’s example of the phonograph shows that a
fast growing customer base, demanding in home musical entertainment, can shape an
industry despite the intentions and marketing of the technology’s creator.
Ithiel de Sola Pool, one of the leading telecommunications sociologists of the
late 20
th
Century, also parses the economics of early new media entertainment. He
identifies the high capital cost of building out the telephone network infrastructure as
ill suited to the rapid scaling that would be required for mass entertainment. An
expansive service requires sponsorship to supply the capital costs, but the sponsors
require customers, yet the customers require the content and device of the service—a
chicken and egg problem, complicated by the expense of connecting a wire to all
potential customers. On the other hand, an incremental build funded by individual
customers as they subscribed allowed for the customer to obtain the desired service,

227
and thus contributed to the telephone as primarily (and later exclusively) a medium
of person-to-person communication.
While the mobile media marketplace of the early 21
st
Century is considerably
more complicated than that of the phonograph and early telephone, both
economically and technologically, similar forces are at work. Wireless carriers
hesitate to invest in infrastructure for carrying new forms of content without an
expectation of profitability; content producers are at the mercy of what products the
carriers will distribute; and consumers tentatively explore this new landscape of
mobile media. The earlier chapters of this work focus on the cultural, artistic and, to
a lesser degree, technological influences on narrative forms of mobile media
entertainment. Taken together, they both identify existing narrative forms on mobile
media, as well as illustrate technological and artistic potential of the mobile phone.
My central argument is one of cultural assessment, rather than the type of
technological assessments de Sola Pool studies in Forecasting the Telephone: A
Retrospective Technology Assessment. In that book, de Sola Pool emphasizes that
most technology assessments “make little use of market analysis” depending largely
on available technologies, their uses, side-effects and their interaction with other
technologies and social goals.
186

As a conclusion, I offer an overview of the mobile entertainment business in
order to paint a more complete picture of the current landscape of mobile media.
Along with the artistic potential discussed in the preceding chapters, economic

186
Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment.
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company, 1983), 2.

228
forces, the push and pull between the business practices of the industry and the
consumption patterns of the public, will have a significant influence on the
development of narrative forms of entertainment on the mobile phone and other
devices. This discussion of the business will be brief as the market is in a turbulent
phase of growth, finding publics, audiences, content and business practices, as would
be expected during the current incunabular stage.

Business Overview
In terms of mobile entertainment content in the United States, the industry
divides into two main arenas: content available through arrangement or approval
with a major carrier and content, products or experiences created outside the
province of a major wireless carrier. The former generally takes the form of digital
files (videos, graphics, music files, etc.) available by purchase, subscription or
provided free to the user and funded through advertiser sponsorship. The latter
category includes primarily art projects, do-it-yourself creations, and experiences not
requiring access to the proprietary segments of a wireless carrier’s network. For
example, the spatial annotation project [murmur] merely asks the user to dial a
phone number, enter a code and listen to the recorded anecdote or personal story.
Any user on any carrier can participate, as the user is simply making a phone call.
Downloading a ringtone, on the other hand, requires a complex series of

229
technological steps and business relationships, all managed by the carrier, to get the
content from the producer to the consumer’s handset.
187

Carrier-based content
Whether games, ringtones, graphics (e.g., screensavers and wallpapers) or the
mobile videos discussed in Chapter 3, the business model is quite similar. Content
producers, if large enough (such as the major entertainment studios), can strike a deal
directly with the carrier (such as Fox’s 24: Conspiracy on Verizon’s V*Cast
service). Smaller producers distribute through content aggregators, either branded
aggregators such as Fun Little Movies and Thumbplay or “white label” companies
like Motricity (aggregators that do not have a branded presence on the handset).
Complicating the business further is the relevance of “on-deck” versus “off-deck”
content. On-deck content can be reached immediately through the portal on the
user’s handset, and this gateway is controlled by the carriers. Presence on the
carrier’s deck has a significant impact on success of mobile content. In January
2007, industry-tracking firm Nielsen Mobile (formerly Telephia) reported that games
actively promoted on a carrier’s deck saw a 90% increase in downloads, and games
on the first page of a carrier’s deck, that is on the first menu a user sees after

187
A consideration as to why: if a user dials a service like [murmur] and fails to connect, she assesses
[murmur] as malfunctioning; if a ringtone she downloads through her phone is incompatible with her
handset, she seeks redress from the carrier—thus the carriers exert considerable control over the
digital content made available on their networks.

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selecting the “Games” function on the handset, saw 53% greater sales.
188
Video
downloads and mobile television services, owing to more complex technological
back-ends, are exclusively sold through the carrier decks. In the current market,
then, getting on the carrier deck is essential to achieving mass market success for the
majority of mobile content, which is the role of the content aggregators that collect
content from independent producers, bundle it and make it available through the
carrier deck. Recent trends, which I will return to later, indicate an increase in off-
deck sales, generally on sites accessible via the mobile web.
189

An overview of the general business model and revenue distribution for
mobile entertainment offers some insights into why the current state of the market is
heavily oriented around repurposed content.
190
For pay-per-download, the carrier
usually keeps approximately 40-60% of the payment made by the consumer. The
content aggregator keeps 3-10%, leaving the balance for the content producer. Thus,
for a $1.00 downloadable ringtone, the creator receives approximately $0.40-$0.50.
This revenue distribution holds true for on-deck content as well as off-deck content
paid for through Premium SMS. (Premium SMS is by far the most popular billing

188
Nielsen Mobile. “Promotional Placement of Mobile Games on Carrier Decks Can Double Sales
Volume” January 2007.
http://telephia.com/html/press%20releases/gamedeckmerchandising_press_release_template.html

189
In another complicated technological and business arrangement, access to mobile websites is
generally controlled by the carriers, just as access to Internet websites could be controlled by ISPs
interested in diverting users to specific sources for content. This is the heart of Net Neutrality issues,
yet to make a major impact on the mobile web.

190
The revenue distribution figures in this section are drawn from conversations with two content
aggregator executives bound by Non-Disclosure Agreements from revealing the specific terms of
their deals with the carriers. Therefore, I have omitted their names, companies, and provided
estimated amounts.

231
method for consumers, whereby a ringtone or graphic is purchased by sending an
SMS code to a specified number, and the aggregator pushes the content to the
consumer’s phone. The charge appears on the consumer’s carrier bill, and thus the
carrier again takes a large cut.) The carrier percentage of subscription services is
similar; the carrier retains approximately 50% of the subscription fee, leaving the
aggregator retain 25% and to distribute the remainder to the content producers based
on popularity of content.
With revenue to content producers relatively small, there is considerable
pressure to either keep production costs low (unless massive popularity drives
significant overall revenue). As discussed in Chapter 3, this motivation drives much
of the repurposed content in the video market segment, and the same influences hold
true in the ringtones and graphics segments. Copyright holders eliminate the initial
development and production costs by reformatting existing popular music and
images, then reselling these pre-sold properties. With relatively low investment in
production, the content producer maintains acceptable profit margins. The advent of
Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp that emerged in late
2007, illustrates the extent to which repurposing and reselling existing content is a
primary strategy amongst major entertainment companies. Hulu offers web and
mobile integration and, by leveraging the large library of its partner institutions and a
higher quality video image than is commonly available for web-based viewing, seeks
to bring the advertiser-funded model of entertainment distribution to the Internet and
mobile media. Whether this venture succeeds, of course, depends on how the

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intersection of consumer behavior (itself a product of a complex combination of
awareness, accessibility, desirability, and perceived value), consumer tastes,
economic forces, and unforeseen alternatives plays out.
While downloadable or streaming content, often repurposed from major
entertainment companies, has a significant and growing presence on the carrier
decks, amateur content is not absent. Nearly 60% of Internet video content is
amateur, though industry forecasts suggest that will decline to a steady figure of 10-
15% in the next few years.
191
The Internet figures are important for understanding
the mobile market, since, at least in terms of video, the major wireless carriers video
services offer access to YouTube, Revver and similar collections of primarily
amateur video. As described in Chapter 3, though, these are limited access channels
offering a pre-selected set of videos. As YouTube, Revver and others move towards
more and more professionally produced content, it is reasonable to assume the on-
deck channels of YouTube and Revver will carry at least an equal, if not higher,
percentage of professional content.

Carrier-independent content
In contrast to the $4.1 billion dollar mobile content market that runs through
the carrier’s portals and mobile browsers, another, smaller, but nevertheless not
insignificant segment of the mobile media market warrants attention. This is the

191
Holohan, Catherine. “Web Video: Move Over, Amateurs” Business Week. November 20, 2007.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071119_701831.htm?chan=technolo
gy_technology+index+page_top+stories

233
arena of many of the mobile projects described in Chapters 4 and 5, as well as cell
phone guided tours of cities and museums, and games that are independent of carrier
support such as Alternative Reality Games. In this market there is considerable
overlap between cell phone specific products and those available for other types of
mobile devices such as iPods and PDAs. With the rising popularity of smartphones
(mobile phone/PDA hybrids running Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM or Symbian
operating systems) and the iPhone, this market will continue to blur. Tracking this
market is also considerably more difficult, as transaction data is not readily available
through carrier bills to research companies like M:Media, In-Stat, and Nielsen
Mobile. And, since the market is dramatically smaller, there is less economic
incentive for these companies to track this segment.
On the other hand, operating independently of the carriers allows these
content producers to retain greater control of their product and a higher percentage of
their revenues. In some cases, a content producer will offer multiple avenues of
access and billing, thus straddling the line between carrier integration and
independence. For example, Talking Street produces cell phone tours of
Washington, D.C., New York and Boston, among other locations. The $5.95 price
for the Washington D.C. tour can be paid via credit card over the Internet or over the
phone directly to Talking Street. For consumer convenience, however, Talking
Street offers the option to bill the tour price through the carrier bill, accepting the
reduced revenue in favor of flexibility and security (for those customers concerned
about sending credit card information over the phone).

234
The genre of Alternative Reality Games also offers some examples of
independent business models. While these games are not specifically mobile media
productions, they are exemplary of the growing cross-media trends and their
business models could be applicable to mobile entertainment. The larger and better
known ARGs have primarily been marketing devices. Examples of this include The
Beast, an ARG promoting the film A.I., I Love Bees, an ARG promoting the video
game Halo 2, and The Lost Ring, promoting the 2008 Olympic Games. As a
marketing stunt, these games are free to play for the participant, their development
and execution funded by the marketing divisions of the promoted product. Two
major ARG production companies, the UK-based Mind Candy and US-based 42
Entertainment have each launched self-financing ARGs. Mind Candy’s Perplex
City, which included a £100,000 prize, incorporated puzzle cards that the company
sold through retailers. 42 Entertainment’s Cathy’s Book utilizes a retail component
along with advertising on the various web pages and online videos that are part of the
game’s content. The 42 Entertainment spin-off EDOC Laundry embeds codes in
graphic designs on t-shirts and other apparel, the codes leading towards the ARG
gameplay. Estimates vary for the size of the ARG community, as well as for revenue
of the leading ARG production companies. Mind Candy released figures of 55,000
registered players for Perplex City, though the number of regular players is likely
much lower.
192
Perhaps the most successful ARG to date (in terms of participation

192
Durman, Paul. “Game on for the future of advertising” The Sunday Times, February 25, 2007,
Business section.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article1433827.ece

235
numbers) was The Beast, created by a team at Microsoft for Warner Brothers. 42
Entertainment estimates that over three million players across dozens of countries
participated in The Beast. While this is a large number in terms of ARG
participation, comparison of this global figure with mobile video subscriptions in the
US alone at nearly five million indicates that the market forces for the two types of
entertainment are quite different.
Owing to their different goals and smaller audiences, art projects such as
Urban Tapestries, [murmur], 34N118W, and Tracking Agama and innovative
commercial ventures like Yellow Arrow (which combines an art project vibe with a
cell phone tour practicality) depend on corporate or civic arts sponsorship, or
university funding.
193
Yellow Arrow partly funded its enterprise by selling
merchandise, but with 15,000 participants and 50,000 stickers distributed throughout
New York in the first year and a half, its economics are not viable without additional
revenue of sponsorship and advertising.
194

Trends
By revenue, participation numbers and mindshare, the retail product forms of
mobile entertainment, especially ringtones, graphics, casual games and videos,
dominate the market. Why does the mobile industry push these forms leaving more
participatory forms underdeveloped? The first reason is ease—quick purchase

193
See, for example, the lengthy list of partners for the various instantiations of [murmur]:
http://murmurtoronto.ca/

194
http://countsmedia.com/secretcities

236
downloads and ringtones are a ready and repeating market, with the trail blazed by
downloadable music, wallpapers, screensavers and the like for the personal
computer. ARGs, art projects, and location-based games require substantial
investment of time, reducing the potential market. In addition, breaking the
conceptualization of the mobile phone as something more than a person-to-person
communication device has been slow in the United States (compared to Europe and
Asia). Individual downloads of electronic files are themselves point-to-point or
person-to-company transactions, and are thus more in line with less sophisticated
conceptualizations of the mobile phone as an interface device offering access to a
wide variety of media, services, products and entertainment forms. And,
entertainment is a conservative and risk-averse industry, preferring known products
(TV tie ins, computer games, etc.) much like the Hollywood film industry’s
predilection for pre-sold titles like Spiderman, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Lord of
the Rings, and the like.
Rather than taking risks and investing in innovative ideas that capitalize on
the networked nature of mobile phones, their mobility and their ubiquity, such as
Counts Media’s Yellow Arrow or It’s Alive’s Botfighters, the American
entertainment and wireless industries focus on repurposing their existing content for
the new medium. While this is an expected process of remediation during the initial
growth phase of the mobile medium, it ignores the artistic and cultural legacy that
exists within those media forms the industry seeks to shoehorn onto the mobile
handset. As Chapter 2 illustrates, the cultural imagination is full of examples of the

237
mobile phone as a narrative interface, as a signpost, as a means of transportation
between worlds, and as a talisman of power. Few of these characteristics are
activated by clips of David Letterman’s Top Ten List or highlights of an upcoming
Wrestlemania performance.
Many years from now, future historians may look back on this period and
select the introduction of the iPhone as the turning point for mobile media as a
cultural phenomenon. The conception of the mobile phone as a highly portable
device for person-to-person voice communications is changing now with a
generation of youth addicted to texting and instant messaging along with the cultural
cache of the iPhone—not that it does anything different than a variety of phones
have for many years, but it bursts the conception that email, text, mobile web devices
are difficult to use, suitable only to business “road warriors” and early adopters of
technology and gadgets.
But the iPhone is also a visible marker of a changing landscape. One trend
that will have a significant impact on mobile media entertainment, especially
narrative forms, is the rise of participatory culture. From the popularity of interactive
entertainment like console and PC video games to DIY video distribution sites like
YouTube to MMOGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life, entertainment forms
whereby the individual takes on a creative, contributory and authorial role are
becoming more and more popular. This preference for participation and creation is
reflected in user studies of mobile video subscribers. According to the Pew Research
Center, 3% of their survey respondents regularly view mobile video, and the

238
percentage is the same for recording mobile video. 18% reported having ever
recorded mobile video, while 10% had ever viewed mobile video.
195
While there is
certainly some measure of error in these statistics, owing at least to respondents who
counted accidental video recording while experimenting with a new handset, the
report clearly indicates a desire to participate and create on the part of some users.
In an innovative venture, HP Labs has sponsored a software platform and a
development community aimed at supporting this creative and participatory element
of today’s culture. Their Mediascape platform and Mscapers community is squarely
centered in the development of the narrative potential of mobile media.
196
The
Mediascape application is both a development platform and playback software for
compatible, location-aware mobile devices running Windows Mobile. The
development application allows for relatively simple association between media
content (images, audio files, video files) and actions (proximity to location, speed of
movement, etc.) Individuals can download the development platform for free, create
a mediascape experience and upload to the mscapers.com site. Interested players can
download the mediascape projects to their handsets. Some projects, such as the
“Riot 1831!” mediascape that guides the participant around Queen’s Square in
Bristol and dramatizes early 19
th
Century political unrest, are location specific.
Others, such as Duncan Speakman’s “Always Something Somewhere Else,” are
portable and invite participants to create connections in their mind between the

195
Horrigan, John. “Mobile Access to Data and Information” Pew Internet and the American Life
Project. 2008.

196
See http://www.mscapers.com

239
spaces they move through and the images and sounds presented to them by the
mediascape project.
The mscapers.com site also includes a forum for the community of
developers and players to participate in exchange of experiences, successes, and
failures. HP Labs’ deliberate efforts to create a community of practice falls in line
with another cultural trends that will impact the development of mobile media art
and entertainment. The rise of social networking and communities of practice—
including YouTube along with MySpace, Facebook, MMOGs, and to a lesser extent
ARG communities—bring together individuals into communities that enjoy a type of
entertainment and communicate with one another about it. This facilitates the
participatory aspect of culture, but it will also affect the economics of the mobile
industry. In addition to the March 2008 debut of MySpace Mobile on Sprint
network, bringing social networking to the mobile arena in a big way, younger
Americans exhibit a clear preference for purchasing mobile entertainment products
off-deck, but using Premium SMS transactions.
197
With the increase in social
networking, the challenge to marketers of attracting customers to their off-deck sites
will decrease, because of the power and speed of word-of-mouth and viral
marketing. At the same time, these early adopters will increase the amount of
financial transactions conducted through the carriers, possibly increasing carrier
profits but also pressuring carriers to streamline the backends for content providers.

197
M:Metrics US Report February 2007.

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Looking Forward
As the overview of the current business climate and the comparison to other
once-new media forms indicate, the future of mobile entertainment is an exciting
period of growth and experimentation, a future at once invigorating but murky and
fraught with unknowns. In 2006, market analysts were predicting 10% of the mobile
user base would be subscribing to mobile television and video services by 2008. In
2008, only 2% of the market subscribes to these services. It seems while 80% of the
market is interested in mobile television, most are unwilling to pay $15 per month
for the service.
198
Enter Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News
Corp, offering their vast cinematic and televisual holdings for viewing online and on
mobile in a free, ad-supported format. Does Hulu represent the right balance
between consumer desire, market and economic fundamentals, and technological
capability? Or will access to full episodes of The Simpsons on the mobile phone
prove nothing more than a novelty? That the practice of watching television is both
a powerful economic force and socially embedded practice makes the appeal of
porting that cultural activity to the new medium of the networked mobile device
enticing; and the capital costs incurred by the wireless carriers motivate rapid and
significant monetization of all activities across the medium. But, at the same time,
cultural and technological forces shape the use and potential of any medium, and my
goal here has been to shine some light on these components of the equation, more so

198
Kharif, Olga. “Mobile TV’s Weak U.S. Signal” Business Week, March 3, 2008.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2008/tc2008033_721418.htm?link_position=li
nk1

241
than the dime-a-dozen economic forecasts about “mobile entertainment”, usually
read exclusively as mobile television and ringtones
This situation calls to mind once again Carolyn Marvin’s contention that all
new media are introduced into a pattern of tension between old and new. The
preceding chapters have illustrated this tension, explored the overlooked artistic
associations at play in the cultural imagination, delved into older or traditional
entertainment forms ported to the new medium, and highlighted developing narrative
formats that combine the technological and ontological features of the mobile
medium with possibilities of the epistemological engagement people have with
contemporary culture and mediated lifestyles.
So, what is the result of this analysis of the cinematic/televisual history of the
telephone as a narrative device, the convergence of the television with the mobile
phone in the “mobisode”, and the creation of a voice and text based game-like
narrative experience? I am convinced of a few things: First, the cultural use of the
mobile phone is currently in flux, much as the telephone experienced a period of
widespread experimentation in its early development.
Second, while media producers, especially large entertainment
conglomerates, are recycling market-proven entertainment modes on the new
technology, this is part of the remediation process by which older media refashion
themselves to face the threat of new media, and new media are shaped by established
usage patterns. This is not a negative critique of this type of use of mobile media.
Rather, I think that video and television services on the mobile phone establishes a

242
degree of familiarity with mobile phones as sites of reception for narrative
information and entertainment, similar to the television in the home or the cinema.
As alluded to in Chapter 1, neither of these media that we now consider paragons of
leisure entertainment dominated by various genres of fictional narrative began as
narrative entertainment forms. The initial creators of the cinema, television,
phonograph all had different visions of the use of their inventions.
Third, uniting the televisual/cinematic history of the telephone as a narrative
device in film and television with the use of the mobile phone receiving narrative
entertainment on the handset, presents a new opportunity for narrative entertainment
forms. These new forms simultaneously use the phone for the delivery of the
entertainment product, much like mobisodes, as well as the control of that product,
much like the phone’s signposting role in Run Lola Run, as well as access to the
narrative components as in Sorry Wrong Number—in short, a new kind of narrative
experience using the mobile phone as the narrative interface. This idea suggests that
the cinematic legacy of the telephone investigated in Chapter 2 is part of the socially
and culturally embedded awareness of the telephone (and by extension the mobile
phone). This history privileges the mobile phone’s potential over other mobile
devices, such as the PDA or media player (iPod, Sony PSP, etc.), because of a more
direct connection with narrative interaction. At the same time, the mobisodes
investigated in Chapter 3 along with the variety of mobile projects with narrative
components discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 illustrate cultural practices engaging with

243
the contemporary moment and contemporary media and understanding this
engagement through narrative.
This coming to terms and experiencing our world through mobile media
narratives point to the future and speak to the importance of understanding these
developing media forms, regardless of their market position. Writing about the
social impact of the telephone on communities and at a time of significant growth
and impact also of television, Suzanne Keller notes that two modes of creating
contact between humans and their world: either bring the human to the world or
bring the world to the human.
We have lived by the first, and we are moving toward the second—toward
the electronic encounter with the world. This should permit us to experience
the world in a far less fragmented manner than heretofore and may restore to
us a wholeness and richness which the first industrial revolution destroyed.
199

Thirty years after Keller’s forecast, we have certainly achieved the electronic
encounter with the world. From the immersive and completely electronic encounter
of online worlds like Second Life to the world of business existing on the sidewalk
simultaneously with the social world, the world of news media existing in the palm
of the hand and the mobile phone a means of dislocating oneself from place and
community, the electronic encounter with the world is at hand. Much of postmodern
theory, though, decries not a wholeness to this experience but a greater
fragmentation, a disconnect from history, and a disjuncture with what is real. Films
like The Matrix offer a dystopian view of this electronic encounter with the world

199
Keller, Suzanne. "The Telephone in New (and Old) Communities" in The Social Impact of the
Telephone, 295.

244
and certainly the false wholeness the Matrix represents. But The Matrix’s view is
tempered by a strict divide between the virtual and the ‘real’, one separated and
crossed over by means of a hardwired telephone—a technological artifact of the
soon-to-be past. The mobile phone, though, can be a means, in the case of the
mobile narrative experience, of engagement, of uncovering and revealing layers of
place, community, story, history and human experience. It can be a means not of
creating a false wholeness, but rather creating a dynamic connectivity. A
connectivity that embraces a distributed and relational data set of
virtual/imaginative/electronic and real/physical/geographic/tangible components; a
connectivity that weaves together history, fiction, lived and live experience; a
connectivity that accommodates both the known and the unknown, as well as the
speculative imagination into both—all available to be stitched together by the
narratives in which we participate.

245
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259
Appendix A

Filmography—Telephone Films

24. Joel Surnow and Robert Cochrane, executive producers. Fox Television. 2001-.

711 Ocean Drive. Joseph Newman, dir. Columbia Pictures, 1950.

All the President's Men. Alan Pakula, dir. Warner Bros Pictures, 1975.

Aventure Malgache. Alfred Hitchcock, dir. British Ministry of Information, 1944.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Stephen Herek, dir. De Laurentis Entertainment
Group, 1989.

Blackmail. Alfred Hitchcock, dir. British International Pictures, 1929.

Bon Voyage. Alfred Hitchcock, dir. British Ministry of Information, 1944.

Cellular. David R. Ellis, dir. New Line Cinema, 2004.

Detour. Edgar G. Ulmer, dir. Producers Releasing Corporation, 1946.

Dial M for Murder. Alfred Hitchcock, dir. Warner Bros Pictures, 1954.

Doctor Who. BBC. 1963-.

Far from Heaven. Todd Haynes, dir. Focus Features, 2002.

Get Smart. Mel Brooks, Buck Henry, creators, NBC (1965-1969), CBS Television
1969-1970).

Halloween. John Carpenter, dir. Compass International Pictures, 1978.

In a Lonely Place. Nicholas Ray, dir. Columbia Pictures, 1950.

It's a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra, dir. RKO, 1946.

Long Distance. Marcus Stern, dir. Lascaux Pictures, 2005.

Lost Highway. David Lynch, dir. October Films, 1997.

Memento. Christopher Nolan, dir. Newmarket Films, 1997.

260

Nightmare on Elm Street. Wes Craven, dir. New Line Cinema, 1986.

Nikita. Luc Bresson, dir. Gaumont International, 1990

One Missed Call. Eric Valette, dir. Warner Bros Pictures, 2008.

Phantom of Liberty. Luis Buñuel, dir. Euro International Film/Twentieth Century
Fox Film, 1974.

Phone Booth. Joel Schumacher, dir. Twentieth Century Fox Film, 2002.

Phone. Byeong-ki Ahn, dir. Toilet Pictures/Buena Vista International, 2002.

Pillow Talk. Michael Gordon, dir. Universal Pictures, 1959.

Point of No Return. John Badham, dir. Warner Bros Pictures, 1993.

Run Lola Run. Tom Tykwer, dir. Westdeutscher Rundfunk/Sony Pictures Classics,
1998.

Scream. Wes Craven, dir. Miramax, 1996.

Sorry Wrong Number. Anatole Litvak, dir. Paramount Pictures, 1948.

Suspense. Lois Weber, dir. Rex Motion Picture Company, 1913.

The Blue Gardenia. Fritz Lang, dir. Warner Bros Pictures, 1953.

The Lonely Villa. D.W. Griffith, dir. Biograph, 1908.

The Matrix. Wachowski brothers, dir. Warner Bros Pictures, 1999.

“The Phony Alibi.” The Adventures of Superman. Warner Bros Television, 1952.

The Wire. David Simon, creator. HBO, 2002-2008.

When a Stranger Calls. Fred Walton, dir. Columbia Pictures, 1979.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Ruston, Scott W. (author)

Core Title When a story calls: the narrative potential of mobile media

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 06/04/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Entertainment,mobile phone,mobisode,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,telephones in film

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Fisher, Scott (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email sruston@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1305

Unique identifier UC1176821

Identifier etd-Ruston-20080604 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-83425 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1305 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Ruston-20080604.pdf

Dmrecord 83425

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Ruston, Scott W.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu