Blame it on the Karsh\Hagan creative brief. It continually reminds me that people today lack patience. When they want information, entertainment and products, they want them now.
In 2009, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone. Karsh\Hagan has launched mobile podcasting for one client. And a mobile advertising campaign for another. But to fully understand the possibilities and pitfalls of the location-based, hip-pocket media of the future, I wanted to immerse myself in it. So I deleted my browsers and pledged that for at least a week, I’d access the web entirely through my email application, RSS reader, and mobile device.
Almost immediately, I hit a snag in the form of the Karsh\Hagan accounting department. My timesheets needed to be entered online. The website wasn’t navigable on my Blackberry. Sigh. Fail. Reinstall Firefox.
But after a few days, I started to get into the swing of things. If Web 0.0 was about programming, Web 1.0 was about design, and Web 2.0 was about conversation, then the mobile web is about immersion. I began to treat information not as something I had to find, but as something that flowed around me. Where’s a new restaurant in LoDo with an average consumer rating of three stars or higher? Will the weather this afternoon be nice enough to head to the pool? And what’s on my schedule this morning? My mobile device made my TV, my email client and my calendar application irrelevant in a way that my computer never had.
When I did consume traditional media, I used my Blackberry to experience it on multiple levels. For instance, one night I happened across the opening credits of a detective show named Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. I did a quick check on the PBS website to learn what it was about. And then watched it while scanning through Wikipedia to explore the show, the book it was based on, and the culture of southern Sweden. (And then I Twittered my observations.)
Mobile browsers don’t play nice with a lot of trendy websites. Several ostensibly hip online destinations didn’t play at all for me, while blogs and wikis worked like a charm. But I was able to download enough web-specific apps, like TwitterBerry, that my mobile browser’s deficiencies never really bothered me.
Eventually, I eased back into using my Mac’s browser. I spend at least a couple hours a day at my desk; it seemed silly to grab my Blackberry every time I needed to find a word on thesaurus.com. (And there’s those timesheets I have to fill out.) But there’s no doubt that my experience was positive. The Internet too often encourages you to sit staring at a screen. With the mobile Internet you’re still staring at a screen, but at least you’re not sitting down anymore.
