13 Jul Digital Hunter-Gatherers In Mobile Worlds
An Anthropological Perspective On The Need For A Home On Mobile Platforms
by Muriel Vernon
In the natural world, physical mobility of any species is generally an evolutionary indicator of complex intelligence like a brain. Living things that are stationary, like trees, do not need brains. Humans who move all the time, on the other hand, need extremely complex brains which have enabled us to move and adapt to even the most extreme climates and situations. But humans didn’t become more mobile because they were intelligent. Rather, mobility is what made us smart. Our ancestors became smarter precisely because they were mobile enough to meet the challenges of the limiting environments of new ecological niches. In other words, natural selection pressure acts on variation in a population and selects for advantageous traits best suited to the environment it occupies. Mobility is one of those traits that helped us populate the world.
Fast forward to mobile human life in the digital world as our newest ecological niche. Here, too, mobility bestows vast advantages to those who can not only physically but also digitally move anywhere anytime. Digital mobility in the 21st century supersedes the necessity to be physically present to participate in meaningful human social interaction, creation, labor, education, etc. As the lines between online and offline lives are blurring rapidly, we are less and less able to think about the technology which enables this as external devices disconnected from our sense of personhood. Mobile personhood is the result of curating, managing, planning, transforming, and experiencing our lives and those of others through data created on our mobile devices. But our data records are not just a product or reflections of us, they are us. Our digital data “footprint”, as data records are often called, is much more than that, which is evident in recent debates about data ownership centering on the question of “who should own our data footprints?”
But who “owns” our actual footprints? Does a footprint belong to the person who created it or does it belong to the person who owns the property it is created on? What is the value of an actual footprint? People who walk up and down Hollywood boulevard to stare at cemented hand and footprints of famous people travel millions of miles to see them, yet nobody cares about the millions of footprints they themselves make in the process. A footprint at a crime scene can decide exoneration or life in prison. A footprint in the sand is beautiful and romantic, yet a footprint on the carpet is a nuisance. Forensic analysts can tell a lot about people from just looking at footprints. Ancient footprints discovered by archaeologists have been used to trace anything from prehistoric human migration routes to prehistoric local human activity. But the value of these footprints is not just to reconstruct the record of some humans existing somewhere at some point in time – its value is also to explain who we are and how we got here today. That’s why mobile data is not a passive, static entity; it tells the story of our mobile personhood as it unfolds. It is living, interactive history.
Understanding how humans move in mobile worlds is like understanding the paradigm shift of human bipedalism. Walking upright enabled Homo sapiens to see what was happening above the grasslands while holding a simple stone tool. Today, walking upright enables Homo digitalis to see what is happening 10,000 miles away while holding a complex digital tool. Not much has changed and yet everything has changed. But thinking about human mobility, physically and virtually, also requires us to re-think how the concept of “home” operates in a world dominated by mobility. Human settlement is much younger than human mobility as we were hunters and gathers for much longer than we were sedentary individuals defined by domestication and increasing social complexity. So human mobility always came first. The concept of “home” implies stationary permanence that gives meaning to everything from human belonging to nation state boundaries. And yet we know that ideas about the meaning of “home” are cultural constructs that change over time and space. What is the meaning of “home” in digital worlds and what is its relationship to mobile activity?
In mobile worlds, and especially on mobile platforms that host millions of apps, we have returned to being hunters and gathers. Unlike in web browsers where we might make “home pages” or create individual websites, in mobile worlds we roam across apps, hunt or forage for resources, interact with other migratory tribes. We might set up temporary camp in a few apps but we don’t stay permanently; either we deplete the apps’ resources by swelling to unsupportable numbers or we experience an entirely new and unnatural phenomenon where an ecological niche disappears on us when the app makers decide to shut it down. Like our ancestors, we move on to better places because we are unencumbered by material goods to drag with us. And yet, we lose much of our ideational content that is critical social currency in the age of reviews, likes, comments, transactions, etc. The value of our content created cannot simply migrate with us like a herd of Zebu cattle migrates with the Wodaabe. In fact, humans have only managed to domesticate a few species that are suitable for migration; we are only at the very beginning to think about domesticating data that can migrate with us across apps. We are tied to it; we cannot leave it “at home” and roam on.
On the other hand, apps domesticate us over time because we adapt to its specific ecological niche conditions. We become sedentary on Facebook because our data lives there. Which means our mobile selves live there. Facebook enforces a natural selection pressure that acts on variation in the population by rewarding those who adapt to live in it while those who cannot successfully reproduce in it die out. The platform discourages us from leaving it just like material goods that are hard to move discourage human migration and favor settlement. And with settlement comes surplus production and population growth; Facebook users produce trillions of data units and it broke the 1 billion users mark in 2012. Moving and starting over is thus costly for the mobile app user who would have to leave valuable data behind.
Thinking about how mobile platforms for app use can address the need for users to connect mobile personhood with data ownership or migration and a sense of “home” belonging on mobile interfaces requires innovation. Parker, Alstyne and Choudary (2016) discuss competitive platform practices that discourage users from switching apps via multihoming. They note that “Multihoming occurs when users engage in similar types of interactions on more than one platform” and that “limiting multihoming is a cardinal competitive tactic for platforms” (213). Yet, the singular concept of “home” is a powerful and central ethos of human identity building that does not easily decouple from our modern mobile lives. The bridge connecting the need to be mobile in digital worlds to the need for a permanent place for one’s data to live is not fragmentation but integration. Instead of setting up multiple “homes” in apps, a better solution would be to build a home outside of apps but on an app-like platform; a “home page” so to speak on mobile interfaces.
Digital homes stocked with user data are to the “subscription generation” who prefers renting, streaming, sharing, and “prosuming” to actually owning what traditional homes were to the baby boomer generation. Whereas previous generations accumulated lots of material goods but left behind small communication records, modern humans are quickly reversing the trend. However, even ideational content must “live” somewhere while never being disconnected from the mobile user. Digital mobile homes would allow people to move in and out of apps because wherever they go their “home” follows, not unlike an actual mobile home. This would eliminate multihoming, which is fragmenting mobile user activity and most certainly user identities across apps.
However, all homes, even mobile homes, need to have domain identifiers like unique addresses for their owners. Web browsers host millions of individually owned websites, but a website cannot “sign in” to an app, only its owner. Similarly, with few exceptions, an app user cannot use one app ID to sign into other apps. A cross-app ID like [linket] solves this problem and coupled with a mobile data home in the form of a unique domain allows users to migrate data in and out of apps. For the first time then, our mobile hunters and gatherers can thus migrate their resources across different ecological niches and are able to hold on to them anywhere they go. This kind of hybridization of unencumbered interactive mobility without the loss of data artifacts created by mobile personhood would not only eliminate multihoming on different platforms, it would truly intertwine mobile identities with mobile spaces.
Although our human ancestors were always and already mobile, they had to contend with geophysical limits of the earth; humans cannot make the earth bigger than it is. In digital worlds, the possibility of terraforming (Boellstorff 2008) allows users to add infinite space via cloud computing which in turn allows for limitless data creation. Mobile personhood can thus expand infinitely in digital worlds, which is another reason why mobile data will quickly dwarf historical records of past generations. The archaeologist of the future will marvel at digging up the humble but vast beginnings of Homo digitalis. As Homo sapiens left behind a small but important physical record, we can only speculate about the ideational content they created; Homo digitalis on the other hand, has already outperformed all of their ancestors and past civilizations combined in terms of material and ideational content created. And yet, we are only just learning about them by way of trying to understand the story their data tells. [Linket] cross-app IDs and mobile domain homes are homo digitalis’ newest tools and accommodations in digital worlds.
References Cited
Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores The Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Parker G., Alstyne M., and Chaudary, S. 2016. Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming The Economy And How To Make Them Work For You. New York: W.W. Norton & Company
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