Hello! My name is Nicholas Konieczny and I will be a new student in your class starting on Wednesday Jan 28th. To be perfectly honest, I’m taking this class because it was the only production track class that I could add to stay on track for May graduation, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the subject matter.
Being and older student (I’m 30) I can still remember the world before the internet and before the ubiquity of mobile media. I watched the beginnings of cell phone culture emerge. I remember dial up! I remember AOL! I remember when no one thought text messaging would catch on, when people would actually say “I hate texting, just call me!”. Watching how all these things progressed to where we are now, it starts to become easier to see where the trends are headed. We are quickly becoming a global culture linked together through our cell phones and other mobile platforms. Everyday I communicate with people from across the globe on my cell phone whether through tweets, web forums, image boards, or direct messaging. It’s a tremendously fascinating thing to be linked like this considering that in my freshman year of high school almost no one had a regular old “Zack Morris-y” style cell phone, let alone the fancy touch screen pocket computers we call cell phones today. I never thought I’d be able to ask someone in Germany, or Denmark, or wherever in the English speaking world about their preferred method for mic-ing a snare drum while sitting on the toilet at work. Or to be able to stream the complete run of Twin Peaks while making my daily train commutes. It really still astounds me every day what we’re capable of today with our tablets and cell phones… Jesus, I’m starting to talk like an old man…
As far as what I hope to get out of this class, well, I’d be lying if I didn’t say my degree in May, but also I’d just like to get maybe a wider perspective on where we’re headed as a mobile society. What the future of human interaction will look like, for good or bad, as we progress down this path. Really, all this tech is super new, like I said, I was a teenager in the age of dial up and AOL, so just thinking about the possibilities of where we’re headed is really mind bending. To me, it already feels like were living in a William Gibson novel at t
his point.
But with all this talk about the future of mobile media and where we’re heading with it, I still feel like the peak of mobile tech (to me at least) was around 2002 when this Nokia was the single greatest cell phone ever made. I had one of these fall out of my pocket on The Great American Scream Machine in the early oughts and survive the fall with nothing but a small crack. No fancy pants iPhone or Galaxy Note is going to do that! Plus it came pre-loaded with the best mobile game ever — Snake.
Citations:
I used to be with “it”: posted by YouTube user OriginalDip on April 27,2014, accessed on January 27, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV0wTtiJygY
[Untitled photograph of the infamous Nokia “brick” phone]. Retrieved January 27th from http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/04/4a/e4/044ae4cf28a238a3a7b182d591c796cd.jpg
My dream is to work for GQ Magazine one day. I feel like it’s coming very soon. It’s something I can see myself being included in at some point in my life.
Mobile Media, Spring 15 
