Commentary: Redefining Mobile Entertainment

"Handheld devices, in particular, have trouble holding our attention in quite the same way as IMAX screens and immersive environments, but they weren't really meant to. I mean, how long can you stare at your watch? And even though a Gameboy can hook a 14-year-old into its Liliputian reality for hours at a time, and an iPod can envelop us (via earplugs) in its musical swirl, is the "entertainment" model of captivation appropriate for wireless mobile devices? I don't think so.

A playful mobile device need not entrap its owner within its own RAM. Rather, it can connect the owner with other people, the environment, or the temporal reality in new ways. Who is available? What is around me? What's going on right now? Instead of enter-taining, these devices might do better to inter-tain us -- that is, hold our connection to other people, places and things. "
--Douglas Rushkoff
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