and Grebe attempted to capitalize on the public’s love affair with radio by making portable devices for cars, camping trips, and other summertime activities.19 The ability to be in public spaces and reach a faraway place fascinated early adopters. From the beginning, the design of mobile devices was conceived with particular public places in mind, namely, on vacation, in the car, and in nature. The technology may not have been reliable, but the brief portable craze of the 1920s provided a glimpse of Americans’ desire for mobile entertainment to enhance their experience of public spaces.
Transistor Radio Era
Portable radios became more technologically advanced in the 1930s and 1940s, as the components became smaller, but the devices did not become truly popular until the invention of the transistor in the early 1950s. Transistors replaced the bulkier and more energy-intensive Audion tubes, making portable radios inexpensive and long lasting. The end of the Second World War, the development of America’s automobile culture, and the beginnings of teen-focused marketing had a massive effect on mobile media. Portable radios provided people with a sense of independence and control over space, as it enabled people to fill their surroundings with music. The rise of the teen audience changed the music industry, as record labels began making rock ’n’ roll music that teens could conceal from their parents via personal headphones.20 Schiffer writes, “The shirt-pocket portable or, simply, the transistor (as it was called then) became a metaphor for freedom and independence; the right to express, in music and in things, the style and tastes of youth.”21 The popularity and utility of the transistor to youth audiences came as a surprise to manufacturers that originally thought these devices would be too expensive for young people and targeted adults instead.22 Teens’ desire for control and the ability to evade adult supervision guided the design of mobile devices. Not only did the needs of the audience dictate the direction of the technology, but the aesthetics of the music adjusted to be more conducive to headphones.23 Throughout the late 1950s, portable-radio makers such as Zenith directed their advertising to American teens by inserting the devices in teen hangouts like the soda shop.24 As American radio makers competed with Japanese companies, prices dropped, and portable radios became ubiquitous by the end of the 1960s.25
Transistor radios concealed music and allowed listeners to create a “soundscape” to accompany their movements through the world. The composer Murray Schafer initially described soundscapes as an urban-planning concept that can be deployed to institutionalize and organize public space.26 The mobile device allows the listener to make his or her own soundscape, potentially against institutional design. Mobile devices provide both a customizable and a clandestine audio experience while also giving listeners a sense of control over their surroundings. Shuhei Hosokawa has found that this customization and feeling of autonomy provided by portable radios only increased as mobile devices evolved from transistors to the cassette players of the 1980s.27 Hosokawa explains that the feeling of autonomy provided by mobile devices is most obviously observed in the way people move through public space. The listener’s soundscape can augment his or her bodily experience and can affect the listener’s gait and passage through space.28 Thus, listening to a mobile device provides the user with an enhanced reality and the power to choose a route through everyday life.
Portable TV Era
Portable television devices also provided a similar sense of control and autonomy over public space but with an added visual element. Spigel describes a 1967 Sony advertisement for portable television that compares mobile viewing to the romantic intimacy of the drive-in movie.29 The Sony ad offered this fantasy as a way of differentiating portable television from its more domesticated older sibling. The appeal and the target demographic are similar to the teen-oriented advertising of the transistor radio era. In both cases, the concept of the portable device as a transgressive technology is foregrounded. Spigel makes the point that the desire for mobility in television was often couched in gendered assumptions.30 A portable screen meant that people could personalize their viewing, since men and women did not have to watch the same show if they had an additional portable screen. Spigel explains that, contributing to the gender divide, within the rhetoric of the 1960s “New Frontier” political ethos, men were depicted as “sportsmen and adventure seekers.”31 Portable television, and most new media devices, target men as the early adopters, those users willing to test the limits of the technology. This gender split is one that Spigel sees continuing in later mobile technologies such as the home office and the mobile worker.32 During the 1960s, mobile technology continued to blur the distinctions between public and private through the depiction of gender distinctions that reinforced divisions between public and private spheres.
At the same time, portable television offered the family a way to bring their home with them on the road. Spigel describes the desire in the 1960s to bring the comfortable and family-unifying activities of television viewing on the road.33 In the 1950s, television addressed the suburban family by offering them a “window on the world,” which helped them stay connected to the nation from the comfort of the living room. The portable-television ads of the 1960s advocate leaving the home, enjoying nature, and bringing a piece of home with you. The rhetoric of portable television encouraged a more passive media experience for mobile devices than the one presented by portable radio devices. Mobile television suggested that, instead of using mobile devices to create a soundscape to enhance a public place, you could ignore your surroundings by making any place your living room. Both technologies shared an emphasis on using mobile devices as personal technologies that allowed you to transform your surroundings. Yet they differed in terms of the active versus passive engagement with public space. Listening to a portable radio, a person uses the soundscape as he or she travels through space, sometimes transgressing the restrictions of traffic laws. Watching a portable television, a person is in public space but retreats to a makeshift living room.
Car Phones and Pagers
Mobile phones continued the evolution of mobile devices that blurred distinctions between private and public space. Unlike portable radio or television, these devices facilitate communication between users. Early car phones and pagers offered a way for the outside world to intrude on the private sphere. Mobile phones have long been associated with work; early adopters were mainly taxi drivers, truckers, emergency services, and the military.34 Other personal mobile communication devices, such as pagers, were associated with particular professions, such as medicine, because these tools allowed busy multitaskers to receive messages without disturbing other daily activities.35 Bell and AT&T launched the first commercially available car-mounted telephones in 1978. Despite international appeal, there was a strong feeling in the US from engineers, marketers, and managers that these new phones were more viable in cars than as portable phones carried by people. This insistence on car phones over personal mobile devices reflects the cultural attitudes around this technology, the intended audience, the current technological capabilities, and the American preoccupation with automobile travel. Correspondingly, mobile phones became associated with “businessmen” extending their workday, transforming the time spent commuting into productive work time.36 The mobile phone shifted from being a trapping of the business elite to a status symbol of the wealthy in the late 1980s.37 Eventually this technology became the tool of many tradespeople traveling from client to client.38 The expense and limitations of car phones helped to shape their initial usage and cultural association with work. Unsurprisingly, the flexible labor associated with the mobile worker continued to influence the use and design of mobile devices.
Walkman Era
In the 1980s, a new technology surpassed the portable radio in popularity: the mobile cassette player. The most popular model of these was Sony’s Walkman. The cultural studies theorists Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus famously used the Sony Walkman to demonstrate the usefulness of applying the circuit of culture methodology to an analysis of a cultural product.39 Throughout Du Gay et al.’s analysis, there is documentation of Sony’s advertising campaigns for the technology. These ads emphasized youth, mobility, and originality; the Walkman represented the cutting-edge of miniaturization technology and 1980s personalization.40 Sony created numerous versions of the Walkman to attract consumers of various self-definitions.41 The
