ICT mobility research in Finland: From immaterial consumption to material sustainability?

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ICT mobility research in Finland:
From immaterial consumption to material sustainability?  2 The source of inspiration for these projects was the success of mobile communication businesses, especially Nokia, but a scientific approach to mobilities was still unclear. Scholars working on mobility foresaw that people's social relations would increasingly be defined and mediated by ICT. Hence, people's lifestyles could also be increasingly understood in terms of their daily computer-mediated mobility. 3 Finnish cultural historians saw new mobile media and entertainment technologies as a way to reduce the tedium of mundane traveling. 4 Despite these early efforts, the paradigmatic shift toward the study of a wide range of mobilities did not manage to make a real breakthrough in the Finnish social sciences at that time. Comparatively small investments in basic transport infrastructure (e.g. road, railroads, and air traffic), the unprofitability of many regional airports, and difficulties in providing fast broadband networks in the least urbanized areas, among other things, probably restrained scholarly interest in advancing this area of research.

Sakari
The aim of this essay is to review the most recent studies on the relationship between ICT and mobility in Finland. The review is predominantly limited to international publications that were published in the 2010s. However, some excursions into older literature are made to relate this later research to its historical roots. In regards to ICTs, studies on portable devices as well as technologies and applications that enable the movement of information are included in the review. The essay is organized around three thematic sections. The review ends with a concluding section which presents arguments on the current state of research. One key argument is derived from each thematic section.

Contextualization of ICT mobility research
Historically, the Nordic welfare state, which provided a highly-skilled labor force by means of a free education system, and a determined research and innovation policy, contributed greatly to the rise of the mobile communication business in the 1980s and 1990s. 5 The role of the Finnish welfare state was most outstandingly acknowledged in The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model written by Castells and Himanen. 6 Although this historical backdrop is widely recognized by researchers, the policies that are framed to promote the development, adoption, and use of ICTs have received considerably little scholarly attention in Finland. Niemi and her colleagues have described how the government has guided the development and the use of ICT in the education system. 7 More recently, Finland's information society strategies have been analyzed to understand how mobilities are politically promoted in the country. 8 Taipale Statistical social research in Finland has also noticed the significance of the context of ICT use. Statistical inquiries indicate that the context of use -separated into ubiquitous context (the presence of digital/virtual services), social context, and work/task context -does not sufficiently account for the use of mobile social media services in Finland. However, these contextual factors are considerably more powerful predictors for the use of mobile entertainment and messaging services. 12 These studies clearly re-assert the role of contextual factors as predictors of mobility patterns and mobile communication. However, what they do not make apparent is that new location-based ICT services also have potential to make service users (not only researchers) more aware of their physical whereabouts and social surroundings. For instance, mobile services that visualize the geographical location of a person or that of his/her friend on a map, or personalized location-based ads that pop up while browsing the Internet en route, make the ambient geographical (and to some extent also social) surroundings of a user easier to grasp.
Inkinen's study on the use of wireless technology and networks in the distribution of travel information sheds some light on this issue. 13 However, his study shows that the use of online services which provide information on nearby places through wireless technologies in Helsinki, Finland, is still in its infancy. Similarly, studies that investigate the use of interactive displays in the city of Oulu, Finland, show that the utility of such displays is questioned by users. 14 Overall, it turns out that although context matters in the use of ICT, the intended uses of many new location-based services and the actual utilization of these services does not easily converge.

The immateriality of ICT mobility
Current literature shows that researchers are, as in the past, geared to analyzing and understanding mobile ICTs as conduits of information -something that is thoroughly immaterial by its nature. 15 This characteristic deserves more scholarly attention as it is definitely not only typical of the investigated Finnish research. If we consider ICT tools as physical and concrete objects, it appears that they provide many affordances other than information and data. 16 These affordances are typically studied by scrutinizing what kinds of properties users associate with the object (e.g. a smart phone is small, thin, fits in a pocket).
Such analyses have, however, remained few in Finland, although work on the so-called new or neo-materialism is on the rise. 17 Strandell's article, mentioned above, is a step in this direction. In her analysis the immateriality of communication and the physical space of cell phone use are tightly tied together. Also the study of Vartiainen and Hyrkkänen, which presents findings on the electronic tools used by locally and globally mobile employees, includes information on how the material aspects of ICT tools are connected to their usage patterns in work. 18 According to this study, globally mobile people mainly use very basic and common devices, such as cell phones, PCs, and laptops. However, this population carries them not only to their second work place, but often to their third. By contrast, mobile workers moving at a local level, utilize more specific ICT tools (such as multipurpose PDAs) and take them fewer places.
This shows that beyond their capacity to convey information, the physical properties of digital tools (size, weight, portability etc.) affect their usefulness in locally and globally mobile work.
Taipale's study on the affordances of paper/pen and screen/keyboard in reading and writing puts the main focus on the materiality of digital technologies. He shows that although college students in Finland appreciate the portability of electronic reading and writing tools such as laptops, tablets and cell phones, they associate many deficiencies with them as well.
When compared with paper and a pen, for instance, the dependency on electricity, poor usability outdoors and in sunlight, and a certain lack of personality are, according to the studied students, the defects of digital reading and writing tools. 19 From usage and consumption to sustainability? Also users' unwillingness to invest more than a small amount of money in mobile communication is evident. The same study also re-confirms that men still value more technical features in cellphones -even if they do not always use them -and that female users appreciate design and practicality. Haverila has also explored gender differences in the preferences and use of smartphone functions among nineteen-to twenty-five-year-old undergraduate students in Finland. While for women price, aesthetics, design, and safety (in terms of radiation) matter more than for men, men report higher levels of business use than women. 22 A slightly different approach to the use of ICT (and physical) mobilities is presented by Taipale. 23 He examines how the form and frequency of travel is linked with the use of ICT tools. The findings reveal that the use of traditional private modes of traveling, especially that of a private car, is combined with the use of fewer and more stationary large-sized ICTs. On the other hand, younger people prefer public transportation and combine such traveling with the use of small-size and portable ICTs. While the former group of users is mainly illustrative of carbon-intensive mobility, the latter takes advantage of clearly sustainable forms of public transportation. Overall, recent literature is dominated by approaches that elaborate the form and volume of ICT use. By contrast, the socio-ecological implications of the increased ICT consumption and sustainability have received considerably little attention up till now.

Concluding remarks
This last part of the essay shortly elaborates the state of the reviewed field of research and presents three arguments in order to pave the way for future research. First, it is obvious that researchers are well aware of the need to situate ICT mobility studies in terms of geographical place and the social context of use. However, a somewhat distorted view that ICTs are otherwise used in a universalistic manner that overcomes the limits of time and space persists. This partly stems from the technological standardization that unifies ICT experiences in a number of countries. In can be argued that national and regional differences in the cultural history of ICT were more obvious in the past. For example, before the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), the Nordic countries had their own Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) network, which made visible the peculiarity of Nordic countries.
Today a GSM standard and few competing operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows) are dominant across the world. Hence, technological standardization seems to contribute to the suppression of the local cultural history of technological development. In recent Finnish literature on ICTs, this is manifest in the almost categorical ignorance of the role of local, regional, and national cultures as well as that of history and language. In this regard, a recent book edited by Kangas is an exception as it shows some cultural differences in the use of new media between Finland, Japan and South Korea. 24 More generally, this phenomenon is reflected in sociological interpretations that propose there is a worldwide need for autonomy and connection that makes people adopt personal communication technologies in a similar manner. 25 Second, a constant analyzing of portable ICT tools as the media of digital mobility and as the reshapers of social structures has also blinded researchers to recognizing the significance of the materiality of ICTs. Related to this, third, the field of ICT mobility research has not yet seriously begun to investigate the most tangible and concrete consequences of such mobility in Finland. There are some investigations on the non-material consequences of ICT use, such as cyberbullying, yet sociological studies on issues such as electronic waste are still to be conducted. 26 This review also revealed a distinct incongruity between the politically recognized needs for sustainable ICT and the recent literature that has stuck to studying the increased consumption of ICT tools and applications. More research along these lines is needed as the lifespan of new ICT tools is shortened and the socioecological impacts of ICT use in general, and new applications in particular, remain nebulous.