Abstract

Fluid Nexus is an application for mobile phones that is primarily designed to enable activists or relief workers to send messages and data amongst themselves independent of a centralized mobile phone network. The idea is to provide a means of communication between people when the centralized network has been shut down, either by the government during a time of unrest, or by nature due to a massive disaster. During such times the use of the centralized network for voice or SMS is not possible. Yet, if we can use the fact that people still must move about the world, then we can use ideas from sneaker-nets to turn people into carriers of data. Given enough people, we can create fluid, temporary, ad-hoc networks that pass messages one person at a time, spreading out as a contagion and eventually reaching members of the group. This enables surreptitious communication via daily activity and relies on a fluid view of reality. Additionally, Fluid Nexus can be used as a hyperlocal message board, loosely attached to physical locations.

Conceptual Motivation

What would happen if the mobile phone became a repository for data, transmitting its store to other mobile phones as they came into local proximity? Mobile phones are (in most cases) associated directly with people, but do not necessarily represent them, an important consideration given problems with over-determined representation in networks. Nevertheless, mobile phones travel with people and can be considered a proxy for the short-term, ad hoc, unconscious links between people as they travel about their day. These are links of a strange sort, because they do not necessarily represent the connections between people that are often attributed to edges in social networks. Rather, they simply refer to local proximity, dying away as soon as one has passed someone else on the street. Additionally, mobile phones provide ever increasing amounts of storage space, and many come with a form of ad-hoc networking already: Bluetooth. We could consider the possibility of using short-term Bluetooth connections to share forbidden, surreptitious, and/or useful data amongst mobile phones within the Bluetooth range, hoping that blanketing all phones within an area, coupled with geographic dispersion of people, might enable the transmission of data over distances not otherwise possible.

Thus the person using the mobile phone becomes part of a "sneaker-net", carrying data that is highly sensitive but possibly without knowledge of its contents. The "links" between the current "node" and other nodes are serendipitous, making any determination of a network structure impossible and unnecessary: the network is, for many purposes, simply a random one that would be different for each particular data transmission.

This form of network is therefore constructed partially as a response to concerns about representation in networks. First, it does not try to represent people, yet it uses what people are good at: geographic travel and random interconnections. Second, the network is used for a political and activist end, enabling those who would otherwise be marginalized the ability to subvert the dominant power. Third, the network structure is entirely undetermined, with any definition of structure being undetermined. This differs from other work such as TxTMob that used lists for wide dissemination of data on mobile phones; the networks were thus pre-determined. This is a type of hybrid network that uses the power of people to make short-term links but without explicitly trying to represent them within a model.

Fluid Nexus currently exists as a prototype that runs on Nokia Series 60 phones running Bluetooth. I have additionally written a proof-of-concept version for the Google Android platform, however it is not fully functional due to deficiencies in the Android Bluetooth programming interface. As mobile phone platforms become more and more open over the next decade (as witnessed by the opening of Nokia's Symbian and Google's Android platforms, not the "semi-openness" of Apple's iPhone platform ), applications like Fluid Nexus become possible. Fluid Nexus requires a certain mass of people for its use, and the recycling of phones from the Global North to the Global South, along with the opening up of mobile phone platforms, will provide more potential users in the near future.

Historical Motivations

Lebanon 2006

During the summer of 2006 I was horrified as I read the news each day, watching the bombardment of Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The bombing of large parts of Beirut were especially alarming and distressing. At that time I began to read the blog of Marzen Kerbaj, a musician and artist living in Beirut. Over the course of war, Mazen attempted to post his notebook sketches each day, but often ran into network problems, consequences of the war: "i can see the blog again sometimes and sometimes not. must be a connection problem." During this time it was clear that the oft-stated belief that the Internet would be immune to a nuclear attack was wrong: that even a country that had a decent number of Internet users and thus access points (Lebanon) would potentially lose its connection in any drawn-out conflict. Thus I considered other forms of data transmission, namely mobile phones, and the possibility of using mobile phones as a vehicle for transmitting data outside of a war zone and into another locality where it might be safer and easier to transmit the data to a wide variety of people. This would be based on the idea that information still still gets out of dangerous zones, no matter the conflict; therefore, if we could design a system that would potentially spread this information to a wider number of people, outside of the accepted and (likely) monitored network, we might be more effective. Witnessing this event from afar was the primary motivating factor for Fluid Nexus.

Burma, Fall 2007

The protests in the Fall of 2007, first with Buddhist monks and then later with members of the general population, were the largest the country had seen since 1988. Given the near-total control the military junta has on the infrastructure of the country, it was astonishing---and heartening---that anyone was able to get information out and to external media outlets. Indeed, even things like mobile phone service were cut, leaving only landline connections. What might be the possibility, then, of using technology to spread information in tightly-controlled situations such as this? Could we use the movement of people as a proxy for the movement of data? Would Fluid Nexus be one potential way to spread necessary information?

Videos

Please find links below to videos about Fluid Nexus, since I cannot embed Vimeo clips here.

Fluid Nexus Background Video

Fluid Nexus Project Video

Technical Details about Fluid Nexus

Technical Details for Fluid Nexus from Nick Knouf on Vimeo.

Conceptual take on theories of networks

For a more conceptual take on our critique about political representation in networks, see either Critiques of Networks -- Theoretical bits for Fluid Nexus or a paper I presented at the ISEA conference entitled Reinterpreting Networks of People as Fluid for Political Purposes.