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The growing dynamic of mobile internet, today accounting for 12% of all internet traffic,[ii] signals a new ecosystem where living bodies, machines, networks, code, data, territory and time interact.

as a way of consolidating their strictly neoliberal economic policy.

The hundreds of thousands of apps, available in just a few years, originate from the intersection of two factors:

The desire and necessity to have simple, functional and fast devices able to do specific tasks on the go.

the operative skills to develop apps for popular mobile platforms such as Iphone Operating System (IOS) or Google Android. 

Apps galore

Apple likes to play on the ambiguity in a form of propaganda that exalts the “revolutionary” spirit of technological innovation

The first iPhone, in 2007, inaugurated the new phase of the cognitive era, just as the PC heralded the decline of the industrial phase. Five years later, Apple no longer has a monopoly: hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets are sold every year and the total number of these active devices will be soon 2 billion. It took the PC thirty years to reach this level of diffusion.

War over the immaterial

Often these machines play opposite functions: as a tool to create new forms of horizontal communication and social interaction or as bait for a capillary exploitation.

A political analysis of mobile devices

The PC became a liberating tool for social cooperation in the workplace of a booming third-sector.

In the following phase, the spread of the first mobile devices – cellphones and laptops – provided an initial impulse for a blurring of life and work, imposing with mobile calls, emails or SMS a new type of real-time processing, regulating the rhythms of life

In the new biohypermedia environment, the key change lies in the combination of miniaturizing and mobilizing these pieces of equipment, allowing them to always be within the body’s reach in any context.

they augment physical reality[ix] with every kind of information – commercial, cultural, ecological – and act more and more as biomedical sets for the control, correction and support of our vital biological functions.

The PC has a central function as the medium for linguistic and written processes - its typical uses often tied to the logical concatenation of thought and the priority management of sequences over time.

But mobile devices concentrate complex perception of stimuli in terms of spatial organization and intervene in emotional responses. PC work in this way occupies our left hemisphere, while the continual interactions of a smartphone engage the right hemisphere.

In contemporary neoliberalism, these devices become an essential means of rent and profit, through a fine capture of what we generate by living with them and using them. At one and the same time technocracy and financial oligarchies find here an ideal medium to extend their influence and their control of individuals in space and time.

Marketing and communication campaigns portray these devices as commodity fetishes, characterizing a new phase of capitalism often described as cognitive because based on knowledge.

In the sphere of multinational ICT[x] Corporations a war is being waged over the design and deployment of immaterial enclosures

Even though all this is based on freeware and open source, they trick us into believing that the iPhone 5, Windows 8 or Jellybean[xi] are miracles that descend from Mount Olympus and for which we should be grateful as to the gods.

Unlike automobiles or, to a lesser degree, PCs, the use value of new mobile devices is no longer determined merely by the initial design but can be moulded by the final user.

The innumerable websites, blogs and forums in every language globally blooming and growing are a workshop for worldwide exchange where the digital means are developed that could be used to withdraw workers both from precarity and  from total submission to a life of labour.  

Microsoft is no less defensive of its monopoly: with Intel and other accomplices, they introduced a new firmware to boot Windows 8 PCs that, substituting the old BIOS,[xv] makes it impossible or very complicated to install Linux or other operating systems on new laptops.

Despite hesitations related to “security” problems, today companies allow or even oblige people to use their own devices

So, if you were one of those many who found the latest tablet, smartphone or hybrid touch device under the tree this year, be aware that you won’t be the only one pleased: under the regime of precarity, bring your own device if you want to survive. 

A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects, he suggests. He also says that evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.

This, he claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.

Dr Sigman says that there is research that suggests the number of hours people spend interacting face-to-face has fallen dramatically since 1987, as the use of electronic media has increased.

Dr Sigman also argues using electronic media undermines people's social skills and their ability to read body language.

Wikipedia has encountered particular difficulties with censorship in the past in China. The Chinese government periodically blocked the site between 2004 and 2008, when restrictions were lifted to coincide with the Olympics.

What really excites Mr Wales is the idea of many people in the developing world using the internet for the first time.

"Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with."

This could have huge implications for governments which are unused to dealing with a well informed networked public. However, Mr Wales acknowledged one potential pitfall of all the extra users blogging and adding other material.

social networking tools are just the beginning of something, that they could lead to ways of finding and interacting with one another we never imagined, but whatever happens, you can't dismiss these tools easily. They are taking us somewhere exciting, but we have to work out how we deal with the fading boundaries these tools have left in their wake and that means rewriting our social rules as we go along

expand the pool of people we have the opportunity to meet to near limitless possibilities. We're no longer restricted to or rely on people in our neighborhood, church, or workplace to provide the interaction we desire

None of these social networks even excited at the beginning of the decade. While these figures may be mere numbers for many people, the impact of social network goes far and deep. Here are a few areas in which social networks have had lasting and arguably permanent effects.

social networks have altered the operational model of politics and public service

Facebook

touchstone for how non-profit organizations, environmental activities, and political factions reach out to thousands of potential volunteers and donors

IN THE battle between David Einhorn and Apple over the latter's $137 billion cash hoard lies a deeper lesson about the outlook for the economy. Mr Einhorn, an activist investor, says Apple clings to its money out of a “Depression mentality”. Perhaps. But the more mundane explanation is that Apple, like many of the world's big companies today, is generating more cash from its existing product line than it can usefully plough back into new projects.

Today, we all know Apple’s products, and a lot of us own one. Yet it is hard to identify the impact they or any of today's social-media giants have had on productivity. I was at first delighted with the convenience and freedom to read documents, check Twitter and search the web on the iPad mini I got in December, but it occurred to me recently that this was at best an incremental improvement over doing it on my BlackBerry or laptop. It also provides me with many more ways to waste time. As Tom Toles, the Washington Post’s cartoonist, puts it:

No doubt some of those YouTube videos were being watched over Apple products. Not that I blame Apple for Penney’s culture (after all, Google owns YouTube), but it is a reminder that the social-media revolution has been a mixed blessing. Yahoo at one time stood atop the Internet but the ability of its workers to do their job from anywhere may be backfiring on productivity

are genuine benefits of social media and the related hardware. In its first few decades the computer/internet revolution re-engineered business processes, enabling companies to interact with each other and customers in more ways at lower cost than ever, producing measurable, bankable results. Now, it’s leading to brand-new consumer products, many of whose  benefits are unmeasured or unmeasurable.

"There is an obvious place for the semantic Web in life sciences, in medicine, in industrial research," Shadbolt said, and that is where most of the focus is today."We're looking for communities of information users to show them the benefits," he said. "It's an evolutionary process."The big question is whether it will move on next to businesses or consumers, he said. A consequence of an open and diffuse Internet, he noted, is that unexpected outcomes can emerge from unanticipated places.

"People keep asking what Web 3.0 is," Berners-Lee said. "I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource."Said Sheehan: "I believe the semantic Web will be profound. In time, it will be as obvious as the Web seems obvious to us today."

LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.

But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."

The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)

So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.

Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.

Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.

That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.

Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.