Research Overview Two Pebbles and a Poem: The Landscapes of the Mobile Telecoms Industry

Iwas inside: inside a mobile phone manufacturer research and development campus. The world I had left behind disappeared beyond the event horizon of the security gate, my visitor pass and long-negotiated non-disclosure agreement propelling my body with ease through the fortification of the electrified fence. From now on I was forbidden to use my cameraphone, forbidden my voice recorder. All I was allowed was this: my ethnographic notebook and pencil. I took a long careful breath, tasting the air of this enclave of mobile phone designers and engineers, a few minutes’ motorway drive from Heathrow Airport, near London. The air was thick with the coltan scent of wireless transmission (Smith, 2011), of Wi-Fi and 3G pulse-coded modulations, thick with the exhaust of 737s, whose metal pulses of people transported employees daily around the corporate network of the company. The walls of the three buildings before me were white stone, their thrice-dimmed, fact-neutralizing windows chlorinated clean green. The patches of grass and low bushes were clipped and manicured. CCTV cameras curled out in bold filigree from every edge and cornice. In this landscape future mobile telecoms devices were given form and function. This was a place where the future was dreamed, designed, and demo-ed. And I was here, as an ethnographer, to experience those moments in my bones, to write of that experience. I stepped up to the revolving glass door entrance. Sun glittered through the summer gauze of cloud and, for a moment, there was a glittering reply at my feet. I looked down. Where the stone wall met the earth there was a soil bed of silica-rich pebbles, a boundary that encircled the whole building. I reached down and hefted one in my hand (Figure 1), watched as the mica grains winked back at me and the sky. Pebbles, what did they evoke? I wondered. What enchantments did they weave for the designers within? I crossed their siren call and went in to listen. The design studio was high up a staircase, and then behind a glass door that few people were allowed to enter. The mobile phone designers were huddled together at