Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media 9781845208134, 1-84520-813-7

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MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS

Berg New Media Series ISSN 1753-724X Edited by Leslie Haddon, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, and Nicola Green, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey he series aims to provide students with historically-grounded and theoretically-informed studies of significant aspects of new media. he volumes take a broad approach to the subject, assessing how technologies and issues related to them are located in their social, cultural, political and economic contexts. Titles in this series will include: Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media he Internet: An Introduction to New Media Games and Gaming: An Introduction to New Media Digital Broadcasting: An Introduction to New Media Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media

MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS An Introduction to New Media

Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon

Oxford • New York

English edition First published in 2009 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haddon, Leslie. Mobile communications : an introduction to new media / Leslie Haddon and Nicola Green. — English ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-814-1 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-814-5 (pbk.) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-813-4 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-813-7 (cloth) 1. Wireless Internet—Social aspects. 2. Mobile communication systems— Social aspects. 3. Cellular telephones—Social aspects. I. Green, Nicola, 1969 – II. Title. HM851.H33 2009 302.23'1—dc22 2009033061 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 813 4 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 814 1 (Paper) Typeset by Apex CoVantage, Herndon, VA, USA Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group

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CONTENTS 1

Introduction Perspectives on Technologies and ICTs Innovations and Visions Socially Relevant Groups he Experience of Technologies Domestication Reflection: he Meaning of Products he New Mobilities A History of Mobile Communications Research An Emerging Research Field Emerging Research hemes An Outline of the Following Chapters

1 3 3 5 6 7 8 8 9 9 11 13

2

History and Industry A Brief History of Mobile Communications Technologies Consumption Histories

17 18 29

3

he Relationships Between Technologies ICT Use: Evolution or Revolution? Mobile Technologies and Choices in Communications A Case Study in Communications Choices: Texting Origins and Trajectories: he Early History of an Innovation he Domestication of Texting? Social Consequences of Texting

33 34 36 42 43 44 46

4

Public and Private Spaces Mobilities and the Transformation of the Public and Private Spheres Negotiating the Mobile Public and Private

51 52 55

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Cross-Cultural Norms and Personal Space he Regulation of Mobile Phone Behaviours

63 68

5

Time Time, ICTs and Mobile Communications Time and Mobile Communications Mobile Phones and the Changing Organization of Time Mobile Communications and the Experience of Time he Experience of Meeting: A Case Study

73 73 76 78 82 84

6

Social Networks and Peer Relationships Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks and ICTs he Strength of Mobile Ties Young People and Social Networks Status and Cultural Value Group Identification and Differentiation he Management of Availability

87 88 91 96 98 100 101

7

Power Relations Dimensions of Power Power and the Social Shaping of ICTs Power and the Social Shaping of Mobile Phones Mobile Phones, Children and heir Parents Ownership Children’s Use and Parental Monitoring he Negotiation of Independence Peer Relations and Organizational Networks

107 108 110 112 116 118 120 121 122

8

Mobile Images: he Cameraphone Introduction of the Camera Phone Youth and Mobile Images: Content, Sharing, Posting Issues Related to Images: A British Case Study Media Producers and Changes in Photography

127 128 133 136 140

9

Applying Frameworks, Going Forward he Mobile Internet and Mobile Television

145 146

Analysing Emerging Technologies Going Forward

147 152

Annotated Guide to Further Reading

153

Questions and Exercises

159

Notes

165

Bibliography

169

Index

187

contents

vii

1 INTRODUCTION Do you have a mobile phone? We think you probably do, one way or another. We would also guess that you might use it for many different things in the course of your everyday life—as a telephone certainly, but also as an address book, as a clock or watch, as a camera, or now as a connection to your computer, email and the internet. here will be a range of people you use it to contact (or not), and various strategies you use to take calls—or send texts, or take photos, or receive emails, or search online (or not, in different situations). here are also likely to be a range of social relationships in your life that your mobile phone helps to maintain—or disrupts, or intervenes in, or makes possible, or complicates, or just plain helps to handle. We can make a guess like this about you because in the last decade, mobile communications have attained a more global presence than almost any other information and communication technology (ICT) to have gone before them, and in a much shorter length of time. Of course, how you respond to the question above will depend on where in the world you find yourself when you are reading it, and in what social and cultural context. It will also depend on how you position yourself—as a designer of mobile phones, as a mobile ‘consumer’, as someone who markets mobile services, or as a researcher or student interested the social relationships that embed mobile technologies in everyday life. We’re guessing, however, that whether you yourself own or use mobile technologies or not, your life will in some way have been affected by the current ubiquity of mobile communications—and that the myriad fascinating issues raised by this transformation in communications will have drawn you to this text. For these reasons we consider it important to have a volume on mobile communications as the first in a series of new media textbooks. Before 2000, one could argue that there was very little research on mobile communications—but since then, we have seen a significant proliferation of research and literature. In the last few years for example, we have seen a number of edited collections focussed on research: Brown et al. (2001), Katz and Aakhus (2002), Katz (2003), Hamill and Lasen (2005), Ling and Pedersen (2005) and Glotz et al. (2005). he publication dates themselves show how recently this research area has developed. he Ito et al. (2005) collection specifically brings together Japanese research, while others have particular specialisms

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within mobile studies, such as the Harper et al. (2005) book on texting, and the Höflich and Hartmann (2006) book on ethnographic approaches to the subject. he very accessible book by Ling (2004) also focuses on mobiles but primarily addresses the mobile communications research community. Despite this explosion of research and literature in the field, there exist no current textbooks on mobile communications directed specifically to students of new media. In this book, we seek to address that situation by designing a volume with students in mind. One of our aims is to synthesize approaches to the analysis of media and communications technologies in order to ask interesting critical questions about mobile communications—but in doing so we also want to provide students with analytical tools to go about understanding a range of existing ICTs, and others that might emerge in the future. Our intention with respect to mobile communications is to encourage students to think again about objects that have become so utterly ubiquitous, as well as so utterly mundane. hroughout the text, we therefore ask students to reflect on their own experiences in new ways, to think about and question common assumptions and ways of doing things with mobile phones—to make the familiar strange. We also ask students to do this in the contexts of their own (global) societies and cultures—we have an enduring interest in the cross-cultural diversity that research on mobile communications has uncovered and ask students to reflect on that diversity throughout the volume. he rest of this introduction provides the overall context for the chapters to follow. First, we will consider some of the very broadest frameworks that lie behind the discussions in the rest of the volume, including perspectives to have emerged from cultural studies, the social shaping of technology, and research on media and ICTs. We do this first to link mobile technologies to other information and communications technologies that have gone before them, and which exist alongside them—to map the relationships between different ICTs and how mobiles fit into these relationships. Second, we discuss overarching perspectives in order to think about the different ways that mobile technologies can be approached as objects of study—in many ways they are simultaneously material objects, they are symbolic of social identities and relationships, they structure daily life, they reflect and produce social norms, and so on. If we are to understand how mobile technologies achieve all these different roles, we need to understand the role of technologies in social life more generally. After introducing the broad theoretical approaches that underlie our discussions, the chapter will go on to briefly sketch a history of research on mobile communications and how our experiences of technologies like mobile devices have been studied. We provide a brief chronology of mobile communications research to date, and comment on some of the emerging global centres for that research. his allows us to draw out some of the most important themes to have emerged in mobile communications research over time, and these major themes come together in the following chapters.

We then go on to outline the chapters to follow and indicate what the major themes in subsequent sections of the book will be.

PERSPECTIVES ON TECHNOLOGIES AND ICTS To understand the experience of mobile communications in contemporary social life, we need to be aware of the ways that previous technologies and ICTs have been studied. herefore, the first thing to consider in this section are the wider theoretical frameworks that are used in this book, beginning with the ‘circuit of culture’. In Doing Cultural Studies: he Story of the Sony Walkman, du Gay et al. (1997) develop a broad approach to studying technologies that they refer to as the ‘circuit of culture’. In this approach, they identify five cultural processes that should be addressed if one is to understand how technologies are developed and given meaning in society. hese are as follows: „ „ „ „ „

How that technology is produced How a technology comes to be consumed How any technology is regulated and governed How it is represented (or perceived) How social identities are associated with the technology through its meaning and use

hese processes also all interact with one another—for example, the consumption of mobile communications technologies is influenced by both advertising for mobile devices (how mobile technologies are represented in the media), and by how any markets for tariffs and services are organized (a matter of production and regulation). By keeping these different dimensions of mobile communications and ICTs in mind then, we are able to address each of these processes in turn. his wide-ranging perspective therefore provides a backdrop for more specific frameworks that focus on different aspects of these processes—including research on technology innovation, the consideration of socially relevant groups, how the experience or consumption of technologies has been researched and understood, how technologies become ‘domesticated’, and how the idea of ‘mobility’ more generally has influenced the understanding of communications in contemporary social life.

INNOVATIONS AND VISIONS he social shaping of technology is one framework that helps us to understand how technologies are produced, developed, regulated and consumed. his perspective is an umbrella term for a variety of specific strands of theory and research such as the social construction of technology (SCOT), and actor-network theory (ANT), as well as introduction

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contributions from diverse disciplines including innovation studies (Pinch and Bijker 1984; Latour 1986; Mackenzie and Wajcman 1999). All these perspectives are attentive to social aspects of the production and consumption of technologies. Rather than regarding technological innovations as somehow being an automatic, logical progression from one technology to the next, following on simply from the nature of technology or from the laws of physics, this perspective concentrates on the social and cultural factors influencing those developments. How is innovation (and the later use of technologies) socially shaped? Where are decisions being taken, and by whom (or, to use the language of this framework, by which actors)? What do they take into account, what do they value, on what basis do they make evaluations about the best way to continue? If we think about mobile communications, for example, its development is largely in the hands of private companies. hese companies certainly make economic evaluations whenever they develop new features or offer new services. herefore, they clearly have to ask themselves how much interest potential users will have in what they offer, who will use it and how profitable their products might be, given the development costs of innovating. In fact, the process usually involves making a business case for taking certain steps, and for many new technologies the product managers involved act almost as detectives, trying work out what evidence exists that supports the case for a particular line of technological development (Haddon 2002).

Reflection: Anticipating Users in Design One way in which we can appreciate that technological innovations are in part socially shaped is to consider those innovations that have been designed for some particular users (and perhaps not others). Can you think of any examples?

hese influences are certainly present when a technology first appears, although the concept of ‘first’ is problematic: first in what sense? Is it the first concept, or the first working model? Is the first mobile phone a phone that is (by whatever means) portable, or a phone that uses radio waves, or a phone that specifically uses a cellular system? Fitting in with a social shaping perspective, historians (probably more than social scientists) have also drawn attention to the importance of the wider visions that those developing technologies had at the time, for example, concerning what difference radio would make to the world we live in (Douglas 1986), or what social issues the development of the telephone might raise (Marvin 1988). Whatever visions exist can also influence decisions not to follow a particular trajectory, as when some major consumer electronics and computing firms could see no basis for an interest in home

computers and so declined to develop such a device (and therefore did not become involved in the industry that subsequently emerged) (Haddon 1988). As we will see, the vision of those in the mobile communications industries influenced the very limited short messaging service (SMS) that they originally developed for mobile phones (which is further discussed in Chapters 2 and 3). Apart from these larger visions that frame development, in the case of some innovators the incentive lies in trying to solve specific problems identified in a particular walk of life—such as, in the case of early radio, how to get a message from land to ships at sea. In the case of mobile communications, we will see that one initial challenge for one particular agency was how to get the police force to arrive somewhere as quickly as possible where needed. his broader social shaping framework lies behind the histories covered in this and following chapters.

SOCIALLY RELEVANT GROUPS Companies are by no means the only parties involved in shaping innovations—there are other socially relevant groups (from the SCOT tradition). Governments, for example in the form of bodies regulating telecommunications industries, also make decisions shaping technological developments. In the history outlined in Chapter 2, we will see how governments set the rules for early mobile phone franchises when allowing companies to bid to become network operators. More recently, many European governments set the rules that led to the auction of the 3G spectrum for mobile communications (which would enable video on mobile phones, for example). here have also been various health concerns about the radio waves associated with mobile infrastructures and devices (Burgess 2004). Hence, the lobbyists drawing our attention to this, including parts of the research community, can have a bearing upon how a technology develops—for example where companies can place mobile phone masts— which in turn has a bearing on coverage. In 2007, the European Commission listened to other lobbying groups, including many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as charities, who were concerned about what children might experience once the internet could be accessed through mobile phones.1 Hence they brought together mobile communications operators to explore whether more regulation or self-regulation in this field was needed.

Reflection: Socially Relevant Groups Try to apply the idea of socially relevant groups to some other technologies or services. Can you think of any examples of socially relevant groups that may have influenced the design of ICTs other than mobiles?

introduction

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In general then, we can see the many ways in which social considerations shape technology. Large business organizations, technical innovators, visions for technologies, governments and socially relevant groups are all parts of the picture. It is also the case that as technologies develop, those who use, consume or experience those technologies also shape the ways that they come to be socially embedded (i.e. how they are distributed, organized and used and have meaning in everyday life).

THE EXPERIENCE OF TECHNOLOGIES If innovation and social relevance are some of the concerns of the social shaping perspective, another, often different, community of social scientists have focused on people’s experience of technologies. hese words are chosen with care, because the ‘use’ of a technology can be understood with a somewhat narrow meaning. We use a mobile to make calls, or nowadays to take pictures, play music, play games, access the internet, and so on. We use the technology to achieve certain things. Some have tried to widen our understanding of technologies by talking about how we ‘consume’ them, reflecting the emergence of the relatively new discipline of consumption studies. For example, drawing on perspectives from anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, this could look beyond use to the symbolic meaning of mobile communications in social life. Or, indeed, it could look to the connotations attached to mobile users when, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many were referred to by the derogatory term ‘yuppies’ (derived from the demographic label ‘young urban professional’). To talk about experience, though, captures the very diverse ways in which (and levels on which) we might relate to mobile technologies. It covers, for example, the consequences that their use could have for our lives (both individually and as a society), what we do differently by virtue of having access to mobile communications and how we negotiate with others about when and how to make use of mobile communications. Clearly this is much broader than asking about how we use any particular technology. From the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of researchers started to look more generally at this experience of information and communication technologies such as the computer, telecoms products and television (and to a lesser extent radio). Hence, by the time mobile phones (and the internet) became a mass market in the mid 90s, there was already a community of researchers, albeit at that stage still small and with diverse perspectives, who could apply to mobile communications some of the questions that had been asked about people’s experience of other technologies in everyday life—as well as developing new questions more specific to this particular innovation. It is this background perspective that informs the majority of the chapters in this book. Making a link between the social shaping framework and, to use a shorthand term, user studies, there has also been some interest in the role of users in the process

of innovation: what influence can consumers or users have on the ways innovations develop, over and above buying them? In fact, there are different levels at which people can be proactive in this process (Haddon 2005a). Historically, in the case of radio, when various companies were dubious about the future role of this technology, radio enthusiasts, or ‘hams’, were the first to experiment with broadcasting, influencing the future role of this technology (Douglas 1986). As we shall see, in the case of mobile communications, younger users of mobile phones were the ones to take up and develop many of the conventions related to SMS or texting. To take another level of user involvement, in the field of gaming, some users make modifications to games, or ‘mods’, and if these prove to be popular the gaming industry sometimes takes them up (Sotamaa 2005). In the case of mobile phones, Nokia noted how some Finnish girls were painting their mobile covers with nail varnish in order to customize them, and, taking into account this user feedback, introduced changeable covers as accessories (Oksman 2002). Sometimes companies have not been able to build on user initiatives, but we can nevertheless appreciate that users develop practices the industry has not anticipated, as in the practice of ‘beeping’— especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but also elsewhere. Here, mobile phone users ring and then hang up before the caller answers, so that they pay nothing—but the instance of ringing, or the number of rings, is itself a message according to a pre-agreedupon understanding or code (Donner 2005a; Scifo 2005 for the Italian version). More generally, there has been some crossover between the two broad perspectives outlined so far, looking at the ongoing innovation and social shaping, especially after a product has been released, in part based on what people do with the technology (Lie and Sørensen 1996, Sørensen 2005; Mallard 2005).

DOMESTICATION One specific framework that informs a number of the following chapters is that of domestication. While many of its themes will become even clearer in later chapters when applied to mobile communications, we can summarize some of its key features at this point. Most early statements on domestication, as well as most early British research, focused on the social processes in operation when new ICTs entered the home (Silverstone et al. 1992; Haddon and Silverstone 1993, 1995, 1996). he term domestication itself evokes a sense of taming the wild. Even at this stage these ICTs have meanings for people, derived from marketing, or from wider media discussions, or from what others have said about them, or from elsewhere. he people acquiring them also have a sense of identity—individually (in terms of what type of person they are, their interests, their lifestyle, how they want to present themselves to others) and collectively (in terms of what type of household or family they are, their values and so on). Hence one aspect that domestication analysis considers is what various introduction

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ICTs symbolize to people in relation to those identities—whether ICTs are seen as a threat, or as somehow offering the possibility of enhancing people’s social lives, and what they want to achieve.

Reflection: The Meaning of Products Think about yourself or others you know. Is there an example of a particular ICT product—for example a certain mobile phone, a brand of MP3 player—that you or they acquired in part because it symbolized a lifestyle, or a sense of identity, in the ways described by the domestication approach?

In much of the domestication research there is an emphasis on the social relationships surrounding ICTs. For example, it looks at the interactions between household members, their negotiation of the rules concerning how ICTs should be used, and the tensions or even conflicts over that use. Once ICTs have been acquired, part of the further process of their domestication involves physically locating these technologies in the home, finding a time for their use in people’s routines and, in various senses, displaying their place in our lives to others. If this was the initial starting point of the domestication framework, later British work in this tradition went on to examine the later careers of ICTs, how our relationship to them changed long after their initial acquisition (Haddon 2004a, 2006). his research raised questions about extending the framework beyond the home, as will be reflected in later chapters with respect to mobile communications. In summary, the approach provides a very useful starting point to explore a social complexity beyond any simple so-called benefits and uses of technology. hus, while this book is not primarily intended to assess the domestication framework, a number of chapters are organized from the particular interest of the authors in this approach.

THE NEW MOBILITIES Last, a broad-based perspective that underlies the more detailed approaches outlined previously is one that derives from a renewed interest within the social sciences and humanities in the concept of mobility itself. In this perspective, researchers note that mobility has increasingly become an underlying logic of whole societies, and a ubiquitous condition experienced in contemporary social life. he research in this area is diverse and emerges from numerous disciplines, including social and cultural geography, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. hese researchers address movement in its broadest sense—the movement not only of people, but also of things (such as cars or mobile phones), information (such as emails or text messages) and ideas (Urry 2007; Sheller and Urry 2006). Clearly, technologies of movement have a central role to

play in what some researchers have referred to as the ‘new mobilities paradigm’—an increasingly mobile social world that changes the nature of social interaction and organization. he scales of these mobilities can be from small (research on mobile phones on public transport) to very large (global economic migration), and researchers are interested in, amongst other things, how changing patterns of mobility impact social networks, the nature of places and social inequalities. As a broad-based perspective then, an awareness of the new mobilities complements the other approaches outlined previously, and reminds us to pay attention to how the increasing movement of people and things over time potentially alters our social interaction and organization.

A HISTORY OF MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH In the preceding section, we outlined the broad theoretical approaches that inform the discussions throughout the rest of the book. hese perspectives provide the backdrop for a more detailed consideration of research specifically on mobile communications to date. To contextualize this research, it is worth noting that as mass markets, the mobile phone and internet started to develop at roughly the same time, in the mid 1990s. However, from the start, the internet has had far more visibility in terms of media coverage and policy interest. Reflecting this, academic attention has focused more on the internet than on mobile communications—even if, certainly on a dayto-day basis, the latter have more visibly affected the way we go about life and are used by more people than use the internet. It is therefore also worth noting that research is socially shaped, as much as technologies are. What researchers will pay attention to will vary in time and place, and with respect to other socially relevant groups such as media, policymakers, and funders. It is therefore only in recent years, with the rapid growth in the mass market for mobile communications globally, and an increasing media and policy interest, that a more widespread academic interest in mobile communications has developed. Here, we provide one account of that burgeoning academic interest. his account could of course be presented in a number of ways, with different emphases. A first approach that we have taken here is to provide a general idea of the growth of research in this field and its visibility as seen in the research published over time. We then go on to present an additional alternative emphasis, focusing instead on emerging themes in mobile communications research and the ways these have influenced the focus of each of the following chapters.

AN EMERGING RESEARCH FIELD Some of the first few academic reflections on the new markets for mobile phones in the 1990s occurred in the Nordic countries, in part reflecting their early start there introduction

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(Christoffersen 1992 on Denmark; Roos 1993 on Finland). here was some research on the first mobile phones being given to potentially vulnerable people in the United Kingdom before a mass market developed (Wood 1993, 1994), and there were also some early US comments on the gender implications of mobile phones, enabling ‘remote mothering’ (Rakow and Navarro 1993). In addition to these isolated examples, a number of early studies originated from the social scientists at France Telecom (e.g. De Gournay 1994; Boullier and Chevrier 1994; De Gournay et al. 1995; Carmagnat 1995). As a further trickle of studies appeared over the next few years, the first collected social science volume on the mobile emerged from COST248,2 part of a wider pan-European programme that funds the networking of academics (Haddon 1997). hereafter, the field continued to broaden relatively quickly, with further and more extensive research projects being undertaken. One of the more important developments was the increasing number of workshops and conferences devoted to mobile communications. In general, conferences themselves are an important mechanism for developing the visibility of the field and research agendas; they are another way in which a field of research is socially shaped. hrough them, existing studies find a means of dissemination, findings are written up when they otherwise might not have been, and reflections on the field take place that otherwise might not have occurred. he conferences therefore established a literature for a wider academic and research audience. Besides conferences, the emergence by this time of a growing infrastructure of journals devoted to new media and ICTs meant that another route was open for the dissemination of information on studies of mobile communications.3 Lastly, researchers in this field have, over the years, produced books on a broad range of studies in the field to disseminate the results of a variety of research projects to their colleagues. his brief outline provides a sense of chronology, indicating the relatively sudden growth of this field of study as well as the mechanisms supporting it. We can now also add a note about the geographical distribution of interest in this field. In the early years, and currently, European material has tended to predominate. In part the credit for this goes to individual researchers interested in the sudden growth of mobile communications as a social phenomenon. Some studies certainly emerged independently because of the interests of the researchers, such as those from Tampere University in Finland who studied youth and mobiles during the early years of research in this field (e.g. Kasesniemi and Rautiainen 2002; Oksman and Rautiainen 2002, 2003a, 2003b). But one reason for the location of so much research and dissemination in Europe was the commercial backing in markets that were growing very quickly. his is yet another example of the social shaping of research, where the production of research and the dissemination of results are shaped by the current interests of other social actors, including commercial innovators and technology developers. We must appreciate that corporate funding in Europe supported much early research effort and had a bearing on the location of research. he ongoing support of France

Telecom has already been noted. In Norway, the Norwegian phone operator Telenor supported numerous studies and reports online, as well as papers in books and given at conferences (e.g. Ling 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Ling and Yttri 2002; Ling et al. 1997). In the United Kingdom, British Telecom funded some research, while collectively the UK mobile network operators provided the first project for the newly formed Digital World Research Centre (Brown, Green and Harper 2002). Meanwhile, UMTS (the mobile phone trade association) and Vodafone UK subsequently funded other UK studies (e.g. Lasen 2004, 2005; Haddon and Vincent 2005, 2007). In Italy, Telecom Italia has funded a number of studies (e.g. Fortunati 1997, 2002, 2005), and Westel, the mobile operator in Hungary (later taken over by T-Mobile), supported various conferences in Budapest (Nyiri 2003a, 2003b, 2005). Beyond Europe, the Centre for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University was very active from the earliest days of research, also organizing conferences and producing some of the early key texts in the field (Katz and Aakhus 2002; Katz 2003, 2006). But while there were some contributions to the literature from the United States, there was less North American material in general, perhaps reflecting not only the slower growth of the cellular market there, but also the existence of the much more established internet—which was competing for, and received, considerable research attention. Within Asia, Japanese scholars had been studying mobile phones for some years, but only with the publication of Ito et al. (2005) did this research become available in English translation. South Korea was another of the earliest centres of Asian research (e.g. Kim 2002), as was China, especially through researchers based in Hong Kong (e.g. Law and Peng 2006). In recent years, an Australian literature has also started to emerge (e.g. Hjorth 2005; Goggin 2006). he one exception to a more slowly emerging research field in the Asia-Pacific was the Philippines (e.g. Ellwood-Clayton 2003, 2005; Paragas 2005; Pertierra 2005, 2007), where there was a small, early group of active researchers. One factor here was perhaps the extreme popularity of texting, Manila being known as the texting capital of the world.

EMERGING RESEARCH THEMES One other alternative history that might be offered is a history of the themes that mobile communications research has examined over time. hese are of interest here because the material that we will cover in the rest of this book is a synthesis of the themes of interest to the broader research community. he very first studies from the mid to late 1990s were somewhat diverse—for example, charting early experiences of this new technology (e.g. Wood 1993; Rakow and Navarro 1993; De Gournay et al. 1995) or tracing the growth of the mobile phone market (Christoffersen 1992; COST 248 Mobile Workgroup 1997). One early theme, but also a continuing one, was the question of the meanings associated with introduction

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the earliest mobile phones, and their symbolism at various levels—for instance as display in public spaces (Sussex MTEL 1997), or as a technology carried on the body to which we have emotional attachment (Fortunati 1997; Vincent 2005). Another of the earliest, but still pertinent, set of questions concerned the influence of mobile phones: what was changing about society, about our practices, about our experience of time and space, about our use of language, through the arrival of these technologies? Apart from these more general interests, one early more focused theme—which has also continued—is the question of the extent to which (and why) mobile communications disturb people’s experience of public and even private spaces (see Chapter 4). Several lines of subsequent analysis raised related questions. One involved discussions of variations between cultures. Perhaps reflecting a deliberate strategy encouraging contributing authors to comment on their own culture, we see this in one of the earliest texts, Perpetual Contact (Katz and Aakhus 2002). In this volume, various chapters on national experiences discussed why mobile communications fitted in with, or represented a break from, particular national practices and cultures of communication. Accounting for cultural variation, and drawing attention to cultural specificities, has remained an ongoing interest (Haddon 2004b; Lasen 2004; Ito et al. 2005). Another strand of research relating to this concern was how we negotiate our availability generally, and how we negotiate with both callers and with those physically near to us when calls arrive, or more generally how we develop other strategies to manage other communicative situations (see chapters 4 and 5). To frame this more theoretically, one could characterize such questions as being about how mobile communications are being domesticated within both private and public spaces—how people in the longer term try to control mobile technologies so that they fit more smoothly into life and are less disruptive, less problematic. One way of framing this interest is specifically in relation to time and space, partly in reaction to the popular representation of mobiles (and other portable ICTs) as devices one could use anytime, anywhere. As we shall see in chapters 4 and 5, sociologists in particular point to the social factors constraining our use in practice. Hence, one line of research looks at varying expectations of, and hence behaviour within, different public spaces. Others looked at the time structures in which we operate. he upshot is a discussion within the literature of the circumstances under which, and for whom, mobile communications have introduced more flexibility and sometimes spontaneity into life, and where this is less the case. Once young people started to adopt mobile phones in large numbers from the late 1990s, there was a growth in studies of parent-children interactions in relation to this technology. hese concerned such questions as the motivations of parents when buying mobile phones for their children (or giving the phones to them), how children’s use was financed (and hence emergent rules about use that parents tried to impose), children’s resistance to these, trade-offs between children and parents, and new issues

about parents’ ability to monitor their children (see Chapter 7). But perhaps an even larger body of writing that emerged as young people first acquired mobile phones was how the use of these technologies fitted into their peer relationships (see Chapter 6).4 Texting amongst youth in particular attracted a good deal of attention, since a new generation of youth was widely seen as being innovatory in developing this unforeseen practice (see Chapter 3). Hence there were various studies of text message content, the forms of language used when texting, the etiquette of texting and so on. Beyond texting, there has also been a focus on the nature of social relationships at this point in the life course, looking at the giving of gifts to peers, the place of fashion amongst young people, the way young people in particular increasingly organize their meetings and, more theoretically, the implications for social capital amongst these peers (see Chapter 6). Lastly, there had always been a line of inquiry asking what is special about mobile communications as opposed to landline telephone or internet use. Apart from the attempts to answer this in terms of meaning and identity, there was a more behaviouroriented approach to this question in terms of comparing the nature of calls, or length of calls, and so on, between the two channels (see Chapter 3). Asking questions about what is different about mobile communications prompts discussions of the nature of, or our sense of, connection with other people through mobile calls, texting or email—how some communications are really gestures or rituals to help create a sense of our presence to each other. he broad outline just described can cover only some of the larger blocks of writing about mobile communications, and in such a preliminary introduction it cannot do full justice to all the material available. For example, other lines of research would include all the studies measuring the take-up of mobile technologies, and the patterns of their use and attitudes toward them (although some of this will be introduced in later chapters where it is relevant to particular themes). hen there are the studies of how the language used in mobile conversation is different from language used on landlines, as well measures of the gratifications people derive from adopting mobile technologies. And certainly there has been media coverage of the health concerns regarding mobile phone use, the theft of mobile devices, bullying by text message— and related issues—which fall at the fringes of what previous research has covered. Nonetheless, this broad charting of the field will provide the basis for how the rest of the book is organized, as outlined below.

AN OUTLINE OF THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS Many of the key themes sketched thus far have been structured into the chapters that follow. For example, Chapter 2 traces the history of mobile communications technologies, first reflecting more generally upon what such a history could include. introduction

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In addition to an outline of technological developments, there is some indication of the early history of the use of mobile communications and its precursors, from the limited research that was conducted at the time. his history also introduces us to a wider discussion of the way that mobile communications industries have been organized over time, so that we can better appreciate a key theme we have introduced in our discussion so far—that of how the mobile communications we currently employ have been socially shaped. he third chapter contextualizes mobile communications in another sense by looking at the interrelationships between mobile technologies and other ICTs. It considers the ways in which our use of various features of mobile technologies, beyond those of communication, has a bearing upon our use of the repertoire of ICTs already available to us. Conversely, it also addresses how our use of those other ICT technologies influences our experience of mobile communications. his leads into the specific question of choice: how do we make decisions as to whether we use the communication channels and features of mobile technologies as opposed to alternatives? Finally, a case study of texting illustrates some of the principles discussed throughout the chapter, as well as introducing new questions such as those concerning the social consequences of how we use new technical possibilities. Chapter 4 considers mobile communications in the context of public and private space and begins by introducing how understandings of ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ have changed over time. his leads into a discussion of how mobile communications can influence the experience of public spaces, while at the same time its use can be constrained by the norms that apply there—including specific efforts to regulate mobile communications in those spaces. Here we see the issues raised by the use of mobiles in different public spaces both for the other people present and for the mobile phone user trying to manage communications. Finally, we explore variations between different public spaces, including cross-cultural variations. he fifth chapter looks at time issues, which in many ways complement the considerations raised in the previous chapter on space. Some of the issues with respect to time relate to the adage about mobile technologies enabling communication anytime, anywhere. As in the case of space, the chapter explores time constraints on our use of mobile technologies, as well as the consequences of that use for the very way in which we organize certain aspects of our time. Finally, we look at writings on the changing subjective experience of time, asking how mobile communications might contribute to this, and hence have a bearing upon the very way that we feel about our lives. Chapter 6 considers mobile communications in relation to social networks and peer relationships. To set the scene, we first consider how social networks have been discussed in relation to other ICTs, both historical and contemporary. his introduces concepts such as social capital, and strong and weak ties, as well as debates

about ICTs, communities and the changing nature of social networks. We can then discuss these specifically in relation to mobile communications. he chapter moves on to deal with social networks mediated by mobile technologies, especially peer groups amongst younger people, given the considerable coverage this topic has attracted in the research literature. Finally, in this chapter we consider why and how we manage our contactability via mobile technologies, reflecting on claims that these communications allow us to be contactable anytime, anywhere. he seventh chapter turns to questions of how power is experienced and exercised in relation to mobile communications, although the literature rarely addresses this explicitly. Approaches to understanding power however, as illustrated in this chapter in relation to other ICTs, provide a framework for thinking about a range of issues from mobile ‘digital divides’, through the role of mobile communications in politics, to more general ways in which mobile communications do (or do not) empower us. We then focus on what has, in practice, been a major issue in the mobile communications literature—power relations between parents and children—before looking at how we can find power issues in our relationships more generally with others, including through the use of mobile communications at work. Chapter 8 examines the specific innovation of adding a camera to a mobile phone, since this topic has generated a subliterature of studies in its own right. Some of this research captures earlier responses to the camera phone, including the creative processes involved in learning, socially, how to use the device, and what it could be useful for. We go on to examine how camera phone images differed from traditional camera images, and how they were used by youth in particular once they became more established. A case study indicates some of the issues raised by camera phone images, especially when posted online, before we consider the implications of there being wider audiences for these images (than intimate friends and family), and the potential consequences of this for photographic practices. Finally, in Chapter 9, we attempt to pull all the themes together through a brief exploration of two emerging mobile services being offered: television on, and internet access through, mobile technologies. he aim is not to predict the future so much as to indicate how the approaches encountered, and the questions raised throughout this book, can be applied not just to other ICTs, but also to the ongoing innovations associated with mobile communications and media. hroughout the following text, we invite students and other readers to reflect on their own social experiences and practices with mobile communications, in order to ‘make the familiar strange’. hrough these reflections, we encourage our readers to question common assumptions about ways of doing things with mobiles, in the contexts of different places and cultures. Readers will also find other material throughout the volume that we particularly want to highlight—for example, particular case studies are highlighted in boxes, as are specific illustrations and examples of relevant introduction

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points. At the end of the volume, and for each chapter, we also provide annotated reading guides, further questions for reflection or writing, and exercises (for either groups or individuals), to provide the opportunity for further learning activities. We hope these will give students and their lecturers both interesting and useful tools to further understand and analyse the field of mobile communications.

Chapter Summary „ This chapter introduced the book as part of a new media series, contextualizing it in relation to other publications dealing with mobile communications. The first section explained the goal of encouraging students to stand back and critically reflect upon an object that has become so ubiquitous, familiar and taken for granted in many people’s lives. „ In order to provide a broad framework for many of the subsequent chapters, we next indicated some of the various existing theoretical perspectives on technologies in general, and ICTs in particular. More specifically, the chapter examined a range of social (including economic) factors that might influence the way technologies develop, in order to understand the idea of the social shaping of technology.

„ We then examined the range of areas that various user studies have considered. This section noted the particular subliterature on the ways that users can be active in shaping the innovation process. Finally, some of the general themes covered with the domestication framework were outlined, as were themes in the ‘new mobilities’ literature. „ The second half of the chapter charted the history of empirical research on our experiences of mobile communications. In particular, it noted some of the factors enabling or shaping that research field, and the relevant themes to have emerged. Finally, the introduction outlined how the following chapters of this book will integrate and develop these themes.

2 HISTORY AND INDUSTRY In Chapter 1, we introduced the broad frameworks that inform our consideration of the issues raised in the following chapters. hese included perspectives from the social shaping of technology, approaches that draw on cultural and media studies, and the importance of considering both innovation processes and relevant social groups when thinking about what shapes the experience of mobile communications in society. his chapter builds on those frameworks by considering a brief history of the development of mobile communications technology, noting at the beginning some issues in writing any histories such as this one. A history of any technology is necessarily selective, and we first consider themes to have emerged in other accounts. his is complemented by some reflections on histories of how people have experienced mobile communications technology over time. Currently very limited research material exists on this, so our account focuses on the questions that might be asked in this area given the broad frameworks outlined in Chapter 1. hroughout the chapter we build on these histories by considering the importance of the emerging infrastructure of mobile telephony and associated communications, and the services they have made possible (the technologies and organizations that comprise mobile communications systems). here are few current studies of the political economy of mobile communications industries—that is, the legal, governmental and customary conditions under which the production and consumption of mobile communications are organized. However, social shaping approaches suggest that how the technologies are organized, and how the economics and politics of industries and markets are developed, influences how, when and where technologies come to be used and experienced in social life. his has traditionally been an area of focus in media studies, relating to arguments that the very industry structure may influence the type of media we have, including its content. We saw in Chapter 1 that this is not a one-way process. herefore, to understand the contemporary experience of mobile communications, we need an awareness of how the historical development of technologies is linked to its political economy, and indeed to the contemporary organization of mobile communications industries and markets.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES If we are to understand how technology infrastructures and communications industries shape the contemporary experience of mobile communications, we first need to consider how to tell the stories of such industries and infrastructures. First, then, in this section we consider different accounts of technological and market development and highlight those elements of historical accounts that are important for describing the experiences of mobile communications we discuss in the following chapters. As in other studies, one can write multiple histories of a technology, emphasizing different elements with varying levels of detail. As noted in Chapter 1, we might look at the history of a concept—at what point do we first find the notion of a portable technology that has the principles of the modern mobile phone? Meanwhile, a product such as the mobile phone itself contains other technologies, so one may want to take into account the history of other innovations—not necessarily within those engineering departments developing mobile telephony—which nevertheless facilitated the evolution of mobile communications technology. Examples other histories have touched upon include integrated circuits (Goggin 2006) and battery technology (Agar 2003). hen one can have histories of the ‘next improvement’ (to the extent that there is a consensus about what this is), or the histories of multiple trajectories along which different technologies developed, or even histories of what could have been but was not (e.g. AT&T in the US decided not to launch an early mobile phone service; Goggin 2006). Finally, we have the histories of standards setting and regulation (in the case of mobile telephony, involving radio spectrum allocation), alongside histories of the spread of the market (who was using the technology at different points in time), and histories of how people began to experience mobile communications. Moreover, these experiences and practices themselves often built upon ways in which they had used related technologies, such as pagers—which themselves had histories. While we provide a historical narrative here, previous studies on ICTs have demonstrated that the history of any technology is inseparable from a discussion of how it is economically and politically organized. he shape of contemporary ICTs are based on their development and organization over time. Technologies, economic organizations and political institutions co-evolve. For example, Haddon’s (1999) history of interactive games notes that the early development of the computing hardware for the games was linked to a number of initiatives in arcades and amusement parks, private companies (some working in defence-oriented projects), and institutions such as universities. Later developments included the evolution of software businesses, which became a mainstream industry as it progressively evolved trade associations, and its content was progressively standardized. In the same way, the mobile communications industry has evolved through the co-evolution of technologies (in the form of the

objects made by handset manufacturers), business organizations (such as network operators or service providers), trade associations (such as the GSM associations), and political institutions (such as telecommunications regulators). A number of other books (Agar 2003; Goggin 2006; Gow and Smith 2006) have pieced together histories of the mobile phone, from original sources, which are far more detailed than what we produce below. he history outlined in this chapter is in this sense more selective, identifying what we consider the most relevant points from these earlier works.

Reflection: Defining the Mobile Phone Imagine someone were to ask you what an object must have in order for you to call it a mobile phone. What would you say? What features, what capabilities, what technologies would it have to have?

he mobile phone may seem to be a relatively new device, but its antecedents stretch back nearly a century. If we look to precursors in the sense of devices that are mobile and send messages, then radio itself was originally developed as a pointto-point communication technology to send telegraphic messages (via Morse code) to places where wires could not reach—as when the object was mobile; for instance, ships at sea. Not long after the invention of radio, the first voice messages (and music) were sent from land to ships in 1906 (Gow and Smith 2006). And then there were very early mobile carphone experiments in 1911, where one had to stop the car and connect the mobile device to telephone cables (Goggin 2006). Admittedly this did not use the radio signals we now associate with mobile phones, but it embodied the concept of a phone that was portable. Not all technology developments come out of R&D labs—as we saw in Chapter 1, highly motivated users can sometimes play a role in innovation. In this history the Detroit police department conducted the first experiments with a system of oneway radio paging in 1921, where the text messages were sent to officers in police cars (Goggin2006). he first such voice-based mobile system appeared in 1928 (Agar 2003), and two-way systems for the police were developed in 1931 (designed by the company later renamed Motorola, after one of its products). As in the case of so many other innovations, work on behalf of the military also played a part. he twoway system, the first backpack portable radio phone, was enhanced for the American armed forces in World War II, one version being the walkie-talkie. Up until this stage these portable devices using radio signals were clearly more akin to portable two-way radio than telephony, given that there was no direct connection to the landline telephone system. Indeed, at the time such systems were referred to as history and industry

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‘radiotelephony’ (Gow and Smith 2006). In fact, in the United States—where most of this early development was taking place—for many years an enforced split existed between radio and telephone, reminding us that the regulatory system can have an influence on the pace and nature of innovation. It was only when the US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), gave permission to link the two systems that the first system allowing calls from a fixed phone to a mobile phone was developed in 1946 (Agar 2003). In civilian life, the police—and more generally the emergency services—were the early adopters of this new technology, but after World War II taxicabs also took up this radio system for dispatch (Goggin 2006). As these private radio systems spread there was a problem of congestion on the air waves, since only a limited radio spectrum was available, and these early systems used a wide bandwidth (Gow and Smith 2006). hese calls were also competing with the fixed ham radio used by amateur enthusiasts (Agar 2003). Hence users often experienced delays while waiting for a channel to become free. It is worth pausing a moment to consider further the extent to which these early mobile telephones were similar to, or different from, their modern equivalents fifty years later. At this stage, calls still had to be connected by an operator—the system was not automated, and users had to push a button to talk and release it to listen. Not until the 1960s could one have a simultaneous two-way conversation (Gow and Smith 2006). Nevertheless, to give some idea of the numbers taking up this early technology, by 1952, there were 350,000 private two-way radios in use, mainly in cars (Goggin 2006). he early handsets were in many ways not like the handheld devices we know today. hey were bulky, often fitting in a large briefcase. his was partly because they used considerable battery power—hence they were often connected to the car battery. hey were also expensive, the quality of communication was poor, and there was a lack of privacy during calls since other users could listen in. But in every US city where they were introduced, there were waiting lists to acquire the new technology, indicating a level of interest, albeit one often related to work uses at this stage (Gow and Smith 2006). If early versions of mobile phones had so many disadvantages compared to more modern ones, at least some people were prepared to put up with the limitations of these early devices. Only with the development of other technologies could the mobile phone become smaller—principally, with the miniaturization of components, starting with the transistor and then integrated circuits. his also led to a reduction in power consumption. While battery technology became smaller, improvements in efficiency also enabled the first handheld to appear in 1973. he DynaTAC 8000X weighed a kilogram and was the size of a small brick. It was hence referred to as the original ‘brick’ phone, a term later used to describe older-generation and larger phones more generally, as

ever smaller handsets appeared. he DynaTAC 8000X also was not cheap, originally selling for $3,995 (Gow and Smith 2006). he next major development picked out in various histories of the mobile phone was the introduction of the cellular system, which gave rise to the name ‘cell phone’, and is the underlying technological infrastructure of the modern mobile communications system. his more efficient use of the radio spectrum involved dividing geographical areas into cells, where dedicated transmission towers handled all calls within that cell. As the mobile device moved between cells, management of the call was handed over to the next tower. Cellular had originated as an idea in the Bell Labs of AT&T in the United States as early as 1947 (Goggin 2006), but it was in fact many years before it could be developed. In part this was because AT&T did not see a market for mass mobile telephony. he other problem, however, was a lack of available radio spectrum— again, pointing to the role of regulation in the innovation process. Only after years of lobbying by AT&T did the FCC allocate some radio spectrum for a cellular experiment, the final details for this being established in 1974 (Agar 2003). here were some small-scale cellular systems in the late 1960s (Gow and Smith 2006), but the first citywide cellular system was trialled in 1978 in Bahrain, and then the United States, and the first commercial system was launched in Japan in 1979 (Goggin 2006). his was the start of what was subsequently called the ‘first generation’ (1G) of mobile phones. At this point it is useful to consider why mobile phone systems followed different trajectories in different countries. In the United States, the only company large enough to have been in a position to offer a single service for the whole country was AT&T. At the time, however, it was under investigation by the communications industry regulator as a monopoly in the telephone business, and the FCC broke it up into regional companies (Agar 2003). We noted that there is evidence that AT&T also underestimated the future potential of mobile phones, even though it had developed the technology (Goggin 2006; Gow and Smith 2006). his is not the first time that a company’s vision of the future shaped the pace of innovation. In addition the geography of the United States played a part, in that the country consisted of large cities with considerable (less populated) rural areas in between them. he rural areas were less attractive for potential mobile operators. he FCC granted licenses by auction on a city-by-city basis, the end result of which was that, although there was one standard—Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS)—based on AT&T technology, many different companies were involved in operating their own systems. his made organizing roaming arrangements (to enable calls between different systems) difficult. he other feature of early US mobile phone systems was that the tariff arrangements were such that mobile phone users paid to receive calls.

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his meant that these users were less inclined to give out their numbers, and so the mobile phone was used much more for business than for socializing (Agar 2003). Here we can see how the shape of the technology that developed over time, the ways that the market and business took shape, and the regulation of the technology all came together to shape how users experienced mobile phones in everyday life. his is also clearly connected to the shape of mobile phone markets and technologies today. Because of this institutional history, the US system has tended overall to produce competing systems and organizations. For example, US cell phone numbers today do not have a dedicated numbering system like their counterparts in the UK. Instead, modern US cell phones—like their landline counterparts—are prefixed with the geographical location of their purchase: they are located by area code because of the city-by-city spectrum auctions. Furthermore, because early businesses structured the tariff so that users paid to receive calls, it potentially affected early markets for the phones themselves—perhaps a factor in the comparatively slower growth of markets and use in the United States, and a reason for the late uptake of the mobile phone for social purposes. Although much of the early technological innovation had taken place in the United States, the pattern of roll-out and delays meant that not only did other European countries catch up in terms of launching products, but many also eventually attained higher adoption rates (Agar 2003). Sweden had launched the first mobile system in Europe in 1955 and also had the highest distribution rates in the region by the time that the Nordic countries collaborated to produce the NMT (analogue cellular) standard in 1981. NMT was used not only in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland but in some other countries as well. It introduced the principle of roaming between countries (even if this was little used at the time), and in addition it provided important early markets for Ericsson and Nokia, companies based in the region. Some have suggested that there are cultural and historical reasons behind this Nordic collaboration, enabling an engineering consensus (Agar 2003; Goggin 2006). It is therefore not only an engineering consensus, but also a social, political and regulatory agreement that emerged between different Nordic states—enabling swift uptake and continued cooperation through international standards today. he larger European countries (the UK, Germany and France), by contrast, preferred to design their own national systems. his early history has implications for the ways that the mobile communications industry is organized today, and current developments. To take a case study, we might look to early visions of ‘third-generation’ (3G) mobile phones, to examine how historical developments influence the political organization of mobile communications in use today. For example, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the world standards body of the United Nations, had started thinking about standards for the next generation of mobile communications, 3G and beyond, back in 1992

(Gow and Smith 2006). It is important to appreciate how this work was informed by the vision at that time of how mobile communications would progress. One element of the envisaged next generation was a move towards a single world standard so that one could use the same mobile technologies anywhere—universal roaming. Another key element of that vision was personal communications services (PCS) that would involve integrating existing mobile phones with other channels of communication so that a person receives a call on the mobile, or the home phone if at home, the work phone if at work and so on. It also is interesting to note what was absent in this vision at this time. here were no thoughts about links with the internet, since at the time, developments in this area were not widely known outside of computing circles. he internet was not yet a mass market and did not gain widespread media visibility until at least the mid 1990s. Hence at this stage there were no substantial discussions of internet-based mobile data services, even if some companies were providing mainly business mobile data services (such as data on client pickups for taxi services, or software for directing containers in harbours; see Lindmark 2002). hose early visions did not materialize. PCS was a challenge technically, but perhaps more important were questions as to whether telecommunications businesses could make much money out of it. As regards moves towards a world standard, recommendations were developed about the frequency (which part of the radio spectrum) that such a standard might use. For a variety of (partly historical) reasons however, one problem here was that in some countries, the frequency discussed was already used for other purposes (e.g. military band radio). Moreover, what in practice emerged were regional standards for 3G based on the previous 2G standards. he years 1999 to 2001 saw the allocation of 3G licenses in many countries, a number of whose governments organized this in terms of an auction, the licence going to the highest bidder (the licenses constituting a revenue-generating exercise for those same governments). here has been much discussion about this particular option following the auctions. It may have raised substantial amounts of money for governments (US$36 billion in the UK, US$51 billion in Germany), but it created a serious financial burden for some of those operators with successful bids, with questions about whether this subsequently delayed the development of some 3G offerings. he first 3G (internet-enabled) services started to appear from 2001 (in Japan and South Korea) To take stock, what these histories demonstrate is that layers of local, national and international politics and regulation influence the shapes of mobile markets (at the same time as markets influence the organization of industry, and political and regulatory power). his illustrates both how historical developments influence contemporary infrastructure and organization, and also how, as is the case with other ICTs, larger interlocking infrastructures of political and economic organization can influence the experience of mobile phone use—what any of us can do, achieve or history and industry

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accomplish with respect to our mobile communications depends on the political and economic infrastructures under which the technological systems have been historically organized. his raises potentially interesting questions about how such systems might be organized differently. To return to our brief history, the 1980s and 1990s saw the more general digitization of telecommunications networks, including mobile communications networks, whose handsets became known as ‘second generation’ (2G) mobile phones. his development allowed phones to start having a broader range of features, such as address books for storing numbers, a register of received calls, alarm clocks, calendars, calculators and games (Goggin 2006). It also paved the way for the multimedia facilities that were later to migrate to mobile phones. Digitization was accompanied by the development of new regional standards that were incompatible with each other. his is why it is possible to roam (i.e. to use mobile communications when abroad) in some countries but not in others. All of these decisions not only involved the participation of the engineers working on the systems but also emerged from regulation, and competition and/or collaboration in mobile telephony markets. It is worth considering the case of GSM just a little more, since it has the largest market of any standard, covering 185 countries, and because it started the truly mass market for mobile phones in Europe (Gow and Smith 2006). Prior to GSM there were nine (often national) standards in Europe, some of which even operated in different parts of the radio spectrum. With the exception of the Nordic collaboration, this often reflected the legacy of the period when there were national telecommunications monopolies, known as PTTs (postal, telegraph and telephone systems), which created relatively small national markets where international roaming was difficult. It was in the broader context of moves by the European Commission—a very important political and economic actor in the European context—to promote more European integration, as well as to open up the telecommunications field to competition, that GSM was developed in the 1980s as a European standard, originally modelled on NMT (Agar 2003). It was finalized in 1991 and was quickly deployed across Europe in the early 1990s. his again illustrates how changes in the wider economic and political context can have a significant bearing upon any technology innovation that takes place. Here at one stage we had a set of European telecom monopolies, fragmenting a wider European market with incompatible national standards, while at another time point pressures to create a broader and reformed European market led to one, initially regional, standard. Beyond Western Europe there is some, but a limited amount of, material on developments in postcommunist countries (Agar 2003). One observation here, but also true of many developing countries (Castells et al. 2006), is that the previously poor landline infrastructure gave mobiles an extra appeal as a way to get a phone at all. In the case of Russia, there was a somewhat chaotic context following the break-up of

the old Soviet Union, where Western companies were allowed to operate only if they had a Russian partner (Agar 2003). It is also the case that mobiles bypassed landline infrastructures in a number of developing nations—Jamaica being just one example (Horst and Miller 2006). he next question concerns factors that led to a development of mass markets for mobile phones. One influence was, arguably, economic—in the form of falling prices, related to the privatization of telecommunications in different countries, and the growth in competition as private mobile companies competed for markets—as illustrated in Case Study 2.1.

Case Study 2.1 The Danish History of Mobile Phones In Denmark, the origins of private mobile radio systems date back to World War I, when they were first used by Danish fishing fleets and later by the transport industry (taxis and haulage) (Christoffersen 1992).1 In 1962, the state-run PTT decided to extend its provision by creating a system of public mobile telephony, although this first attempt was later felt to have been overpriced and failed to attract much interest. In 1963, however, a relatively cheaper ‘System A’ was the first of a series of systems which attracted far more demand than had been anticipated, from users such as farmers and tradespeople. The market was further opened by a change in policy whereby the Danish PTT allowed its customers to buy terminals rather than rent them. While contemplating the move towards an automatic mobile telephony system, negotiations were conducted with Sweden, Norway and Finland about the idea of setting up a pan-Scandinavian standard to develop a large enough market to allow manufacturers to produce cheaper terminals. The traditional cooperation between the state-run Scandinavian PTTs facilitated a regional approach which might have had less chance of success if at this stage the PTTs had been private companies. This culminated with the launch of the NMT 450 system in Sweden in 1981, and in Denmark and in the other Scandinavian countries in 1982. Once again, demand was greater than anticipated. By 1989, the competition between manufacturers had forced down the prices of NMT handsets considerably. The next step was the introduction of competition where, as in many other European countries, the mobile phone sector was among the first parts of the PTTs to be privatized. A duopoly led to the setting up of TeleDanmark Mobile as a private company, spun off from the old PTT. Meanwhile, a competitor started operating from 1992, which is now known as Sonofon. Both operated the new European digital standard, GSM. Up until 1991 and 1992, mobile telephones had been marketed as a business tool, although the operators knew that they were also used for private purposes. The marketing changed in late 1993 when there was a major price war between the two operators. Whereas the old state PTT had not sought customers, the new private operators wanted to acquire subscribers more quickly. TeleDanmark Mobile especially felt under pressure from its new competitor over market share. Hence both companies adopted what was recognized as ‘the British model’ of subsidizing handset prices to increase this market. This involved huge discounts for a short period, accompanied by an advertising campaign—which by December 1993 was portraying the mobile phone as a Christmas gift. Media coverage of the price wars gave the technology further visibility. In the end, the regulator intervened

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to limit the amount of discounting, but in a very short period the beginnings of a mass market had emerged. For example, at the start of the campaign, TeleDanmark Mobile hoped for 15,000 new customers, three or four times normal demand for that period. In practice, they got 65,000 new customers in that one short campaign. In Sonofon’s original planning, they had expected to have 25,000 by 1995. In fact, the rapid development of the market meant that they achieved 100,000 by that date (COST 248 Mobile Workgroup, 1997).

Some further economic considerations are relevant for how we might consider a political economy of a particular national case more generally. A few years later than covered in the Danish national history in Case Study 2.1, for example, many countries introduced pay-as-you-go (also known as prepaid) systems which required no contract or credit check, and which were an attractive option for those with low usage or income (or indeed, with those such as young people who cannot legally enter into commercial contracts; Ling and Helmerson, 2000). his system of payment is also credited with boosting sales in developing countries with lower average incomes (Gow and Smith 2006; Castells et al. 2006). Furthermore, micropayment systems arose out of this organization, which meant that users in, for example, South Korea’s Cyworld produced a new business model combining mobile technologies and the internet that had not previously been seen in the mobile telecommunications industry (Haddon and Kim 2007). Another example of economic factors that shape our contemporary mobile communications infrastructure, amongst others (especially having a bearing upon the development of mass markets), was the introduction of cheaper but less sophisticated mobile telephony services. his is best illustrated in the case of China, which since 2002 has been the largest world market in terms of numbers of mobile phones (Agar 2003). In fact, cellular systems had been available in China since 1988, but as in many other countries, users were initially restricted to a wealthy elite—and indeed it was pager technology that expanded rapidly throughout the whole of the 1990s (Castells et al. 2006). One particular consideration here, apart from the general economic growth of China, is the massive urbanization that has created huge numbers of migrant (economically mobile) workers, with a concomitant demand for low-cost telephony. Meanwhile, on the supply side, some firms operating paging systems moved out of the pager technology, as it became increasingly stigmatized as unsophisticated; they instead moved into providing mobile telephony services—hence the appearance of a cheap, limited mobility service called Little Smart. While such services have been adopted elsewhere, such as in India, the appeal of such services is most significant in China. Various accounts of mobile communications history have argued that noneconomic developments also helped mobile communications to develop into a mass market. Nokia, in particular, has been picked out in accounts of the development

of the mass market for its changes in mobile handset branding. Nokia innovated in terms of producing new designs, a range of product releases and accessories, which all encouraged people to think of different phones to suit different lifestyles (and consumers themselves had a part to play in these developments). he Nokia handsets therefore allowed consumers, in various ways (such as changing covers), to customize their phones. his reminds us that innovations can not only include technical and marketing (e.g. pricing or advertising) elements, but can also incorporate changes in the symbolic connotations of technologies, as happened in the past with radio (Forty 1986) and later with the home computer (Haddon 1988; Lally 2002).

Reflection: Symbolic Innovations Think a little more about innovations in marketing or design. Can you think of any examples of such innovations in relation to mobile handsets, or the particular features offered, that made a particular mobile technology brand or product appear different from competitors’ products, at any particular point in time?

Curiously, almost no research currently exists with respect to an analysis of the advertising and branding of particular mobile phone handsets, or an analysis of advertising and branding with respect to mobile network operators or service providers (although one recent exception is Aguado and Martinez 2007). From the perspective of the ‘circuit of culture’, material cultural studies and consumption, or new media and social innovation, this is a strange omission. From the point of view of social shaping or domestication studies, for example, we would expect to see studies of the ways marketing and branding industries affect the production and consumption of the meaning of mobile communications for those who consume them. Strangely, these studies have largely not so far appeared in the academic literature. he questions that would be relevant in this area include how meanings are made by the messages in mobile phone advertising and marketing, and how users (or others) make meaning from experiencing those messages. It could also include questions about the ways these representations change over time. Early in mobile phone mass markets in the United Kingdom, for example, network operators tended to emphasize as a brand the range of coverage of their masts across the country. his changed when the impact of brand advertising for handsets (such as Nokia) made its mark—and network operators turned far more to lifestyle factors (as they do now), and their associated meanings and identities, to market their services. Apart from factors relating to the mass market, mobile communications have also been evolving in terms of new features. Of course, SMS is a major development, and we will cover this as a case study in the next chapter. Internet access via the mobile history and industry

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was initially deemed to be a failure in Europe with the WAP system but a success in Japan with its i-Mode system, first introduced in 1999 (Agar 2003; we will return to the theme of the potential of the mobile internet on third-generation handsets and systems in the conclusion). Meanwhile, mobile communications devices have been developing more multimedia functionality. here is, for example, the now-familiar functionality such as the camera phone on new-generation handsets (see Chapter 8), which potentially changes mobile communications practices with respect to the role of image exchange in the sociality of the mobile. With the technological capacity of sound technology, we have also witnessed the growth of markets for sound and music on mobile technologies. Such developments drew in many other actors to develop the earlier markets in what came to be known as ringtones. Rather than simply the ability to play simple sound sequences, mobile phones could now play quite complex tunes and songs—which drew in the entire edifice of the music industry. Rather than handset makers or network operators including simple sound sequences with their products or services, a whole market developed for polyphonic ringtones, linked to popular music. Music production companies, claiming copyright on the output of their artists, began to market ringtones as vigorously as they did new-release CD singles. Web distribution companies for ringtones developed whereby users could download ringtones for a nominal fee—and these services were widely marketed and advertised through both old (magazines and newspapers) and new (internet) media channels. As they have become established, therefore, these contemporary markets have become extremely complex, involving long and interlocking chains of actors and organizations that obtain significant revenue throughout the value chain that delivers these services. A contemporary equivalent of the development of these infrastructures and services for sound concern location-based services. As we noted earlier, it has always been possible to triangulate the position of any particular mobile handset with reference to the handset signal and the way its signal is handed over between cellular masts. Knowing the location of any particular handset thereby offers opportunities to deliver or market services that are specifically linked to location, or place. Internet Web sites have developed which triangulate the location of a mobile phone from mobile telephone mast signal data—because any mobile phone number may be entered, and its location pinpointed (with, or sometimes, without the knowledge or consent of the owner of that handset—see Chapter 7 for a discussion of this with respect to the relationship between parents and children), others may pinpoint the location of any person associated with that mobile device. Furthermore, having data on the location of handsets allows for new marketing opportunities to develop—not only with respect to, for example the ability to download maps of current location, but also services available in that area. he market for location-based services is currently developing and is likely to expand with the introduction of third-generation mobile

handsets. Once again, all of these developments will be discussed further both in later chapters and in the conclusions. Suffice to say at this point, the complexities in infrastructure and markets introduced through all these developments establish a political economy for the mobile phone that generates extensive revenue for organizations. here are increasingly expanding and interlocking sets of value chains—more organizations linked together that profit from each additional feature—with each new functionality of mobiles, but their revenue and value also rely on the role of regulators in determining the limits of legal and acceptable service and content, as well as the role of consumers in innovating uses and consuming products. One final observation before ending this section on the development of mobile communications is that in the preceding account, we have the history of what succeeded. But as in the cases of other types of technology, there also existed innovations that held the promise of taking mobile communications in a slightly different direction but ultimately proved to be dead ends, as in Case Study 2.2.

Case Study 2.2 Unsuccessful Mobile Phone Innovations: A UK Case Study It is useful to put cellular telephony into context by contrasting it with alternative forms of mobile communications. In 1989, four licences had been issued for CT2 (better known by the marketing brand Telepoint) operators, once again with the aim of establishing more competition in this sector. In fact, CT2 was initially intended to provide a mass market product while cellular was for professional use. The point was that while cellular handsets were expensive (before the era of subsidization), CT2 was cheap because the handsets could be sold as indoor cordless phones, which had the extra facility of allowing users to have some mobile telephony when out of the home. Basically, users could make outgoing calls only when sufficiently near to transmitters located in public sites such as railway stations, the underground, petrol stations and so forth, just as a cordless phone in the home can operate only at a certain distance from a base unit. The handset therefore required less electronics than cellular and represented a fundamentally different route to mass mobile telephony, as an extension of the increasingly familiar cordless phone. In practice, most of the operators who first took up CT2 licenses decided not to launch a product in the end. For a short time one operator, Hutchison, ran a service called Rabbit, but this did not attract much custom and was soon discontinued. At the time, its failure led some critics to claim that there would be no mass market for mobile telephony (COST 248 Mobile Workgroup, 1997).

CONSUMPTION HISTORIES If the preceding account provides a history of technological developments and of the market as it exists to date, we might also ask about how user experiences changed over time—in other words, what is the history of consumption? One of the themes arising history and industry

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from the user studies introduced in the previous chapter is that often when a new technology comes along, it builds on the way we have learnt to consume previous ones. herefore, were there products before the mobile phone mass market developed that, even if only in part, prepared the way for the later experience of these technologies? And what, if they can be identified, are the stages that led from mobiles being owned by a few to their being owned by the majority? If we look at related technologies that set a precedent for mobile communication, one of these is Citizens’ Band (CB) radio. With these car-based push-a-button-totalk radios, one could talk to anyone in the vicinity who happened to be tuned in. CB radios became popular in the mid 1970s, especially among truck drivers (as portrayed in the film Convoy) but also among car users. In fact, there were an estimated 50 million users in the United States, where one in seven cars was equipped with the technology. Although regarded later as a fad, it both gave a certain media visibility to this form of mobile communication, in films such as Smokey and the Bandit, and demonstrated broader public interest in socializing while driving (Goggin 2006). he other relevant technology prior to the mobile phone mass market is, arguably, paging. Paging was first introduced as a commercial service (i.e. beyond the emergency services) by Motorola in 1974. When someone wanted to contact a person who had a pager, he or she had to phone an operator and request that a message be forwarded to that pager (whose owner then found a fixed-line phone to call back). As we will see in Chapter 5, this became the model that operators originally planned to use for SMS. he American FCC estimated that there were 3.2 million pagers worldwide in 1980, rising to 61 million by 1994 (Goggin 2006). Although much of this reflected business use, some was private use and set a precedent for sending texts while mobile. In fact, as we shall see later, some groups such as young Japanese women in the 1990s pioneered the social use of pagers, which helped shape the subsequent use of texting on mobile handsets. As noted earlier, when expensive mobile phones first appeared they were largely adopted by business users. In fact, in the 1980s (in the UK at least), they had a somewhat negative image because they were the iconic possession of a certain type of brash, young, usually male business user, especially one working in the financial centres of the city of London. He (and largely ‘he’) was referred to as a ‘yuppie’ (see Chapter 1). Hence, images of yuppies with their mobile phones circulated in the media, drawing attention to themselves through their ostentatious use of mobile phones in public spaces. By the 1990s however, not just the wealthy had mobile phones. In fact, one British study prior to the mass market argued that certain users had served to make mobile phones familiar and visible. hese did not carry negative connotations, and in this sense they prepared the way for a consumer product (Wood 1993). For example, a number of employers issued mobile phones to employees who they felt were in some

way at risk (such as social workers going into difficult areas, railway buffet car staff who had in the past been attacked, female employees on company business late at night). Some police forces had even issued phones temporarily to women who feared an attack by their ex-partners, and in Case Study 2.3 we can see how safety concerns led to some early, cheaper mobile phones.

Case Study 2.3 Safety Issues in the United Kingdom Chance events played a role in the development of mobile phone services and markets. The highly publicized case of a pregnant women who was killed when she left her broken-down car to seek assistance led to pressure on the British automobile associations to produce a low-cost emergency car-based mobile phone, precisely so that people in this situation did not have to leave the safety of their cars. In fact, after conducting market research which showed ‘phenomenal interest’ (cited in Wood 1993), the car breakdown associations marketed their own emergency phones—Callsafe from the Automobile Association (AA), which allowed only calls to either the police or the association itself, and ET from the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) which allowed other calls in addition. At one stage, TV advertisements for these car rescue organizations actually showed women calling for assistance from mobile phones while in their cars (COST 248 Mobile Workgroup, 1997).

In addition to the question of early user groups, the norms of early use were also somewhat different from when the mass market developed. For example, a French study of mobile telephony conducted in 1994 demonstrated that at that time, even use by travelling business people was constrained by the contemporary norms that mobiles were not to be used for personal messages. his research also showed that, under many conditions, such as making private calls to family when away from home, these mobile phone owners still preferred to use the fixed line rather than the mobile phone (De Gournay et al. 1997). Unfortunately, that is about the limit of what we know about early consumption histories. It would have been interesting, for example, to know more about the experiences of more early adopters outside the business community. How did they feel about having and using mobile phones, especially in public, when only a few years earlier (in the UK at least) many negative representations of mobile phone users existed? How did their peers react to them using the mobile phone?2 How did they develop any rules at that stage about when they could be contactable on their mobile phones? How did norms change, as noted in the French study just mentioned, so that it became more acceptable to use the mobile phone for private calls? What types of negotiations took place in households when the first mobile phones were acquired history and industry

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for or used by children, at a time when it was not yet normal for children to have phones? What were the processes by which this became more acceptable? How did early-adopting youth use and display phones, or not, when most peers did not have them? And what were their first experiences of experimenting with texting and developing some of the first conventions about abbreviations, the use of emoticons and so on? To stand back and refer again to wider theoretical frameworks, there is the question of how mobile communications, or particular practices, become domesticated (Haddon 2003). While the majority of researchers working with this particular concept have looked at how households domesticate new technologies, finding ways to fit them into their daily lives, others have asked how technologies have been domesticated in society (Morley 2005). If we could answer the preceding questions, we might have a better idea of the processes at work. But by and large, the research trying to address this was not conducted at the time. In the case of some other technologies, some of that history has been reconstructed, as in the case of the telephone in the United States (Fischer 1992) and in the United Kingdom with (older) people’s early memories of radio and how it became more acceptable and integrated into people’s lives (Moores 1988). But so far the equivalent research has not been conducted in the case of the mobile phone.

Chapter Summary „ The chapter started by outlining possible relevant histories of mobile communications to underline how this account of the development of the mobile phone is, like all accounts, selective. It then looked at the longer history of mobile message sending, the portable phone and actual radiotelephony services.

„ We then outlined the differences between early and contemporary mobile communications devices. Various developments in the miniaturization of circuits and the prolonging of battery life allowed the device to evolve towards its current handheld form. The main infrastructural change was cellular technology, and here we saw some of the factors influencing the timing of its appearance. Later this was followed by digital replacing analogue systems that enabled many of the features of contemporary mobile technologies.

„ However, there were different national experiences of mobile telephony, mainly illustrated by examples of developments in the United States and Europe. In the case of Europe and GSM we saw some of the factors shaping the development of regional standards.

„ The rise of the mass market in mobile telephony has been attributed to a range of economic developments (e.g. falling prices, pay-as-you-go systems, less-sophisticated services) but also to changes in the nature of the technology itself, as in the range and design of handsets and their symbolic connotations. Histories of consumption are therefore important to consider, including precursors to the mass market and the glimpses of developments we have in early research in this field.

3 THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TECHNOLOGIES In Chapter 2, we considered different histories of the development of mobile communications technologies—the different innovations developed over time, the roles of different social groups and institutions, and how those histories have shaped the current political economy of mobile communications markets, organizations, consumption and regulation. hese factors shape how mobile technologies can be consumed and used, and the meanings they come to have in people’s lives. In this chapter, we shift our focus from production and political economy to the characteristics of different ICTs, and some of the detail about use and consumption in everyday life. he chapter considers the interrelationships between different ICTs, focusing on how mobile technologies might be affecting, and might have been affected by, our use of a range of other technologies. he first issue the chapter addresses is the long-standing interest in the extent to which new innovations displace or complement existing technologies and related practices. his is further related to the question of how our use of new ICTs is influenced by what we used to be doing with older ones. his is relevant to common claims about the way in which new technologies are totally new, even revolutionary. While they may be novel in some sense, there is often some evolutionary process whereby we see continuities from the past. he second section of the chapter deals with how choices between ICTs are made. We have to see the use of any mobile communications technology, like mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) or MP3 players, in the context of other alternative ways of achieving similar goals. he final section deals with texting, which we will explore as a case study of new specific social groups choose their channel of communication. his case study is useful not only for exploring specific communications practices, but also for reflecting upon a wider range of issues, such as the nature of innovation, changes in technologies over time, the social regulation of ICTs and the challenge of how to evaluate their social consequences.

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ICT USE: EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION? When considering the interrelationships between mobile technologies and other ICTs, one of the first issues to consider is the extent to which new technologies supplement or dislocate existing ICTs and related practices. his can be seen as part of a broader and ongoing interest in how technologies influence our lives, and how the arrival of new ICTs has ramifications for our use of older ones. Furthermore, this issue also has implications for how new forms of mobile communicative practice have been influenced by older ones. hese questions are in turn related to whether such developments are considered good or bad, as in the popular arguments about how the interactive nature of the internet makes it a more desirable way of spending time than passively viewing television.1 In this section, we consider these questions of complementarity and reflect upon whether new ways of using mobile technologies are evolutionary or revolutionary. In practice, although the outcomes might be different for different innovations, the arrival of a new ICT usually does not displace an existing one completely, but rather there is some readjustment of our use of older technologies (Bolter and Grushin 1999). For example, historical examples would include how the arrival of television influenced patterns of cinema going and radio listening. When TV arrived, radio listening (and cinema attending) declined but did not disappear—they became a more specialized and differentiated part of our media consumption (Johnsson-Smaragdi 2001). Later, there was the question of how the development of satellite and cable television had a bearing upon the viewing of terrestrial channels. his is also the spirit behind a number of studies commenting upon how the internet has had implications for TV viewing.

Reflection: How Mobile Technologies Have Affected Communications Various forms of displacement and complementarities can be considered in mobile communications. Think about the following: a) To what extent have your own calls on a mobile phone replaced your landline calls? b) To what extent has your own texting by SMS replaced your voice calls?

In some cases, the new functionality in emerging technologies may itself only ever be used occasionally. For example, games on mobile phones may be played, but

they have had limited consequences for the way people play on consoles (or PCs; Haddon and Vincent 2007). Of course, in principle, we could ask the same type of question about this interrelationship of technologies as more and more features appear on mobile phones. hese new technologies may or may not come to be called mobile devices, or some other name such as ‘mobile platforms’ (one name currently used within the industry).

Reflection: Mobile Functionalities and the Displacement of Other ICTs The phenomenon of mobile devices taking on more functionalities beyond that of communication, including in devices like Blackberries and iPhones, raises yet further questions of displacement—or rather, of our more specialized use of different devices. Hence, you can ask yourself: a) To what extent has your use of the camera in mobile phones changed your use of other cameras? b) If there is a music facility built into your mobile phone, has it replaced your use of more specialized music devices, such as an MP3 player? c) To what extent do you access the internet via the mobile phone when in the past you might have accessed it via a PC? d) Do you ever watch TV or a video on your mobile phone when in the past you might have watched it on a TV screen?

In addition to considering how new mobile functionalities might have supplanted the use of older ICTs, we can also examine how new forms of electronically mediated communication on mobile communications devices have been influenced by previous practices. his in part depends on what technical possibilities (or ‘affordances’; Gibson 1977) the newer and older technologies offer. But sometimes new ICTs are themselves developed with an eye to taking some market away from older ones. For example, the action genre of video games was in part derived from the gameplay of pinball machines, and indeed video game machines were first introduced into arcades as a replacement for pinball (Haddon 1999). Moreover, people build on past experiences when faced with new ICTs, and so new uses are often an extension of what has gone before (Jouet 2000). For example, several researchers have observed how sending secret text messages and mobile email in the classroom is an updated and less visible version of passing paper notes around without the teacher seeing (Ling and Yttri 2002 for Norway; Ito 2005 for Japan).

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Reflection: Building on Past Practices In the case of mobile technologies, newer non-communication functions build on our use of pre-existing standalone devices: a) To what extent do you listen to the same type of music on your mobile phone, or mobile device such as a Blackberry or iPhone, as you do on specialized music players (MP3, CDs, etc)? b) To what extent do you take the same type of pictures with the mobile phone as you did with other cameras, digital or analogue?

his is relevant to common claims about the way in which new mobile technologies are totally new, even revolutionary. While they may be novel in some sense, there is often some evolutionary process whereby we see continuities from the past. For instance, the type of programmes originally developed for radio were one influence on the TV programmes that later emerged (Winston 1989). Meanwhile, the practice of the family sitting around listening to the radio initially carried over into TV viewing. hrough considering historical examples, and thinking through current practices, we can therefore see that the relationship between mobile technologies and other ICTs has aspects that are both evolutionary and revolutionary—which has implications for the ways we make our communicative choices.

MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES AND CHOICES IN COMMUNICATIONS As we have seen, new mobile technologies can revise past practices as well as inform or supplant them, and these interrelationships between old and new technologies can influence the communications channels we decide to use in any particular circumstances. his section of the chapter therefore deals with choices between ICTs, because we have to see the use of one technology, like the mobile phone, in the context of other alternative ways of achieving similar goals. his leads to an argument for taking a holistic approach, looking at the larger picture, as opposed to seeing any mobile technology in isolation. In other words, we need to take into account a range of options for communication and information sharing, and this is captured in discussions of the broader social contexts of communications choices, captured in terms such as ‘communications repertoires’ (Haddon 2005b), ‘technospaces’ (Licoppe 2004), and the broader concept of ‘communicative ecologies’ (Tacchi, Slater and Hearn 2003; Hearn and Foth 2007). Although this issue is related to the displacement question discussed earlier, there is a different emphasis here. he early question asked: overall, and at some time

point, how have patterns of use shifted compared to an earlier point in time? Here, the question is: what shapes choices between ICTs in any particular circumstances? When we try to understand people’s use of a technology, we are therefore sometimes talking about their choice to use it rather than using something else. Of course, there are constraints on choice. On the one hand, while some people may have many options at a particular moment, others, for a variety of reasons, may have fewer or no choices. On the other hand, for many people life is increasingly saturated with ICTs from which to choose (see Haddon and Vincent 2007 for how children experience this). Since the research is now sufficiently rich in this area, the main emphasis here is on how people choose between different channels of communication under conditions where our options expand. Most of the examples are of choosing between the mobile and the fixed line, and using voice versus texting (since choices such as that between SMS and IM are considered in a later section). Choices between using the non-communications features of mobile phones and their alternatives are also considered briefly here first—mainly through looking at the music-playing capabilities of the mobile phone (see Case Study 3.1).

Case Study 3.1 Music on the Mobile Phone In Haddon and Vincent’s (2007) research with young people, the participants did not differentiate the mobile’s music quality from iPods or separate MP3 players. The superior storage of the latter was its greatest advantage and, in fact, a number of participants said that they looked forward to more storage on the mobile both for their music and for their pictures. The advantage of the mobile was that you always carried it around anyway. The mobile could also be more easily played aloud for collective consumption, as young people took turns listening to each others’ music when going home after school, when travelling together on a coach to sports events or when stretching or breaking school rules by playing music there. Showing what music you had was in many ways the equivalent to having a photo album. When young people socialize and ask to see each other’s mobiles, gone are the days when this merely involved looking at its features or checking out texts in some cases. Now friends might work their way through pictures and music on the device—the equivalent, for a previous generation, of having a look at someone’s record and audiotape collections in their homes. In the technology-rich world of these youth, there were alternative ways to do this (e.g. sending an attached file of digital music via the internet). Hence some teenagers would take music from their own CD collection or from downloads (legitimately bought from sites like iTunes, or illegally downloaded) and send it on to friends. However, they could equally well put music on the mobile phone (from whatever source), play it when friends were around, and transfer it by Bluetooth whenever those listening asked if they could have that music. More spontaneity existed when one could transfer the song there and then as a gift (even if to an extent this was preplanned by virtue of putting music on the mobile). The mobile phone as a music storage device enabled such ways of sharing to emerge. (Adapted from Haddon and Vincent, 2007)

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One consideration concerning choices made about the use of different ICTs is the technological properties of the device; that is people use x because it is somehow ‘better’ at achieving something than y. As we can see in Case Study 3.1 with respect to digital music, it was easy to play the mobile phone MP3 player aloud if the occasion permitted it, and the ability to store songs on the mobile (plus the ability to transfer them via Bluetooth) supported the particular practice of exchanging songs spontaneously when users were face-to-face. On the other hand, at the time when this book was written, dedicated MP3 players appealed to young people because they had greater storage capacity compared to the music-playing facilities on a mobile phone (Haddon and Vincent 2007). If we now turn to communications, it is obvious that the physical portability of mobile phones is the reason they were used instead of the domestic fixed line when away from home (although this does not account for some young people’s preference for using the mobile phone when at home; see Chapter 4). But one has to be a little careful when discussing the influence of technical advantages or constraints on choices in communications. For example, the limited number of characters allowed in a text message (160), and the manner in which they were written through repeated presses of the buttons, seemed at one time to be a powerful inhibitor against choosing this medium. But not only did texting become popular—studies have also shown how users have in fact been very creative in overcoming this limitation (Segerstad 2005). herefore, we always have to ask how much technological features really constrain use, and so influence choices, or whether users also have scope to manoeuvre in relation to different technical features. he next consideration as regards choices made is one of economics. Even before mobile phones were widespread, the importance of the cost of ‘plain old telephony’ was clear. People often consciously called at times when tariffs were lower, or else rationed their own calls or the calls made by other household members—with parents especially trying to persuade children to use the phone less (Haddon 1998, 2004a). his has carried over into mobile telephony, as studies have demonstrated that costs affect choices, leading once again to negotiations within households (Haddon and Vincent 2005). his influences parents’ choices and, more especially, children’s choices, since money is usually more limited amongst young people. Whereas some early studies documented extensive negotiations between parents and children over the cost of calls (when young people were not aware of the costs), over time they have become very cost conscious (see Chapter 7). he lack of money on the part of young people was partly (but only partly) why texting appealed, because it can be cheaper than speaking on the mobile phone. But cost considerations permeate other decisions, such as using ‘free’ minutes of particular mobile phone tariff packages rather than using a landline. Meanwhile, music exchange via the mobile (see Case Study 3.1)

is also an example of pooling resources, where participants acquire, from their point of view, ‘free’ music. Of chief interest here, however, are the social reasons behind choices, and the existing social constraints, which illustrate the range of questions one can ask of all ICTs. he focus will be on communications, since we have numerous examples in this field—as illustrated in Case Study 3.2.

Case Study 3.2 Communications Choices One British study examined in some detail the various communications choices of particular households. A vignette of one participant—Sharon—demonstrates the complexities of communications choices. Sharon was thirty-nine, married to Mike, with two daughters—Becky, the older one, and Charlotte, the younger one. Some of Sharon’s incoming calls, such as early-morning calls, were to the landline. Most of her friends were in a similar situation, with children being given lifts to school or to the station in the morning. So if they needed to make contact with each other it was usually before 8.30 a.m. on the landline. Family and friends usually called Sharon’s landline first on the days when she was not working, since they knew her routines. If it was a work morning, they might have tried to phone the mobile first. It was complicated because Sharon was out a good deal anyway (e.g. mornings at the gym), and if people knew this, they might once again have tried the mobile first. She had a message on the answering machine attached to the landline giving her mobile number and that of her husband. When Sharon had moved from a pay-as-you-go service to a contract service (because she decided this would be cheaper), the free calls that were part of her package had changed her pattern of communication. Because she had these free calls, she tried to use them up and simply made more calls. She used to make even more calls in the evenings and did not mind doing so—but said, ‘I really don’t like it now’, and so she rang back only people whom she had to ring. Since she was tired then, she preferred not to be bothered doing this—instead, she wanted to ‘sit down and watch the TV and relax a bit’. She would make free calls on the mobile during the day instead—stating, ‘In the day I don’t mind it so much, somehow’. Some daytime calls were from the landline, even before 6 p.m., because she sometimes forgot about the mobile and reached automatically for the home phone. She worked 9–2 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays and so tried not make any calls then. She was willing to receive urgent calls at work but tried to discourage calls in general. However, she did read her emails at work. During the day Sharon sent some texts. She had started texting a couple of years earlier when she was shown how to do it. Her friends also sent texts. She thought that some texting was useful if there was a short communication to convey. But if this was going to lead to several texts back and forth, Sharon would probably choose to phone using the mobile instead, because talking would achieve her goals more quickly. Meanwhile, Becky finished school at 2.30 and made her way homewards via bus and train with her friends. She called her mum on the mobile to let her know she was going with her friends to the shopping centre first. While cooking dinner, Sharon called a friend from the home phone and received a call.

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In the early evening, Sharon often let the incoming calls to the home fixed line go to the answering machine, because she did not want the family to be disturbed—‘Otherwise you’re answering the phone all the time during dinner’. Besides, she could hear the message to decide if it was urgent and whether she needed to pick up. In fact, the calls were for Becky—her friends sometimes tried the phone line going to Becky’s room and when that did not work they tried the home phone. (Adapted from Haddon and Vincent, 2004)

Obviously the purpose and content of communications influence choices, such as those illustrated in Case Study 3.2. hese include communications that are gifts and communications that provide a sense of security. he urgency of communication can be a factor. Here we might think about the urgency of communications in the event of emergencies and new contingencies, less urgent communications to finalize arrangements to meet, and still less urgent communications that constitute regular contact with close family. And of course there are the distinctly non-urgent occasional communications with extended family and distant friends to ‘keep in touch’. We would also have to consider what bearing the social relationship to the other communicator had on that choice: for example, whether this was contact with immediate family, communications with extended family, contact with close friends, ‘mates’, old friends, acquaintances, colleagues and so on. he physical proximity of communicators, within the country or abroad, might also be a factor shaping choices, although this is often tied up with cost considerations. But certainly the social location of the persons communicating is pertinent to the choice of medium: for example whether that person is at home, in the workplace or in various public spaces, as is illustrated again in Case Study 3.2. And finally we would have to look at the communications norms adopted by particular social networks, an example being that texting and instant messaging are the most commonly used media of many groups of young people. Various studies suggest that these are indeed all considerations when making choices, but we should bear in mind that all such checklists are simplifications, and only starting points for more detailed investigation. For example, we see the interaction between several of the above in such matters as new parents announcing the birth of a first child. hose closer in the social network, such as immediate family, may be informed more quickly in person or by phone, whereas those progressively more distant may be informed with a little more delay by written letters or email (Licoppe and Smoreda 2006).2 Or to take another example, within particular social groups there can be rules and expectations about the appropriateness of different media for different circumstances. One study of texting amongst young people showed that there are common understandings about when it is inappropriate to use texting as opposed to using other means of communication, including face-to-face communication (Taylor

and Harper 2003). But even here there is not always consensus, in that group members make choices that others think are inappropriate. Social constraints also affect the choice of medium. hese would include the regulation of one’s communications by others, as when parents attempt to regulate outgoing calls on the fixed line (Haddon 1998), and parental pressure not to spend too much money on mobile phone calls (as discussed further in Chapter 7). Nor should we forget the formal regulation of certain media in other social spaces. For example, in some organizations it is forbidden to use email for social purposes at work (Haddon 2002), or to spend time communicating via social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. Social constraints are also manifest in terms of what is felt to be inappropriate communication in certain social spaces, and the reactions of co-present others to this, such as the informal pressures to restrain mobile use in certain public spaces (see Chapter 4). People’s social commitments to other people at certain times have a bearing on communications choices. For example, especially in the period when many had dialup narrowband internet, which meant that one had to choose whether to use the telephone for voice or internet access, people often did not use the internet at certain times in the evening in order to keep the family phone line free for incoming calls (Lelong and Beaudouin 2001). Timing considerations are also clear in terms of morning calls to the fixed line before the school run, as shown in Case Study 3.2. And then there are the strategies that people use for controlling their own communications, such as young people arranging for other people to call their mobile phones, or to leave messages on the mobile phone’s voicemail, rather than calling the domestic fixed line (or leaving messages on the household answering machine) because of a desire for privacy from other family members (see Chapter 4). Another example of controlling incoming communications would be the reluctance of some people to give out personal mobile numbers to work colleagues.

Reflection: Factors Shaping Mobile Phone Calls Think of the factors that might influence your own mobile phone use. What might influence when and where you make mobile phone calls as opposed to using different channels of communication?

Finally, to complete the picture, we need to consider how people link different forms of communication when making choices. Some studies, for example, have concluded that despite claims about technological convergence, some communication tools are used for only certain types of communication—that is there is a degree of specialization (De Gournay and Smoreda 2001). the relationships between technologies

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But people do also sometimes shift between different parts of the communication repertoire in the short term. his can include reconfirming a message made in one medium through another one, such as emailing someone to confirm a phone decision. People sometimes use one medium to set up another, for example making a phone call to ask for an attached file to be sent by email. Shifts between media may result when the first choice fails or is not available, as in the case of sending a text message when a phone call does not get through, or phoning someone on the mobile when a fixed line is blocked (Haddon and Vincent 2004, 2005). Or there is the example of using one mode when someone fails to reply by another—such as the example of a teenager phoning on the mobile to ask why someone has not replied to their text message: the latter had not met the first teenager’s expectations about how to use one channel of communication properly in terms of giving a timely reply (Taylor and Harper 2003). And shifts may be necessary to sort out problems through one medium that were created through using another, for example making a phone call to clarify an email (Mante-Meijer and Haddon 2005). All of these examples add to our appreciation of the decision-making processes at work behind our communications choices. Now we turn to a more detailed example of such decision making: texting.

A CASE STUDY IN COMMUNICATIONS CHOICES: TEXTING In the previous section, it became clear that a range of social factors impact on individuals’ choices of communications media for different goals and purposes. hese factors range from the technological choices available to them at any one time (and the functionalities associated with different technologies), to the purposes of the communication and the closeness of the relationships involved. In this section we turn to an exemplar of the communications choices some social groups make, in the form of a case study in text messaging amongst young people. his case study in text messaging demonstrates the complex decision making employed in the negotiation of media-saturated communicative ecologies. he early research literature on mobile phones and young people paid a fair amount of attention to the practice of texting (e.g. as summarized in Ling 2004). his may have been partly because the emergence of this practice was in many ways surprising, and it was to become cited as an example of a grass roots initiative leading to an unanticipated innovation. But perhaps some of the attention it attracted also related to the fact that young people and young adults played the key role in pioneering SMS,3 which is a comparatively rare occurrence and can be cited in the recurring question of whether a certain generation of youth is making a break with the experiences of their parents. Here, we consider the effects of texting on choices about channels of communication.

ORIGINS AND TRAJECTORIES: THE EARLY HISTORY OF AN INNOVATION he emergence of texting in the form we know it was not anticipated by industry.4 Originally, a ‘signalling channel’ existed in telephony where one could send short data messages at the same time that someone was speaking on the phone—and in digital mobile phones this channel was initially unused. he original plan was that it could be used to send messages to customers, such as a notification for business users that they had voicemail. It could also be used as an advanced form of paging, whereby if you wanted to contact someone, you would give this message verbally to an operator who would then ‘text’ it on: Some phones will be equipped for originating messages, but it is generally expected that generally telephony will be used to call an operator who types in the message at a service centre. (GSM Memorandum of Understanding, 1990, cited in Taylor and Vincent 2005, 80)

he only problem was that at the time, mobile companies could not see how to make money from this feature. It looked as if it would cost more to set up the billing arrangements to record and charge for each message than the firms would gain in terms of revenue. Of course, this changed when SMS became popular, first in the Nordic countries and initially among younger users, namely teenagers and young adults. Mobile operators responded by setting up billing systems, and text messages became a significant portion of their revenues (Taylor and Vincent 2005). In line with the first section of this chapter, we need to make a number of observations about ways in which some of the social practices associated with texting were not entirely new. It is certainly the case, for example, that texting did not always follow identical paths in all countries. Although the use of SMS may have been unintended, we noted earlier the principle that the use of even new ICTs often builds on what had gone before. For example, in the case of Japan, the principle of using codes to send very brief messages like ‘What are you doing?’ were first developed on pagers, before abbreviations performed the same role in text messages (Okada 2005; Goggin, 2006). Meanwhile, emoticons like ‘smileys’ existed in online forms at an earlier stage, for example in instant messaging (Castells et al. 2006), but also in communications on electronic networks such as newsgroups before the internet as we know it today evolved. Although this brief history alludes to the general popularity of texting, there was certainly some cultural variation in that it was not always taken up enthusiastically in some places, or else was used in quite specific ways. he most striking example where it was not embraced by youth in quite the same way as in many parts of Europe and Asia was in the United States. Some writers have pointed to early technical issues such as incompatible mobile telephony systems (Agar 2003) and different pricing policies the relationships between technologies

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(Goggin 2006), or it may be that the greater prevalence of messaging by internet was a factor. Even within Asia, there was less texting in Hong Kong compared to its neighbours, where the technical and pricing factors have again been noted, as well as the initially greater difficulty of working with Chinese script instead of a Latinbased one (Goggin 2006). At the other end of this particular continuum we have the Philippines, often cited as the text-capital of the world (Pertierra et al. 2002; EllwoodClayton 2003; Paragas 2005). And to emphasize the complexity, one of the key users of SMS in Hong Kong is the Filipino diaspora working there (Goggin 2006). We have yet further examples of cultural variation, in that SMS manuals showing all the codes one could use have proved to be to popular in various Asian countries (Goggin 2006). his is also the case for the prewritten greetings downloaded and sent by SMS on special days like the Chinese Spring Festival (Xun 2005) or the equivalent religious greetings sent in the Philippines (Elwood-Clayton 2005).

THE DOMESTICATION OF TEXTING? As noted in Chapter 1, one framework that can be useful for capturing a range of experiences of ICTs is that of domestication. However, it is important to be aware that different studies using this broad umbrella concept work on different levels.5 he approach, in the original British version at least, focused on households—and asked how new ICTs enter the home. In advance of acquiring them, what did they symbolize? For example, when home computers first came out, many people felt that if they or their children did not have one they would be left behind. he approach initially focused mainly on those ICTs that were domestically based, such as TVs, VCRs, the fixed-line telephone, and computers. he studies looked mainly (although not only) at households containing more than one person to capture their interactions. What role did people imagine the technology would play in their lives? What types of negotiations took place between household members about whether they should get the technology and how it should be used? Once acquired, how was the technology used—what routines emerged, what times in people’s lives did this occupy, and to what extent did that itself reflect rules about use? Where were the technologies located, and why in those spaces? And how were the technologies talked about, or demonstrated to others, perhaps as part of how we present ourselves? In other words, there are a range of questions about what we do with technologies— in various senses—and why we treat them in this way. his approach tries to capture domestic politics, concerns, tensions, issues and so on, some of which are explored in Chapter 7 on power relations. Some of the questions posed above would also apply to mobile phones in general, which would probably be the most logical unit of analysis (rather than texting specifically, since the latter is a very particular use of the mobile device). However, for the

purpose of this case study, we can show that this approach can have implications for how we analyse texting. For example, if parents are often involved in the financial decisions when acquiring mobiles for their (dependent) children, this can have a bearing on the tariff package chosen (see Chapter 7). here might be parental rules about how much children can spend on texting, which also have a bearing on texts sent. Indeed, there may be specific rules about the degree to which children can text their peers (Haddon and Vincent 2007). But focusing on the household clearly has some limitations when talking about portable devices, when much of the time they are not actually located or used in the home. herefore, to what extent is there a form of domestication amongst social networks of peers, where we can still ask equivalent questions to ones about the home? How do texting practices emerge amongst peers? What type of rules (or norms) about texting exist amongst peers? In fact, some research has addressed such issues. For example, although some text messages are of the kind where you do not have to reply straight away, in other cases when young people send messages, they expect an answer reasonably quickly. hus, we have examples of young people phoning up to ask ‘What’s wrong?’ when they did not get a reply to their text message, asking why they were being ignored (Taylor and Harper 2005). To take another example, even though texting does not often involve the use of formal grammar, some young people objected to the overuse of capital letters or the lack of any punctuation, which could make messages difficult to read. And there were understandings about when it was inappropriate to use texting as opposed to using other means of communication, for example when young people thought that it was not right to end a relationship, to ‘dump’ someone, through sending a text message (Taylor and Harper 2005). he domestication approach also draws attention to dynamic elements, to various forms of change in our experience of ICTs over time. In other words, many of the founders of this approach noted that technologies were not domesticated once and for all, such that their usage was fixed forever. Changes in circumstances sometimes require people to rethink the place of a technology in their lives, so it is no longer used in quite the same way. It can be ‘re-domesticated’ or even ‘de-domesticated’ if people give it up (Sørensen 1994). For example, there might be changes in individual lives or circumstances which lead us to use technologies differently or communicate differently—as when general communications patterns change after the birth of a first child (Manceron et al. 2001). As the social networks of people grow older, as they move on to different life stages and lifestyles, so the communication patterns between them can alter. Alternatively, new technologies may arrive and compete with older ones, changing their uses, following on from our discussion earlier in the chapter. here might be changes in technology itself (new versions offering different options), or even the symbolic meaning of a technology may change (what is ‘cool’ at one point becomes passé at another). the relationships between technologies

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What changes over time have occurred in the case of texting? he memory for storing text messages was initially very limited, and so many of the messages that young people especially wanted to keep as memories had to be written out in longhand. his has changed somewhat as phones have acquired more memory (Goggin 2006). SMS also gradually became used for other purposes besides interpersonal communication, such as voting in relation to TV programmes or, in the case of the UK, paying the London traffic congestion charge. And it has been tied into other technologies, as in Korea, where one can receive text alerts if messages have been left on the mini home page on the social networking site Cyworld. Texting practices have also changed, at least for some groups and in some societies, because of competing options. For example, in Japan, emails on Japanese mobile phones (Keitai) allowed the user to send more characters from the mobile than the 160 characters allowed in SMS. Hence Japanese mobile emails had started to supersede texting even by the late 1990s (Matsuda 2005). And as we have already noted, in one UK study some youth texting declined as internet messaging rose in popularity (Haddon and Vincent 2007). Finally, texting was originally mostly associated with young people, a fact that initially served to differentiate this generation from that of its elders. But once some parents, in particular, started texting, this meant the end of its role as a unique channel for young people. Meanwhile, as texting pioneers grow older, there is the question of the degree to which texting remains in use as one of young people’s communications channels: does it simply continue at the same level as before, does it cease or does it get used only for certain types of communications, which are more restricted compared to when this generation was younger?

Reflection: Changes in Texting Think about how your own mobile communications have evolved over time. Has the amount, style or content of your text messages changed as you have grown older?

SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF TEXTING he last issue this case study addresses is to encourage us to think about the social consequences of people’s adoption of any new technology. In general, how the consequences of technologies are characterized, and how they are evaluated, depends very much on the perspectives of the researchers and the criteria they use. We can illustrate this in relation to texting by looking at two very different discussions within the literature: discussions relating to the language of texting, and those related to its implications for sociability.

Some attention has been paid to the style of language used in texting—or more accurately, the texting format certain groups use, since in practice many texters write in a way almost similar to the standard language (Ling 2004). he style that has been most discussed is one that involves such features as missing vowels between consonants, missing word spacing, using new forms of punctuation, using abbreviations, and using symbols (such as smiley emoticons). Some commentators, usually the guardians of tradition, have expressed concern about this style of language seeping into and changing written language such as Standard English (noted in Castells et al. 2006). hat the evaluations of any new development can vary considerably is evidenced by the fact that many researchers looking at this language style have been impressed by the creativity involved. Italian researchers have characterized it as a ‘written orality’ (Fortunati and Manganelli 2002), in that some symbols are based on phonetics to save space, so the reader has to say the word to understand what is meant. Fortunati (2001) also characterizes texting as the chance to rediscover the charm of writing. Meanwhile, in French-based empirical research, Rivère (2002) noted the pleasures some texters experience through playing with written language, personalizing it or using codes that only some others can appreciate. Looking beyond Europe, the review by Castells et al. (2006) points to yet further creativity in the way that language is simplified, and how English or other languages are combined with local languages in different countries to form new hybrids. As one researcher on Indonesian texting observed: [for] those economically less well off, interestingly language is the cheapest way of marking oneself off as trendy and modern . . . Texting in this sense is not just exchanging chitchat, but chitchatting in a very modern way, both through the technology and the languages that are used. (Barendregt 2005, 56–57, cited in Castells et al. 2006, 180)

Lastly, the discussions among academics about language have not just concerned the format of, and the act of playing with, language. here has also been some reflection on content. In their review, Castells et al. (2006) draw attention to the fact that a number of researchers in different countries have noted that texting can be a ‘relaxed’ way for teenagers (though not only teenagers) to talk about sensitive subjects. In fact, that same review notes that texting can be a channel through which adults can more easily talk about matters of a sexual nature, and hence texting is in some places being used for flirting. his brings us back to the earlier discussion in this chapter regarding the characteristics of communication channels, and why users choose some for certain purposes over others. Turning to questions of texting sociability, French researchers Licoppe and Smoreda (2006) have noted how bonds with others always involve some balance of presence and absence. Maintaining the social ties in a group, for example, requires some the relationships between technologies

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moments when group members are present together, such as face-to-face meetings. But there also need to be times when members are not always together, since spending too much time together can create tensions. So it is a matter of finding the right balance, the right distance. However, this process can also involve mediated contact, by ICTs, to help maintain some sense of connection when not co-present—a theme that we shall developed further in the discussion of social networks in Chapter 6. he emergence of written electronic communications (including email and internet messaging, but mainly texting at this moment) has in some groups, especially amongst young people, led to more communication than in the past, creating a sense of what has been called ‘connected presence’ (also discussed in Licoppe 2004; see Chapter 6). hinking about intimate or close friends in particular, there can be a greater continual awareness of the other person, not only from the sometimes brief content of such messages (e.g. saying what they are doing or thinking or observing), but also because the very flow of messages as little gifts (known as the phatic role of communication) shows that friends are thinking of each other. In a similar spirit, Norwegian research has argued how such intensive communications where ‘one has a running sense of the other’s location and situation’ can reinforce social ties and enhance sociability (Ling 2004). his ‘connected presence’ would count as a new development, a social consequence, but it has its risks. Licoppe and Smoreda (2006) note one risk: that of simply being overwhelmed by all these extra communications. But they add that this is at least mitigated by the fact that messages such as texts are a less intrusive mode of communication compared to voice calls, partly because you do not have to answer at once (i.e. it is an asynchronic mode of communication). However, there are other social risks. his connected presence is a certain kind of sociability that can exclude others. Ling (2004) referred to the notion of a ‘virtual walled community’ to convey the idea that when communication is increasingly aimed at a limited number of people we know well, this limits our opportunity to establish new ties in one’s co-located situation. In other words, connected presence can strengthen cliques, where strong ties already exist, meaning that one is less likely to interact with those around (or make new contacts; see Chapter 6). Clearly not only can social consequences be characterized in different ways, but they can also be double-edged.

Reflection: Degree of Texting with Close Friends Think about the extent to which this sense of connected presence applies in your own case, or amongst people you know. Does texting lead you or people you know to have a significant degree of communication with just a few close friends?

Chapter Summary „ We saw that when we acquire new technologies, it can change the way we use existing technologies. But both old and new ICTs can find complementary roles in our lives. While we may engage in new mobile communications practices when we acquire new technologies, what we do with them can also be influenced by what we did with previous ICTs—leading to evolutionary rather than revolutionary change.

„ A variety of social factors shape the choices we make about which technology to use in which circumstances. However, while we ultimately make choices, these are made within social constraints—sometimes external, as in the case of social pressures from other people, and sometimes partly of our own making, as in our obligations to others and our own agendas. „ The emergence of texting illustrates how users help develop unforeseen innovations as well as helps us to understand what industry had anticipated. Texting was an example of a new practice, partly building on what people had been doing before. „ Texting provides an example of the questions we might ask about how a technology might be domesticated and find a place in the lives of some sectors of our society. It also provides examples of how we might think further about the social consequences of our use of new technologies.

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4 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES In the last chapter we examined various characteristics of mobile technologies and the different kinds of communications that they enable. We saw how the uptake of new devices impacts on our use of older ICTs, and also how new practices emerge with new technologies. We also saw how users experimenting with some of those functions might also invent new forms of communication that are unanticipated by those who designed and built those technologies. New channels of communication—such as texting on mobile phones—therefore emerge within social contexts and locales where we already use, or do not use, a range of technologies for different communicative purposes. his chapter builds on these insights by considering the use of mobile technologies in a number of different kinds of geographical and social space. One of the key characteristics of mobile technologies is exactly that they are mobile—they enable communications (amongst other uses) on the move. herefore, new communicative practices involving mobile technologies also emerge from the new ways in which mobile handsets are used in different kinds of social and geographical space. As a general structuring principle, we organize those various social spaces in which we operate in different ways depending on their function, their role and the meaning that we attribute to them. Some are considered more public space, some are considered more private, some have boundaries that indicate particular purposes (such as dwelling or workplace), while others have a function that is somehow sacred or special, or considered set aside from everyday life, such as libraries or churches. here are also those spaces that are in-between, such as bars or cafés, whose meaning with respect to their relative privacy (and the privacy of communications in particular) is negotiated or contested in the course of everyday interactions. his chapter will examine some of the transformations that have taken place with respect to the organization of public and private spaces in recent years, in the course of the development and dissemination of mobile communications technologies. he chapter will first look at some of the common ways that public and private spaces are defined (whether explicitly via rules or implicitly by everyday interactions) and consider how various communications media have been embedded in those spaces. he chapter will then focus on the case of mobile technologies, and some of the early studies that explicitly investigated the transformation of public and private

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spaces with the advent of mobile communications media. We consider in particular emerging practices of managing co-presence and remote presence, and how this takes place in different locales. We also consider whether there is cultural variation in the conception of ‘personal space’ (i.e. the space an individual inhabits) and whether this leads to different communicative practices (in public and in private) in different nations. Finally, we will examine how informal norms of use have evolved alongside attempts to formally regulate mobile phone use in different types of public space, and explore people’s resistance to these forms of regulation.

MOBILITIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES here is little doubt that the ubiquity of mobile communications in everyday life has transformed the ways in which most people in the Western world experience public space. But what we routinely mean by ‘public’ has been changed over time with the introduction of numerous technologies. Each novel travel and transport technology, for example, has historically transformed our sense of private and public space. With the introduction of the steam train in Europe, for example, travel tended to be democratized by comparison with the carriage or coach journeys of the past—people were therefore thrown into unfamiliar contact with one another whilst travelling and needed to establish new ways to interact (or not) while in the company of strangers. In his studies of everyday interactions during the emergence of what we now call ‘modernity’ at the turn of the twentieth century, Simmel (1971a, 1971b) noted the importance of public spaces (with public transport as a prime example) for the culture of the modern metropolis. According to Simmel, the cultures of these urban spaces in early modernity fostered an attitude of indifference—people living in the cities adopted an instrumental rationality concerned with the ‘business’ of everyday life, at the expense of mutually recognizing and emotionally responding to each other. his, he argues, resulted in an attitude of reservation, a reluctance to engage with the everyday ‘strangeness’ of anonymous others, that formed a protective shield for the individual. he desire for protection against unknown others might be a factor contributing to the appeal of the private car, and its widespread use and distribution throughout the twentieth century. In the case of the automobile, the reverse situation to that of public transport occurred—people could now travel in public, but cocooned within a vehicle that was predominantly private—what Raymond Williams (1974, 1997) termed ‘mobile privatisation’. A more recent example of this phenomenon would be the introduction of the Sony Walkman in the 1970s. To use a mobile music player with headphones in public is to create a personal audio environment, distinctive to the individual, thus enabling one to avoid interacting in public space with the

other people who are there, often referred to in the literature as ‘co-present others’. As Michael Bull (2000) notes, when used in public space, personal entertainment technologies such as the Sony Walkman ‘re-spatialize’ subjective experience in public. Individuals may carry their familiar, comforting sounds with them on portable personal stereos, essentially carrying part of their personal, private ‘home’ with them on any journey, enabling them to ignore any ‘strange’ or ‘anonymous’ environment through which they pass. Reactions to the use of personal stereos in public spaces were initially somewhat negative, both from those co-present as well as from some of those commenting on the phenomenon. One early study (du Gay et al. 1997) attempted to explain these negative reactions, drawing on the work of Mary Douglas. Employing an anthropological perspective, they argued that personal or private listening in public space was ‘out of place’, therefore crossing the boundaries of what was considered ‘proper’ behaviour in that situation. While this reaction diminished over time as the technology became more ubiquitous, the case of the personal stereo foreshadows the use of, for example, mobile phones in public places. From these examples of transport and mobile entertainment technologies, we can see that one of the central difficulties in the introduction of novel technologies of mobility, in any historical period, is how to negotiate relationships—to engage or not to engage—with co-present others. When mobile phones first gained significant diffusion in Europe, for example, early fieldwork indicated that people were actively negotiating how to address these issues: I was in the Bijenkorf [a big store in the Netherlands] elevator the other day. You already feel a little discomfort there. Where do you look? Mostly at the ceiling or one’s shoes. If in a situation like that someone then starts ‘chatting’ on his mobile, one feels even more discomfort. I thought: is that really necessary—And so did the others, we raised our eyebrows inquiringly. (Klamer, Haddon and Ling 2000)

We will return to this theme when we direct our attention to the mobile phone in particular. he preceding examples of public and private transport tend to imply that the ways we often think of ‘private’ and ‘public’ are synonymous with ‘home’ and ‘away from home’. he space of ‘home and family’ as differentiated from ‘space amongst relative strangers’ is, however, only one dimension of ‘public’ and ‘private’, and looking at historical communications technologies can suggest what other dimensions might exist. he advent of the fixed-line telephone is a case in point. Initially, its designers saw many possibilities for the fixed-line telephone, including using it for one-to-many broadcasting of events such as concerts, for example (Marvin 1990). his would essentially have been a public use of the technology. On the other hand, its properties as a point-to-point medium of communication were also appreciated, as some public and private spaces

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companies that promoted the technology envisaged that it would be used in businesses and organizations. As the telephone gradually became part of the communications infrastructure in the Western world throughout the twentieth century, its use shifted into homes—initially those of the wealthy—to provide communications for the businessman at home or the female head of household—a private setting. Yet, importing such a communications technology into the home broke down some of the barriers between the public and the private. Calls by children, for example, could not necessarily be controlled from within the home by parents, while the use of the technology simultaneously brought the business of social life from outside into the confines of the domestic sphere. Both these factors create a more permeable boundary between the family home and the outside world than might be imagined when we think of home as a sanctuary from public life. As the social aspects of fixed-line telephone use came to be further appreciated in developed nations, the technology became democratized and spread to many homes. he communications carried out through them were not necessarily private, however. Usually an operator was required to connect calls from one point to another and could potentially listen in on or even join in any calls made. Furthermore, even where and when telephone exchanges became automated, some households (especially in rural areas) remained on services where several telephones shared the same local loop, what were known in some places as party lines (also multiparty or shared service lines). Because several residential telephones would be connected to the same circuit, it was possible in some configurations of the service to overhear others’ conversations, or to use the telephone to contact and speak with multiple other households, at the same time, in the same locality. Even in the case where a single household used a dedicated line, a number of different household members could then use the technology within the same domestic space, often located in areas in the home that were collectively accessible. What could be communicated in such a space was not, therefore, necessarily, private to an individual—rather, a call could potentially be overheard by a number of household members. Indeed, in those homes that had multiple fixedline telephone receivers installed—as had become relatively common by the end of the twentieth century in the Western world—multiple household members could potentially participate in the same call. he case of the fixed-line telephone demonstrates that the function of the call and its content—what is to be communicated—both influence how, where and when the phone is to be used, as we might expect from our discussion of different channels of communication in the previous chapter. What it also demonstrates, however, is that the function, role, meanings and norms of the space in which the call is made or taken are also particularly important contextualizing factors. Whenever a new communications technology is taken up, it changes the spaces in which it is located—and the spaces in which it is located change our potential uses of the technologies. As we

have seen, the introduction of the fixed-line telephone broke down the boundaries of the inside and outside of the home. hese changes therefore required the development of new forms of interaction to define and manage what was public and what was private, both within the household and between the household and other social spaces. It required new norms, new interaction rituals to establish the grounds of the communication between the home and other spaces, and new techniques to manage the privacy of individuals within the shared home space. In the case of mobile phones, the spaces transformed via the communications technology are extensive, exactly because of the phone’s mobility—its potential to be used anytime, and anyplace. Any code of conduct regarding telephone interaction that might have emerged with fixed-line telephones was largely overwritten by what de Gournay (2002) has referred to as the ‘chaotic and divergent’ use of the mobile telephone in multiple spaces. herefore, to examine the effect of the mobile phone, we need to pay attention to how strategies for negotiating the public and private have arisen in different types of spaces—whether those are the bedroom, the train carriage, the kitchen, the office, the street, the restaurant, the workplace, the cinema or elsewhere. In the next section we document some of the research that has taken place over the past ten years investigating the case of mobile phones in particular, especially in public places—and consider how mobile phones affect our experiences of both public and private social life.

NEGOTIATING THE MOBILE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE Some of the earliest research to be carried out on mobile phones investigated the very issue of how the technologies were being used in public spaces. Two of the first themes to emerge were how people managed remote communications and, related to the themes illustrated previously, how they managed relations with co-present others in the same space. he particular difficulty in dealing with relations in public space is partly in managing conflicting demands for privacy whilst being in public, amongst others, who are also managing privacy and being in public at the same time. his has sometimes been cast in terms of simple etiquette. hroughout the massmarket uptake of mobile phones the media widely covered the potential disruption that a phone call might pose to the interactional norms of different public spaces. In the United Kingdom, some service providers ran early advertising campaigns encouraging users to switch off their mobiles in some public spaces—such as the BT Cellnet (later O2) ‘Switch It’ campaign of 1999 (Duffy 2000). Early corporate publications included small booklets of mobile phone etiquette to advise individuals on the proper management of co-present relations and remote communications, and the mobile public and private spaces

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phone continues to appear in Debrett’s New Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners (Harrison 2000). In fact, advice on mobile phone etiquette can now be found in a variety of different places on the internet—the following is taken from the GSM Association Web site: It is generally accepted that there are some places where people should never talk on a mobile phone and where even the ringing of a mobile phone would be considered unacceptable. In most countries, movies and stage shows, weddings and funerals, concerts, speeches and lectures are the sorts of public gatherings where the ringing of a phone and the carrying on of a telephone conversation (indeed, any conversation) is likely to be considered an unacceptable and rude interruption or distraction. Whispering into the phone is no more likely to be considered acceptable than whispering to a neighbor. Restaurants pose a more subjective question. he general atmosphere in the restaurant may give a clue as to the proper etiquette, but it is always an option to ask the restaurant if they have a policy. In any event and as above, the phone can be set to vibrate silently or ring quietly. In appropriate circumstance, you may consider leaving the table, and continuing the call in the foyer. (GSM Association 2008)

he preceding example makes some of the social norms in public spaces explicit rather than implicit—and one of the problems they address is the mobile phone’s intrusion into public spaces, and the violation of the perceived social norms of particular locations. It has been exactly these social norms in public spaces such as restaurants (which pose a more subjective question) towards which some of the early social research directed attention. According to Ling (2004, 123), both qualitative and quantitative data collected across Europe has indicated that a majority of both users and non-users agree that the mobile phone ‘disturbs other people’, and this is particularly the case in specific sites such as restaurants or public transport, with heavy normative expectations of behaviour. When the mobile phone first developed a mass market in the mid 1990s, the European Telsoc research survey found that a significant minority of the population still reacted negatively to the use of the mobile in public spaces (Haddon 1998, 2004a). Even later European research in the P-903 project of 2001 still found a degree of negative reaction, although not surprisingly, these rates were higher amongst non-users (Mante-Meijer et al. 2001). While some studies demonstrated that a number of Europeans reacted negatively to others’ mobile phone use in public spaces, they also indicated that people were equally aware of the appropriateness (or inappropriateness) of their own mobile

phone use in particular kinds of spaces. he European Telsoc study, for example, found varying degrees of willingness to switch on mobile phones in various types of spaces, across different European nationalities (see Table 11). In general, across nationalities, our willingness to receive calls varies during the times when we are in different types of spaces. However, there is also cross-cultural variation. For example, if we combine ‘always’ and ‘often’ in Table 1 Italians (and to an extent Spanish) were distinctly more willing to switch their mobile phones on in a range of public spaces compared to some other Europeans. hese studies, however, were conducted in the early days of mobile mass markets, and norms of use were still emerging—it is likely that these responses predated the later widespread practice of switching mobile phones to silent mode when in specific places. he implication is that in some countries the constraints on using mobile phones in certain social spaces are fewer. But in others the constraints can be greater. For example, at the other extreme, Japan has been identified as a country where norms of nonintrusion demand that a rather ‘low level of noise is maintained’ in public spaces (Geser 2004; also see the section later in this chapter on cross-cultural differences in mobile communications). In order to understand our varying willingness to have phones turned on in certain spaces, as well as the reactions of co-present others, various qualitative and indepth studies have attempted to specify the more detailed meanings of particular social spaces, and how the public and private are actively negotiated. Research has indeed focused on restaurants in Norway (Ling 2004) as well as trains in the United Kingdom (Murtagh 2002; Cooper et al. 2001) and cafés and streets across Europe (Lasen 2004). What this research draws particular attention to, which we have already seen in our previously mentioned historical examples, is that spaces may in various senses be public and private at the same time, and that different expectations may attend each assumption, especially concerning the rules around mobile communication. he physical space, the normative expectations of behaviour and contextual interactions all serve to negotiate what parts of space might be considered public or private, in any particular locale or at any particular time (we will develop this latter point about time in Chapter 5). Individuals or small groups often try to privatize the public spaces they inhabit via various interactional strategies with others in that space. In Murtagh’s (2002) study of train carriages, for example, individuals will manage the physical space, marking off private territory with belongings—and the mobile phone then becomes part of an audible way to privatize space in public. Both phone users, and others who are co-present, may then display their normative expectations of private and public divisions of that space through nonvocal means, particularly through eye contact or aversions of gaze, and bodily orientation and movements. When mobile phone calls are made or received in these locales, individuals will exaggerate their public and private spaces

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Table 1: Locations Where the Mobile Phone is Switched On (by Country)

Home Always Often Sometimes Never Restaurant/Bar Always Often Sometimes Never Shop Always Often Sometimes Never Play/Show Always Often Sometimes Never Bus/Train Always Often Sometimes Never Other/Second Home Always Often Sometimes Never Car Always Often Sometimes Never Source: Haddon 1998

France

Germany

Italy

Spain

UK

32% 14% 20% 26%

22% 12% 28% 34%

29% 16% 16% 37%

31% 7% 18% 40%

18% 5% 20% 55%

13% 6% 16% 52%

12% 6% 14% 63%

25% 13% 19% 39%

33% 6% 14% 42%

23% 6% 13% 58%

15% 5% 12% 54%

19% 8% 11% 58%

24% 16% 21% 35%

30% 3% 12% 48%

34% 4% 17% 45%

5% 2% 7% 71%

5% 0% 5% 87%

8% 7% 7% 74%

17% 0% 4% 73%

11% 5% 6% 77%

21% 4% 6% 50%

21% 12% 13% 47%

26% 19% 14% 35%

29% 3% 7% 55%

30% 4% 10% 53%

23% 10% 15% 38%

21% 10% 22% 44%

31% 22% 20% 23%

34% 6% 13% 41%

32% 3% 19% 44%

35% 10% 8% 35%

67% 8% 6% 17%

61% 19% 10% 7%

56% 10% 9% 21%

72% 5% 8% 14%

private territory by turning their body away from others and crouching the body inwards, towards themselves (Cooper et al. 2001; Cooper 2002). Alternatively, users may attempt some discretion, such as moving to a separate space (such as between carriages) when answering calls (Bassett et al. 1997). Alternatively, in the restaurants of Ling’s (1997) study, patrons would sometimes rearrange the restaurant furniture to create an exclusive space for their group, actions that need to be ritually established with others in the restaurant by a process of permissions and consents, with either management and restaurant staff or other patrons, or both. At the same time, interactional rituals (processes of reciprocal talking and bodily attitudes) exist to manage the relative flexibility of these borders and boundaries to create what Goffman (1971) refers to as ‘symbolic fences’, and Ling (1997, 2004) elaborates to ‘fictive curtains’, in the locale of the restaurant in particular. Erving Goffman, in Behavior in Public Places (1963), offers particular insights into how these interactive processes occur—and these insights have been used by a number of those investigating the use of mobile phones in public places and their potential disruption to the social and communicative order. For example, a number of researchers draw on the notion of ‘civil inattention’ to describe an attitude in public space where, as illustrated in the example of the rail carriage and restaurant, individuals construct a series of nonvocal signs with their body language and gaze. hese signal a neutral intention to co-present others who are strangers—one neither hostile nor likely to be overfriendly or intrusive—displaying an awareness of co-present others, but an awareness that is unthreatening and recognizes the social boundaries that have been raised by interaction (or noninteraction) in these particular settings which have normative expectations attached to them. When a symbolic fence has been raised, civil inattention is likely to ensue, an interactional ritual in which the party on either side of the symbolic fence practices a cultivated and performed disregard towards others. his civil inattention makes it possible, for example, for one party to make and receive calls ‘privately’ in public space, due to the inattention or displayed indifference of the others present. he degree of inattention to others’ calls, however, depends on the explicit regulations governing that space (see the section on regulation later in this chapter) and the degree of flexibility of norms in a particular locale. Ling’s (1997, 2004) study of restaurants, as discussed in Case Study 4.1, demonstrates how the explicit function of a place can influence the degree of flexibility in normative expectations, and therefore the extent of the negotiation that must take place to uphold those expectations, or ritually repair disrupted norms that occur through inappropriate mobile phone use. Studies such as those in Case Study 4.1 remind us that although the focus so far in this chapter has been on space, we really need to be attentive to time-space, to the situation, to the moment and to the social activity that is taking place. It is not just public and private spaces

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Case Study 4.1 Mobile Phones in Restaurants: A Norwegian Case Study In his 1997 article One Can Talk about Common Manners!, Richard Ling uses various concepts derived from Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of behaviour in public and the presentation of self, which likens social spaces to theatrical stages and people to the actors playing upon them (see also Ling 2004). In this analysis, he argues that the restaurant is a particular ‘stage’ (or in Goffman’s terms, ‘front region’) for the presentation of self to co-present others, where ‘face’ is important—that is, the visible display or demonstration to others that one is willing to integrate oneself into the social situation. The stage that a restaurant provides is particularly important because of the significant and extensive cultural rituals associated with eating as a social performance. Social anthropology suggests that in every culture, the rituals performed around eating fulfil a number of functions—they consolidate family, friend and other group relationships, they provide an opportunity to display wealth and they offer a space in which to demonstrate status through the performance of one’s knowledge of social norms (such as manners). Thus it can be seen that the multiple functions the restaurant fulfils make it a particularly sacred or socially significant site. There are a multitude of (largely unspoken) rules governing behaviour. Any disruption to the normative expectations of behaviour in such a site are therefore likely to receive very significant social censure. In Ling’s research, the specific censure that was demonstrated and received with respect to the mobile phone in restaurants mainly concerned its audible intrusion into the space of others. Ling uses Goffman’s term ‘sound interference’ to suggest that it is particularly the noise that mobile phones make, that constitutes the violation of normative boundaries and behaviours. The implication is that by making an audible intrusion (such as displaying a loud ringtone, or conducting a loud conversation), the mobile phone violates the symbolic boundaries that have been ritually drawn in that space to distinguish the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. In Ling’s words, ‘the violator fills up his or her accorded space, and then some’ (Ling 2004, 128). There is a cultural element to this study; Ling notes that in part this was a specifically Norwegian experience in restaurants. A later Japanese study showed some variation in terms of age group behaviour and the nature of the restaurant: the Japanese youth studied would be willing to take voice calls in a fast-food restaurant or family restaurant, although they would be less willing to do so in a so-called fancy restaurant (Ito and Okabe 2003).

the fact of being in restaurants that may have a bearing on how we feel about and handle communication—rather, it is the act of going out for a meal with someone, reserving a time as well as a space for them, with all the expectations and desires that this may imply (see Chapter 5 on time). It is not only the specific function of a space that can influence the degree of civil inattention in public places. It is also the case that some individuals making and receiving calls can entirely disregard the normative interactions of civil inattention (which involve displaying indifference towards others) and entirely ignore those also present in a space—the caller acts as if others are not there. In this case, those also present with the caller must gauge the degree of inattention they respond with. he

following example from Norwegian ethnographic fieldwork demonstrates the case of a caller entirely ignoring those around, which resulted in the involuntary participation of strangers in that individual’s intimate life—thus violating the privacy expectations of the co-present others: It is 07.15 on a freezing Monday morning in January in a town close to the polar circle. It is completely dark, both inside and outside the bus on its way to the airport. Drowsy people try to catch up on lost sleep. A business-man is sitting in the seat right behind me. At 07.36 he pulls out his mobile phone. He is lucky. His friend, business-partner, brother in arms or whatever is still in bed at the hotel where they have spent the week-end. Detailed discussions about the night before, or what he can remember (he,he, hem,hem), detailed descriptions of the woman he met and learned to know quite intimately (he, he, he, hem, hem, hem), it was good—the sex he means, no, he does not remember her name, doesn’t care either. Yes, he is on his way to the airport. Yes, it is going to be a long and tiring day. Bye, bye. At 07.41 I am again drawn out of my sleepy state. His phone rings. Evidently a business connection. He switches on to speaking German discussing delivery date of an IT product. After a few minutes they reach a brusque agreement and ring off. he silence does not last. At 7.48 he calls his wife. Yes, it has been a strenuous convention. Yes, he had got her message and yes he had noticed her call registered on his beeper. However, it was so late, darling, that he had decided not to call her back. Didn’t want to wake her in case she was asleep. She will tell the children good morning from him. He does not have time to talk to them because now he is approaching the airport. Sure, honey, he will call her later. He rings off. At 07.58 the bus ride is over and so is my involuntary participation in this stranger’s intimate life. (COST 248 Mobile Workgroup, 1997, 6)

Reflection: Calls Overheard in Public Think about whether the situation described above in the Norwegian fieldwork applies in your own culture. a) Would cultural norms about mobile phones make this more or less likely to occur? b) Have you ever experienced a similar situation? How did you respond?

At the same time that individuals must manage their relations with co-present others, they must also manage their relationships with the remote individuals with whom they are potentially communicating. We have already seen in the European public and private spaces

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studies discussed previously how individuals express the desire to switch off their mobile phones in particular places. his can go further when one is also concerned about placating the disapprobation of co-present others. According to Licoppe and Heurtin (2002), for example, one might modify one’s behaviour to indicate to co-present others that one is aware of a potential infringement of expectations of behaviour within a space. In these cases, such as an unexpected incoming call on the mobile, individuals might take a call to avoid seeming impolite to their remote communicator but attempt to avoid the potential censure of co-present others by ‘speeding up’ the conversations they are having with their remote communicator, bringing those remote conversations to an end more quickly. hey therefore affect the quality and characteristics of the remote communication, yet also ensure the privacy of the conversation with the caller at a later time. To evaluate how people attempt to manage privacy when communicating with remote others via the mobile, we can first go back to earlier fixed-line phone studies. he European Telsoc quantitative study, for example, examined the prevalence of different strategies for securing privacy with interlocutors when using the fixedline phone (Haddon 1998). his search for privacy also reemerged in two studies of public fixed-line telephone kiosk use. he first, a French study, observed that some people used kiosks because they had no access to a fixed-line phone in the home. At the same time, others who did have such access preferred to use public phones because they wanted privacy from other household members (e.g. younger people did this in order to escape parental monitoring; Carmagnat 1995). A similar finding emerged in a second, Japanese study of younger people who used public fixed-line phones because of lack of privacy at home (especially because it was very easy to hear phone conversations through the thin walls in Japanese homes; cited in de Gournay 1996). Both studies provided examples of public space communications providing the caller with more privacy than the home with co-present family members (see also Chapter 8 on power relations between parents and children). Similar dynamics of privacy management moving between home and public spaces can be found in mobile phone use (Ling and Helmersen 2000). In the European Telsoc study, 14 per cent of the whole sample reported that they used the mobile phone specifically because it provided some privacy (Haddon 1998). he balance of private mobile communications in public work contexts has also been the subject of research. One French study found that only certain types of communication were felt to be appropriate in these circumstances—that is, some subjects would be avoided in such calls (de Gournay 1997). Other studies have examined how unexpected incoming calls are managed. For example, if a particular space does not offer sufficient privacy for a private mobile conversation, individuals use a number of strategies to control incoming calls. We have already seen that individuals often wish to switch off their phones in particular

spaces, but another strategy might be to switch the phone off when it rings, or let it ring (if the ringtone is not too audibly disruptive to the norms of co-present others). Both actions can direct calls to voicemail (Licoppe and Huertin 2001, 2002). As the norms of mobile call management developed further over time, the ‘silent mode’ strategy developed and its use became more widespread—to switch the phone to a silent alert and use judgement of the norms of any particular space to choose whether to take the call, without disrupting those around. In addition to ensuring normative expectations of behaviour in public spaces, these actions also control the reachability of the individual by incoming calls—and thus ensure that a more private communication can be held with a remote caller at a later time, when the time and space are more conducive to a private conversation. In addition to wanting to control their overall reachability (see Chapter 5 on time), people also sometimes want to avoid giving out the contextual details of where they are, what they are doing, and the presence of particular others at any particular time, or in any particular space (Green 2001, 2002). In this section we have seen how norms of behaviour and our understandings of the public and private in different spaces may influence our communications. Moreover, our mobile communications practices can reshape the norms or expectations of behaviour in those spaces—what are considered the public and the private are shaped by ongoing negotiation and interaction. We have also seen some suggestion that these normative expectations of privacy and behaviour in public are culturally specific—and it is to these issues of cultural differences in the understanding of space, and cultural differences in communicative practices, that we now turn.

CROSS-CULTURAL NORMS AND PERSONAL SPACE he earlier sections on the management of the private and the public via mobile communications focus largely on the results from a range of quantitative and qualitative European studies, and we have already seen from the European Telsoc study that willingness to switch on a mobile phone in specific spaces varies amongst European populations (Haddon 1998). Here, we therefore broaden our focus to consider a range of cultural norms in a variety of different national contexts. We consider whether the norms and expectations associated with public and private spaces vary cross-culturally and explore the qualities of differing social norms in different nations and cultures. In particular, we examine different cross-cultural norms of both personal space and behaviour in public. Some qualitative research projects within European contexts, for example, do not deal with specific public spaces (such as restaurants) per se, but rather ask whether the public and private spaces

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social norms of personal/private and public/collective spaces differ cross-culturally and across different types of public space. One early cross-cultural study, presented in Case Study 4.2, found that subtle differences in expectations of behaviour and sensitivity to others did indeed exist amongst three European cities in terms of the management of public and private spaces, and the social norms of behaviour within them.

Case Study 4.2 London, Madrid and Paris: Comparative European Case Studies Lasen (2004) explored public mobile phone behaviours in three culturally distinct urban locales in Europe— London, Madrid and Paris. The fieldwork was carried out using detailed observational methods of behaviour in public, in streets and parks, on public transport and in bars, cafés and pubs, as well as some interview material. The research paid attention to body language, the gaze and the display of the handset amongst users and also to the reactions of co-present others, including attention, disinterest and censure. The intention was to consider whether different cultural norms of public and private space influenced the use of mobile phones in public spaces. The research found that while the use of mobile telephones in public spaces has become a mundane part of everyday life in all three cities, cultural differences exist with respect to how and where the mobile is used. In Madrid and Paris, people feel more free to talk in the street where there is less possibility of being overheard than indoors—although in all three cities, younger people are less likely to be concerned about being overheard. In Paris and Madrid, people are more likely to stand and talk on mobile phones in the middle of the pavement—in London, by contrast, ‘temporary phone zones’ emerge where multiple users will stand to the sides or the corner of the ‘transient’ street. Parisians are more likely than those in either Madrid or London to be worried by the blurring of public and private boundaries, and they openly complain when phone use annoys them. French users therefore actively consider the censure of others when using the phone in public spaces. In Paris and London people use various means to separate out mobile phone conversations from co-present interaction in public space and treat a phone call as an interruption. In Madrid, by contrast, people tend to integrate their remote and face-to-face communication, allowing those co-present to enter the remote conversation in a kind of collective use. Londoners and Parisians are more likely to use call screening while in public spaces with others, whereas people in Madrid give priority to phone calls, given that it is considered impolite not to answer the phone. They therefore tend to keep their mobile phones switched on at all times, even when in locations where mobile phone use is banned. (Lasen 2004)

Apart from comparative studies such as those in Case Study 4.2, some national studies also refer to cultural specificities (in addition to the national differences in the willingness to switch mobile phones on or off in different spaces, as discussed in the last section). Italian mobile phone studies, for example, have identified a particular resonance that the technologies have for Italian people. Fortunati claims that even beyond other Europeans, ‘Italians love the mobile phone basically for two

reasons: their exceptional individualism and the great flexibility that they have developed in the world of work . . . it is especially in Italy that . . . these qualities were, and still are, married to the ‘national character’ (1997, 1). By way of consequence, Fortunati argues that Italians demonstrate a particularly frivolous disregard for public space and conversation within it as ‘common property’: In the hands of Italians the mobile phone has become an especially ‘antisocial’ instrument . . . by taking communication back into the individual sphere the mobile phone has not only somehow devalued the rules governing public communicative space but it has carried out a kind of theft: it has ‘stolen’ communicative space from the ‘public’ sphere . . . And so it happens that travellers sharing the same train compartment for hours prefer to speak with someone far away . . . hey converse with ‘elsewhere’ instead of conversing amongst themselves and becoming familiar with one another, and instead [of ] undertaking the adventure of making a new acquaintance, thus agreeing to the public control of whatever is said . . . the common property of what is said in the public space is plundered. (Fortunati 1997, 2)

Schejter and Cohen (2002, 35–9) made a similar point about Israelis’ willingness to use the mobile phone continually in public space, although the cultural attributes they identify to explain the ‘love story’ between Israelis and their mobile phones is different. One factor they identify is ‘the infatuation Israelis have with new technologies in general and communication technologies in particular’. hey also go on to note some particular national characteristics ‘that augment their obsession with and use of mobile phones: their need to chatter and their basic audacious (chutzpadic) temperament’. Schejter and Cohen argue that this temperament is shaped by a number of factors, including very strong family ties, and friendship ties formed through participation in education, youth movements and the military. hese ties are maintained through a love of gossip and rumour, and a love of talk in general. his ‘Israeli temperament’ is, of course, also embedded within an uncertain and insecure geopolitical situation, in which it is often imperative to be in contact with others for reasons of safety and security. hese cultural and social factors in combination make the Israeli ‘infatuation’ with the mobile phone particularly conspicuous in every public space, including those in which its use is banned. If there are cross-cultural differences in normative expectations of behaviour in particular public spaces, there are also cross-cultural variations on how personal space is defined in different cultures, which are influenced by—but also shape—those norms. One relevant concept to be derived from social psychology here is the notion of personal space itself. In psychological research, the study of proxemics—that is, the study of spacing behaviour between individuals—dates from the 1960s. Early research in psychology (e.g. Hall 1959) demonstrated that individuals tend to create public and private spaces

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a buffer distance around themselves and interpersonally between themselves and others. While the personal space of proxemics refers to the physical distance between two individuals, that space can also expand or contract depending on the social relationship or level of intimacy between the individuals concerned. Generally, a greater intimacy is assumed when there is a smaller physical distance between individuals. However, other nonverbal cues that we have already discussed with respect to mobile phones in public spaces—such as the positioning of the body and the direction of the gaze—can also reflect or construct levels of intimacy. For example, early work by Argyle and Dean (1965) argued that certain interactions (such as a mutually intimate gaze or its aversion) can foster the expansion or contraction of physical distance between individuals. Furthermore, other studies from a range of disciplines have suggested that a number of social factors might also affect distance behaviours, including not only interpersonal relationships, but also such variables as gender and culture (Bailenson et al. 2001). Studies of mobile communications in different national contexts where crowding is common have suggested that cultural factors do indeed shape what is considered personal space, and therefore what communications are considered private in different public settings. We have already considered Lasen’s study of differing public space use and distancing across three different crowded urban European contexts. here are also, however, some national contexts where particular urban public spaces, such as public transport, are crowded in the extreme. In such circumstances the proximity of individuals to one another is very close, so cultural norms of behaviour evolve to negotiate the establishment of personal spaces in very crowded public places. In the Philippines, for example, Paragas (2005) examined different modes of public transport and how they impacted upon mobile communications. In the cheapest and most crowded public transport such as the Manila Metro, using the mobile phone for voice calls is generally considered acceptable—possibly because it is also acceptable in other public spaces where crowds are chaotic and noise levels are, in any case, considerable. Callers are therefore granted a conversational bubble of personal space for private voice calls, in otherwise extremely crowded and chaotic public transport, by means of the cultural norms established elsewhere (although calls in public anywhere in the Philippines may mark the owner of a mobile phone as a potential target for theft or mugging). Even in more expensive, exclusive, air-conditioned and insulated public transport in the Philippines, mobile phone use is acceptable provided that conversations are kept quiet and short and personal or intimate conversations are avoided. he Philippines case stands by way of contrast to the case of Japan, where use of mobiles for voice calls on public transport is considered rude and is collectively censured and policed. Despite being extremely crowded, and individuals proximate in an ‘oppressive crush’, public transport in Japan is ‘characterized by precise technical and social regulation and very low rates of disorder’, and is therefore also ‘remarkably

quiet’ (Okabe and Ito 2005, 205–8). When young people in Japan began to use mobile phones for voice calls in large numbers, public and media debate ensued about mobile voice calls in public spaces. Voice call disruption to public norms of behaviour was constructed as a ‘youth problem’ involving a lack of the manners and respect so highly valued in Japanese society. While some explicit regulation resulted (see Case Study 4.3 in the next section), mobile phone manners in public spaces were equally policed in important ways through normative interaction with co-present others. According to Okabe and Ito (2005, 208), ‘Passengers engage in ongoing acts of mutual surveillance, regulation and sanctioning’ with respect to mobile phone calls, in the same way they do with other breaches of normatively expected mutual respect, such as littering or graffiti. Switching the mobile phone to vibrate or silent while on public transport has therefore come to be known in Japanese as ‘manners mode’, and nonvocal uses—such as texting or email—are tolerated as they do not disrupt the boundaries of public and private to the same extent as voice calls (McLelland 2007). Finally, if mobile phone behaviours in public places are influenced by cultural norms and understandings of personal space, different cultural norms also have an influence on the use of mobile phones in private space. In Horst and Miller’s Jamaican study, for example, the mobile phone was particularly valued by women as an instrument for preserving privacy within the home setting as opposed to engaging personally in public. his is because one culturally normative expectation in the Jamaican setting is that ‘as soon as one goes “on the road”, one has to take some pains as to appearance, both of yourself and often of the young child that has to accompany you’ (Horst and Miller 2006, 69). Given that the low-income Jamaicans in Horst and Miller’s study were usually very informally dressed at home, and given that taking pains with one’s appearance can take some considerable time, many women offset the cost associated with making a mobile phone call at home against the time it would take to prepare to go out of the home. heir privacy was therefore preserved by the facility of making a mobile phone call in the absence of a fixed-line phone in the home. he case studies examined in this section have indicated some of the ways in which norms of behaviour in public places, norms of privacy and notions of personal space differ cross-culturally. he various research across cultures has indicated the ways that different national and cultural groupings define a range of uses as acceptable or not acceptable, in particular public and private places, and has described the interactional means through which they maintain, support and enforce those norms of public behaviour and personal space. As is indicated by the case of the Japanese public transport system, however, institutional and organizational attempts to regulate phone use are as important in some places as more informal and interactional mechanisms. Hence, in the following section, we explore this more formal regulation and its consequences. public and private spaces

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THE REGULATION OF MOBILE PHONE BEHAVIOURS Earlier in this chapter we noted that there have been a number of attempts to make (the largely unspoken) etiquette of phone use in public spaces explicit in the form of advice of various kinds for mobile phone users. hese reports and campaigns largely focus on collectively defined normative expectations for behaviour, but these have changed over time with the widespread dissemination of mobile communications. One of the ways in which these norms have changed over time is that while we continue to actively negotiate mobile communications in different spaces, various institutions have also attempted to explicitly regulate mobile phone use in specific places. hese regulations may or may not have status in law, but these explicit and publicized rules codify the institutional or organizational normative expectations concerning those public places. As we shall see, there is often resistance to such regulation. Given that there are many different functions of mobile phones that might be regulated, in this section we will consider examples from different public contexts in the case of mobile talk and texting; the explicit regulation of camera phone use in public space will be addressed in Chapter 8. A number of organizations, some of which are publicly owned and managed and some of which are private organizations, attempt to regulate the use of mobile phones in what is usually considered to be public space. In general, those rules and regulations that are formulated by private organizations are at the discretion of the business or company concerned. hey are enforceable by virtue of the legal status of private property—that is while some spaces or places might normatively be considered public in a social sense (such as cinemas, theatres, bars, pubs and clubs), many are likely to be privately owned. he owners of these properties, whether they are individuals, businesses, trusts or other organizations, therefore have significant discretion as to the behaviours required by those who use the space and can appeal to law enforcement on the basis of private property rights in the case of infringement of those rules and regulations if necessary. he rules and regulations formulated by organizations who own spaces considered socially public—such as cinemas or theatres—have emerged over time, and usually in conjunction with shifting public debate over mobile phone etiquette and feedback from their patrons. For example, early evidence from media reports suggested that some individuals were making and receiving mobile phone calls during films or performances—not only leaving a phone switched on, but also conducting conversations throughout (Brook 2002). Negative public reaction led to extensive debates over appropriate behaviour.

Reflection: Inappropriate Use of the Mobile Phone It is likely that in your own culture there are situations where it is inappropriate for you to use a mobile phone. a) Can you think of examples of such situations? b) What forms of regulation would accompany these?

Both privately and publicly owned organizations therefore responded by gradually introducing public notices and announcements attempting to regulate mobile phone talk and text in public viewing or performance contexts. It is now commonplace in many different national contexts to view signs outside theatres requesting that patrons switch off their mobile phone before a performance begins, or for cinemas to present a short film asking patrons to switch off their mobiles before the feature film. Some owners of performance spaces have gone further, however. In Ireland, for example, the company that owned the Savoy heatre (a cinema) in Dublin installed a signal blocker to prevent patrons’ mobile phone use. As it is illegal to own or use a signal blocker in Ireland, they were informed by Ireland’s Communications Regulator (ComReg) that they were breaking the law and should immediately dispose of the device (BBC 2003b). In some cases, explicit statutory regulation is introduced to back up what might be seen as more informal regulation or requests from the owners of the space. In these cases, bad behaviour or lack of mobile phone etiquette becomes a public nuisance and explicitly illegal under local laws. In the United States, for example, the New York City Council introduced legislation in 2003 banning the use of mobile phones (as well as audible pagers or beepers) in concerts, cinemas, theatres, museums and libraries. Infringement of the law carries a $50 fine but is considered by some to be unenforceable (BBC 2003a). Other situations in public space prohibit the use of mobile phones on the basis of safety and security and make appeal to the relevant legislation governing those places to enforce these prohibitions—until recently, the use of mobile phones on aircraft or in hospitals would be two cases in point. Public transport is another case where both informal regulation and explicit legal regulation come into play. In the case of the United Kingdom, for example, train services are operated by private companies but are also governed by bylaws introduced in the Transport Act of 1962 which make provision to legally regulate the use of railway premises and travel on the railways. here are therefore two sets

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of rules and regulation potentially at work. One, for example, is the designation by private companies of ‘quiet carriages’ on their services, where patrons are requested not to use their phones (or other audible devices), accompanied by announcements from the train conductor or guard and window stickers in the designated zone. he other is based on legality, where if mobile phone use comes to be considered public nuisance behaviour, the case can potentially be referred to the British Transport Police. Both of these regulatory avenues depend also on social acceptability and social censure to operate—as is also the case in Japan, as illustrated in Case Study 4.3 below.

Case Study 4.3 Mobile Phone Use on Japanese Public Transport Japanese researchers noted the effect of strong public regulation (beyond culturally specific interactional rules of conduct or politeness) in relation to making mobile phone calls on public transport. Automated announcements frequently remind passengers that it not permissible to make such calls, in much the same way that it is not permissible to eat or drink on many public transport systems. As a result, the researchers found very little calling, but mobile phones were nonetheless frequently used for texting in such situations where regulation was tight. (Okabe and Ito 2005)

Apart from the more overt forms of regulation illustrated in Case Study 4.3, other institutional or organizational spaces are regulated entirely on the basis of social pressure or sanction, relying on conformity to operate—and while there may be official prohibitions on the use of mobiles, the rules may not always be followed. his became clear in one early study of use in British schools, where the schools had formulated specific policies in the school rules to prohibit carrying or using mobiles during school time, on penalty of confiscation. Pupils regularly resisted attempts to regulate their use during school time—some children resorted to using mobiles in the toilets in order not to be caught (Green 2001). In another UK study, children regularly broke school rules about phone calls, texting during school breaks or even during lessons, sometimes for the dare of breaking the rules. Moreover, despite the school rules and the occasional confiscation of mobile phones, while the sound of the mobile ringing in lessons may not have been frequent, it did happen on a regular basis, at least in some schools (Haddon and Vincent 2007). And if we move away from communication, breaking the school rules by using the mobile phone to listen to music, sometimes even during lessons, was another example of social constraints which had been ignored.

Chapter Summary „ What is meant by ‘public’ and ‘private’ has changed over time with the introduction of different technologies and adjusting social norms. To illustrate this, we can see from historical examples such as the fixed-line telephone how private or domestic space is reconfigured through the introduction of new technologies. „ Meanwhile, as technologies become ubiquitous in public spaces, attitudes towards them change and norms of use evolve—personal stereos and mobile phones are both examples of this. The functions, roles and meanings of spaces influence the ways in which phones are used in them.

„ More specifically, people using mobile phones in public places need to manage both co-present others as well as manage remote communications. This means managing conflicting demands for privacy while in public with others who are doing the same. For example, early attempts to develop new norms of mobile phone use were sometimes guided by emerging norms of mobile etiquette. At an interpersonal level, people have developed strategies that affect the content and duration of calls, including finding different locations to facilitate privacy, the avoidance of certain subjects in the course of a call, and managing one’s own reachability.

„ Mobile phone use, including where phones are switched on, varies with cultural norms of public and personal space. The particular cultural characteristics of any specific national context influence different normative expectations of mobile use—where mobiles are used, for what purposes, through which channels, and with what cultural acceptance or censure.

„ Mobiles are subject to different levels of social, organizational and legal regulation, from the formulation of semi-official rules that require active conformity to the passing of legislation banning their use.

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5 TIME In the last chapter, we examined the ways that mobile communications affect our experience of space—both public and private places—and also considered the ways that the norms of different spaces affect how and where we use our mobile phones. During that discussion, we commented that certain spaces such as restaurants are considered special not only because of the importance of eating as a social ritual, but also because eating with others devotes time to those relationships. So while we need to be attentive to space, we also need to be aware of how the issue of time has a bearing on our mobile communications. In this chapter, we pay attention to three issues concerning time, which are reflected in subsequent sections of the chapter. he first is the time considerations that affect whether and when we engage in mobile communications—or not. he second is how our use of mobile phones (or other mobile communications devices such as the mobile internet) influences the way that we organize our time. Lastly, we consider how mobile communications might have a bearing upon the way that we experience time and how we feel about it, sometimes translated into how we feel about what is happening to our lives. he objective of the chapter is to help you think through how mobile communications are affected by already existing cultures of time use and time experience, and also to consider how mobile communications affect and change those norms of time, especially in cross-cultural contexts.

TIME, ICTS AND MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS he first issue to consider when discussing time in relation to mobile communications is the existence of broader cultures of time in different social contexts. Apart from the writings on time and ICTs, there is a literature on time in its own right. For instance, perhaps the most cited example of a change in our experience of time was when in the United Kingdom, and in broader Western contexts, people started to organize their time much more according to the clock—or ‘clock time’—with the development of the factory system during industrialization (hompson 1967). More specifically within studies of ICTs, we have discussions of how broadcast media such as television provide people with a framework within which to organize their time, and of how such

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media affect people’s perceptions of time passing (Scannel 1988). From the domestication framework outlined earlier we also find reflections on how different households organize their time, how they are generally oriented to time (e.g. ‘present’-oriented), and how their choice and use of ICTs reflect this (Silverstone 1993). Hence, generally, there is a track record of research on ICTs and time issues that we can apply to thinking about mobile communications. In this section, we elaborate the three themes that we prioritized in the introduction before addressing them in the subsequent sections. In each case, we point to the central issues and identify the questions of interest that will subsequently appear: the factors that affect when we engage in mobile communications, how new mobile technologies influence our organization of time, and how the advent of mobile communications might reshape our very experience of time itself. If we take the first question of the factors that affect the timing of mobile communications, in Chapter 3 we looked at choices between ICTs. But another way of thinking about this is that we make choices about how to use our time. Hence, time for using the internet competes with time for watching TV. In fact, one of the questions asked within domestication research is how people find time not only to use, but also to learn how to use, new technologies (or make this time by reallocating time slots). his occurs in a context where these are competing not just against other ICTs, but also against time for all the other things we might feel obliged, or like, to do. One word of qualification is needed here to avoid the stereotype that everyone has busy lives. Sometimes ICTs, including mobile technologies, are used to fill time, either when there are fewer time demands or when other options are not so interesting. For some elderly, for example, some TV programmes may interest them, but at times TV watching fills the time where there are few other options (Haddon and Silverstone 1996). Asking questions about time demands and the temporal organization of our daily lives can help to explain patterns of use, or non-use, but also includes the timing of our use of technologies such as the mobile phone. Here it is worthwhile to reflect upon some broad principles concerning the time structures under which we lead our lives. here are external (to us) constraints on when we may use ICTs, such as when we are asked to switch off electronic devices at certain points on flights. hinking specifically about communication, if we look at research on telephone landlines, telephone traffic has peaks and troughs structured by institutional times such as when we are at work, when we are at school or when the shops are open. hese constraints affect not only when we are free to make calls, but also when others are free to receive them—hence teleworkers, or retired people, may have more flexibility about the timing of outgoing calls, but in general they make calls at the same time as other people in their social networks whose lives are structured by institutional times (De Gournay and Smoreda 2001).

At the individual and household levels there are further time options and constraints reflecting the detailed time schedules of partners, parents and children. And within those limitations, people make choices, sometimes complex ones, about when to use ICTs. he question for this chapter is how all this applies to mobile communications, affecting when we want to make and receive calls, communicate by SMS or indeed use the mobile internet for information as well as communications purposes. he examples below allow us to think in more detail about what is happening when we talk of these options, constraints and choices.

Reflection: The Timing of Mobile Communications Think of yourself (or your friends or your family). Can you: a) give any examples of how the time structure of your day and various time commitments influence when you engage in mobile communications? b) think of examples of how changes in your time commitments (e.g. through changing jobs or moving to a new place of study) might change your patterns of mobile communications?

Turning now to the second theme—how mobile communications affect our organization of time—we can think about changes in routines and practices, and changes in the organization of our time, that are occurring because of the way that we use mobile communications technologies. In effect, this is one way of thinking about the social consequences of the way we use ICTs (or at least consequences for some sections of society). If we look for examples of how this question has been applied to other ICTs, discussions of potential ‘media effects’ have argued, for example, that television ‘colonises’ time (Lodziak 1986). Within this debate, there are also more specific discussions of the implications for children, such as taking up time that might previously have been used for more creative play or socializing (Winn 1977). Or we might reflect on debates about how our use of the internet can affect the way we organize (some) shopping, or arrange travel from home, rather than doing this by phone or even going to places to conduct those activities. he focus for the subsequent section of the chapter is therefore on what research shows us about the potential consequences of mobile communications, introducing the concept of ‘micro-coordination’ in general, and then focusing specifically on changes in the ways that we arrange meetings. Lastly, the third theme of this chapter concerns how mobile communications may have implications for the way that we experience time. Two particular aspects are selected in his respect. he first concerns debates about changes in the pace of life that time

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predated the appearance of mobile communications, especially in the United States but elsewhere as well. Of particular interest are changes in our behaviour that affect our perception of time pressure, or indeed time stress. In these debates mobile communications are, at best, mentioned in passing. Yet we can nevertheless reflect on how mobile phone use—or the use of internet-enabled mobile communications technologies such as iPhones—might relate to those discussions. he second part of the section, involving a particular case study, returns to the question of how mobile communications affect our experience of meetings. Here we introduce a cross-cultural element, looking at different time cultures in different countries which have a bearing upon how we perceive and evaluate any changes brought about by mobile communications.

TIME AND MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS In the last section we outlined some of the most important themes and questions related to the consideration of how mobile communications affect, and are affected by, time cultures, experiences and organization. In this section we consider in more depth the question of mobile communications with respect to the use of other ICTs. For example, if social factors shape the timing of landline communications, then we might also expect them to influence mobile communications, even if there are some differences because of the portability of mobile phones and other mobile communications devices. So let us start with studies of the landline. Previous research has shown how receiving a call on the fixed-line telephone can be problematic when doing something else (e.g. preparing the children for school or having dinner together as a family), or when the timing of incoming calls is for some other reason socially awkward (e.g. teenagers receiving calls from parents when their peers are present). In fact, people always had strategies for controlling incoming communications in relation to the fixed phone—such as letting the answering machine filter the call, not answering, getting someone else to answer, or saying that the person being called is not at home (Haddon 1998). he mobile communications literature, particularly that on the mobile phone, demonstrates how people have added to these strategies in order to control mobile phone calls by limiting who has their mobile phone number, switching the mobile phone off, negotiating the importance of the call with the caller when the mobile phone rings or sending calls to voicemail. In fact, to understand the reactions of other people who are in the vicinity when mobile calls are made or received (those ‘co-present’), as well as the behaviour of users themselves, various studies have attempted to specify the more detailed meanings of particular social spaces. For instance, in Case Study 5.1, we see one very early Norwegian study that looked at the hytte, or holiday home, as a space for taking a break from city life and communing with nature.

Case Study 5.1 Negotiating Availability: A Case Study of the Norwegian Hytte The authors of this study draw upon anthropological material addressing the principle of taking occasional breaks from normal urban routines to spend quiet time in the countryside or by the sea, time communing with nature. They argue that Norwegians revere nature perhaps more than many other Europeans, and relaxing in such settings from time to time, seeking peace and quiet and reducing stress, was regarded as important. One the one hand, the arrival of early mobile phones itself sometimes played a role in enabling that break, since it allowed people going to the hytte to be contactable in emergencies or for work. For example, where some people might have found it hard to get away because they left behind elderly parents, they could now go to the hytte but still be reachable if a problem arose and they needed to return home. For others, where the boundary between work and nonwork was blurred, the mobile allowed them to maintain that work contact on an ongoing basis while not being tied down to the office or a home phone. And of course, the mobile also provided a sense of security in case those in the hytte, often isolated from any neighbours, themselves had an accident. Yet, the mobile simultaneously presented a problem these Norwegian mobile users needed to manage. Too many incoming mobile phone calls threatened to disrupt the essential goal of taking a break from normal daily life. Continuous work calls led some to reflect that they were not really relaxing or on vacation. To cope with this, mobile phone users negotiated with potential callers and family the conditions under which the mobile could and should be switched on or off. For example, when away from the hytte walking the forest they might agree not to take the mobile phone, but they would switch it on when back at the cabin. In other words, they tried to manage their reachability—or, in this case, unreachability. However, such negotiations with family, friends and work colleagues were not always easy. (Adapted from Ling et al. 1997)

Following up the point about reachability in Case Study 5.1, other analysts have also observed that one can actually be called to account by others for not switching the mobile on (Cooper et al. 2001). his underlines one principle noted in the introduction to this chapter: the nature of constraints on mobile phone calls (in this case the pressure of one’s own social networks) and the complexity of choices. Meanwhile, another early Norwegian study, this time of restaurants (see Chapter 4), explored the very particular expectations people had about what was involved in going out for a meal, constructing private spaces within a public setting that should not be disturbed. If certain times are less conducive to making (or receiving) mobile phone calls, then other moments lend themselves to it. hese moments are sometimes referred to as dead time, or short periods that cannot be used for other major activities but when we can fit in a quick call. Some of the early and prominent social commentators on mobile phones actually referred to this as ‘Lazarus time’, in the sense that one could bring the dead time to life again (Perry et al. 2001). In fact for some, commuting time

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time, or other time spent travelling, can count as such dead time, which can now be used more productively for communicating. he implications of filling the gaps in our lives will be explored in a later section when discussing the changing experience of time. But this characterization does not do justice to all the moments when we engage in mobile communications. Sometimes it is not a case of fitting mobile phone use, for example, into an ever more hectic life; mobile phone use can also be a time filler, as is illustrated in Case Study 5.2.

Case Study 5.2 Texting as Time Filler: A British Case Study In a British study of children’s use of mobile phones, the classic examples of mobile time use that many of the children cited was time spent in long car journeys. But it also included time spent accompanying parents when, as one girl put it, ‘if you’re somewhere where you don’t want to be’. In such circumstances, using the mobile phone to play a game or listen to music or start exploring the very functionality of the phone were ways to escape—or at least to mitigate a sense of boredom. And despite the many positive reasons for sending texts, some children also sent texts because there was nothing interesting to do, or they were not interested in what they were (supposed to be) doing. In these circumstances, not all texts required an answer: For Harriet: ‘It’s just ... if you have a spare moment and you don’t know what to do ... just text them and they don’t have to answer back straight away.’ Nina also says: ‘You can say anything ... you can take as long as you want ... you don’t have to think on the spot all the time.’ And Ruth confirms that: ‘And then by the time they text back if you don’t feel like talking ... you just don’t.’ (Haddon and Vincent 2007)

MOBILE PHONES AND THE CHANGING ORGANIZATION OF TIME he last section focused on considering the existing social factors affecting patterns of mobile communications with respect to different time structures and with respect to other ICTs. By way of contrast, this section turns to consider the opposite case: how emerging mobile communications technologies influence our organization of time in everyday life. To begin this section, it is worth considering some examples of experiences cited in UK and Norwegian research and reflecting on how practices have changed: ‘It’s really useful to check up where people are on Saturday nights and they know they can get hold of me.’ (cited in Haddon 2000)

‘On Friday there are a lot more text messages than on hursday because people are out and need to find out what is going on.’ (cited in Ling and Yttri 2002)

Reflection: Mobile Communications and Organizing Activities Think about the ways you make arrangements with others. Can you think of any examples of how the use of mobile communications technologies have influenced the way that you organize activities?

Mobile voice telephony and texting have in various ways facilitated people’s ability to manage the logistics of everyday life. Apart from teenagers’ observations cited in the research just cited, various other qualitative studies have shown instances of using mobile phones to confirm meetings, in order to avoid wasting time if there has been a change of plans. hey are used to help overcome problems of locating the people one is supposed to meet up with in public spaces (i.e. by phoning to ask where they are). And, frequently cited, they are used to warn of delays and the need to reschedule. Later we will explore in more detail the case of managing meetings, but first it is useful to consider more generally the ‘micro-coordination’ that mobile communications enable (Ling and Yttri 2002; Ling 2004). Discussing the way we socially coordinate activities, especially in modern urban settings, Ling points to the historical (and contemporary) importance of the clock and mechanical timekeeping. We have learnt to schedule activities and meetings, prearrange to do things or be at places at certain times. Moreover, there are expectations about sticking to these arrangements and valuing the importance of punctuality (to be discussed again in the next section). Ling argues that to some extent one of the social consequences of mobile communications is that this time-based social coordination of activities has been partially replaced by a more nuanced management of social interaction whereby we can make midcourse adjustments, make a number of calls to progressively refine an activity and renegotiate plans on the fly. Schedules are softened or relaxed. his can apply to calls arranging for children to be picked up and dropped off as well as calls to people when they are travelling to ask them to undertake some other activity, such as going to the shops. hus, in a sense the mobile phone is ‘competing with or supplementing the wristwatch’ (Ling 2004, 69). More specifically, mobile phones can (for some people) change the organization of meetings. As the quotes earlier in this section suggest, they can change people’s plans to meet up or find out about get-togethers and parties. It can affect certain types of public meetings, as when information about where raves will take place is passed on by word of mouth using the mobile phone in order to escape official prohibitions (Moore 2005). And, touching on the implications for political mobilization, various time

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writers have commented on the use of the mobile phone to organize social protests, as in the case of the Philippines discussed in Case Study 5.3.

Case Study 5.3 Mobile Phones and Political Mobilization: A Philippine Case Study One early and much-cited example of the use of mobiles in political mobilization is the case of the Philippines in 2001, where protestors against the Estrada government used text messaging to organize collective protest on the streets of Manila; the fall of the government followed soon afterwards (Ling 2004; Goggin 2006). Howard Rheingold used this as an example of a ‘smart mob’ (Rheingold 2002)—that is, the use of ICTs and particularly mobile technologies to organize politically (another example is the antiglobalization protest at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999).

he mobile phone has not only been used for organizing political protests. More generally, studies in a variety of countries have noted the greater spontaneity in the organization of meetings as a result of the mobile phone. For example, French research described the shift in appointment-making practices as people could now call someone if they happened to be nearby to see if they could meet up (Licoppe and Heurtin 2001). Meanwhile, Ling and Yttri’s Norwegian research discussed the way people use the mobile phone to make arrangements to meet after they have already arrived at a destination such as a pub, restaurant or other site. hey improvise a meeting rather than planning one in advance. his research observed that this behaviour was especially developed amongst teenagers, in addition to the practice of only vaguely specifying where to meet at first, but then progressively firming this up through subsequent calls (Ling and Yttri 2002). A slightly different emphasis on this process came from a Japanese study noting similar mobile communications in the build-up to a meeting, and then further communications by mobile phone between youth immediately after the meeting (Ito 2005). his changed the very nature, or boundaries, of the meeting, making it less of a distinct moment but more a process. Such uses of the mobile phone (as well as the incidence of phoning ahead to warn others that one is running late and rescheduling when under way) imply the need for less planning in advance. hey suggest flexibility in organizing meetings and travelling to them. Indeed, the teens in the Norwegian study explicitly appreciated this ability to organize meetings at the last moment. We might add, though, that sometimes these negotiations can become quite complex, as illustrated in Case Study 5.4 below.

Case Study 5.4 Rescheduling Meetings Using the Mobile Phone: A Korean Case Study As in other studies, the Korean students in this research all tended to arrange many of their meetings with friends using the mobile, often spontaneously (as in arranging to meet for lunch). They also typically rang mobile phone to mobile phone to tell the other person if they were running late for an appointment. Nevertheless, some peer rules did appear to be emerging. Ra-mee, for example, felt that being twenty minutes late was reasonable if you rang to explain the delay. That said, when she was at the destination she might text her friends the message ‘Hurry up, I’m waiting.’ A-ran used to be late regularly, but now that she was more punctual herself, if the other person was a minute late, she would text to ask ‘Where are you?’ One meeting-related practice that had not been mentioned in previous studies was confirming appointments that had been made earlier. Ra-mee explained: ‘If you don’t send a message, I think that maybe you have forgotten about our meeting, or you don’t want to meet.’ She expected such confirming messages, sent them herself and noted that this culture of confirming had emerged only once everybody had got mobiles—so four years previously this had not happened. It was quite striking to see the efforts these students sometimes put forth to be diplomatic and sensitive on this issue. Ra-mee described the situation where someone asked to meet her, but she already had an appointment with someone else, and the two other people did not know each other. She would usually contact the person with the original arrangement and ask if it was OK if all of them met. Moreover, she usually did this by texting rather than calling: ‘Calling is no good. They need time to think. Texting is better.’ Yun-Jung also sent people texts when she needed to ask them to reschedule: ‘I don’t want them to be angry or sad ... I worry about that ... so I usually send a message.’ Simply saying you were busy was not a good enough excuse. She observed that you have to explain why you need to reschedule and maybe add, ‘And next time I want to pay for your meal.’ (Adapted from Haddon and Kim 2007)

However, there are limits to which new approaches to organizing meetings—such as those in Case Study 5.4—can take place. Ling (2004) acknowledges that it works less well when large numbers of people have to negotiate meetings. Certainly, the institutions with which we interact, such as work and school, still rely on timekeeping. But there can also be problems of synchronizing time with others, including other family members (especially as people’s individual time schedules become more varied). his was captured in one focus group for a pan-European study by a Danish male participant: ‘When we were younger, we visited each other spontaneously. We don’t do that anymore. Now we call in beforehand and make appointments’ (cited in Haddon 2004a). Meanwhile a French male participant complained about the constraints of family life: ‘With a child . . . we need to plan everything. We cannot go out anymore. With the new means of communication, we may organize things better but we feel like we are in a restraint’ (both observations cited in, Haddon 2004a). time

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he greater possibility for instant communication does not always lead us to change the way we plan and manage time. It can be more difficult to do so at short notice, more spontaneously, if we are locked into time structures by our other commitments. Clearly the Norwegian youth referred to earlier would seem to have had a fair amount of flexibility in this respect—but not everyone does.

MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS AND THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME In a review of some of the literature on time, Southerton (2003) notes that from the 1970s—and especially by the 1990s—there was a mainly (but not only) US debate about whether life was becoming more rushed, using terms like ‘time famine’ and ‘the time squeeze’. Here we need to distinguish between words that, in one way or another, refer to an objective scarcity of time, from terms which imply it is a negative experience. ‘Time pressure’ is relatively neutral because we may lead busy lives, but we cope with them such that we do not perceive the situation as problematic; and, indeed, time pressures are not necessarily negative. But for some people it is better to characterize the experience as some form of ‘time stress’, or at least an anxiety about the pace of life, also implied in the term ‘harried leisure class’. here are a variety of explanations for this phenomenon, captured in US surveys showing that between 1965 and 1985, people felt that they were more rushed. One suggestion was that the time pressures reflect the fact that people literally work more hours—but this was debated, and time-diary data show that in the US case people actually worked fewer hours over that twenty-year period (Robinson and Godbey 1997). his makes it all the more paradoxical that people feel more time pressures. Other changes in our time structures provide more plausible explanations for this sense of being harried. One of these is the weakening of socio-temporal structures, as more work takes place at different times, and we can shop or engage in leisure activities at different times. While this provides more individual flexibility on the one hand, it can also increase the (time) problems associated with coordinating with our social networks (Southerton 2003). Perhaps the most interesting line of argument from the perspective of mobile communications refers to people’s changing time strategies—themselves based on new expectations. For example, one account involved the growing number of activities people now tried to participate in. In a German study, three-quarters of those surveyed said that they experienced time pressure precisely because they were trying to do too much in their leisure time (Garhammer 1998). Another changing strategy involves the increasing pace of life as people carry out tasks more quickly in order to

fit everything in. Hence, Southerton (2003) notes in his review that leisure activities become less ‘leisurely’—or there had been a ‘speeding up’ of leisure. Apart from the sheer number of activities undertaken, an Australian study argues that the duration and frequency of these activities are also changing. his leads to people feeling time pressure because they use their time more intensely, perhaps doing several things at once, or because the large number of separate tasks leads to a succession of short, frequently changing episodes of activity (Bittman 1998). Multitasking has also been cited as a cause of stress—or, rather than actually doing several things at once, ‘juggling’ activities has also been mentioned in this respect. hese explanations point to various general processes in society. Writers on this subject have, however, also been willing to acknowledge that our use of technologies may itself have contributed to this experience of time. Many of these early discussions contained observations about other ICTs, such as computers and emails, which predated the massive expansion of mobile phone use—especially in the United States, where mobile phone growth occurred more slowly than in Europe and Asia. Another line of argument has also been to point to the amount of information ICTs can help to generate more generally, which can contribute to time pressures (Eriksen 2001). Some authors do, however, at least mention the mobile phone as a new development that might contribute to this speeding up of life and possible feelings of stress. Empirically, with respect to mobile communications in particular, this question has not received much attention. If we reflect back to the previous section on the effect of mobile communication on the organization of everyday life, in some ways the use of the mobile can save time overall. For instance, by one crude measure it looks as if mobile calls may help to reduce travel time a little, although this really needs closer investigation (Ling and Haddon 2003). Ling (2004) provides various examples of how the mobile phone enables us to organize more flexibly, which may again save time. However, one has to be very careful with claims about time saving because of the precedent of domestic household appliances—such as washing machines—that were also supposed to save time. Although evaluating whether they did so is complex, we can at least question how much time such domestic appliances really did save, given that as a consequence, for example, people washed clothes more often. In other words, people sometimes use technologies to enable them to achieve higher standards rather than to save time. here is a parallel with improvements in the speed of public transport. Many people have chosen to live farther away from work as transport speeds increased rather than to save time, so their commuting times stay the same. he equivalent in the case of mobile communications is that we may use it not so much to save time as to achieve more things. Certainly mobile phones have led to more communications, but to put this into perspective, the number of all mediated communications increased

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partly because of internet-related exchanges. In line with the point made by Southerton, SMS and short voice calls, used to organize daily life, can look very much like those short, frequently, changing episodes noted by Bittman, cited previously. We saw earlier that we could pack more things into ‘dead time’. But does that in itself create more time pressure—fewer moments to relax, for example? Looking beyond the use of mobile phones for communication—namely other mobile devices such as PDAs and laptops—do these portable devices more generally allow scope for fitting in more and more activities? Hence we have the research question of whether mobile communications lead to more activities (or merely substitutes for other activities we previously engaged in when under way), and whether this contributes to any sense of being harried. his may not always be the case, as we saw how children—bored on their long car journeys—welcomed the various functionalities increasingly offered by their mobile phones.

Reflection: Mobile Communications and Time Pressures Think about whether the sense of being harried by the mobile phone applies to you. Have there ever been periods when your use of mobile communications has made you feel you were under time pressure?

THE EXPERIENCE OF MEETING: A CASE STUDY We finish this chapter with a case study that brings together reflections on the subjective experience of mobile phones, with their role in scheduling meetings that we discussed earlier. It underlines the mixed experiences of the benefits of mobile communications while introducing a (cross-) cultural element in that we explicitly reflect on empirical research that explores Singaporean time cultures. In this Singaporean study, the researchers note how the time flexibility mobile communications offer can be located within broader claims about how ICTs are changing our experiences of time (for instance as discussed by Lash and Urry 1994; Eriksen 2001; Castells et al. 2006). Because of mobile communications our activities are constantly interrupted, ‘taking priority over schedules, meeting deadlines and concentration on one task at a time’ (Chung and Lim 2005, 270). But they then draw upon a distinction between monochronic and polychronic time cultures. Hall (1983) argues that before the advent of modern ICTs, different parts of the world,

different cultures, had different orientations to time. In monochronic time cultures, exemplified in Northern European countries, there was an emphasis on not rescheduling, on the importance of being punctual and on doing one thing at a time. In polychronic time cultures, and here Hall points to many Latin American countries and the Arab world, there is more time flexibility in that one can change plans more often and easily, and it is common to be involved in many things at once. Admittedly, one needs to qualify this in terms of asking whether this typology does full justice to the different cultures discussed, and how much of a change in norms about time is occurring irrespective of the arrival of ICTs (e.g. such as those discussed in the earlier section on time pressures). But to make a link with the early part of this discussion, the researchers note that many claims about the consequences of mobile phone use (and other ICTs) seem to imply that mobile phones are helping to create more of a polychronic time culture where a monochronic one may have existed before.1 Against this backdrop, Chung and Lim consider the case of Singapore, arguing that traditionally it has a monochronic time culture as an ex-British colony and as ‘a regional financial, transportation and manufacturing hub. Time in Singapore is considered tangible and is constantly budgeted’ (Chung and Lim, 2004, 268). In their study, the participants often evaluated the mobile phone positively as a time-management tool and saw much the same benefits in the flexibility it allowed as had been found in various European studies. However, overall participants’ feelings were very mixed. hey found the simultaneous unpredictability and firm planning to be at times frustrating and annoying, with examples of people hanging around because of spontaneously arranged meetings, or in some cases giving up on the idea of meeting when it became too complicated. he lack of punctuality that the mobile phone encouraged was criticized, and since changing plans could be inconvenient, many requested more advance notice of such changes—thereby reducing the spontaneity enabled by mobile communications. In other words, this study sensitizes us to the fact that while the mobile phone may have introduced elements of polychronic time, people’s existing norms and expectations that were rooted in monochronic time were making this adjustment problematic. his introduced some negative perceptions of the consequences of mobile communications.

Reflection: Mobile Communications and Time Cultures Think about your own experiences of planning meetings using mobile technologies. Can you remember ever having some of the negative feelings referred to in the Singapore study (e.g. frustration, annoyance)?

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Chapter Summary „ A literature looking at time and ICTs already exists to frame our consideration of mobile communications. Existing research indicates the strategies people have developed to manage availability on fixed-line telephones, and these strategies extend to mobile phones. Social rules as regards making oneself available to others clearly operate, as we saw in the case of the Norwegian hytte.

„ There is also some cross-cultural variation with regard to the social norms or constraints on mobile communications with respect to time, as well as different degrees of regulation. Looking beyond such constraints, however, there are occasions which favour the use of different mobile devices both for communication and noncommunication activities, whether in terms of using time more efficiently or filling in time.

„ We saw various examples of how time organization has changed, especially as regards arranging meetings. Mobile communications allow us to be far more spontaneous, which can change the experience of meeting and create new norms of meeting management. Such flexibility, however, depends on managing other time commitments for both ourselves and others and the structures of institutional times. The Singaporean case study introduced a cross-cultural element to this question and showed how mobile communications can become involved in changing time cultures.

„ Debate also continues over how and why many people might be experiencing increased time pressures. Although the writers involved mention mobile communications only in passing, we can at least consider these arguments to ask whether and how our use of mobile communications contributes to this experience.

6 SOCIAL NETWORKS AND PEER RELATIONSHIPS In Chapter 5, we looked at the ways that mobility structures our sense and experience of time (in relation to space), and how mobile communications intervene in that process. In this chapter we turn to consider how networks of family, peer and community relationships are maintained (or not) through mobile communications. In what ways do mobile communications promote, maintain or disrupt networks of family, peer and community relationships? How does this occur, and how is it similar to or different from the communications that take place through other forms of technology such as fixed-line telephony or internet communications? In particular, what kinds of social associations are created or changed via mobile communications—how strong (or weak) are those relationships in individuals’ lives, and what are their implications? How do these relationships remain stable, change or shift over the course of the life cycle? To set the scene, in the first part of this chapter we will discuss various approaches that social scientists have taken to community, family and peer relationships over time and consider how social networks have been discussed in relation to other ICTs—both historical and contemporary. his introduces concepts such as social capital (the extent of social networks and trust relationships), and strong and weak ties (the closeness and quality of social relationships), as well as debates about ICTs, communities and the changing nature of social networks. We then discuss these in specific relation to mobile communications, using the example of youth peer relationships. We will consider the similarities between other media and mobile devices with respect to the social networks they foster—especially the ways that social networks act as resources for practical and emotional support. Finally, the chapter considers why and how we manage our contactability on mobile phones, adding to the social constraints on claims that this device allows us to be contactable anytime, anywhere. he chapter concludes by considering how family, friends, communities and social networks depend on a number of social factors including locality, culture and the maintenance of ties across time and space when managing their availability to others.

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COMMUNITIES, SOCIAL CAPITAL, SOCIAL NETWORKS AND ICTS As we saw in Chapter 3, mobile communication devices are situated in an ecology of ICTs that mediate social relationships. Individuals develop a repertoire of uses of different ICTs, and they choose among these depending on the communicative relationship and circumstances. Choices between different forms of communication did not begin with what we know as contemporary ICTs, however—and research questions about how different communications technologies mediate different social ties, associations and obligations first arose in relation to much earlier technological systems. In previous chapters, we touched on the ways that technologies such as the telephone (Marvin 1988; Fischer 1992), and steam-based transportation systems (alongside changing social relationships in industrialization and modernization) transformed channels of communication in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western societies. As the new media of that time, the telephone and telegraph extended social transformations not by introducing entirely new social relationships, but by making new tools available to manage established relationships (e.g. the telephone supplemented notes and letters and supported relationships that were difficult to maintain at a distance; Green 2007). At the time these communications technologies were being introduced, social scientists were asking questions about the different kinds of social associations and ties that were changing with industrialization and urbanism. Early questions about the nature of social relationships in modernity focused particularly on increasing individualization, and whether that individualization was eroding community. Ferdinand Tönnies, for example, argued that society was changing from one characterized by gemeinschaft (small-scale communities defined by close ties, established by common property, family, custom, language, ritual and tradition) to one characterized by gesellschaft (large societies defined through individualism, with an accompanying contractually based and rationalized fragmentation of relationships; Green 2002a, 2003b). Others at the time, by contrast, argued that the changes taking place in early modernity were more contradictory, and that individual experiences of affinity and commonality were simply becoming more complex. Simmel, for example, argued that individuals were neither completely individualized nor fully collective, but somewhere in between at different times and places. In both of these arguments, however, the writers were commenting largely on face-to-face relationships and failed to take account of the changes being wrought by new communications technologies that were transforming ideas about time and distance (Green 2002a, 2003a). Ideas about individualism and community have continued to be significant and enduring themes in the social science literature. he debates have been revived

numerous times, including most recently with the introduction of new ICTs— especially because of the ways that new ICTs might be associated with a decline in social capital. Robert Putnam, for example, explored changing relationships between individuals and communities with particular respect to television and social capital in the United States. Putnam’s definition of social capital includes those ‘features of social organisation, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’ (cited in Kavanaugh and Patterson, 2002, 327). According to Putnam, community-level, geographically based and largely face-to-face associations of the immediate postwar era facilitated strong networks of relationship and trust (through high degrees of communication about norms and values amongst the group), resulting in high levels of social capital. his he calls ‘civic engagement’. Putnam argues that the decline in civic engagement since the 1950s has led to a general decrease in social capital, accompanied by a reduction in communication about the community amongst its members. Furthermore, a growth in affluence has enabled more widespread privatized consumption. In the case of television, Putnam argues that the time now used to consume broadcast content within the home decreases the amount of time devoted to social networks and community relationships outside the home. he resulting decline in social capital has, Putnam maintains, led to a widespread individualism located at the level of the home and family. In Putnam’s argument, the family unit has therefore become the most important intimate association in the lives of modern individuals, driving out alternative relationships and reducing social capital and community ties (see also Franzen 2003). Questions about the role of social capital in community formation and maintenance (or decline) found renewed importance with the arrival of contemporary ICT technologies such as the internet. With the development of applications such as email, newsgroups, and bulletin board services in the early to mid 1990s, some social researchers again raised concerns that internet use could exacerbate the loss of social capital already begun by television consumption. his argument is based on some of the qualitative similarities between internet use and television viewing—both can be a largely individual activity, and both practices require time that might otherwise be spent elsewhere—noted in Chapter 5. Furthermore, because the internet is (at least in the West) largely accessed via personal computers located in the home, interactions beyond the confines of the domestic sphere may become more limited (thus again decreasing social capital). Against some of the prevailing popular speculation that internet use isolates individuals and creates a virtual life devoid of real emotional associations, some social scientists carried out in-depth qualitative studies that investigated people’s ties and associations online. his research focused particularly on the emergence of virtual communities. Many of these researchers argued that rather than being a separate sphere social networks and peer relationships

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of life that isolates individuals, internet use is rather embedded in everyday life. he fact that internet-based relationships may be conducted at a distance does not detract from the formation of groups or from the strength of the associations that they develop. Furthermore, the role and importance of textually based communications in creating strong relationships should be acknowledged. Relationships are defined and given meaning through people’s symbolic communications as much as through face-to-face conversations (the importance of letters would be an earlier example). Textually based communications can therefore create and support shared emotional investment, social experience and mutual commitment. It is therefore because internet use is based in everyday life that the maintenance of internet-based relationships runs alongside the maintenance of co-present relationships, and they can very often overlap (see, for example, Rheingold 1993/2000; Baym 1995; Jones 1995, 1998, 1999; Fernback 1999; Kollock and Smith 1999). Following earlier work (Granovetter 1973), more recent studies of internet relationships have focused on social network analysis as one way to explore family, peer and community relationships online and the social capital that emerges from them. hese studies examine both the quantitative empirical reach of social networks as well as the qualitative types, closeness and frequency of associations existing between internet users. Rather than focusing on purely online groups such as virtual communities, they distinguish between the different types of association available in electronic networks that are fostered by different ways of using the technologies. According to Wellman (1999, 94), the starting points for social network analysis are ‘network members and their relationships . . . Indeed, a group is really a special form of a social network that is densely knit . . . and tightly bounded ’. Both bounded communities and larger-scale networks have been examined with respect to the strength of ties that they foster. hese ties can range from the strong (where associations are regular, recurrent and emotionally invested—densely knit and tightly bounded), to the weak (where associations are loose and the communications are casual). In addition, different ways of using technologies are more likely than others to foster stronger or weaker ties. Functional uses of the internet such as information gathering are less likely to foster strong ties than those activities specifically designed to act as social spaces, such as social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Both strong and weak ties can be found in personal community networks, where the individual maintains a range of relationships with different degrees of closeness and intimacy (Wellman and Gulia 1999). Both groups and personal community networks were also maintained both online and offline. Boase (2008, 490) goes further to remark that personal community networks are increasingly being managed by individuals in personal communications systems such as we saw in Chapter 3: ‘Rather than radically altering relationships, communication technology is embedded in

social networks as part of a larger communication system that individuals use to stay socially connected.’ his shifts the basis for maintaining social capital from the relationships within bounded groups to what Wellman has referred to as ‘networked individualism’ (Boase et al. 2006). Such a networked individualism distinguishes itself from Putnam’s definition in that it is based less on relationships associated with activities related to civic engagement and more on activities related to maintaining social ties: ‘Rather than relying on a single community for social capital, individuals must often actively seek out a variety of people and resources for different situations’(Boase et al. 2006, 3). With regard to the foregoing discussion, many of these approaches discuss the relationship between the individual and wider communities, particularly within European and North American contexts; the individual is the ultimate focus of attention. An increasing number of studies in numerous global empirical contexts, however, indicate how the relationship between individuals and communities might differ cross-culturally. Similarly, some studies have also addressed cross-cultural variation in individualization with respect to ICTs in general and mobile phones in particular. We will therefore now consider how, in various cultural contexts, researchers have discussed questions of social networks and social capital with particular reference to mobile communications.

THE STRENGTH OF MOBILE TIES So what are the implications of this research on ICTs such as TV and the internet for the study of mobile communications? he debates about the relationships between individuals, social networks and social capital have unsurprisingly been revived with the use of the mobile phone. In the foregoing discussion we addressed some of the most important themes to have emerged from ICT studies—and one was the way that social capital now appears to be maintained on the basis of multiple ICT technologies as well as in face-to-face relationships. In this section we explore some of the empirical research that has attempted to address the role of the mobile phone in the maintenance of social capital and investigate the nature of the social ties fostered by mobile communications. Some research on mobile communications has explicitly focused on the consequences for social capital of mobile communications practices. Ling et al. (2003), for example, set out to consider social capital and social integration in the European context. While noting that the mobile phone shares some similarities with the internet (in their recent diffusion and certain text-based communications functions; see Chapter 3), they also underline some significant differences (such as the lower cost of mobile phones, their portability and their perceived nature as more personal and intimate). More importantly for the consideration of individuals and their social social networks and peer relationships

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networks is that mobile phones raise a greater number of issues relating to accessibility (whether managing calling or being called on the move, or choosing where and when one makes oneself available for communication). Ling et al. (2003) investigated a number of measures of sociability derived from quantitative data gathered by the EU e-living project—including formal membership in clubs and organizations (a measure related to Putnam’s civic engagement), participation in socially focused leisure activities, and friendship relationships. On the basis of the results of this study, the authors conclude that: ICTs facilitate social interaction where there is already a core upon which to build . . . [W]ell-functioning social groups that also use ICTs to facilitate their interactions will potentially enjoy better-coordinated and flexible informal social interaction . . . hus, it is beyond the role of ICTs to create social networks. While certain types of sociability can be developed and even elaborated via mediated interaction, these are marginal in [European societies] . . . It is far more common that social interaction is founded on various forms of physically co-present contact. (2003, 7–8)

hese research findings tend to suggest that mobile communications in the European context are a tool for social integration and the enhancement of social capital, but only where strong ties already exist. his tends to support the social network analysis of ICTs more generally that emphasize a combination of mediated and faceto-face interactions in maintaining social capital, and reminds us that mobile technologies are part of a wide-ranging ecology of communications that support these networks. Recent research has examined what kinds of ties mobile communications maintain or negotiate in everyday life. As we have seen, early research on how mobile phones mediated social ties often focused on the disruption to co-present social ties in public places (see Chapter 4). One assumption underpinning such research is that face-to-face relationships are of greater significance than relationships at a distance (as in the case where the audible mobile phone disrupts interaction in public places such as restaurants). Another assumption is that co-present relationships are likely to involve stronger ties and be more dense and tightly knit (as when we dedicate time to important others; see Chapter 5), thus enhancing social capital. Evidence certainly exists that mobile technologies maintain those strongest ties to intimate kin and close friends and extend the presence to one another of those already intimately connected—as we noted in Chapter 3 (Licoppe 2003; Licoppe and Heurtin 2002). his therefore creates a greater and constant awareness of kin, friends and intimate ties, as described in Case Study 6.1.

Case Study 6.1 Case Study: Virtual Walled Communities According to Ling (2004, 190), mobile phones can facilitate and maintain what he calls ‘virtual walled communities’ of close contact with those with whom we already have strong ties, at the expense of the weaker ties in our social networks. Mobiles can strengthen our ability to maintain and elaborate contact with the immediate and intimate spheres: We can exchange messages and have an advanced and ongoing dialogue with like-minded people, regardless of when it is or where we are . . . We can speculate that the intense interaction of the in-group can have a chilling effect on the ability to engage in more superficial and peripheral social relationships . . . To the degree this is true, the mobile telephone therefore supports the development of cliques. That is, the device allows for an intensity of interaction within the groups . . . The suggestion that the intensity of intimate interaction might limit interaction with cross- or out-group networks of relationship is echoed by Gergen (2003), who argues that interactions amongst an intimate group require more time and energy to maintain remotely, thereby excluding weaker remote relations in dispersed networks. Furthermore, the intensity that is likely to occur when an intimate group focuses on its own concerns also serves to promote what Rivere and Licoppe (2003) have referred to as ‘incivility’ in the public sphere (as we saw in Chapter 4, where people focus on their own groups and concerns in restaurants), excluding co-present others. According to Ling, this can promote ‘communities of interest, as opposed to communities of propinquity’ (2004, 191) and a ‘bounded solidarity’ (Ling 2008) of social cohesion within intimate personal networks.

he ‘virtual walled communities’ of close family and friends in mobile communications, as described in Case Study 6.1, suggest that we are at times exclusive in our attention to others. Sometimes this is with respect to co-present others, when, as we have seen, we ignore others in the same place. At other times, we are exclusive with respect to those individuals with whom we want to communicate at any particular time. One important theme to have emerged from mobile phone research is social selectivity, or selective sociality. As Fortunati (2002, 51) notes, the use of the mobile or cell phone ‘is to be reachable not by everyone, but only by those with whom we want to communicate—intimate friends or selected others whom we want to contact’. he practice of individuals selecting those with whom they communicate through personal communications networks is already embedded in existing structures of relationships and cultural practices in different places. In Matsuda’s study of selective sociality in Japan, for example, while there was a greater choice of communication partners in urban areas and younger generations, the kaeru call (a ‘homecoming’ call to the family) has become symbolic of ‘thoughtfulness and attention’ to spouses and other family members (2005, 130). Yoon (2003) similarly notes that the social networks and peer relationships

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mobile phone in Korea is typically used to consolidate existing social connections while limiting individuals’ likelihood of extending their communicative practices to new relationships. Further international research has also emphasized the ways in which ICTs such as the mobile phone support family and friendship networks both within particular global communities and across global distances. In these cases, the mobile phone is likely to be only one channel of communication amongst multiple possibilities. We therefore need to pay attention to the combination of the multiple ICTs being used in any relationships, as well as the integrated maintenance of social ties and networks, in any particular cultural context. One way of thinking about how these combinations might operate in mobile communications is by considering research that has addressed these themes with respect to other ICTs, such as the internet. Miller and Slater’s (2001) study of the internet in Trinidad, for example, conducted research that placed community ties rather than individual communications at the centre of their analysis. In doing so they found that through the strong ties characterizing social networks in a distinct cultural locality (tightly knit communities, whether colocated or globally dispersed), access to the internet was achieved through extended familial, friendship and community network relationships rather than individualized access to any particular technology. Similar relationships have been reported in studies of the mobile in different areas of the world. Across the developing world, for example, sharing mobile handsets and/or mobile accounts and numbers amongst peers, family and other close relationships is very common. Beyond issues of economic access to mobile phones, Steenson and Donner (2009) argue that different modes of mobile phone sharing reflect and promote the maintenance of close social ties in various ways. hey note that while some formal phone sharing is an economic activity (individuals or businesses making handsets and call time available to others at a price), in locations as diverse as South Africa or Bangladesh, phone-sharing practices may also consolidate family and community bonds (such as pooling call time and coordinating battery charging in Uganda, or sharing mobile phones amongst family members in India). Some international research, however, has suggested that the distinction between weak and strong ties, and the experience of them, may not always be easy to make. Burrell and Anderson (2008), for example, found that while Ghanaians living in London used the mobile phone as one of the ICTs that helped them maintain close and strong ties with their homeland, they also used the mobile phone to support a variety of relationships elsewhere—not only with co-nationals in their host country, but also with other migrants globally. he case of Jamaica, as described in Case Study 6.2, also suggests that the distinction between strong and weak ties may be difficult to maintain.

Case Study 6.2 Case Study: Mobile Phones and the Jamaican ‘Link-Up’ In the Jamaican study noted earlier, little distinction was made between overlapping social and economic networks of friends and associates. Some participants in Horst and Miller’s (2006) study had up to 170 numbers in their address books—some were family and individual friends or ‘crew’, others came from churches or church organizations, some were neighbours, others were business associates, through to associates with whom rare contacts were made. According to Horst and Miller, there is no clear boundary between stronger and weaker ties. This is partly because any particular contact can fulfil numerous roles (such as kin, part of friendship and social networks, or also business associates in some form, whether partners or consumers). It is also because the overlapping communities operate using ‘economies of favours’—reciprocal relations of ‘helping.’ It is also the case where families and associations become transnational with extensive migration. Horst and Miller also found that address lists were singularly important in Jamaica, with some participants expressing surprise that storage was limited to 200 contacts. This emphasizes the value placed on the extension of interpersonal relationships via talk in Jamaican culture—communication is not a means to some other end, but rather an activity in itself. While very extensive and incorporated kin networks are usual, the participants placed differing significance upon them. Horst and Miller argue that while not everyone freely gives out their mobile phone numbers, [i]t would be hard to overestimate the importance of networking or the establishment of connections and ‘links’ in Jamaica. Certainly, walking down the street, it is quite common to see people meet very briefly and exchange phone numbers for possible future contact ... these chance encounters could ... lead to more substantial relationships. (2006, 91) This is particularly the case with (potentially multiple) sexual relationships and potentially long-term intimate relationships (see also Batson-Savage 2007) but is by no means limited to them. For example, there is the further use of extensive connections including networking church events amongst a wide church community, or formal—but sometimes more importantly, informal—business and entrepreneurial activities. Furthermore, particular types of communication ensue from ‘link-up’; link-up usage across all these different types of relationships often results in a large number of very short calls, about nothing in particular but which keep the connections open and active in a dense web of connectivity. (Horst and Miller 2006)

International studies such as the research described throughout the preceding discussion and in Case Study 6.2 provide us with an important insight: that mobile technologies have the ability to tie individuals and groups together through shared use and community-level communications. Unlike many studies carried out in Europe and the United States that focus on individual ownership and use of mobile technologies and ‘networked individualism’, this research focuses on collective use and the difficulties in distinguishing strong from weak ties as some have in Western contexts. Hence these studies suggest that the relationship of mobile phone communication social networks and peer relationships

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to social capital is ambiguous, and the types and qualities of social ties that are maintained in overlapping personal networks are paradoxical. On the one hand, they can strengthen already strong ties in personal networks and discourage the extension of personal networks amongst nonintimates. On the other hand, weak ties are some of the most common patterns to be found in different parts of the world—although they might be considered shallow in one social context, weak ties may equally be deep in another context. Indeed, the global picture painted is that in some contexts, the distinction between strong and weak ties is unsustainable. As Katz et al. (2004) point out, and what international studies also indicate, is that the effect that a mobile phone will have in any relationship, and therefore the link between an individual’s personal network and social capital in any particular cultural context, is dependent upon exactly what type of tie is being studied, amongst whom, and when. hey comment that [w]eak ties between women may have different characteristics as opposed to weak ties between men or adults vs. adolescents. he tie could be between a superior and a subordinate at work, between extroverts vs. introverts, etc. It is not merely involvement with a group or a set of groups but also the fact that the mobile phone helps to establish bonds over space and time. It could be argued that long-lasting, bond-nurturing home phone calls could establish strong ties and that short goal-oriented phone calls establish weak ties. However, it is not the length of the phone call alone that has an impact on the nature of the bond. A series of brief phone calls could also strengthen weak ties and establish and strengthen strong ties. For example, a mother who calls her teenager to find out where he or she is, makes a brief, goal-oriented call, and yet this strengthens the trust that she shares with her child. (2004, 349)

What Katz et al. draw our attention to here is that different ties and associations can have different strengths and weaknesses amongst different groups and at particular points in the life cycle. To demonstrate this point, we now turn to a case study of a particular point in the life cycle—children and young people—to demonstrate how social network ties are created and maintained on an everyday basis.

YOUNG PEOPLE AND SOCIAL NETWORKS As we saw in Chapters 1 and 3, some of the earliest and most prolific studies concerning the mobile phone have been conducted with teenagers—initially in Europe and North America and increasingly throughout Australasia, Japan, Korea and East and Southeast Asia. Such studies focus on the meaning and communicative practices of mobile phone use in a specific stage of the life course, and draw our attention to the ways in which the mobile phone itself, as well as the social ties it fosters, acquires

different salience or emotional investment at different points in one’s life. In this section we will consider some of the research that has been carried out with children and young people and examine the specific patterns of social network that might be identified amongst these age groups. While teenagers were one of the earliest age-related groups to be considered in the research literature, the diffusion of the mobile phone amongst ever-greater sections of the population has meant that more recent studies have also concentrated on the role of the mobile phone in the lives of younger children as well as teenagers and adults. Haddon (2007a), for example, considers mobile phone use amongst children not only as an age-related group, but also with respect to the diversity of children’s and teenagers’ use in terms of gender, different age groups within the broader categories of child or teenager, and with respect to cross-cultural diversity. Indeed, this diversity is a key focus of recent studies of mobile communications, children and young people. Social networks are particularly important for teenagers or young adults as they transition between childhood and adulthood and achieve independence. Some of the most important relationships for young people increasingly shift from those with nuclear and extended family (although these can remain enduring throughout the life cycle) to friendship relationships and a more extended intimate sociality. he expression of these peer social networks via the mobile phone varies amongst young people, however, with respect to the uses they assign to the mobile phone in different circumstances, its cultural and symbolic value as an object amongst social networks and peer groups, and the social functions it fulfils with respect to specific age groups and gender. Cross-national comparisons, though, reinforce a sense that children and teenagers in many parts of the world use mobile phones in broadly similar ways across cultures and countries and in broadly different ways as compared to adults. Early research in the United Kingdom suggested that amongst eleven- to sixteenyear olds, older children were more likely to own their own phones, although in these instances the phone was likely to have been bought for them as a gift for birthdays or Christmas by other family members, or handed down from older siblings when they acquired newer models (in both instances reinforcing close intimate ties amongst kin; Green 2000a). As the mass market for mobile phones continued to develop into the twenty-first century, more younger children in the United Kingdom reported that their mobile phones were likely to have been given to them by parents expressing parental concerns over safety, and the mobile in this instance was less likely to be in the ownership of the child concerned, but rather was owned by the parents and given to the child as an expression of the parent/child relationship (Green 2000a; Green et al. 2000—see Chapter 7 for further discussion of this point). Numerous studies from elsewhere in the world seemed to reinforce this general pattern. On the one hand, concerns over safety generally prompted parents to give mobile phones to younger children (8–12)—for example, in Japan (Miyaki 2005)—whereas older children or social networks and peer relationships

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teenagers (12–18) are more likely to acquire their own personal mobile whether by purchase or as gifts; as a rite of passage into the teenage years and high school or secondary school (Haddon and Vincent 2007). From the beginning of studies into mobile phone use amongst children and teenagers, age-related patterns emerged that proved remarkably similar in different national contexts. Some of these included the negotiations between young people and their parents over the economic and social aspects of mobile phone use, or attempts by parents to monitor their children via mobile phones (Green et al. 2000; Green 2002; also see Chapter 7 for a discussion of both these issues). As different national studies emerged, though, it became apparent that while interactions with the family might be important for younger children, as they grew older, the mobile phone grew considerably in importance as a vehicle for social networking amongst peer groups, and peer networks acquired a greater personal and emotional salience. his has been the case in studies conducted in Norway, Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom, Korea, Finland, Australia, Sweden and elsewhere (see the annotated guide to further reading for details of relevant studies).

STATUS AND CULTURAL VALUE Both early and more recent studies have indicated that one of the important roles of the mobile phone in peer social networks is its cultural and symbolic role, conferring social status on its owner. At the same time, the teenage years are a transitional period in the life cycle when adolescents are forming their self-identities and a sense of themselves as independent social actors. During this phase of life, then, markers of social standing amongst peers (and between peers and others) become particularly important as both signals of identity and indicators of self-expression. hese cultural markers, and the meanings they carry, can be based on both similarity to and difference from others, whether those similarities and differences are amongst peers or between teenagers and adults. Accordingly, the aesthetics of fashion provide particularly significant social conventions associated with mobile phones, as found in studies in Italy (Fortunati 2002), the UK (Green 2003a), Finland (Kasesniemi and Rautiainen 2002), Norway (Ling and Yttri 2002; Ling 2004), and the United States and Japan (Katz & Sugiyama 2006). As we have seen, mobile phones are generally distinct amongst ICTs in that they are relatively low cost to acquire and use. Nevertheless, the economic value of the mobile phone is also related to its social and cultural value—the more expensive the phone (generally the newest models), or the more difficulty involved in acquiring it (in terms of either price or effort), the higher its value as a marker of status amongst peer groups. he elements of fashion surrounding the phone can vary but are generally focused on the make and model (device styles and designs), its novelty (newness), and the extent to which it can be customized and personalized (in terms of both the device, such

as the colour of fascias, as well as its features, such as colour screens or screen backgrounds). Younger age groups (pre-teens and younger teens) tended to more highly emphasize the influence of fashion in the United Kingdom (Green 2000a, 2003a), but across a number of national studies, many age groups were aware of how their mobile phones contributed to their presentation of self, and how others would perceive particular phones. Phones have been characterized in terms of ‘bling’ or ‘flash’, an element of style and the social status that accompanies that fashionable style, in much the same way that it does with other commodities for popular consumption.

Reflection: Fashion and Mobile Phones Think about your own mobile phone, or the phones of others close to you. To what degree does your phone contribute to your presentation of self? Do you place much importance on how new or fashionable your phone is? Do you notice the handset brands or styles of other people’s phones?

Fashion may take particular forms in particular local contexts—such as ‘cute culture’ (kawaii ) in Japan and its related consumer style in South Korea and the Asia-Pacific more generally. Although associated particularly with young women, a widespread cute culture amongst many different age groups permeates Asian-Pacific consumer cultures and has become associated particularly with new technologies. Whereas some commentators have argued that practices such as decorating mobile phones with cute cultural icons (such as cute characters in the phone software or attached to the handset) are ‘feminizing’ ICTs in Asian-Pacific cultures, Hjorth (2007) argues that cute culture therefore also domesticates mobile phones. It draws technologies perceived as cold and alienating into the social sphere, making online and distant relationships present and personal. Kawaii therefore also becomes involved in gift-giving practices, cementing relationships (see Case Study 6.3). Fashion is therefore not only about popular consumption, but simultaneously about a shared set of meanings with respect to the role of the mobile phone in peer networks. he issue of a perceived feminization indicates that what might be considered stylish or fashionable may also depend on gender. In early studies, for example, boys were more likely than girls to concentrate on the technological features of the phone as the rationale for its fashionability, although more recently, with the expansion of youth markets, the value of technology features has become less differentiated between the genders. Similarly, as teenagers become older, they pay less attention to the elements of style and fashion associated with the phone. Indeed, in some studies a critical rejection of the fashionable elements of mobile phones was considered to confer higher status amongst older teenage age groups. Instead, more attention was paid to its functional and communicative capacities—its ability to facilitate sociality (Green 2003a). social networks and peer relationships

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GROUP IDENTIFICATION AND DIFFERENTIATION Early studies quickly identified the role of ‘hyper-coordination’ (or intensive microcoordination) amongst groups of young people as particularly salient for their sociality (Ling and Yttri 2002). he micro-coordination of everyday social life (calls on the move to coordinate meetings, for example; see Chapter 5) are transformed into hyper-coordination amongst young people. Rather than being simply functional, these calls simultaneously consolidate strong bonds within peer groups, in ways that are similar to those of intimate family connections. Peer groups, who might be considered to have weaker social ties than family, therefore come to take on a far greater salience in the personal and emotional lives of young people. Hyper-coordination involves both voice and text functionality, but text functionality also supports other activities that consolidate young people’s relationships within their peer networks and facilitate group identification. In early studies, text messages were identified as being particularly important to young people in their role as ‘gifts’, enhancing the peer bond between the giver and receiver, as illustrated in Case Study 6.3.

Case Study 6.3 Text Messages as ‘Gifts’ In the early mass consumer market for mobile phones, SMS or text messaging was particularly identified with young people, who were early pioneers of the practice (see Chapter 3). This in itself meant that text messaging differentiated communications between young people’s peer groups, from communication with or amongst adults. Taylor and Harper’s 2003 study The Gift of the Gab? focused particularly on text messaging practices amongst teenagers (as opposed to voice communications as in hyper-coordination) and used the idea of ‘the gift’ to understand these practices. They argue that gifts such as text messages ‘are exchanged in performances that have specific meanings in young people’s daily lives and are played out with the intent to cement social relationships’ (2003, 271). Drawing on the work of Mauss (1997), Taylor and Harper posit that ritual gift practices establish relations of reciprocity between peers, requiring exchange (and therefore mutual obligation). Their research noted that a number of activities they observed in their research reflected these kinds of relationships. These activities, for example, included the following: „ forwarding text messages from one peer to multiple other members of a peer group network (as a gift) „ reciprocal forwarding of other messages on receipt of the first (the gift is reciprocated) „ forwarded text messages acting as a focus for further discussion and exchange with co-present peers (to cement the relationships established by the reciprocal texts)

Through these activities, shared meaning is established amongst a group of peers, cementing the membership of those within the group and differentiating them from other groups (see also Xun 2005 for a cross-cultural comparison). They thus create collective, group memories to discuss and share (Green 2008).

It is interesting to consider whether the increased use of texting amongst adults more recently has had any effect on teenagers’ perceptions and activities of gifting with respect to mobile phones. It is also interesting to consider whether these gift-giving practices will migrate to other functions, such as the use of the camera phone (see Chapter 8).

Beyond the example of text messaging in Case Study 6.3, Taylor and Harper (2003) also identify other gifting practices teenagers performed that support their peer group networks and differentiate them from other groups. As in the case of Steenson and Donner’s (2009) study in India, for example, Taylor and Harper identify mobile phone sharing as a widespread practice amongst young people (and by implication, sharing of call credit and call time). Beyond the sharing of the mobile phone itself, calls may also be shared if a group is co-present—for example, a phone is passed around to different members of the co-present group so everyone can speak with a caller who is part of the wider peer network. Other types of sharing activity confirm the identities of particular individuals with respect to the peer group as a whole. In young people’s peer networks, the sharing of information contained on mobile phones negotiates the status of individuals within the group, which continually shifts and changes. For example, mobile phone address books, and the names and numbers they contain, are particularly important pieces of information for young people and become the focus of significant co-present interaction. Peer groups will share their mobile phone address books when they are together, comparing the names and numbers of different call lists and revising or confirming the relationships concerned on the basis of that interaction. At the same time, the number of logged calls and texts from important others will be compared, to affirm the status and popularity of the individual concerned within the complex and shifting relationships in peer group networks. he maintenance of peer networks in this way relies on the management of availability—peer group networks need to make themselves available to each other in order to provide the time and space for peer network relations. herefore, we now turn to research on how this availability is managed.

THE MANAGEMENT OF AVAILABILITY It is not only young people who now manage their availability to significant members of their peer groups—as we saw in Chapter 5, adults of all age groups now have to make decisions about how to manage their time and availability to significant others, whether family, peers or co-workers. here are therefore more general issues about managing one’s availability to one’s social networks and the strategies for, and problems with, controlling that availability. social networks and peer relationships

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hroughout this book, we have touched upon one popular understanding of the mobile phone, which is the way that it provides communications access anytime, anywhere. his idea assumes that communicative access to others anytime and anywhere is both desirable and beneficial, and that the connections to others that the mobile phone affords strengthens those relationships. In Chapter 4, however, we also saw how a mobile phone call can interrupt or disrupt relationships when they occur in spaces where we are confirming our relationships with co-present others. We have also already seen in the case of virtual walled communities that it is not access to all others, all the time, that is important. Rather, in the process of social selectivity, the point is not to be reachable by everyone (nor to reach everyone), but to manage our communications with those with whom we wish to communicate (or not) in any particular time and place. he management of our availability to others and control over our communications therefore present particular problems, and research has demonstrated a range of strategies that people use to control who can reach them via the mobile phone. he first and most obvious strategy is the attempt to control who has access to our mobile phone numbers in the first place. In some situations, this is a relatively straightforward proposition—we are likely to give family and close friends (the strongest ties in our social networks) our mobile phone numbers, without even considering that there might be an alternative. Another example would be where we are co-present with others and can make an immediate decision as to whether to exchange mobile phone numbers or not, depending on the relationship. Research also suggests that the norms governing who we give our mobile phone numbers to might differ crossculturally—the Jamaican link-up we discussed earlier is one example where mobile phone numbers are exchanged very extensively and freely. In other cases, however, the exchange of mobile phone numbers might not be so straightforward. First, we can think of occasions where social rituals of mutual obligation and reciprocity could cause difficulties—such as a situation where two people have just met, and one wants to share mobile phone numbers but the other does not. Second, we might not always have control over who has our mobile phone numbers, and what they do with them—for example, if our mobile phone numbers appear in a public or semipublic place (such as on a social networking Web site). Similarly, when we give our mobile phone number to businesses or companies as a customer, they might sell that information to other businesses or companies for marketing purposes—and we may not always have the opportunity to give or withhold our permission (Green and Smith 2004). Beyond attempting to control who has our mobile phone number in the first place, research has identified a number of other strategies that individuals use to manage where, when and with whom they communicate. In chapters 4 and 5 we remarked on circumstances where individuals may not carry their mobile phones for

Reflection: The Exchange of Mobile Phone Numbers Consider your own experiences of giving out mobile phone numbers. Can you think of any situations where you have been happy to exchange your mobile phone number with others? Can you think of any situations where you have made a conscious decision to withhold your mobile phone number, either from individuals or from organizations? Have there been any occasions where there was social awkwardness about a perceived obligation to exchange phone numbers, or times when you have given out your mobile phone number and later wished you hadn’t?

different reasons (such as in the Norwegian hytte), or different circumstances where people may switch off their mobile phones so as not to be interrupted in activities with co-present others (such as in restaurants). We also remarked that such actions to manage reachability (and unreachability) may need to include extensive negotiations with family, friends and co-workers to ensure that relationships with members of social networks are not disrupted or disaffected by such actions. Beyond switching the phone off or not carrying it, individuals might engage in call screening to decide whether they will accept incoming communications, a practice that is also governed by perceived mutual obligations to family, work, and peer networks. Where the mobile handset displays the name of the caller (derived from the address book), individuals may use discretion to decide whether to accept the call from that person, or, if it is inconvenient to talk (or if the individual is actively avoiding the caller), to let the call go to voicemail or messaging services. If the caller is unidentified, or if the calling number is withheld, similar decisions may also be made. he decision to remain unreachable to callers may sometimes be called to social account. his is particularly the case with children and young people and their perceived responsibility to be available all the time to communications from their parents. Some UK studies, for example, found that when parents’ attempts at contact were inconvenient or unwanted, one popular strategy amongst children and young people was to claim that their refusal to answer the phone was because the battery on the handset had run out, or that they were in a location where there was no mobile signal (Green 2000a; Green et al. 2000). hese examples demonstrate that unavailability while mobile is now seen as an exception rather than as a social norm, and that such unavailability may require extensive rationalization and justification to intimate others. Research has also indicated that reachability can be extensively negotiated through different channels of communication on the mobile phone. In some sub-Saharan African countries, for example, a ‘beeping’ practice has emerged, which involves briefly calling a phone number to ring a predetermined number of times, as a signal for the social networks and peer relationships

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recipient of the beep (Donner 2005a, 2005b, 2007). While this beep may have many meanings depending on the signal that is prearranged and agreed, one meaning of a missed call is to signal availability to those so called, in the expectation that the call will be returned. hese practices have also begun to emerge in India, and in Italy, Scifio (2005) has also noted missed call messages, known there as squillini. Similar practices have emerged elsewhere but use forms of communication other than the beep or ring. In de Gournay and Smoreda’s (2005) study of Japanese urban areas, for example, they noted the practice of emailing someone using the mobile phone first to ensure the person’s subsequent availability for voice conversations. A mobile email may be sent, with the expectation of an email confirmation of availability for a call, or in other cases a straight response to the message in the form of a return voice call. International research has therefore emphasized the diverse strategies that have emerged in different parts of the world in attempts to manage and control availability to one’s family, peer networks and co-workers. he most interesting thing to note from the research is that when we consider the management of availability, it turns conventional wisdom about the anytime and anywhere nature of mobile communications on its head—mobile communications practices are sometimes about being unconnected, or disconnected, as much as they are about being connected. he degree of control any individual has over his or her availability, however, requires extensive social negotiation with numerous members of social networks and can sometimes be difficult. We therefore turn to the issue of the relative power of individuals in their communications in Chapter 7.

Chapter Summary „ We began the chapter by considering how the introduction of new technologies had historically raised issues about the changing relationship between individuals and their wider communities, and particularly whether community was giving way to an increased individualism. We explored whether the introduction of ICTs had an effect on social capital and the ways in which online and offline social relationships were related, noting how research began to focus increasingly on networks of stronger and weaker ties in both online and offline relationships.

„ We then considered the ways in which mobile phones in particular play a part in social networks, and whether their role serves to enhance social capital, noting how mobile phones tend to play a role where social ties are already strong and the resulting social capital high. This can in turn promote virtual walled communities, where we are more likely to interact exclusively with those with whom we are already in intimate contact through the mobile phone. At the same time, international research has indicated that strong and weak ties may be difficult to differentiate when we look across different cultural contexts.

„ Social ties change throughout the life cycle, and we considered the particular case of children and teenagers to explore exactly how social ties are negotiated and maintained through the mobile phone. We looked at relationships of status, cultural value and group inclusion and differentiation, and examined a particular study of ‘gift’ relationships via mobiles that cement social obligation and reciprocity. „ Finally, the chapter considered how attempts to control and manage one’s availability to family, peer and other networks is worked out on an everyday basis, including the strategies individuals use to control their communications. We noted the uneven distribution of that control depending on the relationship and circumstances, raising issues of power to be explored in the next chapter.

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7 POWER RELATIONS In Chapter 6, we examined the role of mobile technologies in social networks and peer relationships. he concepts of connected presence as well as weak and strong ties have been particularly important for describing and explaining social relationships conducted via mobile technologies. Constant availability can be a benefit in many people’s lives, embedding a strong sense of sociality, supporting friendship and family life and promoting communication, reciprocity and community. We also saw, however, that constant availability can have its drawbacks. Managing one’s availability to all networks all the time becomes a kind of communication work, involving prioritizing, management and negotiation. In this chapter, we take that communication work as a starting point to examine the power relationships that are implicit in mobile communications. he chapter will explore what is meant by power, especially because it is a concept that is rarely used in mobile technology research (one exception being Bustami and Nasruddin 2007). Using the concept of power allows us to examine some mobile phone relationships in ways that have not been previously considered—especially in terms of control, authority, status or knowledge. hinking about situations in terms of power allows us to ask questions in a different way about the very mundane uses to which we put mobile technologies. We have seen, for example, that the relationships between young people and their parents are managed via the mobile phone for the purposes of safety and security, and in ways that maintain family bonds. At the same time, however, parents have social authority over their children—and with growing independence from their families, children may resist parental authority through their use of a number of media. he concept of power therefore allows us to consider how the mobile phone is used with respect to the negotiation of authority and control in a range of social situations and circumstances. his chapter will therefore consider a range of power relations that are particularly brought to light in the case of mobile technologies—the relations between parents and children, the case of peer relationships and relations in the world of school and work. How are relationships of control worked out via the use of mobile technologies? How does authority, status or control serve to shape mobile communications? he chapter will argue that a wide range of power relationships are present in the ownership and

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use of mobile phones, but also that more explicit consideration needs to be given to these relationships in research on different mobile communication practices.

DIMENSIONS OF POWER here are many different forms of power—so much so that it is one of the most difficult theoretical concepts to define. Consider Gordon’s exploration of power in Case Study 7.1, in which she attempts to characterize the various different dimensions of power and their effects:

Case Study 7.1 What Is Power? Power can be invisible, it can be fantastic, it can be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of the police, it can speak the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote control, it can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause bodily injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you. It is systematic and it is particularistic and it is often both at the same time. It causes dreams to live and dreams to die. We can and must call it by recognizable names, but so too we need to remember that power arrives in forms that can range from blatant white supremacy and state terror to ‘furniture without memories’. (Gordon 1997, 1).

In Case Study 7.1, Gordon points out that we can think of a huge range of social relationships when we think about power. Some of these relationships are large-scale, hierarchical and authoritarian, such as state violence—‘the baton of the police’, ‘state terror’, and ‘white supremacy’. However, they can also be seen in mundane, smallscale and everyday interactions such as dreams, thoughts and desires. hese routine thoughts and desires become concrete when we act in the world around us—such as when we use everyday objects such as furniture, or indeed, when we engage in mobile communications. Gordon’s narrative not only emphasizes the many different forms of power but also underlines the idea that while power is highly visible in some social relationships, in others it is all but invisible. Some sources of power appear selfevident, and we are easily able to think of numerous examples where power comes from aspects of politics or economic organization. For example, power can derive from the possession of material resources such as the ownership of property or financial control—generally, those who are wealthy in any given society tend to be able to exert considerable influence over others and extend their own interests. Similarly, we can think of a number of examples of power that come from authority. Sometimes authority has been delegated to people, as is the case in a democratic voting system.

In other forms of authority, power comes from a hierarchy (as would be the case in the military), or from some kind of moral or cultural authority, as would be the case in a priest or minister. By contrast, the power relationships in ICTs such as mobile technologies tend towards the invisible, often being so mundane, routine and everyday as to seem largely unremarkable. If we are to uncover the forms of power that attend our everyday uses of mobile technologies, then we need to think about those forms of power that are less visibly evident rather than overt economic or political power. Individuals, for example, can gain power because of their own personal charisma (or the attractiveness of a social group of which they are a part); here we could think of school popularity or the influence of particularly inspirational group leaders. Individuals also gain power through recognized knowledge, skills or expertise—academic training, for example, gives individuals some social authority because of the knowledge that is acquired. Some individuals or groups can also gain social power because of their ability to convince others of a course of action—advertising companies make much of the power of persuasion. Still other forms of power arise as a consequence of routine social ordering, carried out in everyday social interaction; the authority of a teacher relies not only on the power of knowledge, but also in the social ordering made explicit in the school rules or norms of behaviour in the classroom. While power is often associated with coercion or political influence, power is perhaps better understood as a structuring influence within society that permeates all our social relationships (i.e. relationships that define the ways that we can or cannot act in the world with respect to others, and that we internalize as ‘normal’). Different forms of power can interact with each other and shape the ways that we can act and interact in everyday life. herefore power relationships are achieved, managed and negotiated on an everyday basis by members of social and cultural groups. According to Jordan (1999, 1), power therefore ‘draws its relevance from the sense that [it] names the things that determine how a life may be lived.’ here are many theories of power, but some generalizations can be made to help us understand power sociologically. he first is that power is relational: to understand power, we need to understand the roles and actions of all parties to any specific social relationship. he authority of a medical doctor, for example, is based on knowledge and expertise, but the patients also need to recognize that authority and act accordingly. Secondly, power is also a process. It is a set of relationships that are enacted and renegotiated as part of an ongoing social order or system. For example, parents may hold authority over their children, but as their children grow to independence over time, children may resist that parental authority. he relations of authority between them are therefore dynamic processes. hirdly, power relations are reciprocal, by which we mean that any control an individual has over their life and environment is necessarily met with a degree of reverse control (rarely equal) over them. Any individual, for power relations

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example, is able to act against social rules and norms—one set of such rules is the law of the state. However an individual who takes such action is subject to legally sanctioned social censure or punishment. Finally, power is both enabling and constraining of any individual. Power relationships enable individuals to act but also to be acted upon. So while many forms of power work through agreement or consensus, power can also be resisted. It is therefore sometimes best understood as a ‘locus of struggle’.

POWER AND THE SOCIAL SHAPING OF ICTS We can now apply this understanding of power to the analysis of ICTs. From the fixed-line telephone to radio and television, the broad reach and potential influence of communications media have guaranteed public debate as to their potential for restructuring relations of power. According to McCullagh (2002, 2) ‘Every new medium with the potential to reach a mass audience has been a source of concern over its potential impact, and this has usually been conceptualized in negative terms. New media are seen as disrupting existing relations of communication between powerful and powerless, and so threatening existing hierarchies of power and control.’ For example, when it first appeared, the very engineers who developed the fixed-line telephone were concerned that it threatened to disrupt the power of middle-class parents to control who their children, and in particular their daughters, could make contact with (Marvin 1988). However, the broad debate about the pervasiveness or ideological power of information and communications media has been relatively neglected in research on mobile technologies so far. Hence, we return to these debates about ICTs in general here, as they raise interesting further questions about how mobile technologies are used (or not), by whom, where and when—and with what effect for relations of authority, control, status, hierarchy and social order. Significant levels of public concern about the power relations implicit in ICTs have been reflected in scholarly research and debate. Discussions of power relations concerning the mass and broadcast media such as newspapers, radio and television, for example, have followed a number of threads. hese have included debates about the political control of mass media by political elites and issues of access to the production of content—of interest because media content and the messages media carry about the social world contribute significantly to social consensus or social struggle (we touched on these debates in Chapter 1). Research on new ICTs has tended to shift and expand the terms of these mass media debates even further. Four strands of research into ICTs have developed that particularly highlight power relations—and they provide a background and context for this chapter’s study of power relationships in mobile technologies. he first of these strands are studies on what have come to be known as ‘digital divides’, or inequalities in access to, and experiences of, ICTs. Whereas the literature on digital divides often uses terms such as relative deprivation or social exclusion to

describe the outcomes of differences between groups as regards the ownership and control of ICTs, the issue can also be seen as being one of power because it relates to the unequal ability of different social groups to own, control and use ICTs as a social resource. Some early research on digital divides tended to be simplistic, as it implicitly assumed that (a) ICTs and the information and communication that result are inherently good and progressive, that (b) nonuse is solely caused by a lack of access, and hence people would automatically use ICTs if they had access to them and (c) that providing ICT resources for socially disempowered groups is a means to empower them (for a critique of this position, see Wyatt et al. 2000; homas and Wyatt 2000; McSorley 2003). It is certainly the case that ICTs can support economic development and are embedded in global wealth generation. It is also the case that early access to ICTs reflected relative global wealth and patterns of inequality within societies. As homas and Wyatt (2000) point out, however, relative power not only results from access to technologies, but is also dependent on such matters as knowledge of what they can be useful for, the skills to use them and people’s wider social circumstances— that is access and use must be socially and culturally meaningful (Loader 1998).

Reflection: Are ICTs Empowering? Consider whether ICTs are empowering and, if so, in what ways. What things do ICTs such as mobile phones or the internet allow social groups to do that they might not have done before? In what ways could they empower individuals? How might they empower particular groups, or societies and nations more generally?

A second, related strand of research on power relations with respect to ICTs has moved on from simple questions of access and examined the different use amongst social groups with respect to variables such as gender, age and culture. Again, investigating differences in use amongst social groups can be considered to involve a question of power because it highlights different forms of social ordering and draws attention to everyday social struggles over the ability to define the social uses and meanings of ICTs. In the case of gender, for example, early research on the home computer in the 1980s showed that boys tended to act as gatekeepers for the computer games that entered the home, and so while girls played games, they played the ones chosen by brothers (Haddon 1999, 2004a). Other gender research in ICTs has looked at the everyday household relations between men and women, and their routine struggles over who uses the TV remote control, and sometimes enforced viewing when watching programmes chosen by a partner (Walker 1996). We might also think of research focused on ageing and older people—where studies investigating the design of ICTs argue that ‘design scripts’ (i.e. the use and users envisaged by the designer) for both power relations

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devices and services were created with younger and largely more able-bodied users in mind. Hence, due to such things as the manual dexterity and visual abilities that users are assumed to have, use can be more difficult for older people (Haddon and Paul 2001; Gladstone 2008). All these illustrate how choices relating to the use of ICTs (or nonuse) are constrained by power relations. A third strand of research has focused on the role of ICTs with respect to formal politics. his is what we most often understand in terms of power, and it includes a very wide range of research. For some, this has involved an exploration of the potential of new ICTs for participation in established democratic or parliamentary processes, or ‘e-democracy’. For others, the concern has been to address the potential role of ICTs in opening up an alternative political sphere, or providing a space for dissent and activism (Couldry and Curran 2003). Because of the ways that ICTs such as the internet are distributed, some argue that anyone with (broadly defined) access to the internet can produce and publish their own content of a political or ideological nature (Atton 2005). Furthermore, the communicative capacities of ICTs such as the internet mean that individuals are able to politically organize across communities and borders (Rolfe 2005; Van de Donk 2004). Following on from this, the final strand of research to address issues in power relations involves the regulation and control of ICTs, especially with respect to the production of content. Numerous commentators have noted that the distributed nature of ICTs such as the internet have confused the boundaries between media producers and consumers—many ICT users are both. For some, this has meant asking questions about the space for media creativity offered by new technologies such as the internet, the ability to publish the self (Gauntlett 2000; Hodkinson 2007). In this debate, others have investigated who regulates this self-published content, and the role of organizations such as government, service providers, or regulatory organizations—who owns and controls internet technologies, and what relative power do they have over what content is published? hese are, once again, questions of social order and social control—what activities should be permitted via ICTs, what should be censured and whose role is it to regulate these technologies? Research has considered the diverse influences of law enforcement, national legal frameworks or international governing bodies, and has asked questions about specific kinds of content such as pornography, violence or terrorism and the role of media censorship (Loader 1997).

POWER AND THE SOCIAL SHAPING OF MOBILE PHONES Whilst relations of power have been an explicit theme within the longer history of research into media and ICTs, we have noted that so far, the role of power relations

in mobile communications has tended to remain an implicit issue. Nevertheless, power relations are also a significant dimension of mobile technology use, especially in everyday life, and it is to this that we now turn. As is the case with ICTs more generally, we may ask questions about the ownership, control and regulation of mobile media and communications. Arguably, however, more interesting questions might also be asked about how everyday uses of mobile phones can routinely be part of the very negotiation of social orderings, social status and authority. Here, we review some of the mobile communications research that has addressed social inequalities in the experience of mobile technology use, and the differentiation of use between different social groups. We also discuss those studies that have examined various specific relationships supported and negotiated by mobile communications and highlight the results that suggest various forms of authority, hierarchy and social order are being negotiated via mobile technologies. Some emerging themes in mobile communications research have mirrored those of preceding research in ICTs, such as early national surveys studying access to and uses of mobile phones. hese were carried out in several national contexts within Asia, Western Europe, Australasia and elsewhere and were also compared internationally (Katz and Aakhus 2002). he studies tended not to ask questions about inequalities but rather counted service contracts and the sales of prepaid mobiles, or examined reported ownership of the technologies—posing the existence of a mobile phone digital divide (Rice and Katz 2003). he issue of differential access has now, in any case, tended to be less prominent because of the rapid and widespread take-up of mobile devices internationally. As we saw in Chapter 2, access to a mobile phone in many countries is much cheaper and easier than access to either fixed-line phones or internet technologies. As we commented earlier in the case of ICTs more generally, access is not just about owning a mobile phone (or other) device. For example, some of the national surveys cited earlier often failed to take into account the use of mobile phones that were given as gifts (particularly amongst young people), nor did they account for shared ownership or usage (e.g. within households). Owning a phone (or having access to one) does not automatically mean that an individual therefore becomes empowered in some simple way. Recent research on factors such as gender have indicated that uses amongst different social groups have significant implications for power relations. Indeed, studies of gender have suggested that some usage of mobile phones can be specifically disempowering. Rakow and Navarro (1993) argue, for example, that because gender roles within the family place the largest burden of domestic care on women, having a mobile phone means that women are now constantly available for ‘remote mothering’—leading to a ‘parallel shift’ of material and emotional care work for their families and adding to women’s burden of domestic labour (Rakow and Navarro 1993; Frissen 1995). power relations

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Reflection: Power Relations, Use and Control Think of any further examples of changes in power because of ICTs. Can you think of other situations where different social roles or relationships mean that people who acquire mobile phones might have more or less control over their communications? Why might we want to talk about this as an issue of power?

In other cases, widespread uptake of the mobile phone may simultaneously empower some groups and disempower others, within any given society. In India, for example, professional letter writing used to be a distinctive and socially respectable vocation. With the widespread uptake of the mobile phone, however, many professional letter writers have become unemployed, their services no longer needed when a mobile workforce can now have direct contact with their friends and families via mobiles (Blakely 2008). We can also think of examples in everyday interaction where the shared use of mobile phones in a domestic setting might entail competition amongst family members for access to the phone and negotiations about the legitimacy of different uses that household members might put it to. In the Czech Republic, for example, some early studies indicated that ICTs of many kinds were generally shared within households (Mante-Meijer et al. 2001). hese issues were not investigated in any depth, however, as research in the Czech context was minimal at the time. As was the case of ICTs before them, research on mobile phones has also addressed their role within political processes and in the governance and regulation of mobile content. hese studies have, on the one hand, explored the possibilities for participation in existing democratic or parliamentary processes, under the broad heading of m-government (Vincent 2004b; Vincent and Harris 2008). Alternatively, other commentators have also pointed to cases where mobiles have provided technologies to support political dissent and activism, particularly in the case of communication towards political mobilization. he case of on-the-move political mobilization in the Philippines, and elsewhere with anti-globalization movements, are examples of this (as we saw in Chapter 5). Research about these types of political engagement and struggle on the large public stage provide a backdrop for thinking about more mundane and routine struggles in everyday life. It is in the arena of everyday life that power relations of various sorts become most meaningful for many people, and we can highlight how questions over the exchange and regulation of mobile content might highlight these power relations. For example, Chapter 8 provides a case study in camera phone use which examines the ways in which children and young people are exchanging user-generated content

to consolidate social network and peer relationships, to generate electronic gifts and mementos in the form of images and to capture important moments in the flow of everyday life. Case studies such as this one might imply that the exchange of mobile user-generated content is a positive and creative endeavour. However, this case study also highlights how that content is potentially problematic and involves attempts of one young person to exert power over another (as with children’s ‘cyberbullying’). In these cases questions about authority come into play. What is the authority role of parents or schools in these instances? And what role or relevance would national guidelines such as UK or EC children’s policies on ICT use have in relation to this routine interaction in everyday life? As yet, the connections between the mundane power struggles of everyday life and wider questions of content regulation have yet to be made in any systematic way in research on mobile technologies. Such questions become far more meaningful, however, when we consider other types of user-generated content. Children taking images of each other and sharing them (however problematic) is a quite different situation from adults taking images of children and sharing them with other adults. On the one hand, these images might be shared amongst adults who are family and friends; on the other, the adults concerned might be strangers, and depending on the nature of the images, their everyday activities of mobile content sharing might also be illegal. In such a case, questions about the regulation of mobile media content and the power to govern and regulate the activities of users become very important. In the preceding discussion, we have highlighted some of the ways that power relations of various sorts have figured in mobile communications research thus far. his research has been shaped by earlier questions with respect to the ownership, different usages, regulation and power relations of ICTs more generally. Because few mobile technology studies explicitly address power, however, we suggest from the preceding review that mobile communications studies might fall under three general headings with respect to power relations: (a) individual, interpersonal and interactional power relations with respect to mobile communications, including individuals’ control over their own and others’ mobile technology use, the negotiation of interpersonal relationships via mobile communications and routine struggles around the terms and conditions of mobile communication (b) power relations as a constituent of social ordering and sorting, including the role of mobile technologies in negotiating social status and roles, organizational hierarchies, institutional rules and relations of authority (c) power relations as political economy or ideology, including questions about the role of mobile technologies in formal political structures and resistance to them,

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and questions about the regulation and governance of mobile telephony and its content Most mobile communications research to date would fall under categories (a) and (b) with respect to analysing power relations. We will therefore turn our attention here to case studies which explore these first two broad categories of power relations in more depth. Our intention is to provide examples of the questions that might be asked, or the issues that might be explored, when analysing mobile technologies, taking power as a starting point. he case studies that follow demonstrate the ways that power is enacted, negotiated and managed on an everyday basis in different mobile technology mediated relationships—those of parents and children, amongst peers and at school, and in the world of work with respect to employer and employee relations.

MOBILE PHONES, CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS Now we turn to the first example from the preceding list: the question of power relations between parents and children. But first it is worth noting that cultural anxieties over the introduction of new media are particularly acute wherever their use by children is considered. With respect to children’s use of mobile technologies, a number of concerns have been presented in the media, from threats to children’s health, to lowering standards of language use because of text messaging, to bullying and harassment via mobiles, to stalking, mugging and issues of safety. Livingstone (2002) suggests that significant levels of public concern about children and young people’s use of ICTs may be understood as ‘moral panics’: [P]ublic anxieties or moral panics may present themselves as positive and wholesome, as ‘respectable fears’ . . . establishing an image of children as vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection from the faults or poisons of society . . . As children and young people have their own interests, desires and values, these panics may . . . be read as a struggle between current and upcoming generations, a struggle in which the definition of children as vulnerable further legitimates adult authority to regulate their interests and pleasures. (Livingstone 2002, 6)

hese anxieties are connected with children in particular in part because of the struggles around the social construction of childhood. To state that the category of childhood is socially constructed is to note that the experience of children and young people—and expectations of their capabilities, behaviours and relative

independence—change over time and place (James and Prout 1997). Sometimes those changes happen slowly across whole generations, so in one sense the experience of childhood appears to be reproduced over time. For example, as members of our own culture, we often broadly agree about what is meant by childhood, and different generations can have some similar experiences. If we look across sufficiently long periods of time, however, it can be seen that the meaning of childhood can change considerably. In the Victorian era for example, the idea of adolescence as a category between childhood and adulthood replaced earlier ideas of children as simply miniature versions of adults. Similarly, what childhood means varies across cultures—who or what is regarded as a child will differ from one society to another. Livingstone (2002), for example, found that even within the European context, the degree of autonomy considered appropriate for children of different ages varied amongst nations.

Reflection: The Meaning of Childhood Think about what a child is in your society. How are children supposed to behave (respectfully, obedient to adults, seen and not heard)? When do children become adults (including for different legal purposes, such as voting, drinking and sexual relationships)? What differentiates a child from a teenager or young adult? What is the difference between a young adult and an adult?

If we can state that childhood is socially constructed, then we can therefore equally state that the related role of a parent is socially constructed—the roles and experiences of parents also vary with time, and in different places. his includes social expectations of parents’ duty of care towards their children, parents’ own expectations of their parental role, how parents understand what their relationship should be with their children and their understandings of what childhood should be. For example, some researchers have suggested that family life has become more democratic in recent decades, following the greater involvement of children in household decision making ( Jouet 2000; Pasquier 2001). Others have alternatively argued that there is now a widespread expectation that parents should have a very heavy involvement in the details of their children’s lives and thereby protect them throughout the flow of everyday experiences (Vestby 1994). In either case, good parents might be expected as part of their social duty of care to manage children’s access to, and use of, mobile technologies or other ICTs. Indeed, an Israeli study of attitudes toward mobile phones demonstrated that in the case of negative reactions to children’s use of mobile phones, appropriate adult behaviours were also being defined, as were the behaviours of parents. Where children were seen to be too noisy with their phone use in public spaces, appropriate adult norms of behaviour were to be quieter—and power relations

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the role of parents was to regulate their children’s phone use in public places so far as possible—good parents, clearly, should keep their children under control (Lemish and Cohen 2005). It should be added, though, that children are hardly passive in this process. According to Livingstone and Bober (2003), children themselves play an active role in the negotiation of what it means to be a child (and a parent) through their own practices and participation in everyday experiences and through creative play and learning— including that creativity expressed through their new media practices. Children are always growing up with new media, and children’s experiences of ICTs—and adults’ expectations of those experiences—change over time. Empirical research in the past has been devoted both to the role of mass and broadcast media in the lives of children and young people, and more recently, to their use of ICTs such as computers and the internet (Howard 1998; Sefton-Green 1998). A range of authors have addressed the ways that children use new media and technologies in ways that are distinct from those of adults, and creatively for their own purposes. Like personal computers and individual internet use, mobile technologies hold the potential for children’s independent activity outside of the adult-defined contexts in which they often operate. hese adult-defined contexts include the parents’ definitions of what is appropriate mobile use for children, where and when. As Livingstone notes (2002), the different ideas and expectations that parents and children have about children’s ICT use (and its meaning) frame the negotiations that take place between them. he dilemmas to be found in mobile phone studies typically address the relative autonomy and independence of children and young people, the degree of parental supervision and control of their children at different ages, and the strategies that both children and their parents use to negotiate these issues around the mobile phone in everyday life. We now look at some specific examples of how these are experienced.

OWNERSHIP One starting point for negotiations between parents and children is the age at which children acquire a mobile phone, and for what purpose, as illustrated in Case Study 7.2 below.

Case Study 7.2 The Age of Acquiring the Mobile Phone: Early Studies In some early UK studies of young people (aged 11–19) and their parents, children’s accounts differed from those of their parents with respect to why the young people had a mobile or not (Green 2000a; Green

et al. 2000). For some parents, the mobile phone was largely a device to extend their responsibility for their children—ensuring their safety and providing security (especially amongst the younger age groups). These parents therefore took primary responsibility for acquiring the mobile phones for younger children and also took overall responsibility for the payment of costs. In one Norwegian study, the opposite was the case. For these parents, their desire to have oversight and control of their children’s telephone calls—who they were talking to, for how long and for what purpose—was one reason they did not allow their children to have a mobile phone (Ling 1998). For children, the question of ownership of the device was more complex. Younger children in the United Kingdom study cited safety and contact with their parents as an important role of the mobile. However these responses were also made with children being well aware that arguments about safety could be used to persuade parents to obtain mobile phones, but the real aim of the children was to use mobile phones to fulfil other purposes in their lives (such as socializing). Such resistance to parental authority is an example of the everyday negotiation of relative power between parents and children to define access to mobile technologies and the role of mobile technologies in children’s lives.

By way of contrast with the early studies in Case Study 7.2, later research has indicated that as mobile phones have become far more common, there have been changes in expectations about the minimum age at which children should have access to a mobile phone (Ling and Helmerson 2000). While early studies focused more on teenagers, more recent studies have centred on attitudes towards preteens owning mobile phones. Even some older teenagers have commented that children were now receiving mobile phones when they are too young, and secondary school was the most appropriate time for children to acquire mobile phones. It seems that perceptions have shifted over time such that there appears to be a broad consensus that the mobile phone has become an appropriate coming-of-age gift for children, marking their transition from primary to secondary school and from childhood to adolescence. Nevertheless, it remains largely within the remit of parental authority to make decisions as to when children acquire mobile technologies and how they use them, and children often actively negotiate that parental power in everyday interaction. here is one final note on the question of ownership. In many studies, children’s ownership of a mobile phone as a personal and private device (whether paid for by themselves or by their parents) is seen as an important step towards becoming independent. Indeed, many parents used the opportunity the mobile phone provided for teaching budgeting skills, with children taking responsibility for the calls they make, recognizing that the calls cost money and taking increasing responsibility for paying their own bills. Children do not always have access to a personal mobile phone, however. In other cases, mobile ownership might be collective—for example, when there is a household mobile phone that different family members can all use. Here, the negotiations that take place between parents and children might be more likely to centre around who has access to the mobile phone at any particular time and what that access is used for—and those negotiations centre around the power power relations

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to define who may use technologies and how. his mobile phone usage is likely to see the most intensive negotiations between parents and their children for the latter’s independence; however global studies of such situations with respect to the mobile phone in particular are currently absent from the research.

CHILDREN’S USE AND PARENTAL MONITORING Moving on from issues around access to or acquiring mobile technologies, there are two ways in which actual mobile technology use becomes an important issue between parents and children, as we can see from studies of the mobile phone. he first is parents’ attempts to monitor their children’s usage of mobile phones. he second is when parents attempt to monitor where the children are themselves, and what they are doing, through the use of the mobile phone. Both of these issues are a site of struggle between degrees of parental power, authority and control over children’s activities as well as the relative power and independence of children to define their own lives and how they will use ICTs. We have already commented that children’s ownership of mobile phones can be seen as a way of allowing them to take some steps towards responsibility, which is also related to children’s autonomy and independence with respect to their use of the mobile phone. Whereas the collectively situated fixed-line phones in households gave parents a gatekeeping role—allowing them more easily to monitor and control their children’s use of the phone, who they were talking to, when and for how long—children’s use of personal mobile phones gives the latter considerably more autonomy to act independently and control their own communicative activities both inside and outside the home. For some children, monitoring by their parents has increased as children spend more time in supervised locations. Some studies have found that parents (being conscious of phone bills) meant that they attempted to directly monitor and control children’s use of the mobile phone, limiting the amount of money paid towards the phone each month, and involving extensive negotiations with their children over the purposes to which the phone was put. In other instances, parents create household rules about mobile phone use within the home—informally, along the lines of ‘don’t use the mobile phone at the dinner table’. At the time of this writing, however, we know of no studies looking at parental monitoring of what children access via mobile technologies (e.g. adult content), but this might follow if children use the internet more via mobile devices. Both parents and children are also conscious of the potential of mobile phones to increase parental surveillance of children when they are outside the home—what Ling (1997) referred to in one early study as a ‘digital leash’. For parents, the feeling that they could contact their children at any time (and their children could contact them), and their enhanced awareness of where their children were and what they were doing, helped fulfil their parental responsibilities. Young people of all ages were also very aware

of the constant contact with their parents that mobile phones enabled. At times they acknowledged the safety this monitoring could provide (Green 2000a) as well as the independence it offered (Nafus and Tracey 2002). Yet at other times they also resisted such monitoring—as we shall see below in the negotiation of children’s independence. hese negotiations around parents being in constant contact with their children have also expanded with the introduction of mass-market location-based services. As we saw in Chapter 2, location-based services use internet Web sites to triangulate the location of a mobile phone from mobile telephone mast signal data. Parents are therefore potentially able to use these Web sites to locate the signal of their children’s mobile phone. In the United Kingdom, for example, several services have been marketed specifically to parents, and industrywide standards guidelines for the services have been established in consultation between the police, the Home Office and children’s charities. his is one instance where the interpersonal struggles between children and their parents for control and autonomy interact with public regulation and policymaking. In the United Kingdom, children can opt out of this service independently, whereas in other countries this is not always the case—similar services in Finland, for example, do not allow children under fourteen to opt out (Wray 2004). Although an important development in the power relations between parents and children, it seems that only a minority of parents in the United Kingdom have signed up for such services (Green 2000b).

THE NEGOTIATION OF INDEPENDENCE Finally, we can stand back from the details of use to this wider issue of children’s autonomy. As we have already commented, both young people and their parents in many different parts of the world recognized the importance of mobile phone use as an important step towards independence. For example, taking increasing financial responsibility for the mobile phone has been regarded as symbolic steps towards adulthood for many adolescents. hrough providing their children with a mobile phone (or allowing them to have one), parents encourage this independence in their children—and children and young people are themselves encouraged to take more responsibility for themselves. However, tensions do sometimes exist in this process, and different perspectives and conflicts of interest between parents and their children occur. Children themselves are active in this process—for example, children develop various ‘parent management strategies’ to maximize their use of the mobile and avoid parental monitoring. Switching the phone to voicemail when away from home is one of these strategies; turning the phone off is another (or giving the excuse that the battery ran out). Furthermore, young people also employ strategies such as appealing to one parent or another for further payment on the mobile phone and use the argument of safety to secure additional funding for their use (Green 2000a; Ling and Yttri 2002). Elsewhere, such as power relations

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in Japan, some studies have documented efforts by young people to keep their parents unaware of the content of their voice calls and email (Ito and Okabe 2003). Unsurprisingly, parents are well aware of these efforts but find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, they want to ensure the security of their children, but to do so may mean breaking their own rules about their children’s mobile use (providing additional money per month when it has run out so the children are able to call home). Independence and autonomy are also not the same for all young people. We observed earlier that some US research has suggested that the parental monitoring role falls heavily to women, as mothers with the primary responsibility for childcare. his finding with respect to ‘remote mothering’ as a ‘parallel shift’ of domestic labour is echoed in other studies, such as that of Japan (Dobashi 2005). Independence amongst young people is also gendered, reproducing a social ordering which maintains gendered power relations. Parents are generally more concerned about the safety of girls when they are away from the home environment and attempt to regulate more heavily the use of mobile phones by girls and monitor girls’ activities more than those of boys. Pertierra (2005) and Paragas (2005) both argue, for example, that in the Philippines young women are more constrained by rules of decorum than young men, more subject to parental surveillance in the home and more subject to adult surveillance while in public, especially with regard to their use of mobile phones in public space. We have seen throughout this case study that the mobile phone is an important material and symbolic means through which parents attempt to regulate and control their children’s mobile phone ownership and activities, and a means through which they attempt to exert parental monitoring and authority. hrough these means, they enact good parenthood by imposing rules and regulations. hey also foster their children’s independence and autonomy, and children are also active in managing their parents’ acceptance of their own independence. hese are some of the everyday interpersonal power struggles that families engage in with respect to how young people’s mobile phone use is regulated. hese struggles provide a broad context with which to understand contemporary parent-child relations. It also reminds us, though, that struggles for control over one’s communicative environment extend well beyond the family context, as illustrated in the next section, examining young people’s interpersonal power relations outside the home context and at school, and how hierarchies such as those at work are maintained via the mobile phone.

PEER RELATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKS In Chapter 6 we noted that peer networks were particularly strong for the maintenance of relationships outside the home and family; this is also true of school and

work settings. In the preceding discussion, we detailed the ways that the extensive negotiations between parents and children about the uses of the mobile phone affected children’s independence and autonomy. In the case of peer relations, the question is not so much one of young people’s independence, but rather how children negotiate their position, roles and status (and thus power) with respect to peer social orderings as their independence grows. As Livingstone (2002) notes, children and young people are at the point in their lives where they are highly motivated to construct social identities, to create new social groups and networks and to question cultural meanings. All of these are important aspects of media and communications technologies, and all of these are embedded in peer relationships and mediated by mobile technologies. Young people can use mobile phones to negotiate their status in interpersonal friendship groups in a number of ways. One includes monitoring one another with respect to shifting status and roles within peer networks, including who calls whom, who has whom in their address books and who receives the most interesting texts or images as gifts. Another includes routine calls to peers to find out what they are doing, to establish who they are with and to gauge one’s own importance in terms of how others handle one’s call. All these relations can be demonstrated to others through the type and style of mobile handset one possesses as well as its services, which serve as a symbolic indicator of status within peer networks. hese shifting friendship links are also connected to complex layers of status and popularity within and between peer groups, which include the charisma of individuals and the attractiveness of social groups or networks of which they are a part—both of which are forms of social power. Young people manage their reachability on the basis of such shifting status and roles within peer groups: not taking calls from someone who is not currently an important friend, or displaying the relative importance of different callers through the duration of calls, and time spent devoted to socializing via the mobile phone. hese interpersonal power struggles for status in friends’ lives are a routine part of growing up and reflect other activities that fulfilled similar functions in the past (like passing notes in class at school, the jostling for status in the informal peer gathering or the importance of the fixed-line phone for devoting long periods to chatting with important friends). Other practices involving monitoring one’s peers have emerged with the mobile phone, however, which are not always so positive. Contrary to parents’ (and some children’s) concerns with safety, mutual monitoring amongst children and young people can extend to some practices that demonstrate children’s explicit attempts to exercise power over their peers. In one early UK study, for example, children recounted the ways that a black market for phones operated in schools, where gangs of (usually) older children would identify the movements of younger children in order to steal their mobile phones for resale to other children (Green 2000a). Later, power relations

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other practices emerged which were specific to the mobile phone but also involved the monitoring of one’s peers. ‘Happy slapping’, as it came to be called in the United Kingdom, was a phenomenon where groups of children would single out another individual for a physical slap, often in a public place, which would then be recorded on the mobile phone and distributed to others in peer networks. his bullying was widely reported, and what drew most attention was the role of parents and schools in intervening in young people’s interpersonal struggles for power and status amongst themselves. Many such struggles take place within the context of schools, which have their own rules and regulations about mobile phone use during school hours and on school grounds. In the hierarchy of the school, teachers are given similar authority and control to that of parents when children are present during school hours. But in practice, schools often experienced a number of dilemmas when it came to monitoring students’ mobile use. On the one hand, schools could attempt to ban mobile phones altogether (and in the UK some did), but both children and some parents resisted this. On the other hand, they could attempt to monitor children’s use while in school, but outside the classroom mobile phone use is difficult to control (as we saw in Chapter 5). School is therefore one locale where the interpersonal struggles of young people amongst themselves is also affected by the authority of hierarchical relationships of social order—and it is a very clear example of where extensive negotiation takes place as to the terms, conditions and regulations of mobile phone use. If young people exercise power when managing their reachability with respect to their peers, so, of course, do adults. In previous chapters we detailed some times and places where mobile phones are not carried, they are switched off, or the communications are otherwise managed, such as social settings like restaurants in Chapter 4 or the Norwegian hytte in Chapter 5. While these settings are in some ways set aside from the ebb and flow of daily life as special places, people also manage their availability to others on an ongoing basis—including not only family and friends, but also in the work setting, where working hours increasingly take up a large proportion of adults’ lives. he question of the mobile phone at work is a complex one, and one that has generated a great deal of research and comment. Certainly, much has been made in the media of the role of the mobile in extending working hours by blurring the boundaries between work life and personal life. Some of the relevant research in this area with respect to ICTs is in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), a field of research that examines how workers within organizations are able to work together to achieve their goals through the support of ICTs. Our intention here, however, is to examine slightly different questions with respect to power—such as how is the power and status in organizational hierarchies manifest in mobile phone use? Who within organizations uses a mobile phone, for what purposes and with what effect for

the power relations in those organizational hierarchies? An example of these issues is provided in Case Study 7.3.

Case Study 7.3 The Construction Site Boss: A US Case Study In Perpetual Contact, Katz and Aakhus (2002) begin the volume with a vignette based on casual observation of a New Jersey construction site. As they gaze at a seemingly chaotic and busy scene, they are surprised to find that they could immediately identify the person in charge: He was a man in his late 40s nestling a mobile phone in his meaty fist. The mobile phone was not what tipped us off—most workers at the site had cell telephones or pagers dangling from their belts. The boss carried his in his hand, its stubby antenna poking forward like an extra digit. (xx) While it might be expected that the boss would be more likely to make and receive calls than others on the site, they go on to explain that by carrying the phone in his hand, the boss is also symbolically indicating that he is not doing the manual labour that others are doing. He also uses the phone in his hand to point and gesture, and by having his phone at the ready to communicate (and by using it to direct others’ actions) he is symbolically enacting his power and status. He is physically demonstrating that he has the authority to call in resources, to govern labourers and to control and direct activity. Katz and Aakhus point out that this simple symbolic act draws attention to the role of ‘power, order and command’ in everyday work life, and liken the boss’s use of the mobile phone to an English army officer waving his riding crop to direct troops, or an ancient Egyptian overseer’s whisk: ‘others would be doing his bidding’. (Katz and Aakhus, 2002: xx–xxi)

he case of the construction site boss in Case Study 7.3 illustrates that sometimes the use of mobiles in organizational contexts is quite straightforwardly a matter of hierarchical command. hose who use mobile technologies in these contexts have status and authority, defined by the organizational hierarchy, and the mobile is used for direct control of others’ labour. his situation is found in many different employment relations and professions, from large-scale organizations to small businesses, and from manual to clerical and managerial vocations. If we think of a similar case from the point of view of those being commanded, the situation is a little more complex. As the case of the construction site demonstrates, all the workers on site had access to a mobile phone; the difference with the manual labourers, however, is that they had phones to be commanded. In some organizations, the workplace will distribute mobile phones to its employees to facilitate organizational contact. his, of course, has practical relevance, especially where workers are highly geographically mobile (as in some travelling sales professions, for example). For some workers, the provision of a mobile by their employer means that they are able to strategically manage their working life—having separate mobile phones for power relations

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work and personal purposes and switching off the work phone outside work hours. At the same time, if an organization provides a mobile phone, it can sometimes mean that workers are always on call to their employer. Workers therefore sometimes find it difficult to separate home life from work life and find it even more difficult to achieve a work-life balance than in the past (as in the Malaysian study of power at work in Bustami and Nasruddin 2007). In the case of the mobile phone, it is likely that if work has provided a mobile phone, the perceived obligation will be greater to be constantly available for work calls, especially for those who are lower in any organizational hierarchy (Bustami and Nasruddin 2007). Workers therefore have a perceived obligation to be available for communications from their superiors, and some bosses use their mobile communications to actively manage, order and command. Some powerful organizational roles, however, exercise their status and authority through their ability to control communications—either by exercising their prerogative not to communicate, or to have others do the communicative work for them. As Rakow and Navarro (1993) point out, powerful figures in organizations often have others to communicate for them—personal assistants or advisors who screen incoming calls or arrange outgoing calls. hrough these intermediaries, they exercise power by choosing when, where and with whom they wish to communicate. his includes the choice not to carry a mobile phone—one of the symbols of their power is that they cannot be contacted anytime, anyplace, by anybody.

Chapter Summary „ We have seen through these case studies that power relations are both interpersonal and interactional— such as in the negotiation of authority, status and control of communications in everyday life, whether between parents and children, or between peers, or between employers and workers.

„ In this chapter, we have seen some of the strategies individuals use to negotiate power relations via the mobile phone and have examined some of the detailed choices that individuals make in daily life to try to negotiate many different levels of power relations. „ We have also seen how some of those relationships and strategies are linked to broad patterns of social ordering—whether those are of age, generation and gender, or with respect to specific organizations that institutionalize hierarchy and authority such as schools and hierarchical work relations. „ It remains to be seen however, how questions about power will be further incorporated into mobile technology research in coming years.

8 MOBILE IMAGES: THE CAMERA PHONE When a new technological innovation is developed, how do potential users go about evaluating it? Considering this question includes asking how users interpret what type of innovation it is and how it relates to the innovations or technologies that have appeared before. Once acquired, how do people learn to use a technology— literally, and, even more, in terms of working out what it might be useful for as well as where and how it might fit into their everyday routines? Finally, in finding a role for a new innovation, do they ever use it in ways its developers did not foresee? Obviously in the field of mobile communications, SMS would be a case in point. As we noted in Chapter 1, these are some of the questions asked with the domestication framework encountered in earlier chapters. hese are also the questions asked within a field looking at the social shaping of technology, particularly the strand that examines the role of users in this process (e.g. Haddon et al. 2005; Mallard 2005). he first section of this chapter therefore looks at the early history of the camera phone—the innovation that involved adding a camera to the mobile phone—in order to illustrate how we can better appreciate some of the above questions on the role of users in any new innovation. In the second section of the chapter, we turn to a set of questions more specific to the innovation of the camera phone itself. What do we do with the images taken by the camera phone? And why do we take pictures with the camera phone (or rather certain images) in the first place? Hence the second section looks the choice of content in these images, the circumstances under which people take pictures and whether they choose to view them alone, show them to others, send them or post them online. his latter factor also allows us to start exploring the relationship between mobile technologies and the internet. In this chapter, the focus will be on young people, stretching the meaning of that term beyond children to include young adults. hese age groups are by no means the only ones to innovate in taking and using or sharing camera phone images. But, partly because of novelty and fashion, they have arguably been more (collectively) creative than some other users. Perhaps

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reflecting this, there is a small literature looking at the use of camera phone innovation by young people, upon which this chapter can draw. What follows in the third section is a case study looking further at some specific concerns relating to children’s use of camera phone images. here have in the past been general public concerns about the use of technology, as expressed in policy discussions or in the media. For example, we might like to think about the history of concerns about addiction to technologies, or at least discourses about people spending too much time using a technology (as has been expressed about the TV, electronic games, the personal computer and the internet), or about whether ICTs negatively influence our behaviour (e.g. the influence on children of violent images available through many of those same technologies). In the case of camera phone images, the particular public concerns have related mainly to their use for cyberbullying and, in various senses, embarrassing pictures. herefore, in this section we look at some empirical evidence relating to this topic. What this particular British case study of children’s use shows is how the situation is complex, but also how images can be problematic both for peers and for the institutions—in this case schools—responsible for behaviour in certain public spaces. Lastly, the chapter considers some of the wider implications of the arrival of camera phone technology, as people take new images they would not have otherwise taken before, or take more pictures or use the photos in new ways. One way to frame this is not in terms of users as innovators so much as users as producers, or more specifically media producers. his is most often related to the posting of images on the internet but can cover phenomena such as citizen journalism. In this section, we therefore first look at the variety of audiences addressed through images online, ranging from the Web sites visited by a small set of peers to more political Web sites addressing wider audiences. A second way to answer this question about the social consequences of the camera phone is to ask how it changes the nature of photography. To do this requires us to reflect upon a range of influences on photographic practices over time in order to appreciate where the contribution of the camera phone might fit into this longer history—and we do this in the sections to follow.

INTRODUCTION OF THE CAMERA PHONE To appreciate the role that users play in innovation, we first need to consider a brief early history of the camera phone. Some of the relevant questions in this section therefore ask how potential users first encounter the technology, how they initially evaluate and interpret it, how they relate the innovation to previous technologies and how they understand its potential role in their lives. he aim of this section is to consider how users might domesticate technologies such as the camera phone, how they

might use it for unintended purposes and how they learn to integrate the technology into their everyday lives. Two studies conducted in 2002–3 were able to capture a moment in time when the camera phone was first being introduced and when it was far from clear how its usage might develop.1 In Case Study 8.1, some Italian researchers showed the split in opinions between early adopters and non-adopters at that time.

Case Study 8.1 Youth Evaluating the New Camera Phone: An Italian Case Study In an Italian case study, researchers noted that given little experience of camera phones, both adopters and non-adopters may have been in part dependent on information from the supply companies. Nevertheless, the participants could evaluate the technology through the different ways in which they interpreted the history of ICTs in general, and of mobile telephony in particular. The adopters of this new technology saw the camera phone as part of a linear progression whereby it was an automatic successor to the mobile phone. In fact, it was seen as part of the longer evolution towards video communication. The camera phone was exciting, offering both challenges and learning opportunities. In stark contrast, non-adopters saw this new product as an innovation that had been thrust upon them by the industry, and they did not feel as involved in the development process as they had done with SMS, where they felt that users had actually contributed to that development. Hence, the non-adopters had a more critical evaluation, seeing camera phones as a retrograde step in terms of lightness, battery duration and aesthetics. Furthermore, non-adopters foresaw the new technology as potentially introducing new digital divisions, threatening to make obsolete the mobile phones to which they felt attached. (Colombo and Scifo, 2005)

As the authors of the Italian case study in Case Study 8.1 argued, it all depended in large part on how the history of mobile technologies—including past visions of how mobile technologies would develop—was assessed. In the case of non-adopters in particular, the history of SMS to which they referred was one where—as users—they had collectively played a relatively active role in the social shaping of a technology, whereas there seemed to be less scope for this with the camera phone innovation. hat said, the adopters, and even the non-adopters, acknowledged that they had some choices; however they were choices in different senses. he researchers employed two different metaphors to underline this. For some the choice was like that of the stock exchange player deciding when to jump on the bandwagon—in others words, the only choice

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was one of when to buy into the technology. For others, the choice was more like that of the IKEA customer, with more, but still limited, options to be creative, given that the technology’s design had already been fixed in many ways. hat may have been the sentiment captured at this moment in time, but we will see later in the new practices that emerged, and in the degree of experimentation taking place, that people can have a more active role as users than is captured in these two metaphors. Before we leave the Italian study we should add two further levels at which practices and opinions differed amongst these youth, in order to underline the fact that the potential trajectory of the camera phone was more flexible than might otherwise be thought. he first division was that some of these Italian young people felt that the camera phone would completely replace the camera. Others—some adopters as well as non-adopters—felt it would do so only for particular purposes on particular occasions. he principal appeal of the camera phone, recognized even then and confirmed in later studies, was that it was carried with you all the time. his allowed people to take pictures when they might not carry a separate camera, as well as immediately exchange or show photos after they had been taken in order to enhance relationships with others. he second division related to one specific use of the camera phone— multimedia messaging (MMS). Images sent in this mode occurred within two different paradigms, both building on practices that had gone before. One model was where this MMS was like using traditional SMS text messages but simply with the addition of pictures; these were interactive messages going back and forth. he other model was that the images were regarded as being like electronic postcards, sent oneway to others, without expectation of a response. he second study chosen here (from amongst a number of other studies at that time) shows the process of learning how to manage the particular practice of MMS. his moment of learning is often missed by research. Once an innovation is more established, when researchers go back to a group of users and ask them what happened when they first started to use a device in a particular way, how they experimented, why they made the choices they did and subsequently how they settled down to a certain pattern of interaction, then they often cannot say—and this early phase is lost from view. In an earlier Finnish experimental study which took place before mobile phones with built-in cameras were more widespread, participants had been issued cameras, mobile phones and connections between the two so that they could send pictures. he aim was to explore what would happen when people tried to hold a dialogue by sending pictures combined with text messages, referred to as ‘visual messaging’ (Koskinen et al. 2002). his is one of the paradigms noted by the Italian work cited in Case Study 8.1. In Case Study 8.2, we have a follow-up to that early Finnish study, research that was conducted once camera phones were available.

Case Study 8.2 Learning How to Compose MMS: A Finnish Case Study

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The example discussed in this Finnish research consists of three messages. The first message is from Anna-Maija to the whole group, following many such group messages sent earlier in the day. The second is a reply from Kira’s phone, which includes and introduces two other people as well: Emma and Piitu. The third message is Anna-Maija’s reply sent to Kira, but intended for Emma and Piitu as well. In the first message, the photo is taken at arm’s length and Anna-Maija presents herself in a smiling salute. Although the message was sent to one person, her recipients turn out to be three young women. They do not comment on Anna-Maija’s post-sauna appearance, or use that as a resource directly, although they do reciprocate with smiling faces in their own reply photo. Instead, they ask Anna-Maija to focus on her background and request her to return to her documentary style of reporting. They specifically ask to see the cabin and lake, and finish with a more general request to ‘see the place’, which also informs Anna-Maija how to frame the pictures: namely a general picture in favour of details. After only three minutes she sends her first reply message, showing the sauna cabin, and the dots after the last word indicate there is more on the way. In fact, eight more messages follow with short textual descriptions. In our mind’s eye we can picture her walking a few steps away from the sauna porch, still in a bathrobe and a towel turban and pointing the MMS phone towards the cabin. We can also imagine how the three girls sitting somewhere indoors are waiting for each new message as it arrives, heads together to see the picture, or possibly passing it around. As Piitu is named as the one who wants to see the place, the other two maybe have seen it already and explain to her what may be lacking in the descriptions, or talk about the place more, maybe sharing a memory of the time they visited it. (Batterbee and Kurvinen 2005, 78)

In the Finnish MMS example in Case Study 8.2, we can note some of the negotiations between these users as they decide how to use the camera phone—how to compose images and get feedback from each other about what image to send next, how to frame the picture, what styles of text to use and so on.2 his was characterized by the authors as ‘co-experiencing’ the technology as they collectively interpreted the experience of its use through their interaction. Looked at another way, here we see a form of routine user creativity when encountering a new technology in everyday life. In fact, there are various levels at which users can be creative or innovative, such as the way in which technological hobbyists can experiment with ICTs (Haddon 2005a). In the field of interactive games, for example, some gamers go as far as to develop modifications for games, while others take part in initiatives developed by this community, such as game-playing leagues (Sotamaa 2005). In the case of SMS, users were active in initially developing the codes and practices of messaging. he preceding example shows creativity at a much more mundane level, however, as individuals and groups work out how to use a new ICT and how it might be useful to them; further examples of this are provided in Case Study 8.3. he examples of mundane creativity listed in Case Study 8.3 remained fairly idiosyncratic to the people concerned, despite the fact that mobile operators were advertising various ways in which the camera phone could be used at this time. Yet as we have seen, monitoring this more detailed form of innovation can inform product development. For example, we have seen that some Finnish girls originally painted

Case Study 8.3 User Experimentation: British Examples Mundane creativity can be illustrated by examples from a small-scale British study of camera phone use conducted in 2003. One household found that the small picture that could be taken by the camera phone was just the right size for Loot, the UK magazine carrying classified advertisements of items requested or for sale. In this case, the family concerned took a picture of the car they were trying to sell and submitted it with their advert. In another case, someone with no mirror to hand took a picture of herself to check her make-up and appearance. That same person was looking at houses that she and her partner were planning to buy. She used the camera phone to take pictures of the features they liked, in order to show to estate agents what they wanted when searching for their ideal home. Meanwhile, one teenager asked a friend with a camera phone to take a picture of him and transfer it to her mobile using Bluetooth—when he called her mobile, the picture would then appear. (Haddon, 2005a)

the covers of their mobile phones with nail varnish and attached stickers to them (Oksman 2002). his later inspired Nokia to develop transferable coloured covers as accessories to mobile phones. In this case, we can see that what starts out as a creative process on the part of a few users can sometimes affect the very development of commercial products.

Reflection: Creativity in the Use of the Camera Phone Think of any occasions where pictures are taken not just to save, but also to show others or post online. Have you (or others you know) used camera phone images in ways that were creative, in the spirit of the examples provided in Case Study 8.3?

YOUTH AND MOBILE IMAGES: CONTENT, SHARING, POSTING In the previous section we considered how users first encountered and understood the camera phone and how they integrated it into everyday communications in innovative ways. In this section, we turn to examine specific questions of innovative practices with camera phone images: what sort of images do users generate—where and when—and what do users do with those images? How do different technologies such as the camera phone and the internet come together in innovative ways with respect to camera phone images, and how are these practices similar to, or different from, previous practices? Given the historical (although not exclusive) association of mobile images: the camera phone

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young people with mobile innovations (such as the SMS case study in Chapter 3), this section draws particularly on research with children and young people to think about innovations in camera phone images. Early research on the camera phone has documented what type of photos people take, youth included. Not all images are meant to be shared, but some are for personal archiving, either as visual notes to remind oneself of something, or as part of visual collections which give pleasure or help in the construction of one’s personal identity. Examples of the former (more occasional) uses might include taking pictures of homework on a whiteboard, or photographing recipes, while examples of the latter include images used for the mobile phone screen’s background image, or covering such themes as boyfriends/girlfriends, pets, and scenery (Okabe 2004; Oksman 2005a; Scifo 2005; Gai 2007). Just as in the case of MMS described in the last section, once pictures are shared with others (in whatever way) there is a process of learning what counts as an interesting picture for others to see, for example what might be noteworthy or newsworthy in the eyes of peers. Hence the choice of pictures taken is not just an individual decision but reflects a collective sense of what is appropriate to share. Much of the early camera phone research noted how such pictures were often mundane, such as pictures of a night out or of a new hairstyle. Sometimes there was a premium on capturing elements of humour, as when a pet did something amusing (Haddon and Vincent 2007; Haddon 2007b).

Reflection: Everyday Camera Phone Pictures Reflect on the camera phone pictures taken by you or others you know. What types of mundane photos have you taken and shown to others on your mobile phone or seen on other people’s mobile phones?

Camera phone pictures differ from traditional photography in that they are often more spontaneous images, capturing fleeting and unexpected moments (Goggin 2006). In fact, British research found that, by contrast with camera phones, those young people who also had digital cameras used these dedicated devices on more special occasions where the taking of pictures was anticipated, such as at parties or on holidays. he main reason for that choice was that the quality of the images taken on a digital camera was better at that time. Given the greater scope for picture taking with the ever-present camera phone, early Japanese research suggested that more pictures were taken overall because of the existence of this new option (Kato et al. 2005). Sharing these pictures is often described as form of gift giving, the equivalent of sending postcards, serving to reinforce bonds either within a couple relationship or

within a community of friends. A variety of studies showed that much of the early use of pictures taken on the camera phone was for showing the photos to other people in a face-to-face situation or storing them as a portable photographic album. Various writers have pointed out how, at this point in the history of the camera phone, only some of that sharing involved sending the messages via MMS services, partly because of costs (Oksman 2005a; Döring et al. 2005). For example, in the British study of children’s use (above ), some had sent images, especially if it was part of a tariff package that allowed some free multimedia messages, or if there was no free alternative like transfer by Bluetooth. Others had tried out the MMS service but were not impressed when they had to go to a Web site to retrieve pictures. Photos, like other material such as music, could be swapped by using Bluetooth or email via PCs as an alternative to sending pictures via the mobile phone. Some of the early literature noted the emergent practice of posting photos online (Oksman 2005a, Kato et al. 2005; Goggin 2006). For example, there is reference to the image blogs that some people develop, posting pictures taken by camera phones. Meanwhile, one study focusing on moblogs (mobile weblogs, to be discussed in more detail later) noted that some mobloggers were producing visual blogs from camera phone images, including teenagers doing so in order to show them to friends (Döring and Gundolf 2005). Social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook also encouraged the posting of such images. But perhaps one of the earlier and more dramatic examples of the interrelationship between the camera phone and the internet was the hugely popular Korean social networking site Cyworld. his set of home pages allowed the unlimited posting of pictures, and most of the pictures found there are everyday-life images taken on camera phones. Arguably the popularity of Cyworld and this option has led to an increase in Korean youth and students’ use of the camera phone. Participants in Cyworld sometimes modified the pictures with software, in what has been called elsewhere ‘productive consumption’ (Scifo 2005), to make them amusing. As we can see in Case Study 8.4, young people routinely looked at other people’s online pictures, sometimes copying for themselves the ones they found interesting.

Case Study 8.4 Posting Mobile Phone Images on Cyworld: A Korean Case Study Researchers examining the use of the first large-scale social networking site on the internet—Cyworld— examined the connection between camera phones and this new internet phenomenon. This included participants’

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discussion of their camera phone use. Ra-mee, for example, posted her camera phone pictures about once a week, viewing this practice as a way of enabling her friends to know about her life. Jong-pil updated his pictures about once every two weeks, like his friends showing pictures of such things as the trips he made, his girlfriend, close friends, parents and his pet dog. Moreover, sometimes posting pictures quickly was a premium, as when his diary showed how Jong-pil took a picture of his friends at the university and rushed to post it the same evening, and then did the same with a picture of his girlfriend eating ice cream. Yun-Jung had first got the camera phone in 2002. She had taken more pictures since getting a home page on Cyworld. On any one occasion she might take fifty pictures, and if she was on a trip for two nights and three days, she might take 200. While she might throw fifty away, the rest would go on her site. Hence after such events this practice of putting the pictures on her site took up a good deal of time at weekends. Sometimes she would have to clear up the pictures and frame them. For her, the good thing about Cyworld was that it had unlimited space for photos. In fact, this was one of its main attractions for her, and she wondered how much this option was encouraging her to use the camera function more often. In addition to actually taking photos, Yun-Jung explained that her peers often expected those taking photos to decorate them using the Photoshop facility on Cyworld. For example, she demonstrated how she might add wings to the pictures of people, or put a crown on their heads, by transposing such images from the Photoshop collection. Another option was to make a slide show or a flash effect, when the camera zooms in and out on the same image. Or she could make the picture black and white, or blur it with a mosaic effect. She explained the social pressure to decorate, but there was a downside to this: ‘Because everyone does it (laughs) but for me it’s totally annoying ... it takes a long time’ ... It can take 3–5 minutes to decorate a single picture. Therefore if you take lots of pictures you have to do a lot of work!’ As a result, she sometimes resisted this: ‘When we have picnics I sometimes don’t take a camera on purpose. Then the person who has the camera has the job of taking the pictures, decorating them and posting them for the others to access!’ (Haddon and Kim 2007)

ISSUES RELATED TO IMAGES: A BRITISH CASE STUDY As we saw in the previous section, much of the early academic research on the camera phone was fairly positive about the practices related to picture taking. But in addition to the forms of sharing outlined above, there are uses of these images that are more problematic—such as image taking in institutional spaces such as schools where camera phones are banned, or using the camera phone to facilitate shaming or bullying amongst young people. In this section we draw on a British case study to address innovative uses of camera phone technology that might be considered socially problematic. In the United Kingdom, as in many other countries, there are constraints on the use of mobile phones in schools, which can range from outright bans on bringing them into school to prohibitions on their use while on the premises. But various

writers have shown how children get around this, from phoning in the school toilets to sending text messages in class (Green 2001). In the UK study discussed below, most young people carried their phones all the time, and many used them in school (Haddon and Vincent 2007, 2009; Haddon 2007b). here were regular cases of mobile phones going off in class—sometimes as part of a practical joke as others in the classroom tried to catch out fellow pupils if they had forgotten to switch off their phones. We will now look in more detail at the use of the camera phone in school in this spirit, and, albeit apparently less common, the related use of the video function of the mobile. For example: Charlotte: In PE (physical education] we were doing this gymnastic thing. Someone was sitting on the bench and the teacher was turned to us. And she (the girl on the bench) goes ‘Wave’ and we’re all waving. And the teacher didn’t even notice that she was taking pictures of us and videoing us from behind. (Haddon 2007b, 2)

Such examples of the video use of the camera phone may occur only infrequently, but from the schoolchildren’s point of view this material made good stories, retold by interviewees, of what their peers sometimes dared to do in order to create a little event in school life. On the other hand (and we will return to this issue at the end of the section), the camera phone (and video function on the camera) clearly raises a number of other issues for schools. In fact, some of the subjects occasionally captured in a photograph or video were teachers themselves caught unawares (as when one of the teachers was videoed dancing). Apart from being a problem for schools, pictures and videos taken on the mobile can also be a problem for other children. Early German research noted how picture taking and sending could involve an element of teasing (Döring et al. 2005). But of course, the fun of teasing for some people can be experienced negatively by others. Some policy-related discussions of the implications of the photos that children take of each other on mobile phones have, indeed, picked up on this—most often in relation to new concerns about cyberbullying (European Commission 2006). hese refer to pictures that are embarrassing for children. For example some children have claimed that they have been intimidated by pictures sent to them, or that they have felt uncomfortable—and the modified pictures can also sometimes involve sexist images (Save the Children, Finland 2005). he UK research confirmed the point that what counts as amusing pictures for some can count as embarrassing for others, although ‘embarrassing’ can take on a range of different meanings. Some young people were embarrassed because of how they looked in a photo quickly taken on the mobile’s camera, with both boys and girls mobile images: the camera phone

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noting that this was more of a girl’s reaction. To give a specific example from a focus group discussion, Sandra had been photographed while on the trampoline and had pleaded, to no avail, for her girlfriends to delete it. he participants themselves even commented on the link between the amusement of some at the discomfort of others: Interviewer: What counts as a funny photo . . . can you think of any examples from the past? Nina: Something someone would be embarrassed by (laughs). (Focus group of thirteen- to fourteen-year olds, Haddon 2007b, 2)

hen there were the ‘annoying’ photos, as when James described the practice of being tapped on the shoulder by his peers who would then take a picture to catch an unguarded expression—viewed negatively as a milder version of ‘happy slapping’ (i.e. hitting someone to video their reaction), from James’s perspective. To be fair, some of the participants in this study said that they generally asked permission to photograph, and they were aware that it was an issue. But for others it is not an issue, because either the other young people present posed for pictures, or if one was taking pictures of a group, then the others also did so as a group. Or, as in the example below, young people tried specifically to capture images when their peers’ guard was down for fun, which the person being photographed might or might not appreciate: Clara: It depends whether they’re . . . they don’t like having their photo taken or not. If they don’t like having it taken, then I just say, oh, can I take a picture, and they’re like, okay. And they’ll just pose and you take a picture. But if they’re really, like, shy, you do it when they’re not looking, and then you go “surprise” and take a picture. Interviewer: Yes, but whether they’re shy or not, do they ever complain? Clara: Yes, they say, give me your phone. I want to delete it. And I’m like, no, no, no. Interviewer: So if they ask you to delete it, do you delete it? Clara: No. You then send it to your friends. (Haddon 2007b, 3)

Clara was by no means the only one reporting this situation when asked to delete a photo; resisting this request becomes a game in itself, a form of teasing, and sometimes the images were simply not deleted. Or alternatively, the teasing was escalated, as in the preceding example. In fact, it could be escalated even further by posting images on Web sites: Nina: his girl fell asleep and she had paint all over her face . . . and we all took photos . . . and shared them around and put them on Bebo . . . and she got very upset . . . Ruth: And so we took them off.

Nina: When they get upset . . . then you delete them . . . but . . . You keep going until they’re upset. (Focus group, thirteen- to fourteen-year olds, Haddon 2007b, 3)

he issue of where to draw the line over teasing was sometimes acknowledged by young people themselves, and in the quote below we can see an awareness of the potential bullying implications given the higher profile of those practices in recent years: Interviewer: hese videos and pictures that have been posted . . . have there ever been any cases where has caused any embarrassment or . . . ? Most people: Yeah. (nodding) Karl: You can use it for bullying. Amy: Yeah, people that take really embarrassing pictures of someone like . . . if they pull a face or something . . . Karl: Or if their trousers fall down, or something. Amy: Yeah, that’s hilarious . . . but it’s also really mean. Karl: But if you’re having a laugh . . . but say like me, Dan and Will were in the changing rooms and I just got Dan’s trousers and pulled them down and Will just took a photo real quick . . . and like we put in on the Web site . . . I’m sure Dan wouldn’t take it as a laugh, really. (Several others laugh) (Focus group of fifteen- to sixteen-year olds, Haddon 2007b, 4)

Returning to the issues for schools, it was clear that one common subject of videos was school fights. In this particular study, a number of these had even been posted on YouTube, including mentioning by name the school in question. In addition, pupils had posted examples of staged events. Luke (13): hey were in the drama studio and Jake, he was just sat on a chair . . . and someone came and happy-slapped him right round the face. But he knew they were going to do it. Like he practised . . . like fake happy-slapping. And they put in on YouTube. It’s, like, still there. (Focus group of thirteen- to fourteen-year olds, Haddon 2007b, 4)

In fact, during the course of the interviewing for this study, an urgent communication from the headmaster was read out to all classes about such practices, since it was felt to be giving the school in question a bad name. While there have been calls for the development of an etiquette as regards picture taking, including asking permission (Save the Children, Finland 2005), it remains to be seen how difficult this will be to enforce given the values young people themselves expressed. he increasing ubiquity of digital picture taking, including by mobile images: the camera phone

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the camera phone, may also provide a hurdle. For example, looking beyond just children, one Finnish study noted that in the early days of camera phones, when non-users were asked about their views on this new functionality, there were some concerns about stealth pictures and invasions of privacy, but these concerns actually seem to have declined as camera phones have become more widespread (Oksman 2005a, 2005b). More generally, the academic literature does occasionally mention these negative aspects, such as the possibility of victimization, or inappropriate (e.g. ‘up skirt’) pictures (Kato et al. 2005; Rivère 2005), or the ‘happy-slapping’ phenomenon. he industry has also felt obliged to act, for example, by adding sound to mobile cameras when pictures are taken. Meanwhile, some institutions, such as health clubs and swimming pools where people wear fewer clothes, have introduced bans on taking pictures with camera phones, and indeed the use of the mobile to take pictures has been banned totally in some Islamic countries (Castells et al. 2006). One implication is that taking pictures with the mobile might remain an issue, at some level, for those who feel they have a responsibility for regulating behaviour in various public spaces.

Reflection: Inappropriate Images Taken by the Camera Phone Think about cases you know or have heard of involving camera phone images. Can you think of any examples where photos taken by a camera phone were in some sense felt by others to be inappropriate or even embarrassing?

MEDIA PRODUCERS AND CHANGES IN PHOTOGRAPHY he posting of camera phone images, or at least making them somehow public, has been framed in ways other than the privacy issues outlined previously. Whereas in the last section we concentrated on those circumstances and images involving the camera phone that might in some ways be considered socially problematic, in this section we instead consider the ways in which the camera phone more widely facilitates the public dissemination of media texts. For one thing, the internet in general has allowed people to be producers of mobile public texts and even producers of media. Blogs provide an example of this process, as do the moblogs mentioned earlier in the chapter. Maintained from mobile ICTs, these moblogs often include uploaded camera phone images. Some of these, like some of the Korean Cyworld examples, document people’s daily life. hey are often meant

for and addressed to a relatively small group of friends or some wider peer group. his practice has now continued onto other social networking sites. While this is a form of media user as producer, and it is public, it is public only in certain limited ways. here are also ways of posting images that often, in practice, reach a wider audience. One example would be videos posted on YouTube, which could be taken by a mobile phone. Meanwhile, some more famous blogs/moblogs are designed and promoted specifically to address a wider set of readers and viewers, while other moblogs are interlinked, and we find an ongoing dialogue between their participants (Döring and Gundolf 2005). Broadening an audience for mobile-produced images and sound still further, one development has been the political use of posted images that have been taken on the mobile phone, as in case of images placed on the moblogs of US soldiers in Iraq. hese images were posted in order to provide different sets of impressions from those in more mainstream media coverage (Döring and Gundolf 2005). hrough the phenomenon described as citizen-journalism, camera phone images (especially) have often found themselves in the mainstream media, or they have even been encouraged by that media—as when, for example, after a major event there are sometimes media (and police) requests for people to send in any relevant camera phone images. One example of this was after the London tube and train bombings in 2005 (Goggin 2006). hese images were not, however, confined to requests from the media and police for public cooperation. After the London bombings in the underground and on buses on 7 July 2005, victims within the underground system took pictures and videos of their experiences on their mobile phones. As soon as they were within reception of a cell signal, they sent the images to friends, who then quickly uploaded those images to the internet for public consumption. Some of these images appeared internationally within thirty minutes of the images themselves becoming available from a cell signal in London. In fact, there are now agencies that sell such images to the mainstream media. Rheingold (2002), one of the early writers on this subject, also speculated about the politically emancipatory possibilities of the ability to make public such images, as in the case of violence against demonstrators or minorities (Döring and Gundolf 2005).

Reflection: Citizen Journalism Think of any examples of images taken on a camera phone that have been used in mainstream and digital media. How were they used? By what groups? For whose purposes?

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Not only has the camera phone changed the nature of images that are publicly available, but there have also been discussions about how having the camera phone can sensitize people to the potential pictures they could take—especially since the costs of experimentation with photos have been removed by digital photography in general. It has been argued that this can contribute to a more active visual competence—that is we see the world in a slightly different way. his is one way in which the very experience of photography in everyday life might have changed because of the camera phone (Döring and Gundolf 2005). We end this section on the wider implication of camera phones by considering ways in which everyday photographic practices might have changed. A (limited) social science literature looking at the nature of photography has been referred to within empirical studies of the camera phone. While not attempting a comprehensive review of this material, we can look at some of the broad considerations it covers. First, as background, there are writings on classical photography. Although we may take pictures of many things, such as scenery, some particular attention has been paid to posed pictures, especially family photographs, and especially on special occasions in life such as weddings. Here, it is argued that the picture is recording and preserving a memory to be kept and reviewed in albums.3 What is being captured in this pose is an ideal of the family (or its members; Rivère, 2005). Moreover, we learn social conventions about what pictures to take and how to take them, in both the group posed photo and others. Apart from the influence of any technological change, however, some image conventions may also be changing. One study in US homes, for example, noted a growth in action photos found in the home showing family members actually doing things (cited in Rivère 2005). In addition, we have the consequences of new products in the field of photography besides the camera phone. When instant photography appeared in the form of the Polaroid camera in the 1960s, some of the fun of looking at pictures resided in sharing them then and there, instantly printing the photo and looking at it (which can be seen as a predecessor to instantly looking at the digital camera or mobile phone picture). Prior to the camera phone’s appearance, the launch of the disposable camera also contributed to the taking of more photographs, as illustrated in the case of Japanese youth (Okada 2005). Meanwhile, sales of digital cameras have boomed in recent years. his technology partly preceded the camera phone, but its sales may have subsequently been helped by the fact that the camera phone was often the first introduction to digital photography people had—and some people subsequently decided to acquire a dedicated digital camera. Hence, when we ask about the effects of the camera phone, as when we ask about the effects of almost any technology, the answer is complex.

Reflection: Generations Compared Think about the kinds of images you take through the camera phone, or how you might differentiate between a camera phone and a digital camera to record images. Which technologies do you use to capture images, and under what circumstances? How does this differ from how your parents used to record images? How did the technologies and practices differ? What about your grandparents? Then think about not only capturing images but also sharing them—how is that similar to, or different from, what took place in previous generations?

We saw in the discussion of youth that the images taken with the digital camera tend to be different from those taken with the camera phone, because with the former there are continuities from classical photography: (at this point in time) digital cameras produce better-quality images, and people are more likely to take digital camera pictures on special occasions. What the two technologies share is that most pictures are not printed out but rather are saved or distributed electronically. In some cases, the very option to distribute electronically provides some of the rationale for taking the picture (Rivère 2005).4 In the case of pictures taken with the mobile phone, the aim is not so much to preserve a memory as to share the image, if not instantly, soon after it has been captured, as we saw in the case of Korean students posting images within a short time. As one writer put it, they are ‘short-lived, context-specific vehicles of communication and self-representation’ (Rantavuo 2007a). In addition, although some posed pictures are taken on the camera phone, there is often more value in capturing unposed, unexpected, serendipitous and spontaneous moments, more like the pictures valued in newspapers (Kato et al. 2005; Rivère 2005). In many respects, taking and also circulating these particular digital images, can be ‘playful’ (Rantavuo 2007a). In other words, some different social conventions have emerged in relation to what counts as a good camera phone photo—for example, when one is not presenting oneself, as in pictures of people when they are drunk (Haddon and Kim 2007; Rivère 2005). However, to make a link back to the last section, this means that there is always scope for embarrassing pictures. If this outline captures the essence of some arguments, to paint a fuller picture it needs to be pointed out that many camera phone photos do not fit this description. If no other camera is available, the camera phone is used to take some posed images. It is used, like other photography, to take images of scenery, where something like a landscape, butterfly or flower was moving, creating a ‘pleasure of senses’ that people would like to remember or share with others (Rivère 2005). But although there

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are such overlaps with some more traditional photographic themes, some images are taken simply because the camera phone is always there, as in the more mundane cases where it is more practical to take a photo and show or send it to someone else to convey what you mean rather than to say it in words (e.g. ‘this is where we will meet’, ‘this is what the clothes look like’, etc).

Chapter Summary „ Three studies in Italy, Finland and the United Kingdom allow us to see some of the earliest responses to the innovation of adding a camera to a mobile phone. These studies demonstrated that different user interpretations could be based on different visions of future technology, that users collectively learn how to use innovations, and that users can be creative and innovative in their experimentation with new technology. „ Users have to learn what counts as interesting photos to have and share on the camera phone. We saw examples of some mundane, but meaningful, camera phone photos from everyday life and saw how these were often more spontaneous than those taken by stand-alone digital cameras. Most of these photos were shown to others when face-to-face, with the camera phone acting as a photographic album, although social networking sites have also encouraged online posting.

„ The case study of schoolchildren points to the problems camera phone use poses for some schools and for those regulating schools and other public spaces. We also see that children sometimes take unflattering, irritating or embarrassing photos of their peers, and the teasing or bullying that can follow (including sending on photos or posting them online) can be experienced negatively by those photographed. „ While camera phone images posted online are often meant to be seen by a more restricted audience within one’s peer or social network, these photos can also reach a wider audience through such practices as moblogging or citizen journalism. Finally, the camera phone can lead to new photographic practices, although these have to be seen within the wider context of other changes in the photos we take—including those related to other innovations such as instant photography, disposable cameras, and stand-alone digital cameras. Although there is overlap with more traditional photos, the camera phone has also created some new conventions about the pictures we take.

9 APPLYING FRAMEWORKS, GOING FORWARD hroughout this volume, we have discussed various dimensions of mobile technologies, mobile communications and social relations, and the major themes to have emerged from earlier and current research. But although this book has referred substantially to case studies from mobile phone research, we have also placed this technology in its historical context with respect to other ICTs and outlined a number of critical approaches and frameworks that have informed our broad goal of ‘making the familiar strange’. We have used these frameworks to raise critical questions about how mobile technologies both shape, and are shaped by, social relations. In working through these questions of interest we can appreciate the value of these frameworks and begin to see how we might apply them as ‘thinking tools’ not only to other ICTs, but also to emerging innovations in the field of mobile communications. We are not in the business of prediction; anticipating the paths of technology development is notoriously unreliable and cannot account at all for unexpected and emerging practices (as we saw in the case of SMS texting in Chapter 3). Rather, in this last chapter we aim to take the questions and frameworks we have developed throughout the book and apply them to two case studies of current developments taking place in relation to mobile communications—mobile television, and the mobile internet. In chapters 1 and 2, in our brief histories of mobile phone technology and its early innovations, we noted the role that early visions of the future played in technological developments. Visions of the future of mobile communications still exist, but they have, of course, changed over time. he mobile internet and mobile television are two current visions that are being discussed by technology developers, service providers, governments, regulators and publics. In bringing our analytic approaches to these emerging developments we seek to reflect upon the multiple factors that shape technology developments—from economic organizations and political institutions to the role of users and other relevant social groups in shaping technology innovation, to the influence of social norms and values in different cultures in

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the use of ICTs, to the symbolic roles of branding and advertising, to the ways that technologies appeal to our identities and become domesticated into our lives. While we are concentrating here on mobile television and the mobile internet, we realize that a number of other contemporary visions could be equally analytically compelling and might provide exciting future opportunities. Other potential technologies currently emerging include video telephony more generally, some of the mobile location-based services that we have touched on in chapters 2 and 7, specific mobile data services focused on finance or micro-payments, or the convergence of existing internet art and gaming geographies with the geographies of real worlds. While these are all fascinating examples, mobile television and the mobile internet have existing cross-cultural examples on which to draw (however currently limited), while they also provide opportunities for quite generalized expansion with respect to the services they might provide. For this reason we focus next on these examples, in order to work through how we might apply the analytical tools we have developed throughout the book to emerging technologies.

THE MOBILE INTERNET AND MOBILE TELEVISION Although nowadays we often hear about moves towards the convergence of different technologies, we saw in Chapter 2 that the internet was not originally part of the mobile phone industry’s vision of how the technology would develop. In fact, the emergence of the internet mass market in the 1990s came as a considerable surprise to telecoms companies in general, mobile phone companies included (Goggin 2006). Trying to capitalize on this, a number of companies started to develop protocols so that mobile phones could handle internet data, the earliest example being the Wireless Internet Protocol (WAP) in 1997 (at the time of the second generation of mobile phones, or 2G). We noted in Chapter 2 that this first version of the mobile internet is widely regarded as a failure, although different accounts emphasize a variety of reasons as to why this was so. Certain technical choices have been criticized,1 and some providers offered very limited ‘walled garden’ versions of the internet, with just a few internet-based services, so there was not much interesting content (Gow and Smith 2006).2 Whatever the main reason or combination of reasons, the main point for the purposes of this chapter is that this particular form of conversion between two rising technologies was not an automatic success in that it did not attract many users—although subsequently WAP 2.00 standards emerged to address some of these issues. On the other hand, a different version of the mobile internet that was widely regarded as a success, at least in Japan, was the I-MODE system introduced by the Japanese provider NTT DoCoMo in 1999.3 In the years since then, mobile phone

operators have adapted to new developments on the internet, such as providing access to social networking sites.4 he lessons in the case of the development of mobile television are slightly different, given that television is a more established medium.5 One of the themes we explored when looking at the relationship between ICTs is how new innovations build upon older ones. Small (in principle, portable) TVs have been available since the 1980s, and so there are research questions concerning what, if anything, mobile television developers have learnt from that earlier technology. his also raises a parallel question to that raised in Chapter 2, about what defines a mobile phone: is it the portability of a phone, or its status as a radio communications device, or is it defined by a cellular system? What defines mobile television: the portability of a television, the broadcast content of what is transmitted, or the kind of device (whether a PC or a mobile) on which it is watched? As in the case of the mobile phone, this becomes important when trying to formulate a history, or histories, of development. For example, South Korea is widely regarded as being a pioneer of mobile TV, but part of its first offering in 2002 on its service June was actually labelled ‘mobile cinema’ (Ok, 2005) and, as many other mobile operators have done subsequently (Goggin 2006), it produced programmes specifically made for showing on the mobile phone. So if we call it television, it is not quite the same as the broadcast content we see on television sets. Meanwhile, mobile providers have offered television content (or parts of that content, such as highlights from popular shows, and previews) that can be downloaded onto the mobile phone, so even if the content is sometimes the same as that of TV, it is not being broadcast (in fact, it is being unicast—delivered to particular users on demand). Yet other operators have experimented with broadcast, for example in terms of streaming live coverage of some sports to the mobile phone (Goggin 2006). he point to draw from this is that what counts as mobile television is clearly variable (and in flux at this time).

ANALYSING EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES What, then, might we take from the critical frameworks presented throughout this book to apply to the analysis of the mobile internet and television? One theme from the chapter on the characteristics of different forms of communication, and the relationship between different ICTs, is whether the use of one ICT displaces the use of another. If we just consider portable ICTs, for example, would the time spent watching TV on the mobile communications device mean that we spend less time playing on portable games machines (or playing games on the mobile phone) or listening to portable music? Looked at from another perspective, the mobile TV as an innovation is competing with other portable innovations—so does this have a bearing upon its take-up? For example, if the use of the internet on the mobile phone expands, is applying frameworks, going forward

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this at the cost of time potentially spent watching TV on the mobile phone? Or does TV on the laptop, an alternative portable version of TV, compete with TV on the mobile phone? And how does one choose between viewing TV on a mobile phone and alternatives, including alternative ways of viewing TV? For example, in a British study the young people interviewed thought that for the most part they would prefer to watch TV on a large screen because of ease of viewing, even if mobile phone TV might find a niche in their life (Haddon and Vincent 2007). he screen size issue has, for example, led to some discussion of whether TV on the mobile phone lends itself to some kinds of content rather than others—such as formats with ‘talking heads’ (Orgad 2006). Many of the same considerations apply to questions about the relationship between the internet on the mobile phone and the use of other ICTs, or indeed, other competing channels for accessing the internet. One must also bear in mind that earlier forms of the internet on the mobile phone were in many ways not the same as the internet accessed on a PC. he range of services offered was often only a small subset of what one could access via a PC, and the presentation and navigation was modified for the phone format, including the small screen and the fact that interaction was not via a keyboard but via the phone buttons—a more restrictive input device. In this latter respect the mobile phone is evolving in ways that might have a bearing upon these design decisions and upon the attractiveness of this mode of internet access— for example touchscreens providing slightly larger screens on a mobile device, such as those on the iPhone. As we have seen in general throughout this book, however, a range of social factors influence such choices as well as the usability issues implied in the discussion of mobile technology design. For example, we might ask under what conditions accessing the internet via the mobile phone is useful, in some practical terms, such as downloading a map when lost or looking up train timetables when one has missed a connection. To give a specific speculative example to stimulate some ideas, can we imagine a new form of pub quiz where part of the challenge is who can find the answer quickest using the mobile internet?

Reflection: Social Dimensions of Uses In the case of the camera phone, we discussed how having the ever-present mobile camera gave rise to the taking of new types of images and new relationships with social networks through practises such as posting pictures of friends together. Can you think of the equivalent new practices that could arise through having instant access to the internet?

Apart from issues of choice, there are issues relating to space. In Chapter 4 on space, we remarked first on how the meaning of public and private have changed over time with the introduction of new technologies such as public transport, introducing the company of strangers. We touched on a number of ways in which norms of technology use evolve that reconfigure the functions, roles and meanings of public and private spaces—and mobile television would again challenge those meanings. In one sense, we assume television to be private in some ways—as Raymond Williams did— although there are exceptions such as the (sometimes large-screen) TV sets in pubs and bars. he mobile television would, however, potentially take TV back out into far more public spaces, with diverse co-present others. On a mobile handset, television bears some resemblance to earlier mobile audio players such as the Sony Walkman, as well as to existing ringtones—but its potential for intrusiveness is potentially greater if in practice it is broadcasting aloud to those co-present and lasting for a longer time than a ringtone. Norms of use are likely to evolve further, both building on already existing norms of mobile phone use as well as extending, for example, the organizational regulation of mobile television in specific spaces such as train carriages, classrooms or eating spaces. We might see requirements that headphones be used, for example, which would then preclude the collective experience of mobile television that might otherwise evolve in co-present spaces. he simultaneous management of co-present and remote others might also become more complex. Take a situation where, for example, a group might be collectively watching a mobile television clip when the handset receives a call. Would the co-present media or the remote communications be prioritized? hese conflicting demands for reachability and exclusivity would need new forms of management and negotiation.

Reflection: Mobile Television and Space Consider the norms and regulations for mobile phone use that already exist in your own society and culture. What do you think the critical analytical questions are with respect to mobile TV and issues of space in your society? And with respect to technology use, would your feeling be that in your society mobile television is likely to become a solitary activity or one that is carried out with co-present others—in either public or private spaces?

he question of how the mobile internet might be shaped by and influence different spaces raises different issues from those of mobile television. On the one hand, individuals already carry out informational and communicative activities in public spaces, on laptops and PDAs, and even by text message, so norms of use have already evolved for these practices, although this might change if those activities become audible or intrusive. We also already have some global systems in place—for example in applying frameworks, going forward

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Japan—which suggest some of the ways in which the mobile internet might be used for communications, including norms of public transport use where emails are sent to set up later voice calls. Using the internet while being mobile, though, might also suggest the basis for some internet technologies and services that are location based— advertising on Web sites might become tailored to the location in which the mobile internet connection is made, for example. As regards issues of time, we have already seen that one question we can always ask when assessing the potential for new innovations is: Where is the time to make use of these going to come from? At one level this issue has already started to be addressed in the discussion of other ICTs competing for our time. But more specifically, when thinking about the time structure of our days, we can also ask about the nature of the time slot when we can use the technology: When does it fall, what other activities surround it and, perhaps most crucially, how long does the time slot last? So in the case of TV on the mobile phone, for example, for some people it may be used when travelling. his may mean that the time slot is relatively small and hence, for example, in Korea, media have developed short, five-minute soap operas to fit in with such conditions (Ok 2005), reflecting discussions of the need for ‘snackable’ content (Orgad 2006). Conversely we saw how some young people were sometimes trying to fill slots of time, as in long-distance car journeys or times when they had to be somewhere they did not want to be. When TV on the mobile phone was discussed in that study, the young people participating could see how TV might fill those times as an alternative to listening to music or playing games on the mobile phone (Haddon and Vincent 2007). More or less the same points apply for the internet on the mobile phone. On the one hand, for children in the circumstances above, use of the internet on the mobile phone could at certain moments be one more time filler. For others, with shorter time slots, one has to ask what they could do online within those limits—perhaps carry out tasks that were relatively brief. Moving on to another topic of the book, in Chapter 6 we considered the role of social networks in mobile communications and their role with respect to social and cultural capital. he mobile internet, with its potential to make all of our different information and communications channels mobile (more constantly than in the case of fixed-location wireless servers and routers), might further intensify our personal communicative networks—relationships that constitute both strong and weak ties may be reinforced, as both are potentially more constant. We commented that because of social selectivity or selective sociality, we are currently more likely to use mobile communications to support already strong relationships. It is interesting to contemplate the convergence of the mobile phone and internet with respect to, for example, social networking. If internet social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook were coordinated with the geographical possibilities of the mobile phone,

a whole new ecology of possibilities might emerge for coordinating meetings with a wide range of members of social networks and peers. Turning to questions of power, all kinds of cultural capital or status may be arising from the use of both the mobile internet as well as mobile television. We might consider, for example, how simple access to mobile television or the mobile internet could generate considerable status amongst young people’s (or even adults’) peer groups. To have access to such services where others have none could make an individual the focus of a peer group, especially where content can be immediately shared with others amongst the group when co-present. he potential esteem and reputation ensuing could have implications for group dynamics. Similarly, there could be repercussions with the arrival of the mobile internet for peer group exchanges. In Chapter 8, for example, we examined how the camera phone supported peer relationships that played on the embarrassment factor of mobile phone images shared amongst phones and uploaded later to the internet. Would there be more immediate kudos if images could be uploaded to the internet immediately, with accompanying public comic effect? Access to mobile television and the internet, however, might present dilemmas for some groups as well as opportunities. In Chapter 7, for example, we discussed the ways that both economic and social dimensions of mobile phone use could present conflicting agendas for parents and their children. Within families, children and parents already come into conflict over the time and costs of mobile use—and the further use of a TV- or internet-enabled mobile phone would amplify those economic tensions and negotiations. Parents are often concerned over the amount of time their children spend watching domestic television or are in front of the PC screen. Tensions between parents and their children could also potentially arise over the amount of TV (or internet) time their children have when mobile TV and internet screen time is added to that of the domestic television and internet. Added to this, mobile TV and the mobile internet offer unprecedented opportunities for children to pursue mobile content beyond the monitoring or surveillance of their parents. he regulation of mobile TV and internet content potentially takes us into regulatory arenas that have not yet been tested. In the United Kingdom, for example, network operators and service providers—in consultation with various policy and regulatory bodies (such as Ofcom) and experts—have been meeting to discuss the corporate self-regulation of mobile TV and internet content. How those discussions continue to take place could significantly shape the potential content of mobile internet and television and therefore how they are experienced. Similarly, the organizational regulation of mobile phone use could well intervene in work and employment relations, as we saw in Chapter 7. If television and the internet are available on work mobile phones (rather than on IT systems located

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in workplaces), employees are no longer tethered to the content available on those fixed-line systems. In other words, employees could decouple the internet content they view from the potentially surveillant IT systems in their place of work (where centralized IT systems monitor employees use of employer IT systems; Ball 2002) and instead access all kinds of content on the mobile devices provided by their work organization. his might uncover multiple tensions with respect to the boundaries between work life and private life. We could also think about the circumstances under which the use of mobile television or the internet could be publicly regulated or banned. We saw in a number of chapters throughout this volume that in some circumstances (such as in particular places, or at particular times) mobile phone use is discouraged not just by norms of use, but also (and at the same time) by specific regulations that have legal standing. he use of the camera phone, for example, is banned by convention in places such as bathhouses in different parts of the world. Furthermore, we saw in Chapter 4 that legal instruments regulate the use of mobile phones in theatres, libraries and museums in places like New York City. Is it possible think of places or circumstances where the use of the mobile internet or mobile TV might be similarly banned—and on what basis? hese, then, are just some of the ways that we could apply the approaches developed in this book to the technological possibilities associated with emerging mobile communications devices.

GOING FORWARD hroughout this volume, we have provided multiple ways of thinking through the implications of new technologies, and new communications and information media. In this closing chapter, we have touched upon some of the questions that might be pertinent with respect to emerging issues around television and the internet on the mobile phone. However, we have also attempted to link these developments with issues raised about the histories of analysing ICTs and embedded both the pasts and the futures of mobile communications with those wider ICT histories. We return, again, to the question we began with—do you have a mobile phone? We would again guess that you do. We hope that at this point, however, you identify yourself not only as a mobile phone user, but also as a mobile phone analyst. We hope we have provided you with the tools to shift your outlook from that of simply a user of a mobile phone (within your own personal communications network) to the position of someone who has the tools and approaches to critically analyse the role that mobile communications have within contemporary society—both now and into the future. Mobile communications provide us with personal challenges, but they also provide us with rich and diverse opportunities for research and analysis, and they are likely to do so for some time to come.

ANNOTATED GUIDE TO FURTHER READING Chapter One: Introduction For a general introduction to social shaping, see Mackenzie and Wajcman (1999). For more on the social construction of technology (i.e. SCOT) see Pinch and Bijker (1984), and for actor-network theory (ANT) see Latour (1986). For contributions from innovation studies, see Dosi (1984). he first publication defining domestication was Silverstone et al. (1992), and Silverstone and Haddon (1996) made a later link with social shaping. Haddon (2004a) reviews a variety of domestication research focusing on everyday life. Berker et al. (2005) is a collection reflecting on domestication after a decade of research, while Haddon (2006) provides an evaluation of the contributions of this framework. Early research on ICTs that prepared the ground for later studies of mobile technologies included that on television in everyday life, such as Hobson (1980), Morley (1986) and Lull (1988). Early studies of the telephone included Häußermann and Petrowsky (1989), Moyal (1989), Dordick and LaRose (1992), Umble (1992), Fischer (1992) and Frissen (1994). Equivalent studies of the home computer included Turkle (1984), Dutton et al. (1987), Haddon and Skinner (1991), Haddon (1992), Murdock et al. (1992), Wheelock (1992) and Aune (1996). Du Gay et al. (1997) looked broadly at the case study of the Walkman to show how one could approach analysing a variety of ICTs. Consumption studies have a multidisciplinary background, some key texts being Douglas and Isherwood (1980), Bourdieu (1986) and McCracken (1990). For an introduction to this field, see Miller (1987). here is very little material on the social shaping of academic knowledge, although various publications and papers review what has been done before, as a standard academic practice. For a list of publications and papers on the social shaping of ICTs and mobile technologies, see Haddon’s bibliographies: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/LeslieHaddon/ShapingRefs. htm

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http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/LeslieHaddon/MobileRefs. htm

as well as Nalini Kotumraju’s mobile phone bibliography at UC Berkeley: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~nalinik/mobile.html.

Chapter Two: History and Industry Agar’s (2003) book is a short history of mobile communications until early 2000, focusing in some detail on national and regional differences in how mobile technologies developed. Gow and Smith (2006) provide some chapters covering the same and other developments in the technology, providing much more technical detail, as does Goggin (2006). Steinbock (2001) details the role of one particular company in this field: Nokia. Case studies in the production and regulation of emerging mobile systems include those of the development of networks and standards in Denmark (COST 248 Mobile Workgroup, 1997), and the introduction of prepaid systems and their impact in South Korea’s Cyworld (Haddon and Kim 2007). Steinbock (2005) also specifically covers the history of (and current trends in) mobile services. With respect to the consumption of mobile technologies and services, Wood (1993) provides an analysis of consumption early in the 1990s, the COST 248 Mobile Workgroup (1997) researched early user groups, and some early user practices were also explored in Europe (De Gournay et al. 1997). One of the only research publications to address advertising and branding in mobile technologies and services is Aguardo and Martinez (2007). Chapter hree: he Relationships between Technologies While several researchers have pointed out how new ICTs influence our use of older ones, probably the best-known general account of this remediation process is Bolter and Grushin (1999). One of the more detailed examples of new ICTs building upon older ones is the study of the origins of television and programme genres by Winston (1989). As can be seen in the text, a number of researchers have been arguing for a more holistic view of ICTs rather than studying them in isolation (e.g. Haddon, 2005b). he material on how we make choices is spread out over a number of sources, but Haddon (2004a) deals in some detail with constraints on choices, as well as the dynamics of ICT use over time. Ling (2004) provides a good introduction to the literature of texting, Taylor and Vincent (2005) supply some details about its history, and Castells et al. (2006) review several of the issues that have arisen from the spread of this practice. Chapter Four: Public and Private Spaces Early studies of the Sony Walkman and personal stereos are useful starting points to think about how public and private spaces change over time, and the role of mobile

ICTs in changing them—du Gay et al.’s (1997) study, and Bull’s (2000) research, are both good places to start. Research on the fixed-line telephone provides similar starting points, including Marvin (1990) and Fischer (1992). A number of different research studies have explored the transformation of spaces with the advent of mobile communications. Accessible examples include Ling’s (1997, 2004) studies of Norwegian restaurants, Cooper et al.’s (2000) and Murtagh’s (2002) study of trains in the United Kingdom, and Lasen’s (2004) study of three European societies. Haddon (1998) provides broad cross-cultural survey information on where Europeans are prepared to switch on their mobile phones, and Okabe and Ito (2005) provide Japanese examples. Licoppe and Heurtin (2001, 2002) provide various examples of managing relations with co-present others while engaged in mobile communication in public spaces. Fortunati (1997) comments on Italy, while Schejter and Cohen (2002) comment on Israel. Further research also points to the cultural specificity of ‘personal space’—Japan (Okabe and Ito 2005) and the Philippines (Paragas 2005) provide contrasting cases. Green (2001) provides a UK case study of where social norms become regulations, and Okabe and Ito (2005) provide a similar case in Japan. Chapter Five: Time Some more general references related to the contemporary structure and experience of time include Hall’s (1983) discussion of monochronic and polychronic time cultures, and hompson’s (1967) discussion of ‘clock-time’ in modernity. Lash and Urry (1994), Eriksen (2001) and Castells et al. (2006) discuss the ways that media and ICTs broadly intervene in the organization of time across societies and cultures. Studies of the ways that specific ICTs structure and organize time include Scannel on television (1988) and Silverstone (1993) on ICTs in households. With respect to mobile technologies in particular, Ling (2004) draws on many of his previous articles to examine changes in the way we organize time through mobile communications. Ito (2005) and Okabe and Ito (2005) discuss culturally specific social constraints shaping time-related mobile communications in Japan. Southerton (2003) provides a useful introduction to the literature on perceptions of time pressures. Chung and Lim (2005) provide a case study in ‘time cultures’ and in their empirical study of the consequences of mobile communications in Singapore demonstrate how the concept can be used. Chapter Six: Social Networks and Peer Relationships Broad approaches to social capital and ICTs include Putnam’s (2001) discussion of social capital with respect to community and ICTs such as television, and Wellman (1999) and Wellman and Gulia (1999) discuss social capital with respect to strong and weak social ties, social networks, and the internet. Networked individualism and personal community networks are discussed by Boase et al. (2006). Franzen (2003) annotated guide to further reading

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notes some of the implications of social capital for mobile communications, and Katz et al. (2004) discuss social networks and mobile communications within a wider ecology of ICTs. Strong mobile ties produce what Ling (2004) has referred to as ‘virtual walled communities’, exclusive relations where we practice ‘selective sociality’ (Matsuda 2005). International examples such as Jamaica (Horst and Miller, 2006) have suggested that strong and weak ties are difficult to categorize. Strong ties are particularly important in young people’s peer group networks (Weilenmann and Larsson 2002; Ling and Yttri 2002; Kasesniemi and Rautiainen 2002; Green 2000a, 2000b, 2003a, 2003b; Green et al., 2000; Haddon and Vincent 2007). Specific international evidence for this salience include Norway (Ling 2004), Japan (Okada 2005; Kato 2005), Italy (Mante-Meijer et al. 2001), the United Kingdom (Green 2003a, 2003b; Haddon and Vincent 2007), Korea (Yoon 2006), Finland (Kasesniemi and Rautiainen 2002), Australia (Walsh et al. 2007) and Sweden (Westlund 2007). Elements of fashion are discussed by Fortunati (2005), Green (2003a) and various authors in Fortunati, Katz and Riccinin (2003). Hyper-coordination as a particularly important element of sociality amongst teens is discussed by Ling and Yttri (2002), while texting as a young people’s practice—especially texts as gifts—is discussed in Taylor and Harper (2003). Chapter Seven: Power Relations Broad debates around issues of power and new media technologies are to be found in McCullagh’s (2002) Media Power, and Jordan’s (1999) Cyberpower. he role of ICTs in political and social power is related to debates around ‘digital divides’, including those with respect to mobile technologies (Rice and Katz 2003). Critiques of the ICT and mobile digital divide include Wyatt et al. (2000) and Loader (1998). he ways that ICTs (including mobile technologies) figure in democratic processes is covered by O’Loughlin (2001), Coleman and Norris (2005), Parvez and Ahmed (2006), Dutton and Peltu (2007), and Leston-Bandeira and Ward (2008). he effects of hierarchical social relations with respect to specific groups is also salient— Rakow and Navarro (1993) comment on the gendered uses of the mobile phone, for example. Power relations between young people and their parents via the mobile phone are discussed in Green (2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002a), Ling and Helmerson (2000), Ling and Yttri (2002) and Ling (1997, 2004). We can also see control and authority operating via the mobile phone in organizational networks—Bustami and Nasruddin (2007) provide a Malaysian case study. Chapter Eight: Mobile Images: he Camera Phone here are a number of writers on the early use of the camera phone, but as indicated by the choices in this chapter, Colombo and Scifo (2005) provide an interesting

insight into what shaped early evaluations—while Batterbee and Kurvinen (2005) prompted us to see, through this and other examples, a process of early domestication at work. While many of the references in this chapter report individual studies, Goggin (2006) has a chapter reviewing camera phone material, including (amongst other topics) the history of the first camera phones, how the camera phone changes photographic practices, multimedia messaging and a detailed discussion of moblogging. Like Goggin, Rivère (2005) has a more extended discussion of how the mobile changes the nature of photography. For more material specifically on MMS see Scifo (2005), Ling and Julsrud (2005) and Ling et al. (2005). It was possible to discuss the early use of the camera phone for still images because a small literature on this topic exists, whereas there is much less on the current use of the video camera features built into the mobile phone. Two of the few examples, albeit brief, are from Oksman (2005a, 2005b).

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QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES Chapter One: Introduction Exercises 1. Imagine that you are in a team developing a new mobile technology innovation, in terms of either new hardware, new features or new services. In what different ways could you try to get information from—or about—potential users that might feed into your decisions in the innovation process? 2. As a group, brainstorm any examples where people have used communications and/or media technologies in ways their producers did not necessarily anticipate. 3. Generate a list containing several examples of rules about ICT use that are negotiated within households. Questions 1. ‘Many prominent accounts of trends in technology imply a known path towards a particular future predetermined by the properties of the technology’ (Dutton 1995). What part do social processes have in shaping the way technologies develop? 2. ‘All in all, the (domestication) approach provides a very useful way of exploring a social complexity beyond any simple benefits and uses of technology’ (Chapter 1). Why is it useful to look beyond the list of benefits and uses of ICTs? Chapter Two: History and Industry Exercises 1. In the history of mobile technologies we examine the reasons for moves towards regional standards such as NMT in the Nordic countries and then GSM in Europe. Discuss all the reasons you can think of as to why, at different points in time, national standards were preferred. 2. In the history of consumption we saw some potential research questions or themes. But in any empirical study, these would need to be operationalized—that

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is turned into questions worded in such a way that people could more easily relate to and answer them. Sometimes it might take several questions in a survey or interview to address one theme. Can you draw up a survey questionnaire or qualitative interview schedule with some of the actual questions you would ask people if you were trying to find out about their early experiences of mobile communications? 3. In principle, or from studies you know, discuss any other social dimensions of mobile communications that could be researched, apart from the ones listed in this chapter. Questions 1. Using illustrations from the history of mobile technologies, outline the levels at which innovations can occur and factors influencing these. 2. To what degree do different actors (such as companies, regulators, designers or users) have influence in the social shaping of technologies? Critically evaluate with reference to the history and political economy of the mobile phone. Chapter hree: he Relationships between Technologies Exercises 1. How might people’s changing circumstances affect their ICT use? List all the circumstances you can think of, then consider the levels and types of influence those circumstances are likely to have on our experience of these technologies, particularly mobile technologies. 2. hink about examples of how new ICTs, or new features of ICTs, can change the range of technologies we currently use. Generate various examples of the implications these changes could have for social interactions (in the home, in social networks, and so on). 3. As a group, can you think of any social rules amongst the social networks that you know where it would be inappropriate to send a text for certain types of communication? 4. How would you research the claims that the mobile phone is leading to a greater sense of ‘connected presence’ for some social groups? Questions 1. Given frequent claims about the revolutionary changes that technologies can bring about in our lives, discuss whether the case of mobile communications demonstrates that any changes are more often evolutionary.

2. How can the domestication approach help us to understand the ways that social processes affect the place of portable technologies like the mobile phone in our lives? Chapter Four: Public and Private Spaces Exercises 1. One way to uncover the unspoken social rules of everyday life is to perform a breaching experiment, that is violating the norms that govern everyday behaviour and interaction. Design your own breaching experiment by thinking about some of the norms of public spaces and what would happen if you violated them. Many spaces could be considered—the train carriage or bus, the park, the library, the classroom, the council offices, the church, the business meeting, the doctor’s waiting room—the list is extensive. 2. Reexamine the data in Table 1 in Chapter 4. Summarize the main patterns and discuss whether there are any interesting or unexpected results. 3. Make a list of all the places you can think of where there are attempts to regulate mobile devices in some way. Are these regulations norms, rules or legal sanctions? Do the rules regulate some groups and not others? Who has the power in those situations to define the rules of use? Questions 1. Critically discuss the argument that technologies such as the mobile telephone have altered social norms with respect to public and private spaces. 2. To what degree are mobile communications regulated by normative expectations and social censure, and to what degree are they regulated by rules or legal procedures? Critically discuss with reference to specific examples. Chapter Five: Time Exercises 1. In a group, explore the social constraints on mobile phone use and people’s reactions to this. Can you remember (a) any examples of situations where there were pressures on you or others not to use the mobile phone, and (b) examples of situations where you or others somehow tried to manage mobile phone calls because it was a difficult moment to receive a call? 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being able to organize meetings flexibly with mobile communications? Can you give examples of when you decided it was inappropriate to organize a meeting via mobile communications? Why was it inappropriate?

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3. Can you think of situations where you have experienced time pressures or felt harried because you could make and receive calls on the mobile phone? Questions 1. Critically evaluate the claim that new information and communication technologies such as the mobile phone can increasingly be used anytime, anywhere. 2. Using examples, critically discuss ways in which mobile communications can change the way that we organize and experience time. Chapter Six: Social Networks and Peer Relations Exercises 1. Discuss whether the adult use of text messaging changed the nature or importance of texts as ‘gifts’ in young people’s lives. Are there likely to be any other developments that might affect the ways we exchange texts as gifts? 2. In a group, discuss the degree to which different features of mobile devices are fashionable, or confer social status, or have cultural or brand value. Consider your own mobile devices—to what degree could their features or functions be considered fashionable? 3. On what basis do each of you make decisions about who should be able to reach you, how, and when? Discuss with others to whom you would give your mobile phone number—family and friends? People you have just met? Organizations? 4. How would you research claims that the mobile phone is leading to ‘virtual walled communities’ for some social groups? Questions 1. How useful is Putnam’s concept of social capital in understanding the relationship between ICTs and social networks? Discuss with reference to mobile communications. 2. Critically discuss whether strong and weak ties are qualitatively different relationships in social networks. Provide empirical examples in mobile communications. Chapter Seven: Power Relations Exercises 1. In a group, compare your ‘technobiographies’ (Kennedy 2003)—that is your own biographical histories of interaction and experiences with technologies. Can you think of situations where your parents or other adults attempted to regulate your ICT or mobile phone use as a child or young person? On what basis did they do so, what was your reaction and what was the result of the interaction?

2. Can you think of a range of examples that you have experienced where either the use or nonuse of mobile communications reinforced hierarchical relationships? 3. hink about power as a relation, based on social negotiation. List any situations you can think of where you have felt relatively powerful, or relatively powerless, in some kind of interaction involving mobile communications? Questions 1. To what extent is power a useful concept to examine social relationships mediated by mobile communications? Critically discuss, with reference to examples from research. 2. To what degree are the four dimensions of power particularly present in interactions through mobile technologies? What relationship do those dimensions have with social norms, hierarchies and regulations? Chapter Eight: Mobile Images: he Camera Phone Exercises 1. Reach a consensus over what images it would be more or less interesting to receive via MMS. Now think about sharing those images when meeting face-toface. Does the list of what counts as more or less interesting photos change? 2. Collectively discuss where the line should be drawn between the acceptable and unacceptable taking of pictures, and the use of those images. Should individuals’ permission to have their photograph taken always be given? Are there ever situations where someone who appears in a picture taken by a mobile device has the right to argue that the picture should not be shared? 3. At the time of this writing, there is more research material on still pictures than on video taken on the camera phone. Give examples of how the use of video on the camera phone might be changing the types of videos we take. How would you research this? Questions 1. he camera phone photos that we post online are an example of user-generated content on the internet. Discuss whether camera phone photographs, as usergenerated content, are bringing about a new stage in our experience of the online world. 2. Critically evaluate the claim that the camera phone is changing photographic practices.

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NOTES Chapter One: Introduction 1. accessed 14 July 2009. 2. COST is an acronym for European Cooperation in Science and Technology. While many COST programmes were technical at this time, this was the first to provide funding for social scientists from both telecommunications companies and universities to meet. 3. For example, New Media and Society, Convergence and Telematics and Informatics have carried a range of articles about mobile communications. Réseaux, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies have all had special issues on these technologies. Other articles have appeared in he Information Society, the International Journal of Mobile Communications, Information, Communication and Society, and European Journal of Communication. 4. Who counts as ‘young people’ varies according to the writing—in some studies, this refers to children under eighteen; in others it can go up to adults in their mid to late twenties. We return to this issue in Chapter 7 when we address mobile communications in relations between young people and their parents.

Chapter Two: History and Industry 1. his history is based on Christoffersen (1992), Haddon’s interviews with Danish regulators and staff from Denmark’s mobile phone companies conducted in 1995, and historical details assembled by Vivi Hejdemann Gregerson. 2. As will be seen in Chapter 4, we have some idea about this later in the 1990s but no evidence from an earlier period.

Chapter hree: he Relationships between Technologies 1. However, any student of media studies will appreciate different ways in which TV viewers are active in the viewing process, from interpreting media texts to using TV in various social ways (Lull 1990). 2. his is one example from many in Licoppe and Smoreda’s (2006) chapter illustrating the complexities of choice, especially considering the closeness to others in one’s social network and changes or events during one’s lifetime (also called the life course). 3. In the case of Japan it was even led by what one might called transgressive youth, particular groups about whose behaviour adults were concerned (Fujimoto 2005; Matsuda 2005). 4. For a more detailed historical account, see Goggin 2006. 5. Some writers have also discussed domestication at the level of the whole society, for example the process by which the car was domesticated in Norway (Haddon 2006). We will not develop this level in relation to this case study.

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Chapter Four: Public and Private Spaces 1. Although these data were collected in 1996 when the mass market for mobile phones was new, the principles still apply in that it is more or less acceptable to use mobiles in certain places than in others.

Chapter Five: Time 1. Although this is the overarching argument, the authors note that the picture is a little more complicated in that in certain senses the use of mobiles fits into monochronic culture as well—for example, its use saves us ‘wasted time’, where the very concepts of ‘wasted time’ and ‘using time efficiently’ are based in monochronic time cultures.

Chapter Eight: Mobile Images: he Camera Phone 1. In fact, one Finnish study in 2002 showed how people were at first uncertain about what a camera phone involved when it first appeared. Some associated it with video telephony, while others asked why the two technologies of mobile and camera needed to be combined (Oksman, 2005a). 2. See also Rantavuo 2007a for a case study of this process amongst stevedores working in a port. he earlier Kosikinen et al. 2002 study also explored this process of negotiation and meaning making in visual messaging. 3. his is qualified by the word ‘perhaps’, because people spend far less time looking at pictures taken than the time they spent taking them, and in many senses the act of taking the photograph, or arranging the people in it, is the main social process (Slater, in Koskinen et al. 2002). hat said, looking at pictures, especially together, can be used to trigger memories, to create a sense of connectedness among those viewing the pictures, and even a sense of individual and collective identity (Koskinen et al. 2002, reviewing the literature in this field). 4. Rantavuo’s (2007b) study stresses the importance of taking into account the electronic distribution of images and this is clear in some of her examples e.g. a Finn sending foreign friends pictures of or related to the weather, to assure them of how cold it can get in Finland.

Chapter Nine: Applying Frameworks, Going Forward 1. For example, WAP’s mark-up language (defining the form in which information is presented) was a little far removed from the HTML language used on the internet, which meant that people developing services had to learn a new code (Goggin 2006). 2. In addition, being more geared to business users, a number of the services offered were transaction based, like financial and travel services. Reflecting on this, the WAP standard-setting bodies did not initially address issues of how to manage micropayments system for services such as downloading ringtones and screen savers (Funk 2004). 3. Apart from involving different technical choices—using a mark-up language closer to the internet language—I-MODE has largely being identified as differing from WAP in the way the package was put together. DoCoMo developed close relations with a range of actors in the field (including content and service providers), advanced a micropayments system, and acted as an agent (collecting payments for services used, in effect taking a commission for providing the system; Goggin 2006). In addition, there were a number of providers of entertainment services from the start, which proved popular with early adopters—and indeed one of the most successful earlier services was the downloading of ringtones (Funk 2004). Email on the mobile phone was the other dominant usage, and since its inception, the use of email to access other Web sites (i.e. not the official I-MODE sites) has grown considerably (Funk 2004; Steinbock 2005). 4. Use of the mobile internet has grown such that in a UK survey in 2008, 43 per cent of internet users with a mobile phone and/or handheld devices used them at some point to access emails, and the

same percentage used them to access Web sites (Haddon 2008). On the other hand, cost was still an issue for some, as was clear from the interviews with British children (Haddon and Vincent 2007). 5. As background, a number of countries (e.g. Finland, the UK) were experimenting with pilot mobile television projects from about 2005 (Orgad 2006). here have been over 100 launches worldwide since then (at the time of this writing), although some services have been launched and then withdrawn, such as in the United Kingdom and Germany. By 2008, several million people had access to mobile phone TV in the largest markets of South Korea and Japan, with the more recent service in Italy leading in Europe. http://news/bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6639249.stm.

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INDEX address book, 1, 94, 101, 103 ANT (Actor-Network heory), 3 availability, 12, 101–5 passim, 107, 124 beeping, 7, 103 children, 103 email, 104 phone numbers, 41, 102 –3 see also children cafés, 57, 64 see also public space camera phone, 15, 35, 127– 44, 156 –7 children, 135– 40 images, 15, 132 –2, 134, 140 – 4, 151 internet, 133, 135– 6, 140 –1 learning to use, 15, 131–3 traditional photography, 133, 142 – 4, 157 uses, 15, 133 childhood changing experience of, 116 –17 social construction of, 116 children, 15, 37, 97–101 passim bullying, 13, 124, 128 culture, 97 family, 97, 98, 103, 107, 115, 156 gender, 97, 122 independence, 98, 107, 109, 118, 119–20, 121–2 ownership, 31–2, 97, 98, 118, 119–20 privacy, 62, 119 resistance, 12, 70, 103, 109, 120, 124 see also parents; texting, young people cinemas, 68–9 circuit of culture, 3, 27 citizen journalism, 141 civic engagement, 89 civil inattention, 59 communication choices, 33, 36 – 42

communication repertoire, 36, 42 communication work, 107 computer, 6, 27, 83, 128, 148 location in the home, 89 representations, 27 computer games. See interactive games connected presence, 48, 107 consumption studies, 6, 27 controlling communication, 1, 12, 102, 126 caller identification, 103 incoming calls, 57, 62 –3, 103 outgoing calls, 62 –3 phone number, 102 co-present others, 53, 55, 60 –1, 64, 67, 71, 92, 93, 101–3 passim, 155 and ICT use, 53, 67, 101 COST248, 10, 11, 29 Cyberbullying, 128, 137–8 digital divide, 15, 110 –11, 156 see also relative deprivation; social exclusion; uneven experiences of ICTs digital leash, 120 domestication managing relationships, 12, 32 mobility, 12 social networks, 99 theoretical framework, 7–8, 16, 27, 74, 157 see also texting, domestication of Douglas, Mary, 53 email, 1, 13, 40, 42, 48, 83, 89, 150 mobile, 67, 104 emergency services, 20 etiquette, 55– 6, 68, 71 everyday life, 52, 109, 113 extended family, 95

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FCC, 20 –1 fictive curtains, 59 gender gendering ICTs, 99, 111 mobility, 67, 99, 110, 156 gifts, 100 –1, 115, 156 see also texting, gifts Goffman, Erving, 59, 60, 99 GSM, 19, 24, 32 happy slapping, 124, 140 history, 17–19 passim corporate investment, 21–5 passim, 27–8, 32 market development, 18–19, 22 –3, 25– 6, 27, 28–9, 31, 32 national differences, 21– 4 passim, 32 regulation, 20 – 4 passim, 29 research and development, 19, 21 standards, 22 – 4 passim telecommunications infrastructure, 20 – 4, passim, 27–8, 32 see also texting, history of hyper-coordination, 100, 156 hytte, 76 –7, 86, 103 ICTs, 1, 2, 14, 15, 16 audio technologies, 6 –7, 8, 19, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35–8 passim, 110, 145– 6 definition, 1 history of study, 3 –9 passim, 10, 87, 88 –91, 110 household composition, 8 learning to use, 8 locating ICTs in the home, 8, 89 multiple uses, 94 new ICTs affecting existing ones, 14, 34 –5, 88, 94, 147 old ICT practices affecting new ones, 14, 36, 88, 94 power, 110 –12 passim repertoires of use, 14, 88 stages in the use of, 8 see also internet; telephone; television identity, 7, 8, 13, 98, 134, 166 I-Mode, 28, 147 individualism, 89, 104 networked individualism, 91, 155 industrialization, 88

innovation studies, 4, 7, 16, 17, 27 interaction rituals, 59 interactive games, 7, 111, 128 mobile phone, 150 internet, 1, 9, 11, 13, 41, 91, 94, 113, 128 displacing TV, 89 social capital, 89 stages in the use of, 9, 11 see also email; mobile internet; online interaction iPhone, 148 kawaii, 99 landline. See telephone laptop, 149 link-up, 95, 102 location-based services, 28–9, 121, 150 locus of struggle, 110 micro-coordination, 75, 79, 100 MMS, 130 –2, 135 mobile internet, 15, 27–8, 45, 146, 149–52 mobile privatization, 52 mobile television, 15, 35, 147–52 mobility, 8–9 see also gender, mobility moblogs, 135, 141 MP3 players, 8, 33, 35–8 passim see also ICTs, audio technologies mundane creativity, 132 –3 music mobile phone, 35, 35–8, 150 NMT, 22, 24 –5 norms. See social norms online interaction displacing offline interaction, 89 quality of, 89–90 pager, 19, 24, 30, 69 parenthood, social construction of, 117 parents, 15, 107 concerns about ICTs, 97, 118–19,120, 151 monitoring children’s ICTs, 12 –13, 62, 97, 98, 107, 110, 117, 118–19, 120, 151 regulating children’s ICTs, 12, 41, 107, 118–19, 120, 151

PC. See computer PDA, 33, 149 personal communications systems, 90 –1 personal community networks, 90, 155 personal space, 52, 65–7 personal stereo. See Walkman policy issues, 121 power, 15, 108–26 passim authority, 107, 108–9,114, 115, 119–20, 122, 124, 156 control, 107, 109, 112, 115, 120, 156 definition, 108, 108–10 knowledge, 107, 109 political-economic, 108–9, 112 social ordering, 109, 111–14 passim, 122 status, 107, 109, 151 see also children, family; children, independence; children, resistance; parents, monitoring children’s ICTs; parents, regulating children’s ICTs; work, power; work, authority and status; youth, monitoring of presentation of self, 60, 99 privacy, 61–3, 67 see also children, privacy private space, 67 meaning of, 51 creation of, 57 proxemics, 65– 6 public space culture and, 12, 63 –7, 71 display in, 12 interaction in, 51, 59 legislation, 69 meaning of, 51, 71, 149 nationality and, 12, 56 –7, 63 – 6, 71 privately owned, 68 regulation of, 67, 68–70, 71, 155 rules, 51, 59, 68 social norms, 56 –7, 59, 63 – 4, 66 –7, 68, 71, 149–50, 155 transformation of, 12, 52, 71 see also co-present others public transport, 57, 59, 64, 66 –7, 69–70, 155 see also public space Putnam, Robert, 89, 155 radio, 6 –7, 19–20, 27, 30, 32, 34, 36, 110 representations, 27 see also ICTs, audio technologies

reachability, 63, 103, 124 see also availability relative deprivation, 110 remote mothering, 113, 122 remote others, 61–2, 63, 71 restaurants, 56, 57, 59– 60, 64, 155 see also public space ringtones, 28, 149 safety, 30 –1 SCOT (social construction of technology), 3, 5, 153 selective sociality, 93, 102, 156 sharing, 95 handsets, 94, 101 services, 94, 101 signal blocker, 69 silent mode, 57, 63, 67 Simmel, Georg, 52, 88 SMS. See texting sociability social networks and the Internet, 87, 90 –1 see also social networks social capital, 14, 87, 89, 91–2, 96, 104, 150, 155 social construction of childhood. See childhood, social construction of social construction of parenthood. See parenthood, social construction of social exclusion, 110 social networking sites, 41, 90, 102, 135, 150 Cyworld, 26, 46, 135– 6, 154 Facebook, 41, 90, 135, 150 Myspace, 41, 90, 135, 150 social networks, 14, 40, 74, 87–105 passim, 90 –2, 150, 156 and community, 88–90, 95– 6, 104 domestication in, 99 and individualism, 88–92 passim, 104 social network analysis, 90 and strength of ties, 14, 90 – 4 passim, 96, 102, 104, 156 supporting ICT acquisition and use, 94 see also sociability, social networks and the Internet; youth, peers social norms, 40, 56 –7, 59, 63 – 4, 66 –7, 68, 71, 110, 149, 152 see also public space, social norms

index

189

190

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social shaping of technology, 2 –5 passim, 7, 14, 17, 129 socially relevant groups, 5– 6, 17 space qualities of, 51 see also private space; public space squillini, 103 symbolic fences, 59 teenagers, 97, 98, 105, 119 see also youth, peers telegraph, 19, 24, 88 telephone, 13, 24, 31, 32, 38, 53 –5, 62, 71, 74, 76, 87, 88, 110 children, 54, 62, 120, 123 cordless phones, 29 lack of, 24 –5, 62, 67 locating in the home, 54 privacy, 62 public uses of, 53 – 4 services, 54 television, 6, 34, 36, 74 –5, 89, 91, 110, 128 see also mobile television texting, 1, 14, 35, 38, 67, 68, 76, 129, 133 consequences of, 46 –8 domestication of, 44 – 6 gifts, 48, 100, 156 history of, 42 – 4 public transport, 67 SMS, 5, 7, 27, 30 young people, 13, 31–2, 35, 38, 40, 42, 46, 78, 100 see also youth, peers theatres, 68–9 3G, 22 –3

time, 14, 41, 150 cultures, 73, 76, 84 – 6, 155 filler, 78, 150 organization of meetings, 78–82, 84 – 6 space, 59– 60 stress, 76, 82 – 4 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 88 uneven experience of ICTs, 110, 114 access to ICTs, 111, 113, 114 adoption of ICTs, 111, 113 possession of ICTs, 113 use of ICTs, 111 videogames. See interactive games video telephony, 146 virtual communities, 89–90 virtual walled communities, 48, 93, 102, 104 voicemail, 63, 103, 121 Walkman, 3, 52, 71, 154, 149 WAP, 28,147 Williams, Raymond, 52, 149 work, 15, 41, 123, 151–2 authority and status, 107, 124 – 6 and power, 107, 125 youth, 12 –13, 96 –101 passim fashion, 13, 98–9, 104, 156 monitoring of, 67 peers, 13 –15 passim, 32, 87, 96, 98, 100 –1, 107, 114 –15, 122 –3 status, 98, 101, 104, 123 telephone, 62 Youtube, 141