Cell Phone Culture

Mobile Technology in Everyday Life

Gerard Goggin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415367431
• eBook ISBN: 9781136798702
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Providing the first comprehensive, accessible, and international introduction to cell phone culture and theory, this book is and clear and sophisticated overview of mobile telecommunications, putting the technology in historical and technical context. Interdisciplinary in its conceptual framework, Cell Phone Culture draws on a wide range of nationa

1 Introduction: what do you mean ‘cell phone culture’?!

Since its invention in the second half of the nineteenth century, the telephone has become part of the everyday lives of billions of people around the world. By the middle of the twentieth century, talking to other people over telephone lines was a well-established way to keep in touch with friends and family, engage in social activities and organisations, and conduct business – at least in richer countries. At the opening of the twentieth-first century, the fixed telephone had been officially eclipsed – by its mobile counterpart.

Known as the cell phone, especially in the Americas, or the mobile phone, in Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and elsewhere, and by many other words in other languages, in roughly two and a half decades of commercial availability this technology has enjoyed a staggering rate of adoption. In 2004 there were an estimated 1,752 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide (up from approximately 91 million in 1995, and 1.158 billion in 2002): that is, 58.5 per cent of total telephone subscribers were using cell phones (ITU 2005a). As you might expect, rates of ownership and use of cell phones vary quite widely. In broad terms, the historically wealthy and powerful countries predominate. The fifty-eight countries in the world classed as low-income account for only a little over 98 million cell phone subscribers (a little over 4 per 100 subscribers). In comparison cell connections number over 775 million for fifty-four high-income countries (approximately 77 per 100 subscribers); some 606 million for fifty-three lower middle-income countries (about 25 per 100 subscribers); and roughly 276 million for thirty-eight upper middle-income countries (or 48 per 100 subscribers) (ITU 2005a).

The so-called emerging markets in Asia are seen as the new locales of the cell phone. Take, for instance, the top ten mobile operators in the world in 2004. A sign of the times was that China Mobile now ranked as the world’s biggest operator, followed in descending order by Vodafone, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, America Movil, France Télécom, Telefonica (Spain), NTT DoComo (Japan), Verizon (USA), and finally TeliaSonera, the dominant, merged, Finnish and Swedish telecommunications company (ITU 2005b). Asia hosts 709 million of the world’s cell phone subscribers, compared to 573 million in Europe, 373 million in the Americas, 77 million in Africa, and only 20 million in Oceania (of which Australia and New Zealand would account for the lion’s share). On 2004 figures, China, classed as a lower middle-income country, had 335 million subscribers, at a rate of a little over 25 per 100 potential subscribers. Also acclaimed for its rapidly growing cell phone market is the other current darling of the bourses, India, which has 47 million cell phone subscribers (but only a shade over 4 per 100 subscribers, and so classed as low income for these ITU statistical purposes) (ITU 2005a).

While these numbers on the distribution of cell phones reveal much variation and concentration, nonetheless it is safe to observe that in the mere two and a half decades since it was first marketed commercially, the cell phone has become much more than a device for voice calls – it has become a central cultural technology in its own right. Telecommunications has undergone a radical shift from being about voice (or fax) communications to becoming: mobile; flexible and customisable; associated with a person rather than a household (at least in some societies and situations); and a communications and services hub. Cell phones, mobile technologies, and wireless networks play an indispensable role in the everyday lives of consumers. A bewildering and proliferating range of cultural activities revolve around cell phones: staying in constant contact, text messaging, fashion, identity-construction, music, mundane daily work routines, remote parenting, interacting with television programs, watching video, surfing the Internet, meeting new people, dating, flirting, loving, bullying, mobile commerce, and locating people. Cell phones have come to be associated with qualities of mobility, portability, and customisation. They fit into new ways of being oneself (or constructing identity and belonging to a group); new ways of organising and conducting one’s life; new ways of keeping in touch with friends, romantic intimates, and family; new ways of conducting business; new ways of accessing services or education.

At the same time, mobile devices are of intense economic and political interest because they are at the centre of the vast transformation in communication and media summed up by the rubric of ‘convergence’, or ‘digital technology’ or ‘new media’. Cell phones are being integrated into television – in voting on programs like Big Brother or Idol, as well as picture and video downloads, as well as directly into digital broadcasting systems themselves. Wireless Internet has wide-reaching implications. Mobiles have become hybrid devices that articulate with other new technologies such as digital cameras, portable digital assistants, or location technologies. Third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) cell phones promise finally to realise ubiquitous and personal video communications.

Telephones have had something of an invisible presence in society and culture, but with the advent of cell phones the role of telecommunications has become much more central and harder to ignore. In this book, I explore the cultural dimension of cell phones and mobile telecommunication technologies generally. Cultural treatments of telecommunications are still comparatively rare, but in the case of the cell phone such an investigation is essential. Not only have cell phones developed their own ‘little’ cultures of consumption and use that – though sometimes disparaged – merit and indeed require reflection; we need to grasp and debate the place of cell phones and mobile technologies in our larger cultural settings, interpreting what they signify, what people are doing with and around these devices, and what the implications of all this are for understanding culture at the most general level. Before we turn to considering how to approach cell phone culture, I would like to review briefly the main traditions of studying telecommunications in the humanities and social sciences.

Phone studies

Surprisingly, the telephone has been neglected by scholars of society and culture. Since Ithiel de Sola Pool lamented such inattention, in his pioneering 1977 collection on The Social Impact of the Telephone (de Sola Pool 1977), there has been some important work on the telephone from different perspectives and disciplines through the 1980s and 1990s. Leaving aside the vast number of technical and scientific studies, there has been an increasing amount of work on the economics of telecommunications as well as legal, policy, and regulatory aspects, especially with the transformations from the 1970s with new markets, forms of governance and regulation, and technological innovation. There have been important psychological and linguistic studies. The interest in the telephone and telecommunications among sociologists (and anthropologists) also grew. In the early 1990s a number of important studies of gender and telecommunications were published (Martin 1991; Moyal 1992; Rakow 1993). Studies have charted the development, history, and characteristics of the telephone and telecommunications in many countries (an exemplar being Fischer 1992). Study of the telephone and telecommunications has for some time been a respectable if speciality interest in disciplines such as communications (for instance, Katz 1999) and media studies, but little work has been undertaken by cultural theorists and scholars (one early exception being Ronel 1989).

With the liberalisation of telecommunications in the 1990s, and the growing centrality of telecommunications technologies and networks to other convergent media, social issues become of interest to policymakers internationally, with much debate and some research also. Important social and policy concepts in telecommunications had achieved acceptance with decades of monopoly delivery by unified state administrations (called PTTs, standing for posts, telegraph and telephone) around the world through the twentieth century. Taken-for-granted ideas such as universal service (or the notion that all citizens in a nation-state should have access to a telephone wherever they lived) were being challenged and transformed with the dismantling of monopolies, with privatisation of national telecommunications carriers, with so-called deregulation and the introduction of competition in equipment manufacture and network operation. Much research was commissioned and funded by government, regulators, industry, and funding bodies to provide knowledge about the use of telecommunications, especially evolving new services, as well as to inform or intervene in fierce debates about the reforms and new telecommunications regimes.

As well as a greater appreciation of the social centrality of telecommunications to communications and everyday life, what slowly emerged too through the 1990s was a realisation that telecommunications was becoming central to questions of culture. As telecommunications networks became more complex, not least with their symbiotic relationship with the Internet and other online communications, and the use of cell phones for voice communications rapidly grew during the 1990s, the relative ‘invisibility’ of the telephone as both social object and a cultural technology could no longer be ignored. While there were some important inquiries into cell phones in the early to mid-1990s, especially the coordinated work carried out in Europe (well summarised in Haddon 2004), it was not until Kopomaa’s pioneering The City in Your Pocket (2000), and then in 2002 the appearance in the same year of Plant’s On the Mobile (commissioned by Motorola), Katz and Aakhus’s edited collection Perpetual Contact, and Brown, Green, and Harper’s anthology Wireless World, that comprehensive systematic scholarly work on the cell phone started to become available.

One of the interesting things about this work on mobiles is the comparative, cross-cultural aspirations shown. In recognition, no doubt, of the near simultaneous appearance and rapid adoption of the cell phone in many different countries, studies of the cell phone (or mobile society studies) have tended to be mindful of the national and social contexts of use. Recently, there has been a torrent of work on the cell phone pouring forth. As well as countless journal articles, there have been a number of important books, though mainly, to date, edited collections (interestingly enough), as an international epistemic community of engaged mobiles scholars has emerged. A central focus, still, has been the social dimensions of the cell phone, represented best perhaps by Rich Ling’s The Mobile Connection (2004). There has also been keen interest in the implications of cell phones for communication (Nyíri 2003a). An abiding concern for scholars has been how the cell phone is implicated in the redrawing of boundaries between the private and the public, the subject of many discussions (in which Erving Goffman’s work often reappears) but especially Ling and Pedersen’s 2005 collection Mobile Communications. Text messaging has been a fascination in its own right, with one book-length study (Kasesniemi 2003) and two dedicated collections (Glotz and Bertschi 2005; Harper, Palen, and Taylor 2005). Important studies of the cell phone and work have emerged from different places but especially the computer-supported co-operative work tradition (see contributions to Brown, Green and Harper 2002; and Ling and Pedersen 2005 in particular). The Hungarian philosopher Kristóf Nyíri has convened a series of symposia and subsequent collections on important political and social concepts and institutions, such as mobile democracy (2002), mobile learning (2003b), mobiles and place (2005). The relationships among social and cultural contexts, use and design have received some attention (for instance in a number of contributions to Harper, Palen, and Taylor 2005, Lindholm, Keinonen, and Kiljander 2003, Taylor and Harper 2003). Despite the great public concern over the psychological and linguistic aspects of mobiles, these have been two of ‘several dimensions of the work on mobile telephony … not … as completely developed [as others]’ (according to Ling and Pedersen, who include a section of useful studies on each of these; 2005: v). There has been significant work undertaken by anthropologists; two good examples are both concerned with text messaging, namely Bella Elwood-Clayton’s 2003 and 2005 ethnographic work on SMS in the Philippines and Taylor and Harper’s work on the gift and texting (Taylor and Harper 2002; Berg, Taylor, and Harper 2005).

As this selective and partial rendering of the exponentially growing literature on cell phones illustrates there is now a wealth of studies, analysis and debate in this area, though it is quite recent. Yet there is also much work to be done, and many conversations and debates to be had. My assessment of the work on cell phones is that we do have substantial discussions, if still largely fragmentary and incomplete, of how existing and new social structures, relationships, and behaviours have incorporated and been changed by cell phones. Thus far sociology has played an important role in studying cell phones. I also think there has been considerable study and debate on important aspects of communication and cell phones. There is recurrent public fascination and some scholarly work on how people communicate with cell phones, and to what extent – a recurring theme in new technologies and communicative practices – modes and patterns of communication have fundamentally shifted; or whether, in fact, the cell phone, like the Internet, has brought long-lived, fundamental aspects of human communication to the surface. It still remains very unclear – and is probably quite unlikely – that the nature of communication radically changed with the use of cell phones, and of course this is a large and philosophically testing question.

It seems to me that there are two important aspects of cell phones that merit sustained inquiry at this juncture. First, I think that cultural aspect of cell phones has been underexplored. While there have been quite some studies attentive to cross-cultural context, there has been little work that systematically explores local or international cell phone culture, and its implications for general accounts of culture. In particular, I think there has been a lack of recognition and analysis of how power relations and structures shape cell phone culture. Here international cultural studies have something to contribute with their historical and still current preoccupation with the inescapable constitution of culture through power. Secondly, an important way to approach inquiry into the nature of cell phone communication is to take the medium itself seriously. As Marshall McLuhan wittily pointed out, the message cannot so simply be extricated from the medium that bears it. Intimately related to the matter of the medium – or media – are questions of culture. Communication is embedded in media, and ultimately too in the elusive yet nurturing realm of culture. To date, cell phone and mobile technologies studies may have not needed to consider the media dimension of cell phones. However, as the cell phone moves centre stage as a device criss-crossed by media flows and cultural forms and content, borrowing and cross-fertilising from audio and radio cultures, television cultures, print cultures, Internet and other new media cultures, and is increasingly regarded as a mobile medium, media studies approaches are likely to be very helpful.

About cell phone culture

In approaching cell phone culture, I begin with the ‘circuit of culture’ framework devised to theorise another mobile cultural technology, the Sony Walkman (du Gay et al. 1997). The starting point for the ‘circuit of culture’ approach is the proposition that culture is not merely reflective or expressive of other processes, as though in reductive versions of the Marxist tradition of culture being part of the superstructure of society rather than the economic base. Rather ‘culture is now regarded as being constitutive of the social world as economic or political processes’ (1997: 2). The task of understanding culture is compelling not just as an exercise in its own right, but rather as a necessary undertaking for understanding social practices and processes:

The production of social meanings is therefore a necessary precondition for the functioning of all social practices and an account of the cultural conditions of social practices must form part of the sociological explanation of how they work. Cultural description and analysis is therefore increasingly crucial to the production of sociological knowledge.

(1997: 2)

To inquire into culture in late modernity, du Gay et al. take as their case study the Sony Walkman, as a ‘typical cultural artefact and medium of modern culture’ (2). Their ‘biography’ of the Walkman seeks to take account of culture’s shaping by large, commercial, transnational enterprises. However, rather than just looking at the processes of production, the ‘circuit of culture’ model ‘analyses the biography of a cultural artefact in terms of a theoretical model based on the articulation of a number of distinct processes whose interaction can and does lead to variable and contingent outcomes’ (3). Following Stuart Hall’s definition, an ‘articulation’ is the

form of the connection that can make a unity of two or more different or distinct elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined or absolute and essential for all time; rather it is a linkage whose conditions of existence or emergence need to be located in the contingencies of circumstance.

(Hall 1996: 3)

In seeking to explain a cultural artefact, du Gay et al. suggest, the analyst needs to study it through the five major interlinked processes they identify: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation: ‘Taken together, they complete a sort of circuit … through which any analysis of a cultural text or artefact must pass if it is to be adequately studied’ (1997: 3). As they note, such an approach has also been suggested by Richard Johnson (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: what do you mean ‘cell phone culture’?!
• Part I: Producing the cell phone
• Part II: Consuming the cell phone
• Part III: Representing and regulating the cell phone
• Part IV: Mobile convergences
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index