Mobile Communication E-Book

Rich Ling

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 329

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile subscriptions. Prosperous nations boast of having more subscriptions than people. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people who could never afford a landline telephone now have a mobile number of their own. With a mobile in our hand many of us feel safer, more productive, and more connected to loved ones, but perhaps also more distracted and less involved with things happening immediately around us.

Written by two leading researchers in the field, this volume presents an overview of the mobile telephone as a social and cultural phenomenon. Research is summarized and made accessible though detailed descriptions of ten mobile users from around the world. These illustrate popular debates, as well as deeper social forces at work. The book concludes by considering three themes: 1) the tighter interlacing of daily activities 2) a revolution of control in the social sphere, and 3) the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

Leseprobe

Mobile Communication

Digital Media and Society Series

New technologies are fundamentally altering the ways in which we communicate. This series from Polity aims to provide a set of books that make available for a broad readership cutting-edge research and thinking on digital media and their social contexts. Taken as a whole, the series will examine questions about the impact of network technology and digital media on society in all its facets, including economics, culture and politics.

Published:

Mark Deuze, Media Work

Charles Ess, Digital Media Ethics

Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society

Robert Hassan, The Information Society

Tim Jordan, Hacking

Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile Communication

Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging

Mobile Communication

RICH LING AND JONATHAN DONNER

polity

Copyright © Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner 2009

The right of Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK.

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5598-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.25 on 13 pt FF Scala

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Rich Ling:

To Dad, Grandaddy Seyler and Grandpa Ling

Jonathan Donner

To Calliope

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: the quarter-century beyond the Maitland Commission Report

2. Short history of mobile communication

3. Mobile communication in everyday life: 3 billion new telephones

4. Mobile communication in everyday life: new choices, new challenges

5. Debates surrounding mobile communication

6. Conclusion: individual addressability, interlacing and the spillover of the control revolution

Notes

References

Index

Preface

To get a perspective on the rise of the mobile telephone, it is perhaps appropriate to start with an ode to the past, namely the eclipsing of the phone booth by the mobile phone. Indeed, the mobile phone is helping to push the telephone booth into history.

People born since the mid-1990s may never set foot in a phone booth. Thanks to mobile telephones, most of them have, or will soon have, the ability to reach anyone else they want to, regardless of either person’s location. They will never have to deal with the search for an evasive phone booth in an unfamiliar location. They will not have to rummage madly for a dime (or a krone or a pound or a frank) to buy a few minutes of time. In short, they will not fully understand the way that the phone booth was a shared experience and cultural icon.

Future generations will never really understand that a phone booth was a place where hearts could swell or be broken (“Do you really want to go steady?”); where invitations were received and meetings arranged (“The party is at Frank’s house? Great! We’ll be there with the beer soon”); where important information was recovered (“What was Emil’s address again, I wrote it down but I lost the piece of paper?”); and where deals could be done and undone.

The phone booth was also the location for different types of hi-jinks including prank calls, petty vandalism and phone booth stuffing (the record for stuffing a booth is variously reported as being 22, 24 and 25 persons). The phone booth played a role in a variety of films including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. It is where the stumbling spy Maxwell Smart enters into CONTROL headquarters and it is where Clark Kent somehow transforms himself into Superman. (What did Clark do with the suit of clothes he was wearing? Is it somehow returned to him as though from the dry cleaners or did Superman leave his suits piled up on the floor of different phone booths around Metropolis?) On the darker side, the phone booth is a frequent setting where movie murderers, blackmailers, kidnappers, extortionists and all-round bad guys made anonymous, untraceable calls outlining their demands or proclaiming their – usually temporary – invincibility.

The phone booth was a symbol of temporary shelter, homelessness and a nomadic lifestyle. Bruce Springsteen talked about sheltering himself in a phone booth on cold winter nights and calling his girlfriend. In another case, the oddly placed Mojave phone booth became a cult location – and phone number – given its anomalous placement miles and miles from any major road, building or normal semblance of civilization.

In their time, phone booths were a stylish bit of architecture. The classic British phone booth was designed by the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott who, when not working on what were also referred to as “silence cabinets,” found the time to design the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, Waterloo Bridge, the library at the University of Cambridge and the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Some suggest, rather morbidly, that Scott’s design was inspired by the tomb of Sir John Sloane in St. Pancras’ Gardens – to which it does, incidentally, bear a passing resemblance.

The phone booth is the past. Since the mid-1980s, we have seen the rise of a device that is slowly but surely replacing the phone booth, namely the mobile phone. The mobile phone is becoming the locus of the calls that mark the different phases of our lives. Lovers are cooing to one another; bad guys are making demands; teens are texting with their friends; profit-driven young bucks are trying to move the markets; and parents are trying to keep up with the delivery of children to a spectrum of birthday parties, soccer practices and after-school engagements. Farmers in India are using the mobile phone to check the price of rice at the local markets, Filipina maids in Singapore are using it to send money home to their families, and entrepreneurs all around the world are buying, selling and arranging their affairs via the device.

The mobile telephone is also becoming a cultural icon in its own terms. The style, model and features of a phone all play into the image that we display to the world. Children can buy toy mobile phones or balloons in the shape of the device. They feature in films, and the release of an iPhone or the most recent keitai (the Japanese word for mobile phone) can make the headlines. The mobile phone is even generating its own form of offbeat contests, such as the mobile phone throwing competition (the current record seems to be 89 meters).

The mobile phone also has a much broader exposure than did the phone booth. The so-called “telephone ladies” (women who run a small independently owned mobile phone-based telephone service in Bangladeshi villages) provided, often for the first time, a local telephone service for their villages with a shared telephone link to the broader world. Whether formal or informal – just a lawn chair, an umbrella and some minutes to re-sell – “Public” mobile phones have spread further and faster than the public call offices (PCOs) offered by most landline companies in the developing world ever did or could. Ironically, as with the traditional telephone booth, the telephone lady in Bangladesh and the public mobile phone in Ghana are also being replaced by individual ownership of mobile phones. As we will see below, the private ownership of mobile phones is skyrocketing across the developing world, while in many more prosperous countries there are now more mobile phone subscriptions than there are people.

We are moving out of the box – the phone box – to what Goffman called “the un-boothed” phone. This book examines the incredibly rapid spread of the mobile phone around the world, and how we are adapting to its presence.

Acknowledgments

As with any piece of work, this book draws on the experience, insight and courtesy of a broad variety of people. We wish to thank colleagues and friends who have contributed to the writing of this book.

Leopoldina Fortunati, Casey Jenkins, Raul Pertierra, Jack Qiu, Marit Sandvik, Satomi Sugiyama, Carolyn Wei and Rajesh Veeraraghavan have helped us with the development of the fictional vignettes. Their grounded knowledge of the different milieus was essential in helping us render these situations. Our extended network of colleagues, including James Katz, Richard Chalfen and Scott Campbell, have been supportive in their various ways

At Telenor, Nisar Bashir, Christian Nøkleby, Per Helmersen and Hanne Cecilie Geirbo have provided help and insight, each in their own way. At Microsoft Research India, Kentaro Toyama and P. Anandan have done the same. In addition, the California-based Tom Farley is, as always, a valuable resource when it comes to the history of the mobile phone.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: the quarter-century beyond the Maitland Commission Report

1 Introduction

In 1982, a conference with the imposing name of “The Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union” formed a commission to take up the question of access to telephones in the developing world. Two years later, that commission, chaired by Sir Donald Maitland, issued its report with the equally imposing title, The Missing Link: Report of the Independent Commission for Worldwide Telecommunications Development.

What many policymakers today call simply “The Maitland Report” outlined the impact of telecommunications on the effective operation of public service, commerce, health services, agriculture, banking services, etc. (Maitland, 1984, 7), and examined how telecommunication facilitates coordination and makes transport systems more effective. But it is best remembered for its stark, sweeping statistics describing the discrepancies in telecommunication services between the developed and developing worlds. The report noted that more than 50 percent of the world’s population then lived in countries with less than 1 telephone for every 100 people, and that many of those telephones belonged to offices and businesses, out of reach of everyday citizens. In many countries, it argued, there was literally no telecommunications service outside the more populated towns and cities. Writing in an era before the widespread use of the internet and mobile telephones, the commission lamented: “More than half the world’s population live in countries with fewer than 10 million telephones between them and most of these are in the main cities; two-thirds of the world’s population have no access to telephone services. Tokyo has more telephones than the whole of the African continent, with its population of 500 million people” (Maitland, 1984, 13).

The commission was not blind to the march of technological innovations occurring in global telecommunications at the time. Its report discusses the possibility of using radio in lieu of wired landlines in the service of supplying telephony. It saw microwave systems as an alternative to long-distance trunk lines, satellite systems as serious alternatives for the provision of telephony to rural areas, and terrestrial radio as a way to extend telephony’s reach. In the only real mention of what would become the mobile telephone system, the report’s authors argue: “Improving the effective utilization of the frequency spectrum is possible by using the cellular concept and other methods of dynamic frequency assignment” (Maitland, 1984, 31). However, seen with a quarter-century’s remove, it is clear that the Maitland Commission largely failed to predict the role cellular-based mobile communication would play in revolutionizing the accessibility of telecommunications around the world.