New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion

by Rich Ling

The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is "there"; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us? In New Tech, New Ties, Rich Ling examines how the mobile telephone affects both kinds of interactions--those mediated by mobile communication and those that are face to face. Ling finds that through the use of various social rituals the mobile telephone strengthens social ties within the circle of friends and family--sometimes at the expense of interaction with those who are physically present--and creates what he calls "bounded solidarity." Ling argues that mobile communication helps to engender and develop social cohesion within the family and the peer group. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins, Ling shows that ritual interaction is a catalyst for the development of social bonding. From this perspective, he examines how mobile communication affects face-to-face ritual situations and how ritual is used in interaction mediated by mobile communication. He looks at the evidence, including interviews and observations from around the world, that documents the effect of mobile communication on social bonding and also examines some of the other possibly problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in small groups.Rich Ling is Senior Researcher at the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor and Adjunct Research Scientist at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society.

Genres: Technology

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Richard Seyler Ling (Rich Ling) is a communications scholar who focuses on mobile communication. He is the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has studied the social consequences of mobile communication, text messaging and mobile telephony. He has examined the use of mobile communication for what he calls micro-coordination, use by teens, and use in generational situations, as a form of social cohesion. Most recently he has studied this in the context of large data bases and also in developing countries. He has published extensively in this area and is widely cited. He was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2016. He was named editor of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication in 2017.