Mobile Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere

by Rich Ling (Editor), Per E. Pedersen (Editor)

Mobile telephony has arrived on the scene. According to statistics of the International Telecommunications Union, in the mid-1990s, less than one person in 20 had a mobile telephone; as of 2003, this had risen to on person in five. In the mid-1990s, the GSM system was just being commercialised, there were serious coverage and interoperability issues that were not yet sorted out and handsets were only beginning to be something that did not require a car to transport them. In the mid-1990s, if a teen owned a mobile telephone it was likely an indicator of an over-pampered rich kid rather than today's sense that it is a more or less essential part of a teen's everyday identity kit. Hence, in less than a decade, this device has established itself technically, commercially, socially and in the imagination of the people. It has changed the way we think about communication, coordination and safety and it has changed the way we behave in the public sphere. The mobile telephone has become an element in our sense of public and private space and in the development of our social and psychological personas. It has become an arena wherein the language is being played with, morphed and extended. Finally, it is reaching out into ever-new areas of commerce and interaction. All of this is, of course, interesting to social scientists. As brought out by Woolgar later, this is, in some ways, a type of experiment writ large that has engendered serious insight into the functioning of the social group and the individual in society.

480 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2005

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.