Cell Phone Culture

Comprehensive introduction to cell phone culture and theory.

What do we really know about mobile phone culture? This provocative and comprehensive collection explores the cultural and media dimensions of mobile phones around the world. An international team of contributors look at how mobiles have been imagined through advertising and social representations - tracing the scripting and shaping of the technology through gender, sexuality, religion, communication style - and explore the locations of mobile phone culture in modernity, urban settings and even transnational families. This book also provides a guide to convergent mobile phone culture, with fresh, innovative accounts of text messaging, Blackberry, camera phones, moblogging and mobile adventures in television. Mobile Phone Culture opens up important new perspectives on how we understand this intimate yet public cultural technology. Previously published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

As seen in Time, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and on CBS This Morning, BBC, PBS, CNN, and NPR, iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. With the first members of iGen just graduating from college, we all need to understand them: friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.

This is the first account of the health panic surrounding cellular phones that developed in the mid-1990s. Treating the issue as more 'social construction' than evident scientific problem, it tells the story of how this originally American anxiety diffused internationally, having an even bigger impact in countries such as Italy. Burgess highlights the contrasting reactions to the issue ranging from positive indifference in Finland to those such as the UK where precautionary measures were taken. These differences are located within the emergence of a precautionary culture driven by institutional insecurity that first appeared in the US and is now most evident in Europe. Anxieties about cell phone radiowaves are also situated historically in the very different reactions to technologies such as x-rays and in the more similar 'microwave suspicions' about television. In addition, Burgess outlines a history and sociology of what is, despite media-driven anxieties, a spectacularly successful device.

What do we really know about mobile phone culture? This provocative and comprehensive collection explores the cultural and media dimensions of mobile phones around the world. An international team of contributors look at how mobiles have been imagined through advertising and social representations - tracing the scripting and shaping of the technology through gender, sexuality, religion, communication style - and explore the locations of mobile phone culture in modernity, urban settings and even transnational families. This book also provides a guide to convergent mobile phone culture, with fresh, innovative accounts of text messaging, Blackberry, camera phones, moblogging and mobile adventures in television. Mobile Phone Culture opens up important new perspectives on how we understand this intimate yet public cultural technology. Previously published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

Gerard Goggin has produced an incisive and penetrating overview of the world according to mobiles. Covering sight, sound and status, plus a host of other issues, he provides a provocative analysis of how mobile communication gadgets come to play such a prominent role in our lives. Any scholar of New Media will want to read this book – James Katz, Department of Communication, Rutgers University, USA With billions of users worldwide, the cell phone is not only a successful communications technology; it is also key to the future of media. Global Mobile Media offers an overview of the complex topic of mobile media, looking at the emerging industry structures, new media economies, mobile media cultures and network politics of cell phones as they move centre-stage in media industries. The development, adoption and significance of cell phones for society and culture have been registered in a growing body of work. Where existing books have focused on communication, and on the social and cultural aspects of mobile media, Global Mobile Media looks at the media dimensions. Goggin provides a pioneering yet measured evaluation of how cell phone corporations, media interests, users and policy makers are together shaping a new media dispensation. Global Mobile Media successfully places new mobile media historically, socially and culturally in a wider field of portable media technologies through extensive case studies, including: the rise of smartphones, with a detailed discussion of the Apple iPhone and how it has catalysed a new phase in convergent media, audiences and innovation the new agenda in cultural politics and media policy, featuring topics such as iPhone apps and control, mobile commons, and open mobile networks a succinct map of the political economy of mobile media, identifying key players, patterns of ownership and control, institutions, and issues a critical account of cell phones’ involvement in and contribution to much-discussed new forms of production and consumption, such as user-generated content, p2p networks, open and free source software networks an anatomy of how cell phones relate to other online media, particularly the Internet and wireless technologies. Global Mobile Media is an engaging, accessible text which will be of immense interest to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in Communication Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, as well as those taking New Media courses.

The Cell Phone Reader offers a diverse, eclectic set of essays that examines how this rapidly evolving technology is shaping new media cultures, new forms of identity, and media-centered relationships. The contributors focus on a range of topics, from horror films to hip-hop, from religion to race, and draw examples from across the globe. The Cell Phone Reader provides a road map for both scholars and beginning students to examine the profound social, cultural and international impact of this small device.

Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars, this is a truly global collection with rural and urban examples from communities across the Global North and South. Linking the use of cell phones to contemporary discussions about representation, mediation and subjectivity, the book investigates how this increasingly ubiquitous technology challenges the boundaries of privacy and selfhood, raising new questions about how we communicate.