Mobile Phones

The widespread use of mobile (cell) phones in most countries now affects social innovation and consumer culture in a range of settings including social groups such as family, friends, and intimate networks, as well as across broader social networks including employment, business, and services such as medicine and education. The uses and applications of mobile phone digital content and services are becoming increasingly sophisticated when compared to basic, though popular, traditional services such as short message services (SMS). Multimedia messaging services (MMS) and applications and mobile e-mail and Internet applications along with global positioning system (GPS)–enabled handsets and the iPhone have made a defining impact on the business end and experience end of consumer culture. The growing social, cultural, and economic impact of mobile digital content and services is evidenced in European and Southeast Asian nations in particular and will take on greater significance in the social and cultural life of society in other regions, as the major telecommunication carriers commit to 3G broadband and associated enhanced services in the coming years.

As in the past, the introduction of innovative information and communication technologies (ICT), products, and services evoked changes in existing patterns of employment, family structures, leisure activities, concepts of time, and existing societal values such as privacy and notions of personal and public space, even patterns of human settlement and education. Mobile phones find a distinct resonance with consumer culture given their affinity within both the work and leisure milieu—with fashion and media purposing—and as an expression of style and design.

Personalized devices such as mobile phones are showing similar trajectories in consumer culture but are, however, unique in that they penetrate geographical spaces with existing products and innovations that enable consumption and communication to be applied in new social, cultural, or psychological ways. Such products and services are typified by inputs based on knowledge, creativity, and differentiation. Phone users now have a means of group communication, media content access (entertainment, information, data), and the ability to “synchronise everyday life” (Ling 2001) with home, school, or work through high-speed broadband mobile phone devices and networks. These innovative though now established applications of the mobile are in addition to evolving cultural and social applications of the device.

Beyond voice call and media consumption applications, mobiles are used in a variety of contexts: for electronic transfer of key diagnostic sounds and data to remotely monitor medical patients and use of SMS text messages as a form of patient contact tracing at hospital units; for those in the deaf community, use of SMS and MMS delivers them independence and opportunities not possible beforehand (M. Power and D. Power 2004).

This proliferation of mobile technology in the social and cultural domain and the notion of the mobile as an ubiquitous technology have seeded issues, which track through the development of the mobile phone (just as previous twentieth-century technologies underwent development, such as radio and television). The attention such debates cause are repeats of what Nikhilesh Dholakia and Detlev Zwick (2003) identify as modernist visions of technological development, which tend toward “dystopian aesthetics”—something like a good-versus-evil conversation (the “evils” of video games and violence being another recent example).

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