Mobile Phone Cultures (review)

Mobile Phone Cultures is a comprehensive collection of essays intended for an academic audience that brings together original cultural studies of communications devices. Cultural studies of mobiles are an interdisciplinary and relatively new endeavor that seeks to understand and answer “questions of culture that the technology, its meanings, practices, and consumption merit” (p. vii). How are mobile phones conceived by users? How have mobile phones impacted popular culture? What are the cultural implications of mobile image creation and mobile texting? These are among the various questions explored in Gerard Goggin’s collection.

The integration of the mobile phone into the lives of users has had both positive and negative ramifications for the social and cultural aspects of everyday life. In particular, Alberta Contarello and colleagues’ three-year study of the attitudes of Italian college students toward the use and representation of mobile phones points at a particularly ambivalent disposition toward these devices—“On the one hand, there is considerable interest in the material nature of the mobile as an artefact, with its strong aesthetic and fashion values. On the other, there is awareness of its powerful social function. . . . [I]t changes and enhances communication, reachability and therefore social relations . . . but [it] is also harmful, invasive and annoying” (pp. 21–23). As a result, the transformation of the mobile phone from simply a material object of status to a useful, functional, and insidious social object implies that this gadget will continue impacting the lives of millions of users and thus speaks volumes for the importance of continued research into the cultural impact of mobile phones.

What one may gain by reading this book is a diverse overview of the social and cultural implications of the mobile phone. More specifically, the book brings together essays using various methodologies—drawing on qualitative, quantitative, and ethnographic methods—to explore the impact that mobile phones have in shaping the way we create and maintain social relationships, how we document and archive memories, and how popular culture is being reinvented using this device. To this end, Goggin’s collection shows that the cultural impact of the mobile phone is as great, if not greater, than radio, television, video and computer games, and even the internet. His interest is to unite cultural and media scholars in a forum, arguably the first of its kind, which endeavors to understand mobile phones from a cultural and media scholarship perspective.

For example, according to Lisa Gye, the camera phone is not “just another type of camera.” “Located as they are in a device that is not only connected to the telecommunications grid but that is usually carried with us wherever we go, camera phones are both extending existing personal imaging practices and allowing for the evolution of new kinds of imaging practices” (p. 135).While amateur photography has been a longstanding practice among tourists, moms and dads documenting their sons’ and daughters’ lives, and sports and nature enthusiasts, the camera phone has transformed how photographers construct personal and group memory, create and maintain social relationships, and express and present themselves. Much of the transformation is because there are many more opportunities to take and send photographs due to the increasing accessibility of devices that are carried with us everywhere. Owing to this ubiquity, a distrust of the “roaming photographer . . . is resurfacing today in the current distrust of the mobile camera phone” (p. 142).

Clearly, the mobile camera phone as well as mobile phones in general have penetrated our cultural lives, for good and for bad. Goggin’s collection makes a unified statement in support of this cultural impact. As with any interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary endeavor, however, several of the studies are methodologically unsound for an academic audience because of their reliance on samples that were merely convenient. Together, however, these studies deserve high praise for establishing a strong foothold for future research.