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  • Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media
  • Jon Agar (bio)
Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media. By Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Pp. iii+190. $29.95.

There are now as many cell phones as there are people on the planet. In two decades the device has gone from a luxury, single-purpose technology to an essential multipurpose object engrained in everyday routines of life and work. When examined closely, moreover, the patterns of use of cell phones are found to vary considerably according to place and culture. Answering a mobile on the Metro Manila, for example, is perfectly acceptable practice, yet would be considered rude in Tokyo. The ubiquity of the mobile phone, along with this pattern of diverse use, makes it an ideal subject for introducing students to themes and arguments in the history and sociology of technology.

Since the 1990s, a burgeoning community of scholars, including sociologists, geographers, and historians, has tracked this phenomenon. The result is a large secondary literature of high-quality studies, much of which is too detailed or difficult for students. Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon, two UK-based sociologists, have written in Mobile Communications a short, clear primer that is ideal for guiding beginners through ways of analyzing the cell phone. Each chapter is introduced and its contents summarized again at the end. Boxes describe case studies and pose reflective questions, ready-made for seminar discussions. The assumed knowledge is basic, yet the themes and topics are sophisticated and engaging.

While the book holds to no single sociological framework, several major approaches—social construction of technology, actor-network theory, domestication accounts, and the newer work on cultures of mobilities—are outlined. These are referred to later, as topics such as the relationships among technological systems, privacy, the changing experience of time, and the support of strong and weak social ties are surveyed. Other, more specialized approaches are dipped into where useful. For example, Erving Goffman is used in a neat discussion of “civil inattention,” in the authors’ analysis of the proper public behavior issue. The sociology is complemented by a short synthetic history of the mobile phone. Students will [End Page 664] benefit from this combination of sociological inquiry and historical context. The overall aim is to make this familiar object strange again (p. 145).

The authors draw attention to broad generalities about the effects of the cell phone, balancing these with a picture of local diversity. For example, like other information technologies, cell phones can strengthen existing social networks but do not (or at least very rarely) instigate entirely new sets of social relations. At a European level, this has led to the mobile phone being promoted as a symbol and tool of social integration. A quick summary of Daniel Miller’s anthropological studies of the Jamaican practice of “link up” (p. 95) provides a balancing exemplar of novel use to this general theme of continuity and extension.

While Mobile Communications is avowedly a student textbook, relying extensively on previously published work (not least work by the two authors), there are some novelties. I found the chapter on the camera phone, for example, with comparisons offered between Finnish, Italian, British, and Korean practices, particularly thought-provoking. There are good, direct quotations from users that illustrate the “mundane creativity” involved in exploring a new technical feature: the British woman who discovered that she could check makeup by photographing her face, or the exasperated Korean discussing the social pressure to “decorate” online photographs on the popular Cyworld site. The authors also note where they have found gaps in the literature. They bemoan, for example, the fact that early consumption went largely unstudied by contemporary scholars (p. 31), and later, in the camera phone chapter, they remind us again that the process of first learning how a technology might be used is often missed and is always interesting.

Jon Agar

Dr. Jon Agar is senior lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London.

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