Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life (review)

Gerard Goggin explores the ways in which mobile telecommunications, and the cell phone in particular, are implicated in changing cultural patterns. His book is global in scope—as studies in mobile phone cultures must be—comparative in style, and rich in observation and insight. Under the sign of “culture” Goggin takes in everything from novel ways of communication (text or SMS) and disruptive behaviors (“happy slapping”) and resulting cultural reactions (“moral panics” about youth and health) to celebrity scandals (David Beckham, cricketer Shane Warne, and sundry royals), TV show voting (Australian Idol), and digital photography as a new way of seeing. His methodological model is Stuart Hall’s venerable “circuits of culture” approach—a breakdown of cultural practices into representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation—that will be familiar to British students of technology and culture through the 1997 textbook by Paul du Gay and his collaborators for the Open University’s Culture, Media and Identities course, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman.

After a perfectly competent, but familiar, chapter on the history of the cell phone, stretching from the first portable radiotelephones of the 1930s through the early years of the cellular mobile phone as an expensive status symbol to the ubiquitous object of the 1990s and 2000s, Cell Phone Culture begins to grab the reader’s attention in a chapter on producers and identities. Nokia and Vodafone are taken as case studies of handset manufacturers and service providers, respectively. Goggin proves more than willing to pick away at corporate mythology. So, for example, Nokia’s prowess at design is not denied; rather, the question becomes why has design become such an important aspect of Nokia’s face to the world. Goggin also points out that Nokia has been a voracious reader of social studies of technology, in particular the user-centered theories and studies of recent years. Goggin wonders whether there is something superficial about such user engagement. When our studies now routinely discover the importance of users, we might also wonder whether we are not merely recording third-hand corporate strategy.

The chapter on text-messaging cultures is particularly fine. We knew already (indeed the generalization has become a cliché of our field) that the designers of text messaging did not anticipate its extraordinary popularity. Goggin cites an industry analyst’s retrospective view: “Trying to imagine the same situation today, it is not hard to imagine the average modern executive immediately tearing the SMS concept . . . into pieces” (p. 71). Even now, I do not think we understand the SMS boom of the late 1990s—one billion messages sent between five million Finns certainly needs more explanation than the noting of a landmark agreement between national mobile operators to pass texts between networks. Goggin is an astute collator of secondary sources—drawing, for example, on Eija-Liisa Kasesniemi’s studies this past decade of Finnish text culture, and Raul Pertierra’s and Bella Ellwood-Clayton’s nuanced analyses of the role of text messaging in the downfall of Filipino politician Joseph Estrada. Finally, to provide a very useful corrective case study, Goggin highlights the relative failure of text messaging in Hong Kong.

The chapter on how two different disabled groups—the deaf and the blind—have developed mobile cultures is excellent in the way that it combines scholarship (critical disability studies and social and cultural studies of technology) and insight. For the deaf community, text messaging is a way to communicate by telephone without the intervention of a TTY (tele-typewriter) operator. Usage is high and has led to redesigns in the interests of deaf users. In contrast, Goggin writes that mobile technology “has not been imagined or designed with Blind users in mind” (p. 98). It is a thought-provoking comparison. “This is an important research agenda,” writes Goggin, “not only as a matter of human rights and justice but also because these narratives unsettle our taken for granted theories of technology” (p...