Mobile Communication

Digital Media and Society Series

by Rich Ling, Jonathan Donner

With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile subscriptions. Prosperous nations boast of having more subscriptions than people. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people who could never afford a landline telephone now have a mobile number of their own. With a mobile in our hand many of us feel safer, more productive, and more connected to loved ones, but perhaps also more distracted and less involved with things happening immediately around us. Written by two leading researchers in the field, this volume presents an overview of the mobile telephone as a social and cultural phenomenon. Research is summarized and made accessible though detailed descriptions of ten mobile users from around the world. These illustrate popular debates, as well as deeper social forces at work. The book concludes by considering three 1) the tighter interlacing of daily activities 2) a revolution of control in the social sphere, and 3) the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

Genres: Technology

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Richard Seyler Ling (Rich Ling) is a communications scholar who focuses on mobile communication. He is the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has studied the social consequences of mobile communication, text messaging and mobile telephony. He has examined the use of mobile communication for what he calls micro-coordination, use by teens, and use in generational situations, as a form of social cohesion. Most recently he has studied this in the context of large data bases and also in developing countries. He has published extensively in this area and is widely cited. He was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2016. He was named editor of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication in 2017.