2009

Integration and Ubiquity
Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

Mobile communications are rapidly merging with fixed-line telephony, the internet, and entertainment. Telecommunications convergence is a many-faceted process, creating radically novel and complex patterns of mediated culture, posing new challenges to the humanities.

While the triumphal march of mobile telephony continues – by 2008 more than half of the world's population had become mobile phone users – mobile communications are merging with fixed-line telephony, the internet, and entertainment. Telecommunications convergence is a many-faceted process, creating radically novel and complex patterns of mediated culture, posing new challenges to the humanities. The various dimensions of convergence – digital, technological, socio-cultural, linguistic; of content, devices, businesses, markets, even of scientific theories – do not fuse seamlessly. The volume contains papers by, among others, Mark Turner, Gerard Goggin, Zoltán Kövecses, Dieter Mersch, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Anthony Townsend.

Mobile communications: An introduction to new media

Leslie Haddon and Nicola Green

Product Description
The mobile phone has achieved a global presence faster than any other form of information and communication technology. A global multi-billion dollar industry, this small, mundane device is now an intrinsic part of our everyday life.

This communications medium has had an immense social and cultural impact and continues to evolve. Talking, texting, photographing, videoing, connecting to a network of other media - the cellphone now seems essential. But, beyond the ways in which it has actively restructured our daily lives, the mobile has changed our sense of ourselves and the way we see the world. The relationship between public and private space, how we view time and space, how we rely on and negotiate social networks - all are increasingly centred on this small piece of technology.

Mobile Communications presents a succinct, challenging, and accessible overview of the transformations and challenges presented by this most personal, yet most overlooked technology.

About the author
Nicola Green is Senior Lecturer in New Media and New Technologies in the Dept of Sociology, University of Surrey. Leslie Haddon is Researcher and Associate Lecturer in the Dept of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Sciences.

Mobile Phones and Mobile Communication

Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner

Product Description
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 themes: the tighter interlacing of daily activities; a revolution of control in the social sphere, and the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

About the Author
Rich Ling is Senior Researcher at the Telenor Research Institute in Norway.
Jonathan Donner is Researcher for Microsoft Research India.

2008

The reconstruction of space and time: Mobile communication practices

Rich Ling and Scott Campbell (Eds.)

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
One of the most significant and obvious examples of how mobile communication influences our understanding of time and space is how we coordinate with one another. Mobile communication enables us to call specific individuals, not general places. Regardless of location, we are able to make contact with almost anyone, almost anywhere. This advancement has changed, and continues to change, human interaction. Now, instead of agreeing on a particular time well beforehand, we can interatively work out the most convenient time and place to meet at the last possible moment - on the way to the meeting or once we arrive at the destination.In their early days, mobile devices were primarily used for various types of emergency situations and for work. In some cases, the device was an essential element in various business operations or used so that overseas workers could communicate with their families. The distance between a remote posting and the people back home was suddenly and dramatically reduced. People began to share these devices not necessarily out of economic issues, but also questions of family and interpersonal dynamics.The process of sharing decisions as to who is a legitimate partner makes the nature of relationships more explicit. By examining the economy of sharing, we not only see how sharing mobile phones restructures social space, but are also given insight into an individual's web of interactions. This cutting-edge book deals with modern ways of thinking about communication and human interaction; it will illuminate the ways in which mobile communication alters our experience with space and time.

About the Author
Rich Ling is a sociologist at Telenor's research institute near Olso, Norway and has been Pohs visiting professor of communication at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion and The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society. Scott W. Campbell is assistant professor and Pohs fellow of telecommunications in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. His research has been published in the journals Communication Education, Communication Monographs, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, New Media & Society, and others.

The wonder phone in the land of miracles: Mobile telephony in Israel (New media: Policy and social research issues).

Akiba A. Cohen, Dafna Lemish, and Amit M. Schejter

Product Description
Studies conducted over several years in Israel explored social aspects of the developing mobile phone phenomenon. Using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods the research examined the place that the 'Wonder Phone' has been occupying in many facets of life. It was concluded that the mobile is 'not only talk' - as a recent campaign slogan of one of Israel's mobile providers suggests. Rather, it is a medium through which Israelis define their gendered and national identities; it offers an experience of 'being there' and a security net holding family members and loved ones together, especially in terms of terror and war; and it provides a lifeline during existential crises around which rituals of mourning are crystallized.In analyzing the mobile phone as it is contextualized in Israeli society, two opposing social forces can clearly be seen: on the one hand, the mobile is an expression of late modernity and globalization; but on the other hand it is recruited as a tool - as well as a symbol - for the expression of locality and patriotic sentiments.

Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies

James E. Katz (Eds.)

Book Description
Mobile communication has become mainstream and even omnipresent. It is arguably the most successful and certainly the most rapidly adopted new technology in the world: more than one of every three people worldwide possesses a mobile phone. This volume offers a comprehensive view of the cultural, family, and interpersonal consequences of mobile communication across the globe. Leading scholars analyze the effect of mobile communication on all parts of life, from the relationship between literacy and the textual features of mobile phones to the use of ringtones as a form of social exchange, from the "aspirational consumption" of middle class families in India to the belief in parts of Africa and Asia that mobile phones can communicate with the dead.

The contributors explore the ways mobile communication profoundly affects the tempo, structure, and process of daily life around the world. They discuss the impact of mobile communication on social networks, other communication strategies, traditional forms of social organization, and political activities. They consider how quickly miraculous technologies come to seem ordinary and even necessary--and how ordinary technology comes to seem mysterious and even miraculous. The chapters cut across social issues and geographical regions; they highlight use by the elite and the masses, utilitarian and expressive functions, and political and operational consequences. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how mobile communication has affected the quality of life in both exotic and humdrum settings, and how it increasingly occupies center stage in people’s lives around the world.

About the Author
James E. Katz is Chair of the Department of Communication at Rutgers University and director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies. He is the author of Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life and coauthor of Social Consequences of Internet Use (MIT Press, 2002).

After the mobile phone?: Social changes and the development of mobile communication

Maren Hartmann, Patrick Rössler, and Joachim R. Höflich (Eds.)

Book Description
After the Mobile Phone? Social Changes and the Development of Mobile Communication is a book that looks beyond. It looks beyond in terms of the coming developments concerning mobile technologies, of changes in the mobile media markets, of new aspects of mobile media uses. Moreover, it expands existing theoretical frameworks, since it uses diverse approaches from social sciences, from media studies, from technology studies, etc. After the Mobile Phone? also goes beyond the usual work on mobile media as it looks at wider societal appropriation processes. It is an up-to-date survey of how mobile media are used, produced and imagined. The authors in this book represent a range of well-known scholars in the field. They come from diverse backgrounds and represent a number of different countries.
The Editors

Maren Hartmann is Assistant Professor of Communication Sociology at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin.

Patrick Rössler is Professor of Communication Science/Empirical Media Research at the University of Erfurt.

Joachim R. Höflich is Professor of Communication Science/Media Integration at the University of Erfurt.

Integration and Ubiquity
Towards a Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

Mobile communications are rapidly merging with fixed-line telephony, the internet, and entertainment. Telecommunications convergence is a many-faceted process, creating radically novel and complex patterns of mediated culture, posing new challenges to the humanities.

While the triumphal march of mobile telephony continues – by 2008 more than half of the world's population had become mobile phone users – mobile communications are merging with fixed-line telephony, the internet, and entertainment. Telecommunications convergence is a many-faceted process, creating radically novel and complex patterns of mediated culture, posing new challenges to the humanities. The various dimensions of convergence – digital, technological, socio-cultural, linguistic; of content, devices, businesses, markets, even of scientific theories – do not fuse seamlessly. The volume contains papers by, among others, Mark Turner, Gerard Goggin, Zoltán Kövecses, Dieter Mersch, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, and Anthony Townsend.

New tech, new ties: How mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion.

Rich Ling

Book Description
The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is "there"; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us?

In New Tech, New Ties, Rich Ling examines how the mobile telephone affects both kinds of interactions--those mediated by mobile communication and those that are face to face. Ling finds that through the use of various social rituals the mobile telephone strengthens social ties within the circle of friends and family--sometimes at the expense of interaction with those who are physically present--and creates what he calls "bounded solidarity."

Ling argues that mobile communication helps to engender and develop social cohesion within the family and the peer group. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins, Ling shows that ritual interaction is a catalyst for the development of social bonding. From this perspective, he examines how mobile communication affects face-to-face ritual situations and how ritual is used in interaction mediated by mobile communication. He looks at the evidence, including interviews and observations from around the world, that documents the effect of mobile communication on social bonding and also examines some of the other possibly problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in small groups.

About the Author
Rich Ling is Senior Researcher at the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor and Adjunct Research Scientist at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society.

2007

Mobile Studies
Paradigms and Perspectives

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

A new research topic has emerged in the social sciences and the humanities: mobile telephony. The volume summarizes the results of the new discipline of Mobile Studies, and opens up new perspectives on the mobile phone in the age of telecommunications convergence.

Around the year 2000, a new research topic emerged in the social sciences and the humanities: mobile telephony. Drawing on earlier scholarship on the classic phone, the internet, and the information society, and applying the conceptual tools of communication theory, sociology, psychology, political science, etc., mobile telephone research began as, and continues to be, an interdisciplinary enterprise. Nonetheless, over the years an impressive array of paradigmatic research results has crystallized into what can be termed as the new discipline of Mobile Studies. Summarizing these results, the volume also opens up new perspectives on mobile telephony in the age of telecommunications convergence.

2006

Mobile Understanding
The Epistemology of Ubiquitous Communication

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

The content and structure of knowledge are at all times fundamentally moulded by the media through which knowledge is communicated. Today, the internet and mobile telephony are essential parts of these media. Minds have become bound up with technological devices. Face-to-face communication on the one hand, and the solitary study of documents on the other, merge with a world of continuous digital networking, texts with a world of images. Education is confronted by radical challenges; a revolution in epistemology is underway.

The volume contains papers by, among others, Ian Hacking, Andrew Brook, Richard Coyne, Maurizio Ferraris, James Katz, and Mike Sharples.

Mobile communication in everyday life: Ethnographic views, observations and reflections.

Joachim R. Höflich and Maren Hartmann (eds.)

Book Description

The mobile phone has become an integral part of our everyday life communication – in this sense a domestication of a ‘nomadic’ medium has taken place. For the very reason that the telephone has left its fixed home environment, it requires us to take an ‘ethnographic view’ in describing both this development and the changes taking place therein. Mobile Communication in Everyday Life takes a closer look at the mobile phone as an object of inquiry in the tradition of the so-called media ethnography. Consequently, the bene- fits and limitations of such research designs are the focus of the book. Some contributions focus on the tension between private and public communication, others on cultural dimensions. Overall, the book presents a range of the most up-to-date research in the field of mobile communication.

The Authors
Joachim R. Höflich is a professor at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is also a leading expert in the field of mobile technologies and interpersonal communication. Joachim has published several books on the topic in German as well as many articles in English.

Maren Hartmann joined the University of Erfurt in 2004 (and can soon be found at the University of Bremen). Her research interests include media ethnographies, cybercultures and the domestication concept. She has published books as well as several articles on these topics.

New technologies in global societies

Peilin Luo, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Shanhua Yang (eds.)

Review
A strong point is the heavy emphasis on China ... China is, after all, the largest single mobile telephony market in the world. -- International Journal of Communication

Product Description
Technological advancements in the West since the last millennium have contributed to global modernity. Technologies set conditions for the closeness of the nation-states and for the affinity of the global and the local. They are also penetrating everyday life, and even sometimes the body, producing radical social changes. Yet, arguing that new technologies bring a new life and a promising future to global societies remains a questionable thesis. This book attempts to explore the relationship between new technologies and global societies, to gain an understanding of how the positive as well as negative influences of technologies bear on global societies, how their practices of use are resisted or re-interpreted by these societies, and how their social meaning is constituted through the process of negotiation with these societies. Part 1 is on science, technology, culture, and the body; Part 2 is on new media and generations, and Part 3 is on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and work.

Magic in the air: Mobile communication and the transformation of social life.

James E. Katz

About the Book
In this timely volume, James E. Katz, a leading authority on social consequences of communication technology, analyzes the way new mobile telecommunication affects daily life both in the United States and around the world.

“Magic in the air” is the most wide-ranging analysis of mobile communication to date. Katz investigates the spectrum of social aspects of the cell phone’s impact on society and the way social forces affect the use, display, and reconfiguration of the cell phone. Surveying the mobile phone’s current and emerging role in daily life, Katz finds that it provides many benefits for the user, and that some of these benefits are subtle and even counter-intuitive. He also identifies ways the mobile phone has not been entirely positive. After reviewing these, he outlines some steps to ameliorate the mobile phone’s negative effects. Katz also discusses use and abuse of mobile phones in educational settings, where he finds that their use is helping students to cheat on exams and cut class. Parents no longer object to their children having mobile phones in class in a post-Columbine and 9/11 era; instead they are pressing schools to change their rules to allow students to have their mobiles available during class. And mobile phone misbehavior is by no means limited to students; Katz finds that teachers are increasingly taking calls in the middle of class, even interrupting their own lectures to answer what they claim are important calls.

In keeping with the book’s title, Katz explores the often overlooked psychic and religious uses of the mobile phone, an area that has only recently begun to command scholarly interest.“Magic in the air” will be essential reading for communication specialists, sociologists, and social psychologist.

James E. Katz is professor of communication at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and director of the Rutgers University Center for Mobile Communication Studies, the first academic center dedicated to the study of social aspects of mobile communication. His books include "Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk and public performance" (co-edited with Mark Aakhus), "Connections: Social and cultural studies of the telephone in American life," published by Transaction, and "Social consequence of Internet use: Access, involvement, expression" (co-authored with Ronald E. Rice).

2005

Everyday Innovators: Researching the role of users in shaping ICTs

Leslie Haddon, Enid Mante, Bartolomeo Sapio, Kari-Hans Kommonen, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Annevi Kant (Eds.)

Book Description
Everyday Innovators explores the active role of people, collectively and individually, in shaping the use of information and communication technologies. It examines issues around acquiring and using that knowledge of users, how we should conceptualise the role of users and understand the forms and limitations of their participation. To what extent should we think of users as being innovative and creative? To what extent is this routine or exceptional, confined to particular group of users or part of many people's experience of technologies' Where does the nature of the ICT or the particularities of its design impose constraints on the active role that users can play in their interaction with devices and services? Where do the horizons and orientations of the users influence or limit what they want and expect of their ICTs and how they use them? This book enables a cross-fertilisation of perspectives from different disciplines and aims to provide new insights into the role of users, drawing out both applied and theoretical implications..

The inside text: Social, cultural and design perspectives on SMS

R. Harper, L. Palen and A. Taylor (Eds.)

Book Description
SMS or Text is one of the most popular forms of messaging. Yet, despite its immense popularity, SMS has remained unexamined by science. Not only that, but the commercial organisations, who have been forced to offer SMS by a demanding public, have had very little idea why it has been successful. Indeed, they have, until very recently, planned to replace SMS with other messaging services such as MMS.

This book is the first to bring together scientific studies into the values that "texting" provides, examining both cultural variation in countries as different as the Philippines and Germany, as well as the differences between SMS and other communications channels like Instant Messaging and the traditional letter. It presents usability and design research which explores how SMS will evolve and what is likely to be the pattern of person-to-person messaging in the future. In short, Inside Text is a fundamental resource for anyone interested in mobile communications at the start of the 21st Century
The book will be of interest to anyone in the CHI, CSCW and mobile communications research areas, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, communications scientists and policy makers.

Mobile communications: Re-negotiation of the social sphere.

Rich Ling and Per E. Pedersen (Eds.)

Book Description
This book surveys some of the broader issues associated with the adoption & use of mobile communication, & explores developing areas of inquiry. Mobile communications are looked at in the context of other types of mediated interaction, demonstrating the uniqueness of this form of communication & how it is influencing the renegotiation of the social sphere. The book considers how mobile communication has impacted on society and reflects on how it is used (& sometimes resented) in various public & private spaces. It provides an in-depth analysis of specific areas which complement our understanding of the phenomena including:-The psychological dimensions of mobile communication (addiction, proclivity to be disturbed by others' use of the mobile phone), -The linguistics of mobile communication, & -The understanding of mobile communication’s commercialisation. A valuable addition to any researcher’s or professional’s reading material in the area of interaction of technology & society.

When mobile came: The cultural and social impact of mobile communication (Mobile communication & society, 1).

Shin Dong Kim

Book Description
W hen mobile arrived into our daily lives... The mobile phone perhaps is the fastest diffused medium in th eentire history of human communication. Where lined telephones took over a century to reach the majority of people in developed societies starting in the late 19th century, it took less than a decade for mobile phones to sneak into peoples' pockets and bags. Since the diffusion process took such short terms in many developed countries, the study of the initial stages of diffusion was not easy in many cases. By the time scholars turned their attention to the phenomenon of mobile communication, people were already largely hooked up to the machine. The papers collected in this volume provide a valuable report in that sense. ...

A Sense of Place
The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

Issues of placelessness, the spatial and social relations created by television’s emergence as a dominant medium, have been around since the mid-1980s. With the triumphant march of mobile telephony these issues today appear to gain new significance, and are seen in a new light. Social science focussing on mobile communication increasingly recognizes that the mobile telephone is not only a revolutionary instrument that connects people globally, it is also a powerful tool for connections on a more local scale: an organizer of life in small spaces and communities. The volume contains papers by, among others, Joshua Meyrowitz, Albert-László Barabási, Mark Poster, and James Katz.

2004

2003

Mobile Democracy
Essays on Society, Self and Politics

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Mit Beiträgen von Kenneth Gergen, Richard Harper, Joachim Höflich, James Katz, Joshua Meyrowitz, Mark Poster

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

Ubiquitous mobile communication satisfies fundamental human needs. At the same time mobile telephony is an answer to challenges represented by the complexities of a decentralized global mass society – our postmodern society. With the mobile phone dissolving the boundaries between private and public, work and leisure, and increasingly even between rich and poor, some basic patterns of life, labour, love, war, travel, business, and politics are changing. This volume contains papers by, among others, Kenneth Gergen, Richard Harper, Joachim Höflich, James Katz, Joshua Meyrowitz, and Mark Poster.

Mobile Communication
Essays on Cognition and Community

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

Mobile telephony constitutes a new sort of challenge to philosophy, and indeed to the humanities. The mobile telephone is a machine which corresponds to deep, primordial human communicational urges. The term “mobile information society” needs to be reconsidered. Mobile communications point to a future which offers a wealth of knowledge, not just of information, and promises to reestablish, within the life of modern society, some of the features formerly enjoyed by genuine local communities.

Mobile Learning
Essays on Philosophy, Psychology and Education

Herausgegeben von Kristóf Nyíri

Reihe Passagen Philosophie

The potential of mobile communication for enhancing collaborative learning, and generally the changing nature of knowledge in the network age, make it inevitable that old philosophical problems become formulated in a new light. The problem of the unity of knowledge becomes once again a topical issue. Mobile learning – situationdependent knowledge – by its nature transcends disciplines. Its elements are linked to each other not just by texts, but also by diagrams, pictures, and maps. Many scientific activities today, too, are associated primarily not with printed texts, but with large multimedia databases. The problems of database integration and of multimedia search become central questions of the epistemology of the 21st century.

2002

1999