Thumb Culture: The Meaning Of Mobile Phones For Society

296 Pages·2005·4.042 MB·English

by  Peter Glotz, Stefan Bertschi, Chris Locke

Thumb Culture
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In Memory of Professor Peter Glotz
(1939-2005)
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Peter Glotz, Stefan Bertschi, Chris Locke (Eds.)
Thumb Culture.
The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society

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Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek
Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data
are available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de
© 2005 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
Layout by: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld
Typeset by: Justine Haida, Bielefeld
Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar
ISBN 3-89942-403-4
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Contents
René Obermann and Peter Glotz
Foreword
9
Peter Glotz, Stefan Bertschi and Chris Locke
Introduction
11
Section One—Cultural Identities
Hans Geser
Is the cell phone undermining the social order?
Understanding mobile technology from
a sociological perspective
23
Jonathan Donner
The social and economic implications of mobile telephony in Rwanda:
An ownership/access typology
37
Larissa Hjorth
Postal presence:
A case study of mobile customisation and gender
in Melbourne
53
Genevieve Bell
The age of the thumb:
A cultural reading of mobile technologies from Asia
67
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Leslie Haddon
Communication problems
89
Richard Harper
From teenage life to Victorian morals and back:
Technological change and teenage life
101
Section Two—Mobile Personalities
Jane Vincent
Emotional attachment and mobile phones
117
Joachim R. Höflich
The mobile phone and the dynamic
between private and public communication:
Results of an international exploratory study
123
Michael Hulme and Anna Truch
The role of interspace in sustaining identity
137
Leopoldina Fortunati
The mobile phone as technological artefact
149
Kristóf Nyíri
The mobile telephone as a return to unalienated communication
161
James E. Katz
Mobile communication and the transformation of daily life:
The next phase of research on mobiles
171
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Section Three—Industry Perspectives
Raimund Schmolze
Facing the future, changing customer needs
185
Peter Gross and Stefan Bertschi
Loading mobile phones in a multi-option society
189
Lara Srivastava
Mobile mania, mobile manners
199
Nicola Döring and Axel Gundolf
Your life in snapshots: Mobile weblogs (moblogs)
211
Laura Watts
Designing the future:
Fables from the mobile telecoms industry
225
Paul Golding
The future of mobile in the 3G era
235
Nick Foggin
Mythology and mobile data
251
Conclusion—Delphi Report
Peter Glotz and Stefan Bertschi
People, mobiles and society. Concluding insights from
an international expert survey
261
Notes on Contributors
289
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FOREWORD

Foreword
When I approached René Obermann, the CEO of T-Mobile Interna-
tional, about financing this study in my formercapacity as Directorof
the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the Uni-
versityofSt.Gallen,Ifoundhimimmediatelyreceptive.Ourthesiswas
thatthemobilephone,thispieceofhardwarethatissometimesincon-
spicuous, sometimes gaudy, sometimes used exclusively for business
purposes and sometimes only for building up personal networks, and
sometimesevenemployedcleverlyinawidevarietyofways,ischang-
ingthecultureofcommunallife:Thethingisanartefact,justlikethe
Romanviaductsortheimmensewatertankswhichthemissionariesof
India’s culture used to render the plains of Ceylon fertile. ‘The only
thing is: The mobile phone is international,’ I said. ‘But it is used dif-
ferentlyindifferentcultures,’heanswered.Andthen,RenéObermann
used theterm‘thumbculture’,awordoriginallycoinedinJapan.This
term has now become the title of this volume.
Ourworkprogressedthroughavarietyofstages:Deskresearch,

aninternationalexpertworkshopinLondon,aDelphisurvey,andthe
editorial work on this book. We identified a scientific community of
communicationsresearchers,sociologists,philosophers,andpsycholo-
gists in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland,
Hungary, and elsewhere, all addressing the new cultural patterns
created by the mobile phone. Our introduction presents the perspec-
tives which changed the lives of billions of people—the acceleration
mega-trend, the individualisation of communication networks, the
changes thatthelanguageundergoeswhenshortmessages aresent—
remember the terrorist attacks of New York, Madrid, and London?—,
thecustomisationofthemobilephoneanditstransformationintoafet-
ish, and the process of mobile communication in itself. No more than
two decades ago, when pioneers (such as the late Axel Zerdick, a
communicationsresearcher fromBerlin, or Ithiel de Sola Poole of the
MIT)begantoinvestigatethetelephoneasameansofcommunication,
many believed that this instrument (exclusively served by landline
networksatthetime)wasnothingbutautilitychannelforcommunica-
tion. Communication by telephone seemed uninteresting because it
appeared to have no influence on ‘the public’ or on ‘public opinion’

9
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