Description
The author of the essay, Rich Ling, examines how the mobile phone has become embedded into society and how it has changed the way we interact with our friends and family. Ling compares the mobile phone to earlier technologies, such as the clock and the car, and shows how they all have changed the way we interact with each other. Ling argues that the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society and that by examining it we can learn more about how technology becomes embedded into society.
An examination of how the mobile phone has become part of the fabric of society--as did such earlier technologies as the clock and the car.Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted.Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family.
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