fisharepeopletoo

The Ancient History of the Consequences of Mobile Phones

Some comments by Richard Ling on the earliest papers he has been able to find on the social consequences of mobile communication. The papers are:

Lange, K. 1993. "Some concerns about the future of mobile communications in residential markets." Pp. 197 - 210 in Telecommunication: Limits to deregulation, edited by M. Christofferson. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

Rakow, L.F. and V. Navarro. 1993. "Remote mothering and the parallel shift: Women meet the cellular telephone." Critical studies in mass communication 10:144-157.

Richard Ling's comments:

"The Lange article is available (mostly) in Google Books. There are three major consequences that he sees, these are:
One: The mobile phone will intensify and accelerate everyday life. It may “induce [] struggle for speed and efficiency” (Page 204). This has been seen in terms of micro-coordination.
Two: The author points to the possibility that ubiquitous mobile capability could portent a total society. As he says, we may lose the right not to communicate. . . There is, in some cases this sense with the mobile phone. We are often expected to have with us a mobile phone and to be available to others. It is not necessarily the case that these others are unknown persons, but the research seems to point out that it is our closest friends and family. Thus it is not a total society, but can perhaps be seen as a quasi- gemeinschaft society.
Three: Lange identifies the desire for asynchronous communication – the need to control, in his words on page 203, “to what extent information about the self is communicated to others.” There is again a type of big-brother suggestion in the comments of Lange. There can certainly issues to be considered there, but this last issue is also of note with regards to the development of SMS.

The Rakow and Navarro article is also interesting since it looks at mobile communication through the lens of gender. The authors find that the mobile phone will potentially make women more responsible for the management of the domestic sphere (Chesley has confirmed this as have several others) and that the security dimension of mobile telephony reinforces the notion of women as needing special protection.

It is interesting that these themes were obvious so early in the social analysis of mobile telephony."

Thanks to Richard Ling for permission to cut and paste this from the mobile society mailing list.

Like Dreamland and Ghostland

Lovely lovely lovely prediction of the future from 1901:

Electrical Review, June 29, 1901, page 820:

Syntonic Wireless Telegraphy. [Ayrton prediction]
    After the reading of Mr. Marconi's paper, which was published in full in the ELECTRICAL REVIEW for June 15 and 22, before the Society of Arts, in London, Professor W. E. Ayrton being in the chair, the following discussion took place...

    The chairman: Although still far away, he thought they were gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, of a time when if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a loud, electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the electromagnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. "Where are you?" he would say. A small reply would come, "I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Pacific." Or, perhaps, in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Let them think of what that meant, of the calling which went on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole; not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wanted to hear and absolutely silent to him who did not, it was almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland of the heated imagination cultivated by the Psychical Society, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws. On seeing the young faces of so many present he was filled with green envy that they, and not he, might very likely live to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

via Lynne Hamill on the Mobile Society mailing list.