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.