“The affluent society is a society of voyeurs. To each their own
kaleidoscope: a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes.
You can’t lose: two fridges, a mini car, TV, promotion, time to kill,
then the monotony of the images we consume gets the upper hand,
reflecting the monotony of the action which produces them, the slow
rotation of the kaleidoscope between finger and thumb.”
The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem
It
has taken around a decade for levels of ownership of mobile phones to
reach 90% in some European demographic groups (1). The implications and
behaviour modes related to the mobile phone as a cultural artefact are
of interest as social phenomena and as indicators of the impact
Information Technologies (IT) are having on Western Cultures in other
areas of implementation (i.e. Internet, P.C., Satellite). I shall
briefly attempt to outline examples of how this product is presented to
consumers in some European markets today (the signs), some of what
consumers are using the product for (the signified), and one of the many
functional implications of this interaction in regards to the mobile
phone as an artefact of culture.
“A life management tool for
business, office, and leisure” (2) is the rather all-encompassing
statement made by the Nokia Corporation when they released the Nokia
9210 Communicator. The Communicator is “a cellular phone with mobile
Internet, PC office applications and multimedia capabilities” (3).
Although the Nokia Internet site promotional video features images of a
man and woman singing happy birthday on a phone screen to the user (who
seems to be alone for the occasion), the primary focus in relation to
applications of the phone are work related (although there are several
game applications available). Nokia state that they are “Connecting
People” as its logo, while Vodafone asks, “How are you?” in a recent
television advertising campaign. Vodafone and Motorola market a “Teenage
Phone” with special text message features, the ability to “personalize”
the phone with choices of visual displays, ring tones and colour cases.
France Telecom has started marketing a prepaid cell-phone service
designed for 7- and 8-year-old children (4). It is clear from these few
examples that mobile phones are marketed toward the young and the
employed, resulting in an accommodation of the artefact throughout the
community. In all the advertising and information examined for this
essay the elderly were completely unrepresented.
Mobile phones are of
course a commodity and therefore the deciding factor of legitimate
ownership is money. This point raises an aspect of deviancy in regard to
mobile phones, that of mobile phone theft. Judging by media coverage
and even a parliamentary debate in Britain, this is deemed a growing
problem particularly in London, where people are being “Connected” in an
entirely different setting to that initially thought of by the Nokia
Corporation. Quoting from the letters section of The Guardian, a girl
who is dealing with the realities of mobile phone ownership in an area
of poverty writes: “Over the past year or so, I've had two phones
stolen, or "jacked" and I've been threatened with a knife countless
times. Someone tries to jack me probably every week……….. I would never
walk down the road playing with my phone. It shows you have something
worth stealing…” (5). The present situation in Sweden is somewhat
different with mobile phone ownership running considerably higher among
teenagers than in Britain.
Cultural researchers in central Gothenburg
conducted their study on phone sharing based on observations conducted in cafes
and on public transport. The research assessed how teenagers use their mobile phones,
and the surprising result was that many groups of friends share phones,
even if they have phones of their own on their person (6). The subjects
involved in the study had no reservations about displaying their phones
in public, even going so far as leaving them unattended on cafe tables
for short periods of time. With the Scandinavian countries having the
highest percentage of mobile phone users among youth in the world,
perhaps the impact (novelty, desiring, curiosity) of a mobile phone is
considerably less. A final interesting point regarding users of mobile
phones is the high degree of uptake by females. It has been stated that:
“numerous studies show that technology is associated with masculinity”
(7). However, mobile phones are an area of technology where women are
equal if not above males in usage.
It is clear that many believe
themselves to be “Connected” when owning or using a mobile phone. The
idea of being “off-line” was viewed with great negativity in the
Gothenburg study, hence the loaning of phones within the groups of
friends to remain “Connected”. However, when the issues of mediation or
representation are included in the equation then the exact nature of
“Connecting” is not as clear as Nokia would have consumers believe. The
“Tracking” element of mobile phones for example, where users can be
positioned moving toward and away from appointments by a phone call
inquiry (in essence the meeting is beginning or continuing or is it?).
With this mediated communication taking an expanding role in daily life,
the eventual necessity of being connected 24 hours a day 7 days a week
becomes realisable. “Business” has the possibility of spilling out from
the “Office” and into “Leisure”, connected by the invisible lines of
microwave communication, and therefore defined by it.
Notes:
1. Mobile Phones, WAP and the Internet- The European Market and Usage
Rates
in a Global Perspective; 2000-2003 [SUMMARY] by Carl H. Marcussen,
Senior Researcher, PhD, Centre for Regional and Tourism Research,
www.crt.dk, Denmark
2. Consumption As Knowledge Production –Narrating the Use of the Communicator
Päivi Eriksson (Eriksson@hkkk.fi) and Johanna Moisander (moisander@hkkk.fi)
Helsinki School of Economics
3.ibid
4. Business Week Online July 12 1999 Issue. At:
http://www.businessweek.com
5. Guardian Unlimited Homepage Special reports “Be Prepared and Be Polite”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/
6.
Local Use and Sharing of Phones A. Weilenmann & C. Larson. In B
Brown, N Green & R. Harper (Eds.) Wireless World: Social and
Interact ional Aspects of the Mobile Age. Godalming and Heidelberg:
Springer Verlag pp 99-115
7. Eriksson & Moisander p5
Further Bibliography:
Vaneigem
R. The Revolution of Everyday Life Being a translation of TRAITÉ DE
SAVOIR-VIVRE Á L’USAGE DES JEUNES GÉNÉRATIONS by John Fullerton and Paul
Sieveking 1972 anti-copyright 1998
