Cellphones. What for? on whom?

Abstract

What have you got in your pocket, or in your purse? It is an apparently trivial, mundane object called cellphone – banal, except a growing body of scholarly literature and market research (sometimes difficult to tell the one from the other) is interested in it. True, mobile phones have been one of the fastest spreading technologies ever (Comer and Wilke 2008) –as if, in a sense, they had been long awaited – but their use reveals persistent social, cultural and national differentiation (Arminen 2007): compare for instance the cases of Japan (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda eds. 2005), Singapore (Thompson 2009), Italy (Fortunati 2002; San- guanini 2006), Morocco (Kriem 2009), Jamaica (Horst and Miller 2008) and other developing countries (Donner 2008). This alone explains the sheer number of studies, analyses and assessments.

Keywords

• Connected and People
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