Futures of Learning

With mobile phone usage now reaching almost fifty per cent of the world’s population, there continues to be an urgent need to understand the impact and influence of mobile communication practices across the globe. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective examines contemporary mobile communication and the transformations which the incorporation of mobile phones in society. Co-authored by Manuel Castells, Mireira Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey as a project by the Annenberg School Research Network, the book synthesizes a range of qualitative and quantitative research on mobile phones in an effort to “construct an empirically grounded argument on the social logic embedded in wireless communication, and on the shaping of this logic by users and uses in various cultural and institutional contexts” (4).  Framed within the rubric of Castells now famous notion of the “network society”, the authors divide the book into eight, topically oriented chapters. The book begins with a survey of the global mobile phone infrastructure and differences in the diffusion and adoption of wireless communication in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania and the Americas. The authors then turn to the everyday, mundane changes in family and work life, time and new language practices in different national and regional contexts. They conclude by returning to broader questions about societal changes spurred and/or extended by mobile communication, such as the rapid uptake of mobile phones by youth, in the developing world, in social movements and in global development agendas.

While there is much in this collective volume that will be worthy of attention for readers in a range of academic disciplines, telecommunications companies as well as a variety of government and non-governmental organizations, one of the key contributions of Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey’s analysis revolves around their attention to infrastructure and the forces that shape an individual’s ability to participate in what the author’s term the “mobile network society”.  More than a simple matter of access, the co-authors identify and explore factors which they view as critical to understanding patterns of adoption and appropriation. For example, in their introductory chapters they focus upon the role of geography and population density in shaping the rapid uptake of mobile phones across a range of island nations, such as Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and even less affluent countries like Jamaica and the Philippines.  They also draw connections between geography and population density and the relative prominence of mobile phones in urban areas. By contrast, larger countries such as the United States, China and South Africa which possess vast expanses of land and relatively disperse rural populations face a range of challenges which impact upon mobile phone penetration rates and, in turn, the ability to integrate the technological infrastructures underpinning basic adoption of mobile phones. This attempt to develop comparable concepts across national and regional boundaries is particularly useful given the scale and ambitions of the book.

Billing and pricing structures, telecommunications standards, competition and regulation also emerge as central to the adoption and appropriation of mobile phones worldwide. From calling cards and pre-paid phones to the sharing of phones, personal SIM cards, use of the more cost-efficient texting, or SMS, as well as systems of credits and remittances, creative micro-economies emerge in response to the cost and economic models of payment. While professionals and businesses continue to be at the forefront of mobile phone adoption, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey suggest that many innovations in billing and cost emerge from the more marginalized sectors of society, such as migrants, who navigate considerable economic constraints and social challenges while working away from their homes and families. Drawing upon recent research by co-author Jack Qiu, the authors discuss the importance of mobile phones for rural-urban Chinese migrants. Although there remains a wide variation in the models and payment plans, they argue that migrants spend a large percentage of their budget on mobile phones and air time, which they attribute to the desire to maintain contact with family and others in their home towns as well as an emblem of status. In these instances, migrants often become one of the main drivers for cheap and flexible service innovations in the mobile telecommunications industry at the “bottom” of the market. Similarly, and perhaps more coherently than any other study with which I am familiar, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey also provide compelling evidence that youth have become important drivers of the mobile phone industry.  Through an analysis of the development of the telecommunications industry and diffusion in different countries, they reveal how the industry began by marketing mobile phones to businesses but later discovered that youth (especially in Europe and Asia) rapidly appropriated the mobile phone. In response, the industry altered their established marketing strategies and began to cater to the demand of the global youth market. As they argue, this represents a significant shift away from previous models of technology adoption and innovation.

Like Castells’ network society thesis, Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu and Sey believe that “wireless communication technology does have powerful social effects” which reflects “the networking logic that defines the human experience of our time” (258). Yet, they also acknowledge that social practices and institutions play an important role in defining the textures and possibilities of mobile communication in society. For example, whereas many accounts attribute the widespread use of texting in the Philippines to frugality, research reveals that many of the most prolific users of SMS are in fact professionals in the their 30s for whom cost of a message does not represent their primary concern (140). Similarly, work among low-income households in Chile completed by Ureta suggests that mobility and economic necessity may not fully account for the fact that low-income families tend to treat their mobile phone like a shared, family land line rather than a device which may help each individual in the family maximize their earning potential. Such beliefs also influence the imaginative potential of the mobile phone in everyday life. In contrast to recent work in the United States where young people assert the importance of the mobile phone in terms of its salience as a symbol of independence, mobility and autonomy from the strictures of parents and the family., Yoon’s study of teens and family in Korea reveals that “the adoption of the mobile phone plays a major role in reinforcing traditional structures of family, school, and youth peer group under the cheong networks” (148). Similarly, and with respect to gender, the authors note that, “relative to Europe and America, the Asian Pacific exhibits a traditional patriarchal gendered pattern of diffusion…even in Japan and South Korea” (44) as well as in African countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, Rwanda and Cameroon. Such factors, what the authors refer to as the sociotechnical context, possess clear implications for participation and engagement. It also reveals a diversity of practices which possess the potential to challenge our assumptions about the totalizing influence of technology, as well as provide insights into creative innovations not often considered in the more comfortable living spaces of industry and academic life.

Together, the authors’ efforts to synthesize, consolidate and recognize patterns in a range of practices is ambitious in scope and brings to the fore the importance of a broad notion of infrastructure that takes into account different local, regional and national contexts alongside meaningful variations in different sociotechnical contexts. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective is also a testament to collaborative work in that the author(s) various sets of regional and disciplinary expertise—Fernández-Ardèvol’s knowledge of Catalonia and the European literature, Qiu’s extensive work in China and Sey’s expertise in the African context and, of course, Castells’ ongoing contributions to conceptualizing broader changes in society – emerge as considerable assets to the book’s ability to analyze the mobile communication in a vast number of societies. Indeed, most books analyzing mobile phones and communication cross-nationally tend to compile chapters on different national contexts, which are tied together through introductory chapters. In its efforts to introduce and analyze material from Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Africa alongside the more established literature on mobile communication practices in Northern Europe, East Asia (e.g. Japan and Korea) as well as North America, this book’s integrated analysis is distinctive. These cross-cultural (or perhaps more precisely, cross-national) differences underpin the need to think critically about our organizing categories when analyzing the adoption and appropriation on a global scale and illustrates the need for more empirical research during a period of rapid growth and change in the telecommunications arena, particularly in the space around new media and learning.  And while I am skeptical that the notion of the “mobile network society” is a particularly useful term for conceptualizing mobile phone practices in the “network society” (the “network society” also being a contested concept--see, for example, John Postill’s recent article in New Media and Society, 2008), as research on the global dimensions of global communication continues, Mobile Communication and Society will clearly hold an important place as a work that theorizes, compares and captures the contemporary mobile telecommunications landscape. 

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--Heather A. Horst