Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life

Cell phones and mobile technologies are omnipresent in everyday life, yet the cultural implications of mobile phones have been neglected. This book aims to fill this gap, providing the first comprehensive, accessible, and international introduction to cell phone culture and theory. It offers a clear yet sophisticated overview of mobile telecommunications, putting the technology in historical and technical context. Cell Phone Culture is a fascinating biography of an important cultural object, that adopts an integrated, multiperspectival approach to the cultural and social shaping of technology. Goggin considers the mobile phone from the standpoint of its history, production, design, consumption, and representation, as well as its deep implication in contemporary media convergence - such as digital photography, mobile blogging, mobile Internet, and mobile television. Interdisciplinary in its conceptual framework, Cell Phone Culture draws on a wide range of national, regional, and internationalexamples, to carefully explore the new forms of consumption and use of communication and media technology that the phenomenon of mobiles represents. Cell Phone Culture also reflects upon the challenges and provocations of mobile phone technology, use, and consumption for doing cultural and media studies today.