Mobiles in Teenage Life

8/14/2019 Mobiles in Teenage Life

1/14

61

Kids will be Kids: The Role ofMobiles in Teenage Life

Richard Harper and Lynne Hamill

3.1 Introduction

Mobile phones and Short Messaging Services (SMS) (or text) in particularare new social phenomena, much marvelled at and much commented upon(e.g. Katz and Aakhus, 2001; Brown et al., 2002; Ling, 2004; Harper et al.,forthcoming). This success is said to be because mobiles allow new levels of

micromanagement in an age of fraught and tight deadlines (Plant, 2002) orbecause they allow communities to create and sustain their own languagenetworks (Sanda, 2003: 7181). But mobiles are often criticised because theyare a distraction from true engagement with people at a face-to-face level (asdiscussed by Reid and Reid in Chapter 6) and because, along with other tech-nologies, they will dissolve the civic society (for a sample of articles onthese topics see Nyiri, 2003).

What is certain is that mobile communication, whether it be fully duplextelephony or SMS traffic, is on one hand merely people communicating,

undertaking the prosaic activity of chitchat within the frame of a particularmedium, yet at the same time, many other things too. Talking is after all notalways merely chitchat: it is made up of very many different goals, functionsand content. Indeed it can be argued that texting is a microcosm of society atlarge, as Harvey Sacks taught long ago in relation to everyday conversations(Sacks, 1992). The question that bedevils research in this area is not whethertexting, say, is an expression of a society that has not changed, nor whether itis a manifestation of something new. The problem is that society tends toimmerse new technologies in ways that make the uniqueness of the new

technology whatever those unique properties might be less important,less visible than might be wished: as a result, whether there are changes ornot is all too difficult to see.

Consider teenagers: they have been quick to adopt mobiles. By 2002,teenagers aged 1418 years in the UK were as likely as adults to own

3


2/14


3/14

their salience in our data and because they illustrate the importance of mat-ters which seem to have been somewhat conspicuously left out by much ofthe research on teenagers. Whatever the reason for this absence, these two

topics have much merit on their own and in many ways are sufficiently dif-ferent to make their juxtaposition worth attempting.They are, first of all, to do with the all too social process of cost manage-

ment, which is a somewhat oblique way of inquiring in to the patternedways in which mobile phones are paid for and how these costs are negoti-ated. The financial management of mobile telephony by teenagers is notsomething that is solely the concern of these teenagers, nor is it a cost thatstands alone among all the costs that they are, or are thought by others to be,responsible for. Rather the costs of mobile devices stand as testament for themanagement of a host of costs and this management is chronically visible toothers who might have some interest (real or imagined) in those costs. Andhere lies the rub: in being a visible philosophy, in being conspicuous aseither the costs of a spendthrift or a thrifty person, as either the costs of onewho is reasonable or wanton, and in being so costs that are measures ofother behaviours that incur costs, then these costs become the topic ofextensive and chronic social exchange between teenagers and those withwhom they share their lives.

The second topic relates to what might be called conversational turn-taking systems, including text communications. Systems of etiquette and

propriety govern mobile communication as indeed they govern all formsof communication. This section looks at how these systems are beingdeployed and manifested with this new technology, presenting some evidencehinting at how these systems, old, well practised, known yet oddly unre-marked in everyday life except at their breaking, are being used to create finebut often consequential distinctions between teenagers of different ages,gender and social connection. Further, the evidence is suggesting that it isindividuals in their late teen years who seem most rigid and elaborate in theway they impose these systems, excluding some from communicating and

admitting others strictly in accordance to certain rules of access that olderand younger age groups worry less about.

These two topics the question of who pays what and when on the onehand and who calls who, when and about what on the other do not by anymeans conclude all that could be said about mobiles and teenage life butthey do point towards some directions of understanding, towards a sens-ibility for understanding the just what of the mobile age.

3.2 The Cost of Mobile Phones Versus Costs in GeneralAs part of an ongoing series of projects with a major mobile network oper-ator in the UK,data was collected on the evolution of fixed and mobile phonesin family life. In one project, diary studies and interviews were undertaken in

Kids will be Kids:The Role of Mobiles in Teenage Life

63


4/14

households in the UK and Sweden. Some 59 persons from some 21 house-holds where interviewed and monitored. All had both mobile and fixed linesavailable to them. The research focused on the grounds for the use of either.

One aspect of teenage life studied was how teenagers dealt with mobilecosts and this in part had to do with how they learnt that spending on mobileswould be at the cost of spending on other things, what economists call theopportunity cost. It is a concept that is central to economics which is, afterall, about the allocation of scarce or limited resources. For teenagers thismeans that if they spend their money on, say, a top-up card for their mobile,they will not be able to go out on the forthcoming Saturday night, or if theydo, they will not be able to afford to drink. In other words, they are learningthat it is not possible to have everything that they might want, an importantlesson as they grow from children into adults. Now, clearly, though oppor-tunity costs may be made up of a host of aggregated factors, contingent, vari-able and/or complex, and though mobile devices may have properties thatmake these costs even more complex the existence of the virtual address bookon a mobile and its absence on fixed line devices occluding financial judgementof utility of each for example it was clear from the outset of our research thatthe cost of mobiles was and is measured against other kinds of costs. But thismeasurement was and is not just about relative value, the opportunity costmentioned,but the costs of mobiles was and is also to be understood in termsof the philosophy that a particular teenager uses for the management of deal-

ing with costs in general. And what this, in turn entailed, is how the questionof costs no longer remains in the hands of the teenager but becomes somehow and this somehow is of course the issue at hand a question for other peo-ple too. Now given that these are teenagers, these other people are not justanybody from any time and place; it is mum and dad. And not just any oldmum and dad but this particular Mum and Dad and this particular Teenager.This in turn means that the foibles, moralities and using a term that mightgive exaggerated dignity to what is an often impulsive and ill-considered mat-ter the philosophy of those parents will be brought to bear in conflicting ways

on the philosophy of the teenager in question. What starts out as a question ofmoney ends up being about very much more indeed.

One interview with a father in a UK household conveys the gist of thistake on the economics of the mobile. He said,You know mobile phone billsare about the only thing I can talk to my daughters about when what I reallywant to talk to them about is not eating things out of the fridge and nottelling anyone. I mean, they have got to learn that there are other people inthe house and the only way I can think of making them do this is by havinga talk about mobile phone bills and then I can talk to them about money

and living together and sharing things without coming across as pompous,like some Victorian patriarch.

Another example from the same family illustrates this in another way.When the mobile phone bills or direct debit statements to be precise arrived, this dad would pick them up, open them and leave them around for

Lessons from the Past

64


5/14

his two girls, late teenagers, to come across. He would put them on thekitchen table or on the fridge so that he could guarantee they would seethem. They would thus not only be aware of their existence but would be

also aware that Dad had put them there since he wants to lecture us.He was not, however, concerned with the size of the phone bills. As he putit, Thats up to them. His concern was to discuss how the respective phonebills identified certain behaviours which he viewed as irresponsible; thesecosts may have had nothing to do with the mobile phones themselves. As acase in point, he had noted that when the girls were both at home (one had

just started at University and had been home for two holiday periods), hisown fixed line phone bill went up substantially. His phone statementshowed that this was primarily because of calls to mobile phones ratherthan to other fixed lines. Now, his concern was that for many of these callsit would have been cheaper had they been made from a mobile on the samenetwork. He believed also that in many cases the girls own phones were onthe right networks for this; and that it was the girls who chose to make thecalls on the fixed line not simply or even partly because they knew their dadwas paying, but because they could not be bothered to find their ownphone. Their costly behaviour was simply irresponsible behaviour.

The reason he wanted to talk with the girls, then, was that he did not neces-sarily mind paying bills, including their own, but he did mind paying billsunnecessarily. Bills could be reduced if individuals thought about the overall

economy of the family. For him the issue was that the girls treated expend-iture as a primarily individual rather than a collaborative matter and thereforethey did not act in a way that reflected concern for others. In crude terms, ifthe girls recognised that some costs were shared then he believed that theirbehaviour would be different.Their use of the fixed line phone when a mobilewould have been cheaper would have been an instance of this. By addressingthis behaviour he hoped that the girls would adjust their behaviour for allshared matters in the house, whatever it might be. To be able to conduct one-self with respect to others was a matter vastly more important than the actual

costs of something in particular. It was, if you like, a question of morality.Now, it is worth noting that there is nothing new in the existence of diffi-

culties between parents and teenagers when it comes to the management ofphone costs be they mobile or fixed line telephony. Looking back to a studyundertaken in the mid-1990s, before many teenagers in the UK hadmobiles, it was found that Nearly two-thirds (65%) of British 1417-yearolds received complaints about cost (Haddon, 1998). Furthermore, there isnothing unusual about parents and teenagers entering in to discord aboutcosts in general. This behaviour is a normal part of family life. What is per-

haps more interesting (in being less often remarked upon in the scientificliterature) is how technologies of various sorts become the indirect pretextof such happenings. Our own prior research on the use of paper letters, forexample, found that one of the (social) organising consequences of paperbills is a pretext for such arguments (Harper et al., 2000). Paper bills are put


65


6/14

in places that are likely to ensure their noticing and this in turn ensures akind of discussion, an awareness of the bill that can be brought up in con-versation over breakfast, dinner or tea. Similarly with the mobile phone bill

its arrival, its judicious placement in a place where all can see, becomes thepretext for a parentteenager moment.Bills, particularly paper ones, their arrival and their contents are then of

curious importance to teenagers and those they share their homes and liveswith; but just how this manifests itself is sometimes remarkably attenuated.For example in the same household mentioned above, the father recountedthe following story: Look this sounds daft but I had some sausages in thefridge to make dinner and when I went to the fridge I found that (one of hisdaughters) had eaten them, well at least it must have been her. Now, they areonly sausages though they were special ones I had bought and I dontmind them eating them but now there isnt anything to cook and I dontwant to go up to (the nearest supermarket).

In the first example the father did not worry too much about mobile phonebills but their arrival was the only pretext he could think of that would enablehim to get the girls to sit down over dinner and have, as he put it,a rationalconversation about learning to share. In the instance he is reporting here, hisreal agenda was about the sausages, but he felt that the issue of sausagesper sewould be simply laughed at by his girls. He was probably right. Yet, onlythrough addressing a matter that they thought was potentially serious,

namely phone bills, could he indirectly address matters that they thoughtwere inconsequential but he thought symbolic. In short, he wanted to useconversations regarding mobile phone bills to raise the possibility that theymight start behaving in different ways with regard to other matters.

One might put this in a larger context: when these teenagers had beenchildren, they might have simply taken without asking and used withoutcommenting; as they were getting older and, presumably, as leaving homebecame increasingly imminent, he wanted them to start living in a mannerwhere shared responsibility was the norm. His view was that part of moving

on from being a teenager has to do with the ability to take on responsibility.One of these responsibilities is for household bills; another has to do withconsumption of shared goods, like groceries. The girls should cease behav-ing with little or no concern for others in the same space; they should startconsidering how their own behaviours would affect others. In a phrase, hesimply wanted his girls to start behaving like adults: recognising that if thefridge was stripped of food then others in the house might be left hungry bythe end of day, having planned to eat that same food.

3.3 The Social Etiquette of Calling

The rub of the matter, then, for these teenagers and the household that theyare part of is the difficult, socially organised process of movement from one


66


7/14

social role to another. Here a father is trying to facilitate that in the best wayhe can; though doubtless his daughters thought his efforts at best harmless,at worse tiresome; almost certainly his actions caused them to giggle. But

this change in social status is not solely achieved through the coercion andbenign encouragement of others; teenagers also contribute to it themselves,albeit that the way they do so, and the manifest consequence of this achieve-ment, may not be so visible to themselves.

This can be illustrated by looking at the issue of turn-taking on mobilecommunications, texting being one genre of these communications. In partthis argument is also about the question of the social shift in the compe-tence of teenagers, but as with our prior argument, our concern is not withthe shift in status itself, but how that shift, along with many other changesin teenager behaviour, turn out to include processes that somehow drawteenagers and the technologies they use in to the steady, persistent, innocu-ous yet coercive patterns of how things ought to be. In the first case, asregards costs, it was parents trying to coerce teenagers to act like them; now,in this second set of examples, it is teenagers coercing each other to behavein ways that are, we want to suggest, more traditional, more conservative(even) than might be expected. The coercions are those to do with the rit-uals of who can say hello to who, when and why. Instead of being machinesthat open up the possibility of a communications free for all, teenagersmake mobile technologies the pretext for making the rules and conventions

of social interaction ever more rigid and hierarchical.Approaching this from another place, where teenage practice may be

somewhat distinct, gives some contrastive colour to our own evidence. Ito(2003) reports that one of the skills that Japanese teenagers learn, with theirmobiles, is to use spatial matters as a resource for managing the social eti-quette of communication. She cites various examples of how teenagers willend a mobile phone call on the bus when that bus is about to reach the stopthey want to use; they tell a friend to stop texting when they are about toenter a class. Now, the important issue here is that in the instances she cites

the possibility that these relationships between space and action are contin-gent, and arbitrarily appropriated comes to mind. That is to say, perhaps theteenagers were not saying to their friends Oh the bus stop is near! becauseit really was near; it was rather that they were using the bus stop as an excuseto manage the call. After all, one of the properties of mobile communica-tions is that physical and spatial matters that might impact upon the man-agement of conversation are not equally distributed. Thus the caller mayhave no knowledge as to whether the person they are calling is indeed aboutto enter a class room or get off a bus. Of course it is certainly true that the

caller may have some information: the noise of traffic, for example, mayindicate that the person called is indeed on a bus; the screeching and bel-lowing of kids may suggest that the one they are calling is loitering outsidea class room. But these resources are at once an indication, auditory clues if

you like, that the caller may invoke: Oh are you about to go into class? one


67


8/14

can hear them say. But they are ultimately the tools of the one who is in thatlocation: it is only they who can deny that it is the sound of kids and say per-haps that their television is on; it is only they who can say that they are walk-

ing down the street when in fact they are on a bus. They cannot dissembletoo aggressively, needless to say, since that would be bring in to doubt theiraccounts; the point is that this imbalance of what one might call localknowledge (or situated knowledge) is such that it provides an easy resourcefor managing the process of calling.

Why is this resource needed? Why do they need to manage calls? Thisalmost sounds like adults worrying about saying the right thing, hardly aconcern that one would imagine teenagers to fret about. Yet what Ito sug-gests, and indeed much of the other research on teenage life confirms, is thatteenagers do indeed worry about this although this worrying is graded andstructured according to age.

Crudely speaking, new users do not know how to manage mobile calls atall and this results in them using the phones excessively; it is only graduallyas they move from early to later teens that these skills become more astuteand refined. These skills have many forms and their evolution is itself ameasure of the general social skills of the individual in question. InKaseniemis Mobile Message(2001) for example, Finnish teenagers reporthow tiresome they find friends who have just got their first mobile: appar-ently they phone and text all the time. Once they have got over this excite-

ment they start to use the devices more appropriately, it is reported.What this means is itself variable and complex. The same set of subjects

report differences in the behaviour of the two genders: girls treat what theyshare and exchange over the mobile as more private than boys. So girlsmodulate what they say according to the gender of the person they are call-ing. Taylor and Harper (2003) are among others who have noted that thereare ritual communications that need to be undertaken when girls and boysare going out together: the goodnight text sent from a boy to a girl last thingat night is now a social requirement, for example. Failure to deliver the

message results in a summons the following morning in the playground.Sending a steady stream of little notes throughout the school day is also ameasure of devotion and adoration; the absence of the same an indicationthat an item (an idiomatic label for a couple) is not what they once were.All these little differences, in content, in the frequency of calls, in who is call-ing who and so on, are not only visible to those involved and merely mattersof private moments; they are also matters of public interest since all are sub-

ject to the same patterns, exchanges and rituals. Boys complain to otherboys about the oppressive need to send goodnight texts; girls about the

slovenly failure of the boys to send them, and so forth.These patterns are of course somewhat varied with different codes being

applicable in different societies and cultures. A comparison between Japanand France, for example, highlights curious differences: curious since theyare suggestive that the simple views often deployed when thinking about


68


9/14

these two very different places and cultures have some merit, albeit thatthese views are treated, even though used, as crude. Riviere and Liccoppe(forthcoming) report that texting is used between persons of different social

status so as to avoid the faux pas of interruption; between intimates such ashusband and wife, no such fear is present and thus voice calls are made anytime day or night. In contrast, in France, texting is used not so much toavoid the problem of interruption as to avoid the possibility of emotionalviolence that goes with close relationships: thus girls would prefer to texttheir complaints to a boyfriend since this would not result in a physical out-burst from that same boy; the boys prefer to text their own concerns sincethe girls do not respond with tears and weeping. Somehow text not onlyavoids these all too real physical reactions being seen, they also make themless likely to happen. Girls apparently find themselves less weepy when theycommunicate with texts; boys less prone to violence.

These examples illustrate, then, that mobile technology is affording morerefined and controlled patterns of behaviour as regards who says what, towhom and when; a finessed approach to the all too human task of talk. Italso shows that teenagers around the world, in countries and places that arein many ways quite dissimilar, are beginning to develop fairly common, yetelaborate patterns for mobile-enabled communication amongst themselves.It would appear also that these patterns slowly mature as teenagers getolder: what was accepted when 13 years old is laughed at and a source of

embarrassment by the time they are 18 years. There is in other words, a self-accomplished sophistication amongst teenagers, a sophistication as regardsthe who, the when and the what of mobile connectivity.

It is now time to come back to our own zone, our own evidence aboutthese patternings and codes. Turning again to our studies of home life oneof the things that came out of our research was that this sophistication isnot only with regard to the calls made between teenagers, but also relates tothe problem of how others, particularly parents, might interfere with thesecalls and attendant rules of propriety. It appears that one of the reasons

teenagers in the UK and in Sweden like to use the mobile when calling fromtheir home, and one of the reasons why they like to call a mobile rather thana fixed line, is that thereby they can guarantee who they will end up talkingto. On the one hand, the receiver of a call can see the name of the caller, pre-sented through the functioning of the virtual address book entry associatedwith that number. This follows on from what has been reported earlier; butin addition the other side of the arrangement here has to do with sociallyinvested practice that holds that only the owner of a mobile will pick it up.Thus, a caller knows that their identity will be displayed at the other end of

their call; but they also know who will answer. The mobile phone has cometo be one of those articles that remains essentially one persons sole respon-sibility. Thus a call to that persons mobile will rarely be answered by some-one else, but only by that person. By contrast a call to a fixed line couldsummon anyone within the space in which that fixed line phone rings.


69


10/14


11/14

that provide caller line identification, when combined with the sociallysanctioned rights of ownership and control, the phones themselves are nowbeing used to let the recipients of a call determine whether they wish to

answer or not. They do so by grading their decisions according to socialrights. People, or in this case, teenagers, who have the right to call have thisright embedded in their presence in the address book: those who do nothave this right have it demonstrated to them by their exclusion from theaddress book. Membership and exclusion is not permanent. It is in someultimate sense flexible: dependent in one way or another upon the state ofrelationship between two persons. But when exclusion occurs it is indeed aheavy sanction, shifting the social status of an individual from the in-crowdto the out-crowd; from one who matters to one who does not, from onewhose call will be answered to one whose call will provoke silence.

Teenagers then, especially as they grow towards late teens, use a linkbetween the virtual and the real to manage the details of their phone commu-nications. They appear to do this in ways that can be described as rigid.Teenagers in the schools we studied really did avoid answering calls that donot have a caller ID; similarly with the teenagers in our home study. Theresult of this is that instead of being available to contact by anyone at anytime, one purported reason why mobile technology was devised, the prac-tices of teenagers result in constraints being placed on their social worlds:these ensure that only those who have a right to contact them do indeed

contact them and those that are excluded rarely make the effort and if theydo will be rebuffed.

In summary, what we are finding is that mobile technologies are allowingteenagers to work at their relationships; that this working may entail com-municating more frequently; and that it is allowing teenagers to effectivelydirect their communications to the ones they want. We are seeing also thatthey can use the technology to embody what might have hitherto beenunfilled thoughts, ideas and ambitions about who can and cannot contactthem. The result is a system of social etiquette that is at once complex, sub-

tle, highly graded and punitive: this is the work not of those who have powerover teenagers, it is they themselves who create these tongue-tied processes.Others have noted this too: to extend the list of researchers mentioned above,similar evidence has also been uncovered in Finland (Kopomaa, 2000),Norway (Bakken, forthcoming), Germany (Hoflich and Gebhart, 2003) andthe Philippines (Ellwood-Clayton, 2003).

3.4 An Historic Perspective

The question that arises from all of this is, then, how many of these are newand how many are old? What role does the newly adopted technology play inthe balance of these alternatives? In the pull towards financial responsibilityare teenagers slowly adopting what they have always been taught, long before


71


12/14

the invasion of the mobile device and the direct debit? Are the ways in whichthey limit and restrain their social worlds to those who are inas opposed tothose who are out, the kinds of rigidities that have existed before?

Turning the clock back a generation to 1967 when The Beatles weresinging All You Need Is Love, film audiences were first enjoying TheGraduate and when sociology took a very different approach to exploringits subject matter then despite all these differences in the concerns of thetime, in the methods used to explore those concerns and even in the tech-nologies being reported, there are some stark possibilities that things arenot so different. Schwartz and Merten (1967), for instance, when investigat-ing the social life of teenagers in the USA, tried to delineate what made cer-tain kids cool and others uncool. The measures used by teenagers todistinguish between these were different to those used by the teenagers westudied, just as the approach used by us and our sociological forbears in theanalytical work differs: now there is much less concern with socio-structuralfit and internally consistent ideologies, for example, much more with thelived experience of particular places and times. But all these differencesnotwithstanding, what Schwartz and Merten found was that teenagers cre-ated rigid hierarchies amongst themselves, hierarchies that evolved withage. They report: One informant described what happened to a fraternitywhich did not make the shift to socie patterns: The Lambdas arent wellliked now because the Lambdas dont drink, and the other kids (the cool

ones) are all getting to drink, and they [the Lambdas] are not well liked any-more because they look down upon it [drinking]. So now if you want socialprestige with the kids you wouldnt dare mention the Lambdas.

This could be altered to aver to mobile phones, with the Lambdas remark-ing that they are still calling everyone they know because they can, whilstothers, being cooler and more popular, know how to limit their calls toonly those who are in. Thus the issues that distinguish social groups are notnow the use of intoxicants, as it was in the 1960s, but the management ofsocial contact: a different aspect of teenage life, but one that teenagers prob-

ably find more affecting.It may be that the Lambdas and those who achieved social status through

drinking would find todays teenagers different not only in dress and lan-guage but in the major drama they make of such small things as addressbooks, and the rhythms and rights of telephony; indeed, they may findtodays teenagers unmanly and unfeminine in equal part. But these are in asense superficial details and our concern is rather whether todays world isdifferent from theirs in any measurable or salient way. Teenagers did thenand do now create their own social order, their own hierarchy. What we have

seen is that the prosody of calling and answering, of content and topic man-agement with mobiles, has become an increasingly artful practice fortodays teenagers; and that after a certain age, an inability to manage theseissues gracefully is viewed as a measure of immaturity. In other words,as they grow, teenagers themselves start behaving in ways that distinguishes


72


13/14

those who are becoming adult and those who are not. These skills and com-petences have to do with the social rituals of when to address someone, howto address someone and what to say. These are at once ornate yet every day,

prosaic yet artful. They are about the socially achieved skills of ensuring theappropriate intersections of time, place, content and persons.This intersection is not the only one that teenagers have to deal with. The

first empirical section of this chapter showed how parents used mobilephone bills to educate teenagers about economising and sharing, to create anappropriate fit between what is at hand, who is around and what needs to bedone. Is this new? Long before the mobile phone, parents have presumablytried to inculcate their offspring with their own ideas about frugality andconsideration for others; to instill a sense of the moral order of the house-hold. Who can say? What is certain is that the introduction of a new tech-nology, mobile devices, has certainly played into these larger processes andpatternings. It has done so in ways that sometimes creates shifts forward andsometimes shifts backward; that sometime forces movement to new socialpractices and sometimes changes towards an idea of how things ought to beand perhaps were, once, in some distant time before the mobile phone rangand someone was overheard to say Can you talk now? Where are you?

References

Bakken F (forthcoming) SMS use among deaf teens and young adults in Norway. In: Harper et al.(eds). Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectives on SMS. Kluwer, Amsterdam.

Brown B, Green N, Harper R (eds) (2002) Wireless World: Social and Interactional Aspects of theMobile Age. Springer, London.

Ellwood-Clayton B (2003) Virtual strangers: young love and texting in the Filipino Archipelego ofCyberspace. In: Nyiri K (ed.).Mobile Democracy. Passengen Verlag, Vienna; pp. 225239.

Haddon L (1998) Il Controllo della comunicazione. Imposizione di limiti alluso del telefono.In: Fortunati L (ed.). Telecomunicando in Europa. Franco Angeli, Milano; pp. 195247.

Harper R, Evergeti V, Hamill L, Moray N, Watson D (2000) The Future of Paper-mail in the Digital Age: An Investigation into the Affordances of Paper-mail. Digital World Research Centre,University of Surrey, Surrey.

Harper R, Palen L, Taylor A (eds) (forthcoming) Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectiveson SMS. Kluwer, Amsterdam.

Hoflich J, Gebhart J (2003) Vermittlungskulturen im Wandel: BriefE-mailSMS. Lang, Frankfurtam Main.

Ito M (2003) Mobile phones, Japanese youth, and the replacement of social contact. In: Proceedingsof FrontstageBackstage: Mobile Communication and the Renegotiation of the Public Sphere.Ling R, Pederson (eds). Telenor, Norway, Summer.

Kaseniemi E (2001)Mobile Message. Tampere University Press, Tampere, Finland.Katz J,Aakhus M (2001) Perpetual contact:Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York.Kopomaa T (2000) The city in your pocket: Birth of the Mobile Information Society. Helsinki,

Gaudeamus.

Ling R (2004) The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phones Impact on Society. Morgan Kaufmann,New York.

Nyiri K (ed.) (2003)Mobile Democracy. Passengen Verlag, Vienna.ONS (2004) Social Trends 34. Stationery Office, London; pp. 203204.Plant S (2002) On the mobile: the effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life. Report

commissioned by Motorola.


73


14/14

Riviere CA, Liccoppe C (forthcoming) France/Japan: major trends with respect to mobile phones.In: Harper R, Palen L, Taylor A (eds). Inside Text: Social, Cultural and Design Perspectives onSMS. Kluwer, Amsterdam.

Sacks H (1992) In: Jefferson G (ed.). Lectures on Conversation. Blackwell, Oxford.Sanda K (2003) The fall of linguistic aristocratism. In: Nyiri K (ed.). Mobile Communication.

Passengen Verlag, Vienna; pp. 7181.Schwartz G, Merten D (1967) The language of adolescence: an anthropological approach to the

youth culture.American Journal of Sociology, 72(5): 452468 (available from www.jstor.org).Taylor A, Harper R (2003) The gift of the gab: a design oriented sociology of young peoples use of

mobile. In: CSCW: An International Journal, Kluwer, Amsterdam; pp. 267296.


74

Documents

Mobiles in Teenage Life