“Perhaps It is a Body Part”: How the Mobile Phone Became an Organic Part of the Everyday Lives of Finnish Children and Teenagers

This chapter investigates young people’s relationship to mobile telephony within a cultural and social perspective. Unlike quantitative examinations of telephone behavior (Katz 1999), our emphasis is on ethnographic approaches. We look at the meanings children and their families attribute to the mobile telephone (and other new technologies) and the emotions directed towards them. This line of inquiry complements the social-structural and organizational understandings of the telephone (Katz 2001). The spread of mobile phone use to ever-younger age groups continues in Finland, despite the absence of related marketing targeted at children and their parents. Finland has one of the highest penetration rates of mobile phones in the world (Katz and Aakhus 2002). Currently, 85 percent of Finnish households have at least one operational mobile phone (Nurmela et al. 2000). Young people have been particularly quick to adopt the mobile phone and the Internet into their lives: in fact, according to a study by Pori School of Technology and Economics, 60 percent of children aged nine to twelve own a mobile phone. Among thirteen to sixteen year olds, the figure is close to 90 percent. The phenomenon is by no means exclusively urban: regional differences in the distribution of mobile phones are relatively small in Finland.