ABSTRACT
A survey carried out in October 2000 by a producer in the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)1 leads us straight to a group of GSM users. It tells us about their buying habits, their use of GSMs and short-message services (SMSs), and what they spend. But who are these young people? This is the first question that the sociologist asks. What social circles do they belong to; what is their school background, their daily social and family life? A contextualization of the survey would have been extremely useful for analyzing the data collected because, behind the sometimes staggering figures on phone calls, SMS messages, and above all money spent on GSM, are young people whom we would like to know more about. Behind GSM there hides a problem of social identity.
