ABSTRACT
The framework in which the mobile phone is analysed nowadays is globalization (Castells et al. 2007). It is a matter of fact that the process of negotiation between societies and technology takes place in a global world which is experiencing changes in the organization of everyday life as well as in the conceptualization, production, and use of the mobile phone. Therefore, it is important to explore both how societies negotiate the amount of mobile phones that they need and/or which they in any case adopt, as well as their characteristics, and how the mobile phone does not elude social will, expectations, and requests (Chu 2008; Law et al. 2006; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003, 2008). Like any other technology, the negotiation of the mobile phone has to come to terms with taken-for-granted practices; its penetration has to find cracks in the organization of daily life, it has to insinuate itself in new ways in times and places shaped by relations, sentiments, and emotions, it must meet with desires, needs, mistrust, or enthusiasm. But in its turn, the penetration of the mobile phone has made more acceptable social processes of extreme relevance, such as migration, short-range mobility, the transformation of the organization of labour in a post-Fordist sense, the formation of virtual communities of various kinds, and the maintenance of a link between the world of labour and the domestic sphere (Haddon 2004; Ling 2004). If it is true that mobile phone design brings with it user design, it is just as true that mobile phone users are increasingly able to invent functions and services and then to dictate future developments of this service (Pertierra 2007).
