ABSTRACT
My starting point in this book has been to consider the cell phone and mobile technologies from a cultural standpoint. For those routinely engaged in cultural research, theory, and studies, the desire to embark upon such a study may be relatively uncontentious, and the resulting process or product hopefully a moreor-less useful contribution to knowledge. For many others, however, the very notion of cell phone or mobile culture is still something odd, a contradiction in terms, or simply indulgent. There is a very strong sense that cell phone culture, as a species of popular culture, is very much regarded as low, vulgar culture of the multitudes. While the fact is that it has instrumental uses and meets certain needs, it threatens rather than complements, extends, reconfigures or replaces proper, high culture (actually middlebrow culture, really). There is an important role here for cultural studies, as with sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines, to reclaim the sense of rich wonder and importance of the ways that people do make meaning in their everyday lives, and to make sense of how cell phone culture fits into the broad culture field and its relations to the social.
