ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some preliminary ideas about the gendered uses of some new services and applications in the field of telephony. According to Rakow, telephone use can be conceptualized as 'gender work' and 'gendered work'. The uses of the telephone by women can be labelled gender work, because the objective is to build a network of social relations and in that way women 'hold together the fabric of community'. The chapter explores the potential of some of the telephone-related developments from a gender perspective. It focuses on four patterns of uses of the 'new telephone' which might be interesting to analyse from a gender perspective. Those patterns are the use of the new telephone for sociability and entertainment reasons, for safety and security reasons, for instrumental or functional reasons and, finally, the use of the telephone for reasons of access and availability.
