ABSTRACT
Mobile phones made their way into the pockets and hands of "ordinary" people living ordinary lives. While on the one hand, mobile phones have internationalized and democratized communication, on the other they are the direct heirs of two late-nineteenth-century electromechanical technologies: the landline telephone and the wireless telegraph-telephone. By contrast, when the mobile phone concept returned to favor in the 1970s and 1980s, the phoning concept was already a familiar one. Obviously, mobile telephones are different from landline phones especially because mobile phones were and are free of the wires that bound older phones, and this has been clear since the beginning of its history. The most revealing statistics on Global System for Mobile Communications success and the extent to which it encouraged the popularization of mobile phones are those relating to the increase in mobile phone users that took place in the 1990s.
