ABSTRACT
The telecommunications industry is not alone in targeting age and generation cohorts as the focus of marketing activity but age specific advertising is not the only criteria people use when choosing information and communication technology (ICT) products and services. The exploration of people's use of mobile phones and ICTs touches on many aspects of individual and societal identities. Age and life course emotions are present in all layers of technology adoption and appropriation. Furthermore, the communicative affordances of the mobile phone present extraordinary opportunities to stimulate or trigger electronic emotions. One of the challenges is against the frame on which to analyse this ICT use when exploring the life course. The ICT machines and the technologies that enable electronic emotions are a perturbation that cuts orthogonally through the existing architecture of life course analysis. The emotional attachment to devices, especially mobile and smartphones, and the electronic emotions they engender refute the experience of the heredity of generation.
