ABSTRACT
Over the last 16 years, mobile communication has been established as an independent field of research. In mapping methodological approaches to mobile communication in five major communication journals,1 Taipale and Fortunati (2013) found that no article on the topic had been published prior to 1999. Considering that the first commercial mobile telephone service was available in 1979, it took a while for the new technology to catch scholarly attention. However, since then, interest in the topic (and in the technology) has grown exponentially. As Castells et al. (2007, p. 7) observed, “wireless communication has diffused faster than any other communication technology in history.” What followed were profound changes in the ways people coordinate everyday activities, navigate urban spaces, do business, access the internet and develop social networks. Originally a subset of communication studies, today mobile communication is an
interdisciplinary field, encompassing scholars in sociology, anthropology, American studies, urban studies and, of course, communication. Over the years, several factors have contributed to the establishment of mobile communication as an independent field beyond specific disciplinary areas. First, since the early 2000s scholars have organized several conferences focusing specifically on mobile communication in diverse places such as the United States, Europe and South Korea. Most prominently, the International Communication Association (ICA) Mobile
Communication pre-conference has been around since 2002. It started in Chuncheon, South Korea, organized by Shin Dong Kim.2 In 2016, the pre-conference had its 14th edition in Fukuoka, Japan. Also prominent is the Mobile Communication for Development (M4D) conference series, which is a biennial event that has taken place since 2008. These conferences, which focus specifically on how mobile phones promote economic development, took place in Sweden (2008), Uganda (2010), India (2012), Senegal (2014) and Mozambique (2016). Additionally, numerous edited collections have been published during this timeframe, including
one “companion” and one “handbook” (Goggin & Hjorth, 2014; Katz, 2008), along with various monographs about the subject (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; Doron, 2013; Farman, 2011; Goggin, 2006; Ling, 2004). The most recent recognition of the field was the birth of a specialized journal in 2013: Mobile Media & Communication, edited by Veronika Karnowski, Thilo Von Pape, Rich Ling and Steve Jones. While the social, spatial and political implications of mobile communication
have shifted in the past 16 years, what “mobile communication” means has changed as well. Early studies on mobile communication focused primarily on mobile phones as two-way voice communication devices. Since mobile phones were viewed mostly as mobile telephones, the spatial issues associated with them addressed primarily what happened when a telephone was brought into public spaces. People were no longer talking to remote others sitting on a chair inside their private homes; they brought these conversations into public areas. As a consequence, several early studies focused on how mobile phone use disrupted public settings with unexpected ring tones and intrusive private conversations (De Gournay, 2002; Ling, 2004). Cell phones were claimed to privatize these spaces by creating “telecocoons” (Geser, 2004; Habuchi, 2005), and were accused of preventing people from interacting with co-present others (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002) because mobile phone users were immersed in a world of elsewhere, absently present. At the same time, since mobile phones were still considered a “new” technology in the first half of the 2000s, early studies focused on early adopters, such as children and teenagers (Harper, 2005; Kasesniemi & Rautiainen, 2002; Stald, 2008), observing how they used mobile phones as expressive media of their identity, fashion items and extensions of the self (Fortunati & Cianchi, 2006; Fujimoto, 2005). For example, in Japan, Fujimoto (2005) observed how teenage girls used keitai3 straps to personalize their devices. The very first users of mobile phones, in the late 1990s, were actually business people, but this was before most scholars were interested in the technology, so there are actually very few studies on those users (Leung & Wei, 2000; Özcan & Koçak, 2003). Other relevant research during the first five years of mobile phone scholarship
focused on how mobile phones changed everyday life, as they were used for safety and security, and micro-coordination (Ling & Yttri, 1999; Palen et al., 2000). For example, there are numerous accounts about how mobile phones were life-saving devices in emergency situations, and how parents acquired mobile phones to guarantee their children’s safety (Katz, 2003; Ling, 2004). Micro-coordination, or the act of negotiating daily tasks and mobility through the city on an ongoing basis, also became much easier with mobile phones (Ling & Yttri, 2002; Rheingold, 2002). National and cultural studies of mobile phones were frequent during this time as well. These studies usually focused on specific countries, describing how each nation developed specific mobile phone cultures and unique mobile communication habits. In the beginning, most of these studies focused on European and Asian countries, since they were early adopters of the technology (Ito et al., 2005; Kopomaa, 2005).
