ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the rapidly moving and expanding social aspects of mobile as a focus for multi-disciplinary social research, based primarily on a set of original interviews with mobile experts in academia, industry, and the policy community, anchored in a critical review of the literature. It provides a social perspective on the future of mobile communication, based on an empirical overview of its recent global development that concentrates on the shifting dynamics of its use and social implications. Mobile communication is a relatively new development for the Internet, giving rise to notions of the 'mobile Internet'. Technical innovations increasingly aim at enabling both the personalization and scaling of mobile services. The capability of mobile technologies to act similarly to a sensor and a real-time data transmission device also improves the ability to collect information about traffic and time estimations based on users' aggregated travel time.
