ABSTRACT
From the late 1980s, a number of new media technologies began to emerge. During most of the twentieth century, the number of media for interpersonal communication in the Western world remained relatively constant. In theoretical terms, the technological mediation of interpersonal communication allows human agents to exercise trans-situational agency. Trans-situational agency involves new degrees of freedom in the management of everyday communication, which requires a nuanced understanding of how people balance the different social contexts against each other. Ironically, and perhaps indicative of the ‘presentism’ of much work on new media, the only two personal media that had to be left out of the comparison were landline phones and letters. Popular reports about the influence of mobile phones on everyday life are often caricatures of the situational type: people who cannot plan ahead, with an attention span barely bridging the gap from one SMS to the next.
