Introduction

While acknowledging that cell phones are a transformative technology whose implications we’ve only begun to understand, this chapter introduces the devices in the context of the history of ideologies about communicative mediation, beginning with their relation to beliefs and longings for intimacy. The chapter then turns to the ways in which those ideas about intimacy are inscribed, fixed, and materialized through the concrete features of a device produced, distributed and consumed through globalized chains of monetary and material supply and production. The various chapters illustrate these themes.