ABSTRACT
The nearly simultaneous adoption of mobile phones by people in many different societies offers an unprecedented opportunity to understand the adoption of technologies as a process involving designers, users, social conventions, belief systems, and economic forces – a process mediated through discourses about objects, persons, and everyday activities. This chapter focuses specifically on metacommentaries by users in 15 different countries as they manage a new communicative technology within established cultural conventions for moral behavior. Discussions people engage in when technologies are introduced are not merely, or only, expressions of sensation, wonder, frustration, hysteria, moral panic, or fear of change, but a vital part of technological adoption.
