ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 21st century, mobile communication devices are virtually ubiquitous. The attraction of their ability to potentially connect anywhere, anytime, to anyone or anything in the informational network, combined with an ongoing emphasis of the individual as the nexus of communication and entertainment, has sculptured the apparatuses into vital cultural artefacts. Their pervasiveness has rendered them ordinary and, in a sense, invisible; they seamlessly blend into almost every social activity imaginable. As such, they represent the strangest breed of new media we have come to study in the past ten years: instead of being subject to initial feverish ‘buzzification’, mobile communication devices have steadfastly insinuated themselves among us, and in contrast to the widespread academic enthusiasm that for instance the Internet generated in the 1990s, they sparked very little scholarly interest.
