Moving Cultures : Mobile Communication in Everyday Life

The interruption of personal interaction, even the most intimate, by a ringing cell phone has profoundly affected social behaviour. New communication technologies transform culture - but the reverse is also true. Moving Cultures explores the ways in which teenagers have creatively adopted cell phones and blackberries in their social and cultural lives.

André Caron and Letizia Caronia look at teenagers' use of text messaging to chat, flirt, and gossip. They find that messaging among teens has little to do with sending shorthand information quickly. Instead, it is a verbal performance through which young people create culture. Moving Cultures argues that teenagers have domesticated and reinterpreted this technology.

The authors use these findings as a framework for exploring the larger impact of emerging communication technologies on daily life. They focus on the social and cultural dimensions of the contemporary "mobile turn" - the ways in which new technologies have freed us from temporal and spatial constraints: even the simplest notions of being present or absent, being alone or with someone, must be redefined. Moving Cultures also explores the emergence of an "on generation" and the death of silence, remote parenting, the performance of identity in urban space, the creation of new languages, and technologically mediated cultural communities.