Mobile Communication

Rich Ling, Jonathan Donner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mobile & Wireless Communications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile subscriptions. Prosperous nations boast of having more subscriptions than people. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people who could never afford a landline telephone now have a mobile number of their own. With a mobile in our hand many of us feel safer, more productive, and more connected to loved ones, but perhaps also more distracted and less involved with things happening immediately around us.

Written by two leading researchers in the field, this volume presents an overview of the mobile telephone as a social and cultural phenomenon. Research is summarized and made accessible though detailed descriptions of ten mobile users from around the world. These illustrate popular debates, as well as deeper social forces at work. The book concludes by considering three themes: 1) the tighter interlacing of daily activities 2) a revolution of control in the social sphere, and 3) the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: the quarter-century beyond the Maitland Commission Report

1 Introduction

In 1982, a conference with the imposing name of “The Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union” formed a commission to take up the question of access to telephones in the developing world. Two years later, that commission, chaired by Sir Donald Maitland, issued its report with the equally imposing title, The Missing Link: Report of the Independent Commission for Worldwide Telecommunications Development.

What many policymakers today call simply “The Maitland Report” outlined the impact of telecommunications on the effective operation of public service, commerce, health services, agriculture, banking services, etc. (Maitland, 1984, 7), and examined how telecommunication facilitates coordination and makes transport systems more effective. But it is best remembered for its stark, sweeping statistics describing the discrepancies in telecommunication services between the developed and developing worlds. The report noted that more than 50 percent of the world’s population then lived in countries with less than 1 telephone for every 100 people, and that many of those telephones belonged to offices and businesses, out of reach of everyday citizens. In many countries, it argued, there was literally no telecommunications service outside the more populated towns and cities. Writing in an era before the widespread use of the internet and mobile telephones, the commission lamented: “More than half the world’s population live in countries with fewer than 10 million telephones between them and most of these are in the main cities; two-thirds of the world’s population have no access to telephone services. Tokyo has more telephones than the whole of the African continent, with its population of 500 million people” (Maitland, 1984, 13).

The commission was not blind to the march of technological innovations occurring in global telecommunications at the time. Its report discusses the possibility of using radio in lieu of wired landlines in the service of supplying telephony. It saw microwave systems as an alternative to long-distance trunk lines, satellite systems as serious alternatives for the provision of telephony to rural areas, and terrestrial radio as a way to extend telephony’s reach. In the only real mention of what would become the mobile telephone system, the report’s authors argue: “Improving the effective utilization of the frequency spectrum is possible by using the cellular concept and other methods of dynamic frequency assignment” (Maitland, 1984, 31). However, seen with a quarter-century’s remove, it is clear that the Maitland Commission largely failed to predict the role cellular-based mobile communication would play in revolutionizing the accessibility of telecommunications around the world.¹

To be fair, when the members of the Maitland Commission were at work on their report, mobile telephony was still in its infancy – not yet even considered a yuppie plaything. Experiments in 1969 had used a cellular system to place calls on an Amtrak train traveling between New York City and Washington, DC. Only a few years later, in 1973, Martin Cooper placed the first commercial call on a handheld mobile phone in New York. However, in 1984, the commercialization of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) – the form of mobile communication that is most widely adopted – was still a decade in the future.

This, the picture painted by the Maitland Report, in many ways serves as a baseline against which to measure the digital telecommunications revolution that has followed. We have seen a dramatic change in our access to telephony, and in particular to mobile communication. Inexpensive and used handsets have made it possible for more of the world to partake of these signals. According to the International Telecommunications Union, which keeps track of these things, there were 3.3 billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2007 – approximately 1 for every second person in the world (ITU, 2008a) – and recent figures suggest the 4 billionth subscription became active at the end of 2008 (Cellular News, 2008; ITU, 2008b).

Unlike landlines, these billions of mobile handsets rarely hang on walls or sit on office desks. Instead, mobiles belong most commonly to individuals, who can carry one or more of them around wherever they go. As we will discuss in more detail in the pages that follow, mobile phone users are more reachable than ever before, and can reach out to others more easily than ever before. If the explosion in connectivity is the first major theme of the mobile boom, then this new level of reachability is the second.

This dramatic explosion in mobile telephony since the publication of the Maitland Report is a one-time occurrence. We will never see it again. In this book, we wish to examine the consequences of that change and to explore how it is working its way through society. We will look at how it affects the lives of people from around the world and how academicians are trying to describe its impact. We will look at the positive as well as the negative impacts of the mobile phone. Finally, we will examine how the mobile phone provides us for the first time with a mediated form of individual addressability.

Transitions such as this are rare, yet it is in such moments that the interaction – or should we say clash – between the technology and the accepted way of doing things gives us a chance to see the inner functioning of society. To put this into a sociological perspective, it is as though we are experiencing a type of breaching experiment (Garfinkel, 1967). Those who are familiar with Garfinkel’s breaching experiments know that they were designed to give us the opportunity to see how we respond when the rules of society are changed. The unprecedented altering of expectations shows us how people understand the unforeseen situation and how they patch together a way of making sense.

In many respects, common questions and tensions surrounding mobile communication use allow us to take stock of what constitutes appropriate social interaction. Do mobile phones encourage political protest? Do we need to respect the sanctity of time-based appointments since we can easily renegotiate them as needed? What are our feelings towards free communication between teens? Should we always be available to everybody? What attentions do we owe co-present interaction when competing with the allures of talking with a friend?

The transition from a world of landlines to a world of mobiles provides us with a unique chance to gain insight into how a personal technology affects social organization, both for the better and for the worse. After the boom is complete and mobile use becomes the worldwide norm, it will become harder once again to discern these interactions between mobile communication and society. If we squander this chance to study mobile use, it will not come again.

2 Increased connectivity: mobiles sweep the world

The first decade of the twenty-first century may be remembered as the historical moment when the majority of the world’s population first secured easy and affordable access to telephones. Of course, the telephone was invented in the nineteenth century, and it steadily gained in popularity and complexity throughout the twentieth century. In fact, between 1976 and 2000, the number of landlines in use nearly quadrupled. By the turn of the millennium, there were 1.7 billion telephones on the planet: 983 million landlines, and 740 million mobiles.

While the PC and the internet have received much attention, it is the mobile telephone that has enjoyed a quick and broad level of adoption. In 2006, there were about 10 internet and 32 mobile phone users per 100 persons in the world (ITU, 2008a). The telecommunications story of the first decade of the twenty-first century is undoubtedly mobile. Between 2001 and 2010 the planet will probably add another 400 million landlines, and a staggering 3 billion new mobile subscriptions. If these estimates about the near future are to be believed, there may be over 5.4 billion telephone subscriptions on the planet in 2010, 1.4 billion landlines and at least 4 billion mobile subscriptions (Cellular News, 2008; GSM Association, 2008; ITU, 2008b).

Sources: ITU, GSM Association

Figure 1.1 Worldwide landline and mobile subscriptions, 1975–2010 (est.)

We stress “may” at this point, because both the historical and projected estimates in figure 1.1 are aggregations, compromises and best guesses (James & Versteeg, 2007; Sutherland, 2008). The staff of the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body in Geneva, has gathered estimates by querying member states and telecommunication companies (or “telecoms”) from around the world, who in turn have gathered their estimates by polling individual operators and national regulators. They have settled on subscriptions, in overall and per-person terms, as a common mode of measuring and comparing mobile use around the world and over time.

Counting subscriptions, however, can be problematic since many users are missed in the count. Some users will take advantage of formal mobile payphones that are run as businesses (Aminuzzaman, Baldersheim & Jamil, 2003; Bayes, 2001), while others use informal ones where payment can be in the form of reciprocity (Sey, 2006). Countless others will share phones within a family (Chavan, 2007; Goodman, 2005; Konkka, 2003; Samuel, Shah & Hadingham, 2005), to place and receive calls even if they cannot afford a handset or subscription of their own. In some cases, subscribers purchase only the SIM card² and borrow the handset of a friend or neighbor until they can afford a handset. Looking at the situation in Asia, Zainudeen et al. (2007) found that, across four countries with relatively low aggregate mobile phone penetration (Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines and Sri Lanka), something over 90 percent of the respondents had used a phone in the previous three months. They reported that 80 percent of the respondents were within a five-minute walk to the nearest telephone.

In other ways, counting subscriptions can overestimate the number of people with a subscription, or the number of active subscriptions. We have seen numerous countries surpass 100 percent in terms of penetration. For example, in 2006 the ITU reported that Norway had 108.6 subscriptions per 100 persons. Yet during the same period, data from a random sample of 1,000 Norwegians aged 13 or older indicated that 92.8 percent “Owned their own mobile phone.”³ When asked, about 7 percent of the teen and adult population said that they did not have a mobile phone. If there are 108.6 subscriptions per 100 persons but only 92.8 percent of the people over 13 say they have a mobile phone, something is clearly awry with the numbers. Apart from “dead” subscriptions (subscriptions that are still on the telecom’s books but which the subscriber no longer uses), it is clear that some people have more than one subscription. In the year 2000, about 13 percent of teens in Norway reported that they had two or more telephone subscriptions (Ling, 2004). The motivation is often to save money by “SIM switching,” that is, for example, selecting the subscription that is the least expensive at a given time during the day. Similarly, although many prepay SIMs are discarded by users, operators sometimes carry these dead and dying subscriptions on their books for months or years after users have given them up.

Thus, while estimates suggest that by 2010 there will be at least 5.4 billion fixed and mobile subscriptions on the planet, this does not mean that 5.4 billion people own a telephone. Nevertheless, we can get closer to a back-of-theenvelope estimate of the number of telephone owners in a couple of steps. First, we discount the mobile figures for over-counting subscribers. Sutherland (2008) suggests that, of the 3.3 billion mobile subscriptions active at the end of 2007, perhaps 500,000 should be removed as over-counts. Keeping that same proportionality, if we discount the newer 4 billion mark by the same proportion Sutherland uses, we would arrive at an estimate of 3.4 billion active mobile subscriptions. Second, we can discount the mobile figures by contrasting those who have a mobile subscription and a landline subscription, and those who have only a mobile subscription. Hamilton (2003) contrasts mobile phones as complements (among users who add a mobile line to a fixed line) and as substitutes (among those who have only a mobile). In prosperous countries, some people, particularly youth, are giving up landlines by choice (Blumberg & Luke, 2007). For hundreds of millions of other users, particularly in the developing world, the mobile is the only affordable option. With this distinction in place, we can isolate the mobiles used as substitutes for landlines as the ones that add to the proportion of the world’s population that has a telephone. To be conservative, let’s assume that in 2010 there will be 1.4 billion landlines and 3.4 billion active mobile subscriptions. Let’s further presume that every single landline in the world is paired with a complementary mobile – that the first 1.4 billion mobile subscriptions sold do nothing at all to raise the proportion of the world’s population owning a telephone. That would still leave 2 billion unpaired, substitutive mobile subscriptions in 2010. Roughly speaking, 2 billion “mobile only” subscribers and 1.4 billion “landline plus mobile” subscribers, would sum to 3.4 billion subscribers . . . just about “half the world” of 6.8 billion people by 2010.

Until we have worldwide surveys counting users rather than subscriptions, our numbers will remain approximate. However, the relatively recent arrival, and even more recent sudden uptake, of mobile use around the world is staggering. The arrival of mobiles has, in one decade, roughly tripled the total number of ways to connect to the world’s telecommunication grid (so too have PCs and internet telephony, but that’s a story for another day). At the same time, perhaps 2 billion people acquired their first telephone during the decade.

Most of these new first-time telephone owners will be mobile owners, and most of them are in the developing world. As of 2008, 58 percent of the world’s mobile phones are in these countries (UNCTAD, 2008). As figure 1.2 illustrates, China is the world’s largest mobile market; India will soon overtake the USA as the second largest (IE Market Research, 2008). Figure 1.2 also illustrates that, even with this recent surge in mobile use, mobile subscriptions are not evenly distributed across the globe. Of the ten countries with the most mobile subscribers in 2007, four were from large prosperous nations in the Global North, five were large nations in the developing world (Global South), and one, Russia, is a transitional economy. Although the gap is closing, the prosperous nations have higher penetrations (use per 100 citizens) of mobile subscriptions than poorer nations. Like Norway, mentioned above, Germany and Italy (shown on figure 1.2) each have more mobile subscriptions than people; India had the lowest penetration among the top-ten markets with less than 20 mobiles per 100 persons. Eritrea (1.44 per 100) and the tiny islands of Kiribati (0.75 per 100) had the lowest penetrations among all countries reporting data to the ITU in 2007.

Sources: ITU ICT-Eye, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/, GNI from World Bank Development Indicators, www.worldbank.org/data/dataquery.html

Figure 1.2 Where the mobiles are, 2007

Why the boom? It is usually less expensive to install and maintain a cellular tower to serve a neighborhood or village than it is to bring the necessary landline cables across landscape into individual households. This fundamental difference has changed the coverage–access–ownership equation (Donner, 2005; Dymond & Oestmann, 2003) for millions of people who were unable to own a landline, or even in some cases walk to a payphone. Indeed the World Bank estimates that, by 2005, 77 percent of the world’s population lived under a mobile signal (World Bank Global ICT Department, 2005).

This increase in what is known as “teledensity” has social impacts in more prosperous parts of the world, as well. In one such area, namely Scandinavia, material from the national census bureau in Norway revealed that, quite literally, all 15-year-olds had a mobile phone.⁴ That is, the national census bureau with their advanced forms of random selection and their exhaustive survey recruitment techniques were not able to find 15-year-olds who did not have a telephone. This, too, is a profound change, one with social implications for family dynamics, for public safety and public protest, for work–life balance and for the meaning of adolescence itself. We will revisit some of these questions in the next section, and later in the book.

3 Increased reachability: social consequences of the mobile phone

The mobile telephone changes the way we communicate with one another. Instead of calling to a fixed geographical location as is the practice with the landline device, we call to an individual, wherever they may be. It also allows us to interlace our telephonic communications (and our text messages) into the weave of our other activities.

The mobile phone has developed into a type of safety link for those who would otherwise be tied to physical locations. It has changed the way that we coordinate, or perhaps micro-coordinate, our meetings and our daily interactions. It has become the de rigueur accessory and it has given rise to the practice of text messaging. It has changed the way that teens interact with parents and with peers and it has changed the dynamics of social networks and the development of social cohesion.

In a very short time, the device has had a major impact on the way we interact and organize our lives. Mobile telephones are used by teens to make and break appointments and to keep their friends updated. Texting, a concept that barely existed a decade ago, is used by teens and interestingly also by deaf persons to communicate (Bakken, 2005). It can be used by students to keep track of their social network while they are in class and it can be used by groupies to follow the movements of celebrities such as the UK’s Prince William or, for those with a more decadent bent, Paris Hilton.

Lovers use the mobile to exchange endearments. Soccer Moms (and Dads) coordinate their kid’s next pick-up. Protestors use mobile to outwit police and rattle governments. In the developing world it has spawned “telephone ladies” in Bangladesh (Singhal, Svenkerud & Flydal, 2002) and “umbrella ladies”⁵ in Ghana (Sey, 2006), not to mention texting matchmakers in the Philippines (Ellwood-Clayton, 2003). Fishermen in the Indian state of Kerala use the device to find the best price for their daily catch (Jensen, 2007). Stressed-out small business owners around the world grab their handsets to take orders and find suppliers (Donner, 2005). Many workers, formerly desk-bound, can carry out their jobs while away from the office or even during leisure time – for example, you could be a poolside real estate sales person. The mobile phone is also used in the pursuit of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Content
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1: Introduction: the quartercentury beyond the Maitland Commission Report
• 2: Short history of mobile communication
• 3: Mobile communication in everyday life: 3 billion new telephones
• 4: Mobile communication in everyday life: new choices, new challenges
• 5: Debates surrounding mobile communication
• 6: Conclusion: individual addressability, interlacing and the spillover of the control revolution
• Notes
• References
• Index