Mobile telecommunication devices have penetrated our daily lives and are used by all sections of society. Enforced by flaterates and highly technological gadgets, which combine phones, musicplayers and mobile interent access, they a central role in our daily lives. Mobile phones are used in a variety of contexts and various locations by differnt people for differnet reasons. What is the impact the growing usage and relevance has on our society? That is the central question Ling investigates in his book The Mobile Connection: the Cell Phone’s Impact on Society.

The author builds his compelling examination on several studies and provides a valuable insight into how mobile communication affects public life. He does this not by the subject of technology but rather by focusing on people’s behavior. He outlines what the new world of always-on and ubiquitous access to media means to our daily lives.

The first chapter of the book provides the reader with a general background on the topic, covering the global market for mobile phones and an short history of mobile telephony. Chapter 2 focuses of the theories used to examine the interaction between technology and society. The technical determinism states that it is technology that shapes our society and not society that influences the use and development of technologies. There has to be some consideration given to the social context in which technologies are developed. On the other hand social determinism suggests that technologies are constantly reevaluated by users who give them new functions and use. A compromise of this two perspectives is the theory of affordances which says that the pysical qualities of an object interact with the way we interpret how it should be used.

Chaters 3 and 4 cover the role mobile phones play for safety and security and the coordination of our daily lives. Two core concepts Ling analyses are the micro-coordination and the softening of time. Both deal with the topic how the cell phone is used for social coordination and how it shifted our traditional appointments from time-based to mobile-based. A call allows us – irrespecitve wherever we are and whattever we are doing – to adjust our daily planings spontaneously. It makes our lives less mandatory and interpolates time aspects.

The importance the mobile phones has on social group acceptance and for the emancipation and the interaction are in the focus of chapter 5. It covers teenagers as the main adopters of mobile services. Ling highlights how the mobile phone is used by adolescents to create a thight and dynamic social network that allows the members to have a “anytime-anywhere-for-whatever-reason” relationship.

Chapter 6 deals with the intrusive nature the use of mobile phones has in public places like restaurants, in trains or bus. Thelephony is mostly an interpersonal situation. Done in public changes this function. In chapter 7 Link examines the phenomenon of text messaging. An interesting fact he quotes is that in Norway, with its 5 million pepole, 280,000 SMS messages are sent on an average every hour. As the characters used are limited, text messaging has an deep negative influence on writting and of course on the spoken language, mainly among teenagers.

The last chapter focuses on the effect on social cohesion and sums up the main findings of the book. He does this by pointing out the significance Harold S. Osborne has made with his prognosis of future communication and the pocket phone in 1954. Ling finishes with the history of technical innovation and social adoption and a discussion of social capital vs. individualism.

Conclusion: A very recommandable book to anyone who is interested in how technology affects our daily lives and how design decisions form our society. It is also a view on our highly technological lives and especially the people living it. Very insightful and also very entertaining.

Rich Ling, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, Morgan Kaufmann, 2004, ISBN 1558609369