Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society

Citation

Forge, S. (2007), "Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society", info, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 84-85. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636690710762165

1 The thumb becomes the business

A subtitle such as “The meaning of mobile phones for society” gives us the theme straight away. Glotz et al. bring us a series of papers, a compilation of industry viewpoints, on “thumb culture”. It is packed full of useful and thoughtful social perspectives, with insights on the mobile penetration of society, from a range of commentators in academia, the suppliers and industry players including the ITU (Lara Srivastava) – the telecommunications industry being particularly well represented.

The book is divided into three sections. It starts by looking at cultural identity and forms of usage and then regards transformation of personalities by mobile and finally the industry perspectives. Its conclusion takes the form of a report from a Delphi survey on questions of what are the social trends in mobile communications usage, in terms of forms of relationships, dependence, behaviour, demography, privacy, accessibility and the types of interchange, etc.

The actual experience of design of a mobile handset is even included, complete with dubious cultural references and the gnawing wonder of how it all pays for itself. What is so interesting is that the exploration of the sociology of mobile communications here throws up many themes which have been consistent over ten or 12 years, except that now they are taken down carefully and respectfully analysed. In contrast, a decade ago, especially within the mobile industry, the sociology of usage and its effects on design were not taken too seriously. We see the same concepts again – the paradox of indoors/outdoors, of intimate/public mixes and mergers (“interspaces”) the idea of wearable icons of self, especially for women, that have traditionally figured in exploration of handset design. But now notice is taken of it.

One new facet explored here is the thumb culture itself (as in SMS messaging) especially in the usage of the asynchronism of communications and the impacts for social contacts, with its traces in the affordability of communications, driven by the disposable income of its main users. SMS offered a new strategy to cope with outrageous mobile voice bills and equally important, the fear of them. However, over the last three years we have also seen differences to prior social trends in two directions – first, the use of new technology add‐ons, particularly digital cameras for stills and full‐motion video, and second, the social extension of the mobile in combination with internet capabilities for more than one‐to‐one communications. For example, one current general social trend is to a more public sharing of everyday personal life in explicit terms, even perhaps a form of self‐promotion. This may be published more easily through the mobile world because a mobile device is now available to nearly all in society, and on a ubiquitous 24‐hour basis. Mobile blogs (or moblogs) based on SMS have grown in number, detail and degree of self‐expression. Photos from camera phones form part of the blog, underlining the self in self‐expression. Whether one takes them seriously or not – blogs (weblogs) were recently said to be read by only 1 per cent of the USA's radio audience, to put blogs as a media channel in perspective – the figures can be looked at in another light, by saying what is this notional 1 per cent worth to advertisers and content providers?

Perhaps of most interest is the analysis of the universality of an emerging mobile culture across differing political systems, ethnicities and levels of disposable income. Genevieve Bell's review of mobile usage in Asia is practically nail biting in its non‐put‐downedness, leading on to its exposure of “intimate discourse”. Again we see the old driver – safety and security, traditionally at least a forty‐niner in percentage terms of motivation to buy. But we also see the embedding of ritual behaviours of societies, perhaps reflected in classifications of greetings, using a heralding ring‐tone to signal the class of the caller. We see the deep penetration of non‐voiced communications across Asia, with 100 million SMS messages per day being sent in South Korea in 2005, and even though in China users must navigate a qwerty keyboard for pinyin to Mandarin, SMS traffic is heavy. A social footnote found in China is that perhaps for the first time in the world's history, arthritis of the fingers is preventing long‐distance communication.

At the end of the book we are left with a question – just what is a mobile phone? Really? It is evidently far more than a device to speak into. Is it a social movement?

Altogether a jolly riveting read.