Sunday, January 10, 2010

Negotiations in Space: the Impact of Receiving Phone Calls on the Move

Light, A. (2009) Negotiations in Space: the Impact of Receiving Phone Calls on the Move, in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, (eds) Ling, R. and Campbell, S., Transaction Publishers

It could be said that telephony has only come of age with the cellular phone, in that wireless technology allows a move from location-centered to person-centered phoning. Stripped of the cables that tied phones to a particular point, the full sense of tele-phoning (from the Greek tele = far away and phone = voice ) can be enacted. Phones are now associated with discrete voices. This reflects a change in use as well as in technology; whereas households and businesses primarily had landline phones, cell phones quickly attached themselves to individuals. Person-centered phoning embodies new relationships. The defining quality might be summed up as mobility through possession. These different aspects of the new relationship are captured by the names that the new phones have come to be known by, e.g., 'mobile' in Britain, 'handy' in Germany, ‘keitai’ in Japan.

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