August 21, 2004
New Book On Mobile Phone Use
Howard Rheingold reviewed Rich Ling's new book, "The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society", about his extensive research (thousands of interviews) into the way people (especially adolescents) adopted and adapted mobile devices (both voice and SMS) from their first introduction in Scandinavia in the late 1990s.
"Ling is not utopian. He's skeptical about whether the Internet and the mobile phone will have anything near the degree of impact that the steam engine or printing press did. He wonders whether self-walled, mobile, gated communities will be the successors to today's intimate social networks of texters, and questions whether texting has any long-term future. Ling was doubly fortunate to connect with a worldwide community of social scientists who were observing the first eruptions of mobile social phenomena in their own countries. If you want to find out what the best observers in the world have had to say about the emergence of the mobile telephone as a social medium, Ling's bibliography is a great start. "
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