Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective

It would not be hard to construct a compelling argument that the spread of mobile communications has been the most disruptive technological force of the past decade. The most successful consumer electronic device of all time (now more pervasive than television or even wristwatches), this untethered version of the familiar telephone handset has launched democratic revolutions, economic transformations, and social upheavals in developed and developing nations alike. A decade after the first of Manuel Castells's trilogy on the network society was released, this book is in many ways an empirical validation of some of the theses advanced in that gargantuan tome. In a sense, what Castells and his colleagues are saying in this book is that the network society is everything he said it was in 1996, but more so because mobile communications allow networks to embed themselves not just in social and 119 political organizations, but in our very bodies and interpersonal relationships. Mobile communications have been around for some time-it is the personal nature of today's technology and services that really makes the difference. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of the disparate body of research on the social dimensions of mobile communications that has emerged in the past decade from a wide range of social science communities-sociology, communications, geography, and others. In many ways, it should be seen as an annotated bibliography of the research to date. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the geodemographics of diffusion, highlighting both the ubiquity and various new divides in access to mobile communications. Chapter 3 looks at "everyday life" and how mobile communications are used by various social groups, such as families and workers. Chapter 4 gives special treatment to youths' use of these communications. Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 delve into various topics of the "impacts" of mobile communications-on spatial relationships, language, civil society, and economic development. For economic geographers, Chapter 1 is the most relevant and provides a comprehensive treatment of the global spread of mobile telephony and related technologies since the early 1990s. Unfortunately, there is not much in the way of a detailed analysis at the subnational level. However, this is no fault of the authors-the research simply does not exist. I have looked for years for good city-level data on telecommunications, but it is rare to find such data for a variety of reasons based on regulatory processes and industry practices. This lack of data is particularly glaring when one looks at emerging economies, where the urban-rural divide is the biggest demographic reality yet is never seen in national averages. For instance, while only about 25 percent of Chinese have mobile phones, at least 80 percent of Shanghainese do. In most of the developing world, the mobile phone is the definitive personal statement of urbanity. The thinness of the geographic treatment of this global phenomenon again appears in Chapter 5, where Castells starts to link the literature to his theories of the "space of flows and timeless time." It is one of the shortest chapters in the book and leaves many ideas underdeveloped. This is disappointing because Castells is one of those rare scholars who can effortlessly span the discourse of social theory and urban economic development in a way that captures the richness of how urban life is choreographed. In the end, this book raises many more questions than it answers. Social research has only just begun to scratch the surface of change in our untethered global society. Compared