Taken for grantedness : the embedding of mobile communication into society / Rich Ling.
By: Ling, Richard Seyler [author.]
.
Contributor(s): IEEE Xplore (Online Service) [distributor.] | MIT Press [publisher.].
Material type: 
BookPublisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, c2012Distributor: [Piscataqay, New Jersey] : IEEE Xplore, [2012]Description: 1 PDF (256 pages).Content type: text Media type: electronic Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9780262304344; 9780262305266.Subject(s): Communication and culture | Interpersonal communication -- Technological innovations -- Social aspects | Mobile communication systems -- Social aspects | Cell phones -- Social aspectsGenre/Form: Electronic books.Additional physical formats: Print version: No titleDDC classification: 303.48/33 Online resources: Abstract with links to resource Also available in print.Summary: Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted. Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Restricted to subscribers or individual electronic text purchasers.
Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted. Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family.
Also available in print.
Mode of access: World Wide Web
Description based on PDF viewed 12/23/2015.
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