The mobile phone: Towards new categories and social relations

The debate over the social use of the mobile phone has been enriched by a large amount of information and reflection as to how this instrument has modified interpersonal relations, changed roles in the family, re-defined the limits of communicative possibilities, rewritten the present functioning of institutions such as hospitals and schools, as well as the modus operandi of criminal organizations, intensified work rhythms, rationalized the organization of work relations, in a word, how the use of the mobile has profoundly changed society.² On the contrary, less attention has been dedicated to the reconstruction and analysis of the impulse that its users have given the mobile (see its unexpected transformation, from the king of orality to a means of writing and reading). The main thesis of this article is that the mobile is changing not only society, but above all the framework in which society lives. This framework is made up of space and time as its primary determinations, which are able to integrate, stabilize and structure reality. The mobile changes reality in its widest sense, or rather its social representation. Let us remember with McLuhan (1964), Meyrowitz (1985) and many other scholars, that the medium is not only the message, but also a specific concept of time and space, that is, a specific dimension of existence. In the following sections, above all the changes that have been brought about to space and time will be dealt with, and then how the statute of the presence and absence of individuals in social space is modified will be analysed, how the relation between modern citizens changes radically with public space, and finally how the democratic process is enriched by further implementations.     

The advanced use of mobile phones in five European countries

The paper explores the advanced users of mobile phones in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the UK (EU5 countries) and aims to clarify the social meaning of advanced use. The mobile phone is seen as a strategic tool of social labour, whose capabilities are exploited to a different extent in the five studied countries. The analysis is based on a cross‐national survey data collected in 2009 (N = 7,255). First, the results show that there are substantial differences in the advanced use of mobile phone and its predictors in Europe. Generally, only about one third of the studied mobile features are exploited. British and French people are the most advanced users, followed by German, Spanish and Italians. While Italians have stuck to early developed mobile phone features, Britons especially have continued to adopt the newer properties of the mobile phone. Second, the article shows that owing to the extensive under‐utilization of its features, the mobile phone as a tool of social labour is efficiently exploited by only a small number of people. They, however, constitute technological vanguards that make use of the diverse features in different countries. This limited use of advanced features results in the new patterns of social stratification.