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Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones for Society

2007; Emerald Publishing Limited; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1108/14636690710762165

1465-9840

Simon Forge,

ICT in Developing Communities

When I approached René Obermann, the CEO of T-Mobile International, about financing this study in my former capacity as Director of the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen, I found him immediately receptive.Our thesis was that the mobile phone, this piece of hardware that is sometimes inconspicuous, sometimes gaudy, sometimes used exclusively for business purposes and sometimes only for building up personal networks, and sometimes even employed cleverly in a wide variety of ways, is changing the culture of communal life: The thing is an artefact, just like the Roman viaducts or the immense water tanks which the missionaries of India's culture used to render the plains of Ceylon fertile.'The only thing is: The mobile phone is international,' I said.'But it is used differently in different cultures,' he answered.And then, René Obermann used the term 'thumb culture', a word originally coined in Japan.This term has now become the title of this volume.Our work progressed through a variety of stages: Desk research, an international expert workshop in London, a Delphi survey, and the editorial work on this book.We identified a scientific community of communications researchers, sociologists, philosophers, and psychologists in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, and elsewhere, all addressing the new cultural patterns created by the mobile phone.Our introduction presents the perspectives which changed the lives of billions of people-the acceleration mega-trend, the individualisation of communication networks, the changes that the language undergoes when short messages are sentremember the terrorist attacks of New York, Madrid, and London?-, the customisation of the mobile phone and its transformation into a fetish, and the process of mobile communication in itself.No more than two decades ago, when pioneers (such as the late Axel Zerdick, a communications researcher from Berlin, or Ithiel de Sola Poole of the MIT) began to investigate the telephone as a means of communication, many believed that this instrument (exclusively served by landline networks at the time) was nothing but a utility channel for communication.Communication by telephone seemed uninteresting because it appeared to have no influence on 'the public' or on 'public opinion' this study, Chris Locke, who co-edited the book, and Beat Schmid, the Managing Director of the MCM Institute, who held sheltering hands over our heads whenever necessary.Needless to say, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to T-Mobile International which proved itself a wise and unobtrusive sponsor.