Towards a Philosophy of the Mobile Information Society

Abstract

This introductory section of my present paper is a kind of report on the ongoing social science research programme I am directing: the project “Communications in the 21st Century”, launched in January 2001, conducted jointly by T-Mobile Hungary (until 2004 Westel Mobile) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In the framework of the project a number of international conferences were held, on the basis of which altogether eleven volumes—four Hungarian, one German, and six English—have been published. I will first give a very brief summary of these volumes, and then provide a more detailed description of some of the main results we arrived at. The eleven volumes are witness to the history of the mobile phone between 2001 and 2007, no doubt the most dynamic aspect of the recent history of technological and social transformation. But most of all they amount to a first laying of the foundations for, and at the same time the awakening to consciousness and self-reflection of, a young discipline: the social science of mobile communication. Initially, research on problems pertaining to the mobile arose as an interdisciplinary task. From the interdisciplinary research, each of the participating disciplines pro?ted, being forced to take account, on the level of theory, of the new medium which by now has come to constitute their main communicational environment. As a consequence of this taking account of the new realities, by 2005 a transformation was occurring which today has clearly become irreversible: the internal adaptation of the social sciences to the world of mobile communications. At the same time, an autonomous line of research emerged, based on a set of wellestablished paradigms of its own: the social science of mobile communication, Mobile Studies. Both aspects of this juncture in the history of science are represented in Nyíri (2007a, 2007b), which on the one hand takes stock of the paradigmatic results of mobile studies, and on the other hand highlights some new perspectives of the social sciences becoming aware of their mobile environment.

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