Chapter2002

Mobile phone consumption and concepts of personhood

50 citations0/0 files storedCambridge University Press eBooks

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification Media and Communication Studies Cultural, Social, and Media Studies

Abstract

Contemplation of a mobile telephone, or, in general, technology, evokes ideas about change or the social consequences of change. The implicit understanding in societal and academic terms is that technological innovation engenders a number of social ramifications. This thesis is not necessarily deterministic, defined as the notion that the nature of an object necessitates a given set of social relations (Latour, 1993). Sociologists and anthropologists alike have devoted themselves to working past the problem of technological determinism (Ormond, 1995; Bloch and Parry, 1989) in arguing that mere materiality plays no role in social constructions. In exploring a middle ground, we ask how mobile phones can be rationalized in concepts of continuity and change. This chapter theorizes how society's concepts of old and new, on the one hand, and individuality and community-relatedness, on the other, are pertinent to everyday use of material objects. We argue that all four components of these dichotomies rely on people to create and negotiate meanings for themselves. Our central claim is that the mobile phone acts as a means of providing material characteristics for these often conflicting societal concepts. We focus on the social construction of individuality through mobile phone consumption. In fact, it might be better said that the English strongly associate the mobile with the perpetual reinvention of the individual. The meaning of mobile phones can be correlated to Hirsch and Silverstone's (1992) conception of a “moral economy,” whereby members of a household compare and contrast themselves with one another as well as with other households, thereby developing identities and moralities by way of distanced relatedness.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

References

1986The Social Life of Things 1991Material Culture and Mass Consumption.1998A Theory of Shopping 1982The World of Goods 1998:Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 1994After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century.1983Man and the natural world: Changing attitudes in England 1500–1800 1980The Origins of English Individualism.

Cited by

2007Work–life boundary management and the personal digital assistant 2008The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture 2011Mobile Phones in Romantic Relationships and the Dialectic of Autonomy Versus Connection 2006Teenage Girls and Cellular Phones: Discourses of Independence, Safety and ‘Rebellion’2013Cultural Biographies and Excavations of Media: Context and Process 2009Drama, digital pre-text and social media

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.