Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement

Author

Amber Case. Written as an undergraduate thesis in sociology and anthropology at Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, completed in 2007–2008. Case went on to found CyborgCamp, to write An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology (2014) and Calm Technology (2015), and to establish this site.

Description

The thesis is a study of the mobile phone as an anthropological object, written in the first year of the iPhone's existence — early enough that the device's social consequences were still being negotiated in public rather than assumed.

Its organising concept is the technosocial site of engagement: the observation that a mobile phone does not simply transmit communication between two places but creates a third place, constituted jointly by the physical situation the user is standing in and the mediated situation they are simultaneously attending to. The person on the phone at a bus stop is not absent from the bus stop and not fully present at it either; they are somewhere that did not exist before the device did, and the etiquette, boundaries and expectations of that somewhere have to be invented by its users as they go.

The framing draws on the sociology of mobile communication established in Perpetual Contact (2002) and on Mizuko Ito's work on "technosocial situations" in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (2005), and applies it to a moment of transition — the point at which the phone stopped being a device for calls and became a general-purpose portal.

Themes

• The phone as prosthesis. The device as an extension of memory, navigation, address book and social awareness, to the point where its absence is experienced as impairment rather than inconvenience.
• The second self and the second place. The mediated identity a phone maintains continuously, and the negotiation required when it and the physical self are addressed at once.
• Etiquette under construction. The rapid, unwritten development of rules about when a phone may be answered, looked at, or placed on a table — a live case of the internalization of a moral code.
• Compression of time and space. The phone's effect on planning, punctuality and the meaning of an appointment, closely related to the micro-coordination literature.

Significance

The thesis is the origin point for much of the vocabulary developed subsequently on this site, and it is a useful primary document in its own right: a contemporaneous anthropological account of the smartphone written before its ubiquity made its effects invisible. Many of the behaviours it describes as novel and awkward — checking a device mid-conversation, the phone face-down on the table, the phantom vibration — have since become unremarkable, which is precisely what makes a record from the transitional moment valuable.

Related Reading

• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• Mobile technologies
• Ambient Intimacy
• Cyborg Anthropology
• Calm Technology

External Links

• Full text on Academia.edu