Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance

Editors

James E. Katz, then of Rutgers University and later Feld Professor of Emerging Media at Boston University, and Mark A. Aakhus, of Rutgers. The volume collects work by an international group of researchers including Rich Ling, Leopoldina Fortunati, Kenneth J. Gergen, Chantal de Gournay, Ling and Birgitte Yttri, and Katz and Aakhus themselves.

Publication Details

Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0-521-80771-5.

Description

This was the first major comparative social-science collection on the mobile phone, assembled when the device was already ubiquitous in Scandinavia, Japan and Italy but before it was so in the United States. Its chapters report field research from Norway, Finland, Israel, Italy, France, Korea, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and elsewhere, and they share a question: what does it do to social life when everyone is reachable everywhere?

The book's answers are notably unromantic. Rather than treating the mobile as a neutral extension of the fixed telephone, the contributors document the emergence of new genres of interaction — the micro-coordination of plans that no longer need to be fixed in advance, the "hyper-coordination" of teenage peer groups, the public performance of private talk, and the renegotiation of what counts as rude.

Key Ideas

• Apparatgeist. Katz and Aakhus's concluding theory, and the volume's most cited contribution. The term names the "spirit of the machine" — a consistent logic that informs how people across very different cultures take up personal communication technology. Their claim is that the striking cross-cultural convergence in mobile phone use is explained neither by the technology's affordances alone nor by local culture alone, but by a shared socio-logic they call the logic of perpetual contact: the ideal of pure, unmediated, always-available connection toward which users orient even when the technology cannot deliver it.
• Micro-coordination. Rich Ling and Birgitte Yttri's account of how mobile telephony replaces fixed appointments with progressively refined, continuously renegotiated arrangements.
• Hyper-coordination. The extension of the same practice into the expressive and identity-forming register of adolescent peer groups.
• The absent presence. Kenneth Gergen's chapter on the way mobile communication makes a person partly absent from the physical situation they are in — the phenomenon that would later be everyday.
• Public/private renegotiation. Several chapters treat the mobile as the instrument by which the boundary between public and private was redrawn rather than simply violated.

Criticism

The empirical material is now historical: it describes voice calls and SMS on feature phones, before smartphones, mobile data and social platforms. The theoretical contribution — particularly Apparatgeist — has proved more durable than the case studies, and has itself been criticised for being difficult to falsify, since almost any pattern of adoption can be read back into a socio-logic of perpetual contact.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This is the founding academic collection for the study of the mobile phone as a social object rather than a device, and the direct ancestor of work such as Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement. Its concepts — absent presence, micro-coordination, perpetual contact — remain the standard vocabulary for describing what a phone does to a room.

Related Reading

• Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement
• Ambient Intimacy
• Mobile technologies
• Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access