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- Title
Is the Cell Phone Undermining the Social Order?: Understanding Mobile Technology from a Sociological Perspective.
- Authors
Geser, Hans
- Abstract
Hans Geser considers the potentially subversive and regressive impact of mobile telephony--reconnecting the individual with a smaller, tighter social world, one which is perhaps solipsistic in its concentration on small individual social networks, oblivious to the larger institutional society surrounding it. Geser argues that the mobile phone achieves this both as an empowering technology, putting communicative power into the hands of the individual, and as a consequence of its mobility, which removes communication across society from stable and formal institutionalised channels into a de-centralised, individualised network. This freedom from the institutionalised tyranny of place and time that Geser identifies as a radical force is one which he argues points towards an almost 'anti-evolutionary' trend backwards from the homogenised culture of the many to a heterogeneous culture of the individual.
- Subjects
CELL phones; TELECOMMUNICATION; MOBILE communication systems; INTERPERSONAL relations; SOCIAL order; SOCIAL bonds; BAHRDT, Hans Paul
- Publication
Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 2006, Vol 19, Issue 1, p8
- ISSN
1946-4789
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12130-006-1010-x