How the mobile phone changed the world

The tool, once considered a toy for the elite, has today crossed social and geographical boundaries to find its way into the hands of the young, the old, the rich and the poor, even in communities largely untouched by new technologies.

Teenagers have become the conduits through which mobile phones have found their way into the wider society. For the young throughout the world the sense of freedom of movement and the privacy afforded by the mobile are highly valued.

The young were also the first to see the potential of text messaging. But teenagers and text messaging are only part of the mobile story. Historians of technology have told of how the telephone arrived at the exact period when it was needed for the organization of great cities and the unification of nations. The mobile arrived to suit a time of mobility. Unprecedented numbers of people are now on the move, whether as commuters, nomadic workers, backpackers, freelancers, exiles or migrants.

The effects of this new mobility extend beyond these travellers: even people who go nowhere face new instabilities as traditional structures of employment, family, community and cultural life are disturbed by unprecedented movements of information, money and commodities. Mobile phones encourage and respond to this mobility.

The mobile also adds and answers to the more subtle senses of mobility which mark so many contemporary lives: the restless, noncommittal feeling that all plans are contingent and might change at any time; an awareness that life is unpredictable and insecure; and the slightly schizophrenic tone of a word in which people have become adept at doing their banking while jogging in the park.

Connecting people rather than locations, the mobile phone alters people’s expectations about what is possible and desirable and changes the parameters of their social lives. It affects their perceptions of themselves, their boundaries and capacities: it is ridiculous to compare a mobile to a prosthetic organ but carried on the person, often all the time, it is something to which people grow attached. It alters the experience of solitude, providing a stream of ways to fill dead time and constant reminders – not always welcome – that one is never quite alone.

Mobiles have changed the parameters of public space, too, blurring the edges of the private world. Visible and audible to all, their usage has rewritten many social rules about where, when and what one should communicate.