Moving Cultures

by Caron, Andre H.

• ISBN13: 9780773532304
• ISBN10: 0773532307
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ Pr

Summary

The interruption of personal interaction, even the most intimate, by a ringing mobile phone has profoundly affected social behaviour. New communication technologies transform culture - but the reverse is also true.Moving Culturesexplores the ways in which teenagers have creatively adopted mobile phones and blackberries in their social and cultural lives. André Caron and Letizia Caronia look at teenagers' use of text messaging to chat, flirt, and gossip. They find that messaging among teens has little to do with sending shorthand information quickly. Instead, it is a verbal performance through which young people create culture.Moving Culturesargues that teenagers have domesticated and reinterpreted this technology. The authors use these findings as a framework for exploring the larger impact of emerging communication technologies on daily life. They focus on the social and cultural dimensions of the contemporary "mobile turn" - the ways in which new technologies have freed us from temporal and spatial constraints: even the simplest notions of being present or absent, being alone or with someone, must be redefined.Moving Culturesalso explores the emergence of an "on generation" and the death of silence, remote parenting, the performance of identity in urban space, the creation of new languages, and technologically mediated cultural communities.

Author Biography

Andre H. Caron is the Bell Chair and director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Emerging Technologies (CITE) at Universite de Montreal Letizia Caronia is associate professor, education, University of Bologna

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Transcription Conventions	p. xi
Introduction	p. 3
New Social Scenarios	p. 13
Looking for the "Where" and "Who" of Our Communications	p. 13
Delocalization	p. 32
Multilocalization	p. 17
From Identity to Identification	p. 18
The Chronic Symptoms of Our Time	p. 19
Wasting Time to Save Time	p. 20
Technologies in the Rear-View Mirror	p. 21
Synchrony, Asynchrony, Polychrony	p. 22
The Death of Silence?	p. 32
Seeking Noise	p. 24
Seeking Silence	p. 27
Communication: Between Noise and Silence	p. 28
Social Actors: Locations and Links	p. 31
Speaking Objects, Acting Words: New Communication Practices	p. 32
Technologies and Everyday Construction of Culture	p. 32
Technologies as Statements: The Performative Force of Social Objects	p. 36
Technologies That Make Us Do	p. 40
The Contemporary "Nutcracker": The Cascade Effect and the Interrelation of Technologies	p. 42
Reflexivity at Play: The Interaction between Technology and Culture	p. 44
The Discursive Origin of the Meaning of Things	p. 46
Common Sense, Technologies, and Daily Life	p. 47
Doing with Words: Language, Interaction, and Culture	p. 50
Individual Sense-Making and Dominant Discourse	p. 52
Discourse on Technologies as a Meaning-Making Device	p. 54
Life Stories of Technologies in Everyday Life	p. 58
How to Domesticate Technology	p. 60
Life Stories of Technological Objects	p. 61
Geographically Migrating Technologies	p. 63
Unexpected Uses: When New Technologies Perform Old Functions	p. 66
A Cascade of Adoptions and a Cascade of Communications	p. 69
From Communicating Something Urgent to the Urgency of Communicating: Reasons for Adoption and Anticipated Uses	p. 71
Now Playing: Mobiles, Discourses, and Advertising	p. 78
Discourses of the Past and Simple Future	p. 79
Type and Stereotype	p. 81
Kitsch and Discriminatory Humour	p. 84
Talk Young, Talk Ads	p. 88
And Elsewhere	p. 89
Communicating at Any Price and All Cost	p. 90
All Included, Even Friends?	p. 93
Differences in Similarity	p. 94
Mobile for Every Situation	p. 97
Language, Interaction, and Mobile Culture: Field Research among Teenagers	p. 102
New Rites of Passage: Technology Ownership as Symbolic Threshold	p. 103
Linguistic Creativity and Cultural Innovation	p. 105
Teenagers' Mobile Culture: The Shaping Role of Everyday Discourse	p. 108
Making the Familiar Strange: A Chronology of Field Research	p. 109
Culture in Action: Adolescents as Cultural Translators	p. 114
Naturally Occurring Mobile Conversations: Social and Cultural Microcosms	p. 118
Displaying Identities in Urban Space: How Do Young People Talk on Mobile Phones?	p. 122
Telephone Conversations as Linguistic Patchworks	p. 122
Speaking "Teenager"	p. 123
"Bad" Language and New Technologies: An Identity-Producing Synergy	p. 125
Crossing Linguistic Boundaries: Cultural Identity on the Mobile	p. 128
Cultural References in Teenagers' Mobile Conversations	p. 136
Belonging to a Community of Practices: Geek Language and Culture	p. 138
Crossing Words and Cultures by Mobile Phone	p. 140
Mobile Culture in Everyday Life: Teenagers Talking on Their Mobiles	p. 142
Making Sense of Space: Where Do Young People Talk on Their Mobile Phones?	p. 142
Repertoire of Cultural Reasons: Technologies and Teenagers' Laziness	p. 144
Domesticating Technologies: Vegging, Doing Nothing, and Talking on the Mobile	p. 148
Breaking the Rules: The Implicit Logic of Mobile Phone Use	p. 150
"Being a Couple": Maps of Everyday Life and Simulacra of Proximity	p. 153
Live Narrating of Everyday Life: Storytelling on the Mobile Phone	p. 157
Mobile Phone Use as a Friendship-Building Activity	p. 159
Guess Where I Am: Derealization as a Social Game	p. 163
Borrowed Calls and Co-Conversations	p. 164
Saturday Night: Telephone Organization or Social Control?	p. 167
Who Is Where Tonight: The Mobile Phone as a Panoptikon	p. 171
The Ritual Meeting: Micro-Organization through Mobile Calls	p. 172
Domestication of a Technology and Cultural Changes	p. 175
SMS in Everyday Life: Ethnography of a Secret Language	p. 178
Text-Messaging in Peer Culture: A Field Study	p. 178
The Secret Language of SMS	p. 179
Inventing a Code: Mini-Messages as Secret Handshakes	p. 181
Hidden Communication: SMS in Teens' Underground Life	p. 138
The Thumb Generation: SMS Conversations	p. 186
Text-Messaging as an Interactive Phenomenon: Social Organization and Linguistic Creativity	p. 188
Putting Everyday Life into Words: Gossiping in SMS	p. 190
Verbal Performances: Flirting in SMS	p. 193
Teenagers' Techno-Language across Contexts	p. 196
Intergenerational Communication: Changes, Constants, and New Models	p. 198
The ON Generation versus the OFF Generation	p. 200
Co-Construction of Family Boundaries by Technology	p. 201
Gift and Counter-Gift	p. 204
Listen to Your Father and Mother, or Your Mobile?	p. 206
The Mobile Phone: Tool for Transgression?	p. 213
Being Free Together	p. 215
Mobile Communication as Social Performance: New Ethics, New Politeness, New Aesthetics	p. 217
Storytelling about Technologies: Urban Legends and Personal Narratives	p. 217
Telephone Conversation as Social Performance	p. 222
New Ethics for New Social Encounters	p. 224
Politeness Rules: Manners for Mobile Use	p. 228
Biomorphism or Sociomorphism? Emboding New Communication Technologies	p. 231
New Aesthetics or New Self-Perceptions?	p. 233
Between Globalization and Localization: A Few Conclusive Notes	p. 236
Notes	p. 239
Bibliography	p. 253
Index	p. 263
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