Notes from: Raine, Lee and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

PART I: THE TRIPLE REVOLUTION

CHAPTER 4 – THE MOBILE REVOLUTION

No longer “place-bound”

• Mobile devices – phones, laptop computers, tablets.
• Changes how we connect with each other and information.

Activities that no longer work well as plot devices in movies (and real life!):

• Being attacked while alone – Rear Window.
• Coping with and documenting disasters and traumas.
• Running to the scene of the action to convey important information – The Graduate.
• Depending on others being uninformed and out of touch – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
• Getting away with capers because the good guys can’t coordinate.
• Failing to communicate in a timely fashion – Romeo and Juliet.

Early mobile phone use:

• First call made by Michael Cooper of Motorola on April 3, 1973. (more images)
• 1983 – Motorola sells a one pound mobile phone for $3,500.
• Transistor and battery technology improve, reducing size.
• Supporting infrastructure like cell towers start appearing in cities and suburbs to keep up with demand.
• Early 2000s – low cost text messaging.
• Charged-coupled devices (CCDs) like digital camera become common features.

Mobile Communications

• Mociology (Mobile Communication and China).
• 21st century development (iPhone, iPad, and all the other "smart phones" and mobile devices).
• Communication, GPS navigation, "The Age of Connection."
• 2011: 487.7 million smartphones sold, estimated to double by 2015. USA, 50% of mobile phones.
  • 2013:Tablet and eReader ownership.
  • 2013: Cell Phone Activities and internet use.

The World Goes Mobile

• Mobile phones are now cheaper to use, easier to carry, and function in more places.
• Smartphone applications (apps) serve users in different ways than personal computers.
  • Apps (2008-2011, 18 billion apps downloaded for iPhone).
    • Major industry.
    • What's really used (2011: 10 apps comprise 43% of use on Android. 50 account for 61%).
    • 25% used once.
    • 68% of smartphone owners use five or fewer each week.
• 1985 – 340,000 mobile subscriber connections.
• 2011 – 302 million mobile subscriber connections.
• 58% of adults have a smartphone.
• 30% of households are cell only, 16% have cell and landline but mostly use cell, and most of the remainder (about 50%) use both cell and landline (in 2010).
• Mobile adoption rates – 2014 Pew report.
• The Web at 25: Part 1--How the Internet has Woven Itself into American Life, Pew Research Center, February 27, 2014.
• Digital Divide:
• Quicker adoption of mobile device use than internet use.
• Divide is shrinking, but disparities still exist:
• People over 65, rural.
• African Americans less likely to be wired internet users, but more likely than whites to use a mobile phone to access the internet.
• 2 kinds of mobile user:
  • “Motivated by Mobility” (39%):
    • Positive attitude about being more available to others through mobile technology.
    • Young adults, road warriors, teleworkers.
    • More women than men.
    • Greater proportion of minorities.
  • “Stationary Media Majority” (61%):
    • Tend to be older, poorer, have less than a university education, live in rural area.
    • Only about a quarter of this population are actively involved with the internet.
    • A third hardly ever use mobile devices.
    • Landlines are (were) the norm.
• Worldwide mobile phone use:
• 2009 – more than 3 billion mobile phones in the world.
• Cell towers reach 80% of the world’s population.
• By 2011, more than three fourths of the world’s mobile phones were in less-developed countries.
• China – 879 million subscribers.
• Developed versus developing nations.
  • Cell phones versus smartphones
    • Communication: family ties, economics, medical care.
    • In Africa: "mobile banks." (see also)
    • Transformative effect. (reading, full report, local copy)
• 3 economic factors that expanded global use more rapidly than in North America:
  1. The cost of fixed landlines tends to be higher in countries outside of North America.
  2. Cell towers are less expensive than the copper wire and fiber optic infrastructure needed for landlines.
  3. Mobile phones are often the first means of telecommunication people in less-developed countries have ever had.

Texting Joins Talking

• New un-phonelike capabilities become prominent in the late 2000s texting (SMS – short message service).
• Becomes mainstream (31% in 2006 to 59% in 2011) now nearly universal for young adults.
• Teens send 60 texts per day:
• Enjoy the simplicity – less interest in talking.
• Volume of communication increases – individuals become more networked.
• Mobile communications overtake all other ICTs and in-person communication.
• Why do teens prefer texting?
• Done from their own personal phones privately and unobtrusively.
• Asynchronous communication.
• After exchanging phone numbers, mutual understanding that neither party will call the other until the relationship is more serious.               
• Facebook and instant messaging are used for newer and more distant relationships.

Beyond Talking and Texting – The Smartphone

• Smartphones emerge in 2007.
• New features not commonly available on previous cell phones.
• Camera, access to the internet, apps, play music, email, games.
• How American adults use their smartphones:
• Most popular apps – games, social media sites, maps and driving directions, weather.
• 35% of adults have apps, but only 2/3 actually use them.
• This number will increase as smartphones become more familiar and ubiquitous.
• Seniors and Cell Phones (Pew Research Foundation FactTank, by Monica Anderson, 4/29/2015)
• Will technologies like standalone MP3 players, wristwatches, GPS devices, paper maps, portable game consoles, voice recorders, and point-and-shoot cameras be made obsolete?
  • Are mobile devices killing the Internet?
    • Probably not (and this)

Computers Become Wireless and Mobile

• Personal computers have been used for internet use only for the past 15-20 years.
• 1996 – only 19% of computer users used the internet (most used standalone programs).
• 2011 – 98% of computer users used the internet.
• More frequently, multiple devices are used to connect with others wirelessly.
• Wireless users are more likely to do more internet activities than users who only have a landline connection.

Living in the Cloud

• Cloud functions enable people to have access to their files wherever they have a mobile device.
• Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook push internet users to use cloud computing applications.
• Help users answer the question, “What are my friends doing now?”
• Risks of using the cloud:
• Cloud service companies can disappear.
• Internet connection can go down.
• Surveillance is easier.
• Cracking and identity and data theft.

Continuous Access and Hyperconnectivity

• Changes in culture--
• Affects people’s sense of time, place, presence, and social connectedness.
• Liberate us from, and reassure us about existing, social relationships.
• Castells – “We never quit the networks, and the networks never quit us”.
• More individuals are almost always online or on their mobile phones.
• Available to others, capable of searching for information, and uploading their own material online.
• May have an internet-first frame of mind when seeking information.
• accessible regardless of physical location – network in your pocket (cell phone).
• 84% of teens with cell phones sleep with their phones next to them. 44% of all cell phone owners.
• Hyperconnectivity – we never have to be alone – we constantly can identify as networked individuals.
• May be physically alone, but not socially alone.
• 13% of American adults report pretending to use their phone to avoid interacting with someone around them.
• Pretend to be on phone when feeling threatened.
• Reduce loneliness and kill time.
• Reinforce existing relationships.

Controlling the Volume and Social Interactions

• Work-life balance.
• Barron – mobile communication allows us to “control the volume” of our social lives:
• Screening calls, turning phone on and off, and managing others’ expectations about our availability.
• This works both ways – we can regulate the access others have, but we must work harder to gain access to others.
• “Email bankruptcy” – giving up hope of answering or reading hundreds of unread messages in an inbox.
• Organizing communication based on the context of the contact.
• Most suitable form of media to communicate with specific people across different situations.

Ad Hoc Communities Using Mobile Communication

• Communities created in an instant.
• Do not require centralized decision-making or top down information flows.

The New Choreography of Physical Gatherings

• During the Industrial Revolution, time and space become more important.
• Cultural aspects of time.
• Clocks control events instead of needs.
• With Mobile Revolution, importance of time and space fades.
• “Hypercoordination” now preferred by many young mobile users.
• “Soft time” and “soft space”
• Arriving at the precise time or choosing a specific location no longer as imperative.

Longer Encounters

• Social encounters can be prolonged with mobile devices.
• Rhonda McEwan – Toronto students stretch social meetings out by calling/texting before and after face-to-face meetings.

The Weakening (But Not the Death) of Distance

• Not dead, but being renegotiated.
• Distance is certainly less of a factor in many situations:
• Online video games.
• American doctors’ notes being typed overnight during the day in India.
• Mobile phone used as an address.
• Distance still matters though--
• The closer people work and live to each other, the more contact they have.

Connected Presence, Absent Presence, and Present Absence

• Connected Presence:
• Manuel Castells’ “space of flows” – time has been made timeless through the rapidity of our technological infrastructure.
• More opportunities to interact.
• Mobile devices can fill waiting times (traffic jams, waiting rooms, standing in line).
• Less backlog of information – tell friends instantly what you are doing.
• Absent Presence
  • Physically in one place, but socially somewhere else:
• Texting during a meal.
• “Distracted driving”.
• Pew Report on cell phone distractions.
• Present Absence:
• Included socially, but physically in some other location.
• Skype and FaceTime.

The Blurring Boundaries of Public and Private Spaces

• Public and private boundaries are not as rigid as they were.
• Private is more likely to become public.
• Bluetooth phone conversations.
• Laptop use in public places (coffee shops).
• Personal autonomy grows with more hyperconnected devices, but there is a corresponding pressure to stay connected at all times.
• Social striving – FOMO (fear of missing out).
• Social needs – getting useful information from others.
• Social obligation – close contacts are highly connected.
• Old rules of etiquette and courtesy are changing:
• “Metiquette” – mobile etiquette.
• Renegotiating norms of absent presence.
• Goffman’s “civil inattention”.

The Triple Revolution Pushes On – Mobile + Internet + Social Networks

• The three revolutions reinforce each other.
• Inflection point – when mobile phone users go beyond talking and texting and start using the internet.
• Growing reliance on mobile phones.
• Hardest device to do without.
• Mobile connectivity decreases individuals’ perceptions that they are members of fixed groups.
• Mobile connectivity is a social lubricant driven by:
• Mobile phones.
• Portable computers – laptops and tablets.
• Increase in wireless connections.
• Emergence of cloud computing.
• Increased number and use of apps.
• “Networked individuals are using both the internet and mobile access to orient their ‘continuous partial attention’ to a variety of social networks and information sources” (p. 108).

Chapter 7: Social Structure from, Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 5: Networked Relationships

Back to The Networked Society Lecture Notes

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