Week 10: Social Implications of Mobile Telephony: The Rise of Personal Communication Society critique

Week 10 reading reflection - George Thalassoudis

Social Implications of Mobile Telephony: The Rise of Personal Communication Society

Campbell and Parks co-written essay on the development of mobile phone technology and its vast implications for communication and identity is an accurate recognition of sociotechnological trends. The issue is that it was published in 2008. Over the last nine years the trajectory of technological ties with communication and identity has grown almost exponentially, and continues to do so as I write this blog post. It might not be the revelatory article that injects profound ideas into the heads of its readers in 2017, but it does give us an indication that academics and social scientists were aware of the direction that this kind of personalised technology would take us. 

Firstly, as acknowledged, the “mobile phone” has transformed itself into the mini-computer predicted by Campbell in the latter half of the article. Communication these days using the “smart-phone” is multi-faceted and can occur through a variety of media – photos, videos, gifs, etc – and through a large variety of apps at once. It was fitting that I chose to read this article on my mobile phone as I sat outside, and had to swipe away notifications I was receiving from Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and incoming text messages as I swiped through the paper.

The symbolic nature of the mobile phone has changed I feel. The notion of the mobile phone being a status symbol is a little dated. I feel that the social and practical necessity of having a mobile phone has made its price inelastic – people will pay whatever they need to – and phone varieties are largely as sleek and functional as others. There might be some distinction between people who have varying models of the iPhone, for example someone who has the latest edition of the iPhone compared someone who has a cracked iPhone 4. In this phones can still be status symbols.

With regards to youth culture surrounding the mobile phone, hereon out, people will not be able to distinguish between youth culture and social technology culture. They are one in the same. The way in which young people use mobile social technologies is distinct from older generations and arguably subjected faster moving trends.

Public space is largely privatised through the use of mobile technology. The implications for designers and marketing agencies have arguably the most relevance through this point expressed by Campbell/Park. People can be marketed something anywhere. What we are beginning to see now particularly is personalised marketing mechanisms based on, most notably, two things: search history and geographic location. If you are frequenting particular places, Facebook will market things to you based on your GPS tracking. This means the advertising in public spaces becomes less relevant because your phone will market things to you based on your location AND in conjunction with your search histories, making the advertisements more geared to goods or services you may be interested in.

Sociotechnological developments have particular relevance to the fields of rhetoric and ethics as discussed in previous weeks of the course. Rhetoric on social media accessed through mobile technology is progressive, ever-changing, and because of the larger degree of personalised information we receive, has the capacity to vary more. What I mean by this is the notion of preaching to the choir – you are in a feedback loop of your own personal media sources and belief systems that push a particular type of rhetoric that is geared to appeal to specific interest groups more. The ethical implications of data collection are broad, and considering how little we know about all the information that is being collected about us, it’s hard to say. A common argument for data collection through mobile devices is that it is largely for the safety of the public, for example, filtering peoples social media activity and search history to identify people who might be consider acts of terrorism. Is it okay to collect data on everyone to potentially save lives? What other ways is this data being used?

Yikes. Scary world.