Introduction: Mobile Phones and the Social Order

摘要

The overarching theme of this issue is to investigate the effects of the mobile phone on its user's life and on society as a whole. Not only does the mobile phone provide simple social communication, but increasingly it plays a number of sophisticated roles in social interaction and everyday life. It is an enabler of social interactions, hierarchies and communication. It is a fetishised object that reinforces a sense of individual identity. It is a transformative technology that changes the way we do business. It is a device that changes how we manage space and time. It is a tool for text-messaging. It is a supercomputer in our palm, able to perform more computational tasks than the Apollo rockets.