“Some day we will build up a world telephone system making necessary to all peoples the use a common language, or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood” (Dilts, 1941, p. 11, cited in de Sola Pool, 1977, p. 129)
Like an underground current, the same social discourse reappears each time a new technology enters the social world: the technology purportedly produces new unex- pected behaviours and causes major changes in the way people live. Whether it is for the worse or for the better is not important. What matters more is the underlying unidirectional causal-deterministic model that putatively accounts for the influence of technologies in people’s lives.
The deterministic approach to social phenomena and particularly to technological evolution has had a long and strong tradition that spans the 20th Century. Even if today no one would say “science discovers, industry applies, man conforms,”1 the deterministic model persists in both scientific and commonsense approaches. At least within commonsense reasoning and theories, information and communication technologies are supposed to determine not only people’s behaviours but also their attitudes, relationships, and even identities. Empowered technologies are perceived as overwhelming unskilled people as if they dominate their lives. Such a view of the role of technologies in people’s everyday life has the hallmarks of all com- monsense theories. It is self evident, taken for granted, and ready made. It shares commonsense’s advantages: it provides easy to grasp explanations for a number of social events and allows people to cope with more dramatic circumstances. Like most practical reasoning, the one concerning information and communication technologies is a shortcut. It reduces the complexity of the phenomenon making it simpler and apparently more manageable.
Often echoed by media discourse and sometimes reinforced by references to simplified expert discourse, commonsense reasoning and layman theories constitute a shared cultural system through which we make sense of technologies in our daily life.
Although the deterministic approach to social phenomena has nurtured commonsense theories more than any other approach, it is not the only one. A major philosophical approach has been supporting concurrent views on social phenomena and providing a different paradigm for understanding technologies in everyday life: the phenom- enological approach to social life.
Since Edmund Husserl’s and Alfred Schutz’s philosophical investigations, scholars in both Europe and the United States have emphasized the role of individuals in constructing culture, social organization, and their relation to the material features
of everyday life contexts. Against any form of social and cultural determinism, eth- nomethodology has demonstrated that people create their social and cultural world through their everyday actions and interactions (Garfinkel, 1967). Everyday practices of ordinary people are the effective tools that make supposedly passive users behave as active subjects. Defying and subverting any determinism of both dominant culture and the systems of production, social actors invent and create, moment by moment, the meaning and functions of things that circulate in their social space (De Certeau, 1984). Far from obeying implicit logics inscribed in goods, consumers develop their own tactics and follow paths in often unforeseen and unpredictable ways. The uses and gratification approach to information and communication technologies (Katz, Blumer, & Gurevitch, 1974) is consistent with this antideterministic paradigm.
Proponents of this stream have shed light on the role of users’ needs and goals in the adoption or rejection of a technology and its intended uses.
These approaches to social life and phenomena share a crucial theoretical assertion:
the strength of human agency (Giddens, 1979, 1984) and subject intentionality in making the meaningful dimensions of the world people inhabit.2
Accordingly, everyday life is conceived as a never-ending cultural work through which social actors produce the meaning, structures, and social organization of the world they live in, as well as their own identities and those of the people they in- teract with. Everyday language and interaction are the primary tools of this culture construction. However, social structures as well as the material features of everyday life contexts are more than an inert background for culture construction. Disregard- ing any radical subjectivistic drift, the phenomenological approach to culture and everyday life does not underestimate the constraints of the world of things nor does it claim for an omnipotent actor. Rather it conceives the process of culture creation as radically embedded in the cultural frames and the material resources available in the world people inhabit, which in turn makes this creation possible.
As renewed attention to the material aspects of social life indicates (Appadurai, 1986; De Certau, 1984; Gras, Jorges, & Scardigli, 1992; Latour, 1992; Semprini, 1999), the artifactual dimension of daily life is a crucial component that affects and is affected by everyday interactions, social organizations, and cultural frames of reference. Things, whether technological or not, participate in such a process of creating cultural models of living: as cultural artefacts, they are domesticated by users into pre-existing patterns of meaning and create new social scenarios and identities.
As people establish meaningful interactions with objects and artefacts, they make them exist in their social world, making sense of and domesticating them according to their frames of relevance and “moral economy” (Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1992). Literature on the social uses of media and the cultural ways of coping with a technological environment has shown how these uses, like other social practices, may be considered semiotic actions in the strict sense of the term; that is, ways of communicating and tools for constructing meanings and social realities.
The available technologies, the material features of the objects which support them and the daily routines they create or are integrated in, are all tools for the everyday production of culture and identities. Through media-related practices, individuals construct themselves in specific ways and produce the forms of their social partici- pation (Caronia, 2002). Simply put, through our uses of media, through the way we act out these uses, we define (at least locally) the communities to which we belong and our identities.
We define but we are also defined. If face-to-face interaction and talk may still be considered the basic forms of socialization (Boden & Molotoch, 1994), the ways in which media uses become topics of everyday conversation are powerful tools to construct their meanings and the identities of those who use them. People’s ways of using media, whatever real or imagined, enter everyday conversations as parts of the narratives through which people constantly construct who they are and who the people they talk about are (Ochs & Capps, 1996).3
If human beings construct the meaning of things and make sense of them according to their goals, the reverse is also true. Things are not neutral nor are they “pure”
material objects waiting to be defined. Even though they do not determine people’s life, things delineate the conditions of possibility for new behaviours and ways of life.
Their features and engineering anticipate paths of action and project new possible identities for the users. By moving the image from the permanence of the analogical universe to the ephemeral digital world, the digital camera demands and proposes a radical nonrealistic ontology for photography. Even the social perception of the photographer’s work and identity has changed. The digital camera has definitively legitimized photography as a manipulation of reality through iconic representa- tion. Whereas the assumption of the nonreferential nature of documentary images has always been taken for granted by epistemologists and philosophers, the digital camera has integrated this representation of photography in the layman’s culture.
Allowing people to make, remake and unmake iconic representations of reality, the digital camera has produced a new everyday culture of photography.
Overcoming the “subject-object” duality, we need to rethink the relationship between humans and technologies in terms of reflexivity, that is, a mutual construction of meaning and reciprocal sense making.
This need is even more pronounced for information and communication technolo- gies. Their progressive introduction into people’s everyday life, the multiplication of possible new courses of action, and ways of communicating and getting infor- mation, expand the range of tools through which individuals construct culture and identities.
Faced with this changing and growing technological environment (Livingstone &
Bovill, 2001), it then becomes relevant to investigate how the work of everyday culture construction may be affected by the new forms of technologically mediated actions, and vice versa.
The process of mutual construction among technologies, culture, and society may be analyzed at the macro level of patterns of diffusion and uses, as well at the mi- cro level of ordinary everyday interactions. Drawing upon data from qualitative and ethnographic research on mobile communication devices in ordinary life,4 this author of this chapter discusses the role of these technologies in the construction of family relationships and inner culture. Particularly, the chapter focuses on the following aspects: the creation of a cultural model of “parenting” (hyper-parent- ing), the dialogic use of mobile phones in connecting the different socio-cultural universes to which children belong (i.e., family and peer), and the role of mobile communication technologies in articulating the paradoxical nature of the contem- porary cultural model of family education.
Contemporary Studies on Mobile Phone Diffusion and Appropriation
In recent years, considerable research has examined the adoption and diffusion of mobile phone technology. It seems quite evident that, even though important dif- ferences exist across different countries (Kats & Aakhus, 2002), adolescents are a major well-established target for the adoption of this technology (Colombo, & Scifo, 2005; Kasesniemi & Rautianen, 2002; Ling, 1999; Lobet-Maris, 2003).
It is not surprising, then, that research has focused on young people’s uses of the mobile phone, especially in European countries where the adoption rate among adolescents and young people had been quite high.5 Investigating adolescents’ uses of mobile phone, Ling and Yttry (2002) show how adolescents hypercoordinate their social life and construct social encounters moment-by-moment. Mobiles phones al- low for “perpetual contact” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002), a form of social link that seems to fit perfectly with young people’s peer culture and developmental tasks. Rather than voice calls, young people have made the Short Message System (SMS) their typical use of mobile phone (Cosenza, 2002; Grinter & Eldgridge, 2001; Grinter &
Palen, 2002; Riviére, 2002) Along with the economic advantages, the diffusion of the SMS among teenagers may be explained by social and cultural factors (Taylor
& Harper, 2003). The silent dimension of this distant communication is at the core of its domestication in young people’s underground life both in the family and in school (Caron & Caronia, 2007). Allowing for silent and hidden communication, the mobile phone perfectly integrates a typical teenagers’ cultural pattern: constructing their social world outside of their parents’ control and the official rules govern- ing life in school. Young people have also interpreted the technical constraints of SMS according to their specific peer culture. The limit of the numbers of available characters has been transformed into a resource for constructing a new language
and new language games. Competence in this language defines the boundaries of a community of users, creates group membership and cohesion, and distances users from adults’ culture (idem).
Studying teenagers’ discourses on mobile phone, some scholars have noted that this technology is a detonator of social thinking: it provokes reflective thinking on the ethics, politeness, and aesthetic rules of everyday action and social life (Caronia &
Caron, 2004). Reflecting upon social uses of the mobile phone, teenagers explore the identity-making processes involved in the presentation of oneself on a public scene. They interpret and make the uses of the mobile phone work as a social gram- mar through which people supposedly define themselves and those around them.
In this sense, using a mobile phone in a teenage-appropriate way is not a matter of technical competence; it requires broader communicative skills that include cultural knowledge of when, where, why, and especially how to use this technol- ogy. Similarly, researchers have analyzed the normative aspect of mobile phone use among teenagers’ groups. In particular, they focus on the implicit cultural rules governing the sharing of the technology (Caron & Caronia, 2007; Weilenman &
Larsson, 2001). According to teenagers’ cultural frames of reference, the owner- ship of a communication device is not an individual matter. Rather it is a radically social affair. Alliance and friendship, leadership and membership, require sharing individual property: mobile phones are loaned and borrowed among the members of the group and this performance entails a system of reciprocal obligations. This
“gift exchange” (Mauss, 1954 {1924]) reinforces social links and ritually defines who belongs to the group.
These studies shed light on different aspects of what can be conceived as a single process: the domestication and integration of the mobile phone into youth-specific culture. The mobile phone seems to work as a developmental tool that meets the needs of the growing up process. Particularly, young people use it to attain a cer- tain degree of autonomy with respect to family world, to mark their belonging to a community of peers, to create their specific social organization, and to develop the skills and share the knowledge needed to become competent members of their own community.
Less explored than the world of teens are the cultural and social micro-aspects involved in parents’ uses of the mobile phone in communication with their chil- dren. Research on this issue mostly describes mobile phones’ usefulness in mutual coordination of children and working parents and their perception of mobile phone as a security/safety/control device (Caronia & Caron, 2004; Ling & Yttri, 2002;
Rakow & Navaro, 1993). These studies have investigated relevant dimensions of the process through which mobile phones affect and are affected by family culture.
However, more detailed knowledge and a deeper understanding of the cultural and interpersonal aspects of such a process is required.
Our hypothesis is that this mobile communication device contributes to the creation of new cultural models of being a parent and being a child.