As the mobile phone became a tool for parent-child communication, it has been shaped by a pre-established culture of parenting. Pagers and mobile phones have been interpreted by parents as means to exert control over and fulfil their responsi- bilities toward their children. They have thus been completely domesticated in the family’s moral economy and transformed into tools for family socialization. By analyzing parents’ and children discourses on their use of mobile phones, we can reconstruct the repertoire of official reasons family members invoke to make sense of the adoption of this technology.6 Some patterns of meaning are recurrent, namely being in touch and responding to emergencies.
In the following example, Guy, a father in his mid-fifties, sees the mobile phone and pager as a kind of “umbilical cord,” since they allow him greater contact with his children:
Guy: But we also used it, now less, it used to be a lot like an umbilical cord with the kids. The kids could call us... Now it’s less important... they’re 19 and 20 now.
They both have pagers. Bruno who didn’t want one, we twisted his arm to get him to have one, so we could get in touch with him.
Parents may also insist on their children calling them, as we can see in the following discussion between Louis (age 10) and his parents, Gerry and Madeleine (in their 40s) that lend him their cell phone to reach them:
Researcher: Do you call your parents often?
Louis: Well, yes. Even when I’m going to school.
Gerry: Let’s say you don’t call, it’s because we tell you to call...
Researcher: Why do you call them, for example?
Louis: Well! Sometimes when it’s important or something that uh...
Madeleine: But he doesn’t call us. We have to insist on him calling us.
Gerry: In fact, it’s because we are starting to leave him at home alone a little. So we tell him, “before you go, you call.”
Children also can perceive the mobile communication device more as a kind of
“electronic leash” that allows their parents to contact them at any time:
Barry (19 years old): It is a pager heu.. (…) and then afterwards there, it happened, what we call.. it becomes a bit like an electronic leash for my mother…
Researcher: An electronic leash?
Barry: For my mother and then so… It lets her call me all the time and then uh…
any time.
Andrée (mother, age 50): Well, it’s true, I appreciate it.
Barry: Yeah, she finds it very useful.
Andrée: I can reach him everywhere because he has it and it’s reliable, you always have it?
Barry: I alw… I almost have it all the time on me. Sometimes I forget but otherwise it is always on, always, always.
The image of the cellular phone as a piece of emergency equipment is another recurrent pattern of meaning in parents’ accounts of the reasons they introduced cell phones. Parents and children often construct narratives of hypothetical dangers and imagined scenarios in which having a mobile phone helps the owner resolve a problematic situation. The emergency discourse is actually one of the most recurrent themes in explanations of why the mobile phone came into informants’ family and how they were supposed to use it:
Researcher: You told me you’d have a cellular?
Louis (son, age 10): Yes.
Madeleine (mother age 40): When did we talk to you about having a cellular?
Louis: When we were in the car.
Gerry (father, age 45): That’s right.
Louis: To call each other in emergencies.
Gerry: That is we will lend him one of our cell phones so that when he is on the mountain, if ever something happens, that he would get lost, like when he went to blue mountain and he got lost, well he would have his cellular and it is going to be programmed, because, you know, you can program the cell phone, so he will have to program the number.
Louis: At Green Mountain I had it.
Gerry: Had you lent it to him?
Madeleine: Yes I remember.
As these examples show, the use and the functions of mobile phones are shaped by typical features of cultural model of parenting characteristic of contemporary western society. Exerting control over children, ensuring that they are safe, handling emergencies, managing time to create family moments, assuming responsibility to- ward children, supervising children’s life out of the home, and mutual coordination to be in touch are all behaviours consistent with the cultural definition of being a parent. From this point of view, remote parenting (Caronia & Caron, 2004; Rakow
& Navaro, 1993) seems to be nothing more than a new way to perform old functions and to act according to established models of fulfilling parental roles.
Our hypothesis is that mobile communication devices are not only an expression of an existing family culture and social organization, they are also ways to create them. By tracking their children’s movements, finding out who they are spending time with, claiming to know that their children are safe, reminding their children
when they have to be back or scolding them if they are late, parents realize the rights and duties involved in “being a parent.”7 By participating in these remote parent- ing interactions, children are socialized in the commitments and responsibilities of being members of the family. Mobile communication devices’ practical uses are thus meaningful actions: they establish and confirm family boundaries, they state
“who makes family with whom” and what behaviours belong to family members.
They make the link between relatives permanent and work as teaching-learning strategies on the rights and duties governing family community life. Through the courses of action implicit in mobile phone use, parents do more than exert their role: they construct culture by legitimizing the definitions of what counts as “be- ing a parent,” “being a child,” or “being a family” inscribed in their mobile phone mediated actions.
The following example from our ethnographic fieldwork on mobile use in the family sheds light on the cultural and social consequences hidden behind the most visible functions of remote parenting.
Scene: It is Saturday afternoon in Bologna. Silvia, a divorced mother in her 40s, is talking on the land phone to her friend, participant researcher Laura. Mafalda, Silvia’s oldest daughter, age 13, is in Milan at her father’s house. Silvia’s mobile phone rings:
1. Silvia to Laura: Wait, just a minute, it’s “Serafini-Milano.” (reading on the display)
2. Laura: Okay.
3. Silvia to Mafalda: Yes, sweetheart, I’m on the phone, talking with Laura.
4. Silvia: “Wear?” (English in original), W-E-A-R ? (spelling the word) It means to bear on the person.
5. Silvia: “Back?” (English in original), it means “at the rear” or “been re- turned,” It depends. You have to consider the sentence.
6. Silvia: “Appear?” (English in the original), I don’t know, wait, I’ll ask Laura...
7. Silvia to Laura on the land phone: Laura, what does it mean, “appear?”
A-P-P-E-A-R?
8. Laura: “To have an outward aspect.”
9. Silvia to Mafalda: “To have an outward aspect.” Laura said that it means to have an outward aspect.
10. Silvia: “Fail” (English in original), I don’t know, I’ll ask Laura.
11. Silvia to Laura: And “fail?” (English in original), F-A-I-L?
12. Laura: To deceive, fail, to not succeed in doing something.
13. Silvia to Mafalda: To not succeed, okay sweetheart? Is it correct? I love you.
14. Silvia to Laura: Hey, many thanks, many thanks from Mafalda, too. It’s fan- tastic, I never do that, helping Mafalda with her homework in this way. She’s in Milano and I’m in Bologna and you, you’re at home, it’s great!
Remote parenting is more than an easy way to attain practical purposes or carry out typical functions related to the parental role. Through this mobile phone mediated interaction, Silvia is not only helping her daughter do her English homework. The sequence of her “mobile” actions is a meaning making devices.
Consider first the opening sequence of this multiparty telephone conversation. Silvia interrupts her conversation with Laura to give priority to her daughter’s call (turn 1.). “It is Serafini-Milano”: reading aloud the identity of the caller appeared on the display, she tells Laura whose needs come first. In this family culture “Serafini- Milano” is a shortcut for “daughters when they are at their father’s house.” Sharing this background local knowledge, Laura accepts Silvia’s shift to her daughter’s call (turn 2.). Acceptance is an action: through this action Laura legitimizes her being put in standby position. Then, Silvia does more than merely shift her attention to her daughter. After addressing Mafalda with some instances of intimate talk, she formulates this move with words (turn 3). Describing in words what one is doing is one of the linguistic moves though which participants negotiate the meaning of what is going on (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970) and construct a shared definition of the event and its implications. This can be summarized as: “if children call, their mother is available and their needs come first.”
The second part of the conversation is a typical mother-child scaffolding interaction:
the mobile phone guarantees a direct, always open access to the caregiver and makes it possible to carry out this kind of joint action despite physical distance.
In the closing sequence, Silvia formulates what happened as a new, original way to perform as a parent (turns 13 and 14).
The actions performed in and through this technologically mediated conversation are culture building activities and socialization devices. By doing “being a parent”
in certain ways, the mother locally constructs and proposes dimensions defining her cultural model of parenting: being always available, giving priority to children’s needs over adults’ needs, interrupting the ongoing course of action to open up a parallel one, using intimate talk to address one’s own children, and giving children a scaffolding to overcome their difficulties.
At the same time, the mother’s actions convey a cultural model of the child: a child is a demanding individual whose needs come first. He or she has the right to expect his or her parent to divert attention from an ongoing adult-adult interaction to take care of the children.
What about the other participants? By participating in such an interaction, Mafalda is learning more than the meaning of some foreign words: she is being socialised in the cultural models of “being a mother” and “being a child” that are at stake in this family. Accepting her role as a collateral participant, Laura legitimizes the defini- tion, under construction, of “what is going on and why.”
The participants officially involved in this interaction, are jointly constructing and ratifying, at least locally, a shared definition of “being a parent” and “being a child.”
That is, they are constructing a cultural model of parenting as a technologically mediated achievement.
If “reciprocal availability” can be considered a trait of an existing culture of parent- ing, how does mobile phone shape this trait?
Mobile communication devices are distinctive because they allow anytime and any- where reciprocal availability. This is nothing more than a suggested way of acting, a “possible world” inscribed in the technology. It is through everyday and ordinary ways of using the mobile phone that this cultural model becomes a (technologically mediated) accomplishment.
A pre-existing cultural definition of being a parent has clearly shaped parents’ and children’s use of the mobile phone far beyond the management of urgency, safety, and control. In very reflexive ways, the use of this technology has created a new original way to be a parent. The possibility of remote parenting has been turned into hyper-parenting.
Through their everyday mobile interactions, parents and children have transformed physical distance into relational proximity; they have overcome the spatial and temporal constraints of face-to-face or traditional telephone interactions, and trans- formed almost every moment into an opportunity for coconstructing joint actions and care-giving. Family relationships seem to perfectly mirror the contemporary paradox of a wireless world producing hyperlinked people.