Delphine (15 years old): On top of that, I don’t have call display, so I have no choice but to answer.
Sandrine (15 years old): I have call display, you know, when it’s someone, let’s say I’m somewhere and it’s my parents and I don’t want to talk to them, I don’t want them to bug me, so I don’t answer.
Turning off the mobile phone and not answering if parents are calling are behav- iours that have to be justified or accounted for: no signal and low battery are the arguments commonly used by children to justify their being unreachable. The need for explanations defines these behaviours as exceptional transgressions. Invariably, transgression reveals and confirms the rule at stake. In this case, the rule is dialogic use of the mobile phone, a pattern of interaction legitimizing both parents’ right and duty to supervise their children and children’s right to be autonomous.
Parents’ and Children’s Dialogical Use of Mobile
meaningful actions that define their social and affective ties as relevant and prior to almost any other course of action. Simply put, mobile phones have magnified and overstated a totally cultural and unnatural parental model: children come first.
It may sound obvious, yet it is not.
Mobile phones uses confirm, naturalize, and literally objectivize what is nothing more than a socially constructed definition of “being a parent.” These technologies participate in the silent and almost invisible process in and through which individu- als create their cultural world as a quasi natural one.
The same process underlies the use of the mobile phone as a bridge connecting family and peer worlds. As we have seen, contemporary parents must contend with a definition of parental authority and children’s rights that make family education almost paradoxical. Mobile phone use has been totally integrated in a dialogical model of exerting parenthood. Thanks to its engineering, it leaves room for negotiat- ing the symmetric and opposite rights defining the status of contemporary children and parents.
The mobile phone has opened a symbolic space to manage the transition from family universe to that of peers and to cope with paradoxes of the developmental process such as the typical autonomy-dependency dimension. Parents and children use the technology to blur the boundaries of the different socio-cultural universes to which children belong, and to make a smooth supported transition from family culture to the peer world. In particular, the mobile phone is used by family members to negotiate the often conflicting perspectives of parents and children with respect to the developmental needs and to articulate an often incompatible system of recipro- cal rights and duties.
In a social and historical context where parental governance is no longer legitimized by power and obedience, mobile communication devices are used as an educational tool consistent with a consensus-based notion of parental authority. Performing ac- cording to such a cultural and even normative model of being a parent is a way to constantly recreate it. Through a dialogic use of mobile phones, parents and children participate in the process of defining a contemporary model of family education as a democratic social practice.
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