Interesting review of Rich Ling's new book, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society, by Howard Rheingold in The Feature. Here's a clip that should interest anyone who works with adolescents:
Neither do I have the space to do justice to Ling's study of teenage communication practices, and at the risk of reducing it too far, I'll summarize by saying that the mobile telephone's instrumental value as a constant, always available, private link to peers that cannot be overheard and does not have to be mediated by parents comes at a time when people shift allegiance from parents to peers. The mobile telephone is also a sacred object of symbolic potency to those undergoing the passage to adulthood — a talisman of emancipation with magical powers. Ling adds that the telephone's important ritual and symbolic dimensions enable teenagers to invent gift rituals, courtship rituals, fashions and fads while continuously hanging out with eight or a dozen friends in an intimate social network.Ling doesn't think texting has much of a future. The communication practices that so perfectly matched particular needs of adolescence, he suspects, won't extend far into adult life. Texting will continue to be used population-wide to coordinate meetings and communicate in situations where voice telephony is inappropriate, but he predicts today's teenage texters will be on to other things, and so will mobile media, when today's fifteen year olds are twenty-five: 'There will always be a need for asynchronous mobile communication', Ling noted in a recent e-mail to me, 'but SMS will go the way of paisley ties and bell bottom pants, i.e., will become a nostalgic phenomenon that today's teens will remember fondly as part of their youth'.
