Paul Levinson’s, Cellphone; The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! is a breezy book on the mobile phone that raises interesting points without doing much else. For example, it doesn’t systematically tell you the story of the development of the cellphone or tell us about the market for cellphones. The book has a good annotated bibliography.
On page 56 Levinson talks about immediate communication and mediated communication. We expect delay and artifice in media – or mediated communication. The immediate means the presence of the other and we therefore think of as authentic. The cellphone extends the immediacy – creates a sense of immediate access to others even at a distance.
The clearest prediction that I think can be made about a cellphone with Internet access in everyone’s pocket is that it will strengthen the self in its voyage through the world. Put more directly: We and our descendants will be able to do more of what we want to do, … We will be able to accomplish more of this, because we will be able to reach the people and places that have this information much faster and more easily … Indeed, place will become far less relevant as a source of information that it is today… (p. 60)
I suspect Neil Postman, to whom this is dedicated, would roll over in his grave at the claim that the cellphone will strengthen the self.
What is interesting is what Levinson has to say about place. Most of our mediation and communication technology is not portable – it is fixed in place and we go to it. Cellphones allow us to take technology with us rather than go to it. Most informaiton is attached to spaces, especially spaces that are enabled with electricity, lights, network access and s on. What if we didn’t need to design spaces to support information and communicaition?
On page 66 he talks about “Customs of Refusal” and how we are going to have to learn to refuse connection and information. Telemarketers take advantage of how we are trained to be polite. We more immediate technology we will need to develop ways of saying no, ways of deciding how and when to be immediate.
The silence of text is probably its biggest social asset. (p. 112)
Levison goes on to point out how the cellphone with text messaging is more than just a mobile audio phone. It can work in silence too.
In chapter 9 he writes about infrastructure and politics. Phones take infrastructure which typically means government. Cellphones take far less. PCs tooks less infrastructure, but users have/had to be literate. Cellphones don’t expect much training from us.
In chapter 10, “The Cellphone at War” he talks about how mobile communications allows journalist to embed themselves and report “live”, especially now that we have the capacity to send pictures or slow video over cells.
Bibliographic Reference: Paul Levinson Cellphone; The Story of the World’s Most Mobile Medium and How It Has Transformed Everything! New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
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