Thesis Title: Subtitle

Mobile Phones: The Overlap of Social and Technical Spheres

However, there are other technologically oriented approaches that are less linear and acknowledge the interplay of the social and technical spheres and their ability to act upon each other (Wajcman 2008). Acknowledging the overlap and interplay of the ‘social’ and the ‘technical’ recognises that new technologies have the ability to reconfigure relationships between people and alter the basis of social interaction (Wajcman 2008).
Technologies like Facebook are also an example of this interaction. Exploring the overlap between the social and the technical is at the core of the present research questions concerning the production of Facebook as a social space.

Research that examines the overlap of the social and the technical has focused on mobile phone usage. This research has suggests that technological advances and social practices co-evolve to reconfigure, as opposed to speed up, lived experience (Wajcman 2008). This means focusing on how individuals make use of an ecology of communication options (Gershon 2010). This approach can be broadly described as ‘user-centred’. User- centred approaches emphasise the role of human agency in relation to technology and its affordances. From this perspective users are rational actors that appropriate technology as it best suits their needs and purposes. Technology is simply a means to an end, a tool that is employed to create desired outcomes, such as the adoption of the mobile phone to help manage social relationships or work commitments. However, this model assumes rational decision-making on behalf of the users and distances them from the social context and circumstance in which these actions occur (Fischer 1992). Social and cultural context enable certain choices, and limit others. Most obviously, individuals’ economic circumstances inhibit their ability to adopt new technology. Individuals also make choices that are constrained and informed by the information available to them and their ability to gather new information and their skills. Choice can also be constrained and encouraged by institutional design. For example, by limiting face-to-face service options, or making them unwieldy, businesses, and to a certain extent government, encourage consumers to use online options, which require significantly less resources to run efficiently.

An example of a user centred approach is Licoppe (2004) who argues that mobile technologies, instead of taking up time, provide a continuous pattern of meditated interactions. These modes of communication do not substitute for face-to-face interaction, but coexist with previous ways of managing relationships (Licoppe 2004). Licoppe (2004) explains that ICTs such as mobile phones, email and text messaging create a changing ‘technoscape’, which allows for the development of particular patterns of construction of

social relationships in ways that were not previously possible. Licoppe (2004) also contends that the addition of mobile and digital technologies to the technoscape allows individuals to engage in the ‘connected’ management of relationships by allowing the absent party to render themselves present via multiplicitous and continuously mediated communication. Multiplicitous communication gestures are seamlessly interwoven with co- present communication. Licoppe (2004) further maintains that communication technologies, rather than being used to compensate for the absence of another, are instead being exploited in such a way that the mediated interactions that they facilitate begin to blur the line between absence and presence. Likewise SNS such as Facebook also help facilitate continued mediated interaction, which is also not constrained to participation via a desktop computer or laptop. With Facebook’s mobile application, users can engage with Facebook in a way that mimics the use of SMS that Licoppe observes.

Licoppe (2004) also highlights the way that the advent of mobile communications removes previous spatial constraints associated with mediated communication. To receive a phone call, one no longer has to be at home or in an office. This observation can now be extended to smart phones. To be online, one no longer has to be at a computer or laptop. The internet and its associated affordances for mediated communication can be accessed anywhere as long as there is an available internet connection. While the advent and rapid adoption of mobile and digital technologies may be a sign of a faster pace of life, Licoppe reasons that this does not necessarily mean that sociality is poorer for it. In fact, Licoppe explains that increased use of technology does not necessarily mean less of something else, stating that, “the more people see one another the more they telephone one another” (2004: 138-139). Broadly, Licoppe’s (2004) argument can be understood as an example of the technological and the social overlapping to create a new social space for people to enact their relationships. These effects are not always anticipated by the designers of these technologies, but rather are created when users begin to co-opt the constraints and feature of a technology for their own ends. For example, the heavy use of text messages, primarily by adolescents, was not an anticipated use by its designers, but has had a profound effect on the development of mobile phone and telecommunications services (Agar 2003). Like mobile technologies, social networking sites are often accused of ‘displacing’ real relationships. More nuanced arguments (Green and Singleton 2009; Larsen et al. 2004) acknowledge the potential for temporal flexibility in creating and maintaining relationships as supported by Licoppe’s (2004) work. Licoppe (2004) also notes that the trend in France is towards a higher frequency of shorter mobile phone calls

or text messages and argues that this demonstrates that mobile technologies sustain ongoing patterns of communications. Licoppe (2004) further notes that these modes of communication do not substitute face-to-face interaction, but coexist with previous ways of managing relationships.
Aside from altering patterns of communication, technologies may also have other secondary effects called ‘externalities’ (Fischer 1992). Externalities include things such as increased demand of telecommunications networks, thus requiring expensive upgrades, the cost of which is frequently passed on to consumers. Thus, technologies can be both a tool for users to adopt to achieve a desired outcome, but also a structuring force that constrains individual actions (Fischer 1992). Even though technology can be understood both as a tool and a structuring force, the users remain at the centre adopting or rejecting technology as they see fit. However, the context in which these choices are made may be so constrained as to represent little choice at all (Fischer 1992). Additionally, the uptake of one technology, for example the mobile phone, may have unexpected and contradictory consequences. A mobile phone used to make one more available to family and friends may result in increased work intrusion into one’s private life. Using mobile technology people can make productive use of time spent in transit, or third places – the places between work and home. Mobile phones mean that previously ‘dead’ time can now be utilised in a productive way. Wellman (2001) contends that mobile media fosters a networked individualism not tied to workplace or home time-space boundaries. Mobile technology means that individuals can organise their life in more flexible compartments of time that are not geographically bound (Green 2003). While mobile technology has seemingly positive outcomes, recent US research on the impact of work extending technologies (WET) such as mobile phones on professional managerial couples indicates that the blurring of time-space boundaries fostered by these technologies has significant links to increased distress and decreased family satisfaction (Chesley 2005). Most research concerning the use of ICTs categorise them as work devices and proceed to measure them and their effects using this framework. By examining ICTs in a purely instrumental way, we cannot capture the variety of ways people may be using these devices.

The research explored above challenges the presumption that communication devices simply take up time, leaving less room for other forms of communication and sociability. Similar theories are apparent regarding internet use (see Gershuny 2003; Wellman 2001). As evidenced by Valenzuela et al. (2009), the time displacement thesis does not

necessarily stand when tested empirically. Gershuny (2003) concludes on the basis of the UK time diary panel study that, if anything, the internet is positively correlated with sociability.