Just read two books on mobile phones. The first ‘Constant Touch’ hops around in time and space in a quite effective and amusing way, but is so short, can only throw up tightly wrapped parcels of facts or ideas without opening, unwrapping or developing them. There’s some interesting factoids about the history of mobile phones, and the inevitable sociology.

Agar looks at how technical development is shaped by existing technology and technical cultural characteristics at a more local level, for example the nation state or region. In the USA the early success of one system acted as an obstacle to further development, in Scandanavia there is a more consensual and social approach to technical development.

Worth reading the review linked to in yesterday’s post .

The next book is altogether more substantial from a sociological perspective – and so it should be with a title like ‘Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone’ and part of a series called ‘Postmodern Encounters’. The author George Myerson takes a different approach, looking at the ‘communications theory’ of Heidegger and Habermas. His view is of the distortion and systemisation that mobile technologies create in human discourse.

“In modern life, more and more connections between and among people are made through systems: we are allocated places and times, roles and prospects by means other than dialogue”

“Now the system will do our communication for us “

“….in the age of full mobilisation, communication would refer primarily to a flow across a system. Voices, and such like, would be simply one small aspect of this traffic “