Rich Ling

This is a sociological study of mobile phones and their use, drawing on large amounts of international quantitative and qualitative data. The author presents his findings in the general themes of safety and security, coordination of everyday life, teens and emancipation, the intrusive nature of mobile telephony, and texting as asynchronous mobile discourse. The presentation is well-grounded, credible and highly accessible. From a designer’s point of view, the book is very strong on describing established phenomena and use patterns, where the notion of micro-coordination in particular seems like an important insight. However, more imaginative aspects of mobile communication such as placemaking and local media production are not addressed at all -- since they do not really appear in the empirical data and thus fall outside the sociological realm.… (mehr)