Mobile Communication and Low-Skilled Migrants' Acculturation to Cosmopolitan Singapore examines the role of mobile communication in the acculturation of South Asian labor migrants to Singapore, adopting a mobile phone appropriation model and following a pluralistic-typological approach. While presenting data from a questionnaire survey and interviews with low-skilled migrants from Bangladesh and India in Singapore, it explores how their specific social conditions, including their transient status and low entitlements in their host country, influenced their mobile phone appropriation. It considers the links these migrants established and retained with their countries of origin and residence to identify several types of appropriation and acculturation types among the various populations.

The rise of the smartphone has shifted news from fixed publication to a flow of updateable information. The chapters in this book investigate the implications for audiences, industry and society as news becomes mobile. Wherever we go, news from anywhere can reach us on our smartphones. And wherever we are, we can search up information specific to that place. News is produced by mobile journalists (MoJos) as well as by citizens armed with smartphones, reporting breaking news from crisis zones where information is uncertain, or hyperlocal news from neighbourhoods where little happens. Mobile technology allows citizens to engage deeply with a cause or to skim headlines so they know a little about a lot of things. News is distributed on mobile networks and consumed by mobile audiences as they make their daily way through time and space coloured by their mobile devices. It is consumed in the niches of life. It intersects with place in new ways as geolocated news. It pursues us wherever we are through push notifications. And news has moved from fixed to fluid, a flow of updateable information rather than a regularly issued product. In this book, the contributors take varied viewpoints on mobility and news, its impact on what news is, how journalists produce it and how it fits into everybody's everyday life. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

This volume brings together scholars from around the world to consider how mobile communication is both bringing us together and destroying our sense of social cohesion. There is no question that uses of technology can lead to increased cohesion within personal communities. However, as social networks become inundated with mobile communication users, the contributors argue, they may become isolated and social division can take hold. Mobile Communication covers a wide range of topics, including the replacement of co-present interaction with mediated contact; analysis of mobile-based cohesion and gender; the role of media choice and its effect on the quality as well as quantity of social cohesion; mobile communication and communities of interest; and mobile communication, cohesion, and youth. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of mobile use and its impact on social cohesion are also considered. There are chapters on caravan couples in Australia, factory workers in China, young couples in Germany, citizens in Slovenia, and sports clubs in Ireland. There is also research on drunken calls between university students in the U.S., calls among international students in Switzerland who strive to keep in contact, and communications by immigrant women in Melbourne, Australia.

One of the most significant and obvious examples of how mobile communication influences our understanding of time and space is how we coordinate with one another. Mobile communication enables us to call specific individuals, not general places. Regardless of location, we are able to make contact with almost anyone, almost anywhere. This advancement has changed, and continues to change, human interaction. Now, instead of agreeing on a particular time well beforehand, we can iteratively work out the most convenient time and place to meet at the last possible moment--on the way to the meeting or once we arrive at the destination.In their early days, mobile devices were primarily used for various types of emergency situations and for work. In some cases, the device was an essential element in various business operations or used so that overseas workers could communicate with their families. The distance between a remote posting and the people back home was suddenly and dramatically reduced. People began to share these devices not necessarily out of economic issues, but also questions of family and interpersonal dynamics.The process of sharing decisions as to who is a legitimate partner makes the nature of relationships more explicit. By examining the economy of sharing, we not only see how sharing mobile phones restructures social space, but are also given insight into an individual's web of interactions. This cutting-edge book deals with modern ways of thinking about communication and human interaction; it will illuminate the ways in which mobile communication alters our experience with space and time.

The rise of the smartphone has shifted news from fixed publication to a flow of updateable information. The chapters in this book investigate the implications for audiences, industry and society as news becomes mobile. Wherever we go, news from anywhere can reach us on our smartphones. And wherever we are, we can search up information specific to that place. News is produced by mobile journalists (MoJos) as well as by citizens armed with smartphones, reporting breaking news from crisis zones where information is uncertain, or hyperlocal news from neighbourhoods where little happens. Mobile technology allows citizens to engage deeply with a cause or to skim headlines so they know a little about a lot of things. News is distributed on mobile networks and consumed by mobile audiences as they make their daily way through time and space coloured by their mobile devices. It is consumed in the niches of life. It intersects with place in new ways as geolocated news. It pursues us wherever we are through push notifications. And news has moved from fixed to fluid, a flow of updateable information rather than a regularly issued product. In this book, the contributors take varied viewpoints on mobility and news, its impact on what news is, how journalists produce it and how it fits into everybody's everyday life. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

With at least seven billion subscriptions worldwide, the impact of mobile devices undoubtedly rivals that of television, radio, and newspapers. Mobile technologies have had-and continue to have-a profound influence on every sphere of public and private life. Unsurprisingly, since their emergence in the late 1970s, mobile technologies have been the focus of serious scholarly study and exploration, and, as research on mobile technologies continues to grow dramatically, this new four-volume collection from Routledge provides an authoritative reference work to make sense of their defining aspects and cardinal dynamics. Edited by three leading scholars, Mobile Technologies brings together in one easy-to-access set, the essential, 'must-read' Major Works on the greatest technology of our time. Goggin, Ling, and Hjorth have carefully integrated foundational texts with the most significant and pioneering new material to create an indispensable research tool and pedagogic resource.

Mobile telephony has arrived on the scene.According to statistics of the International Telecommunications Union, in the mid-1990s, less than one person in 20 had a mobile telephone; as of 2003, this had risen to on p- son in five.In the mid-1990s, the GSM system was just being commerci- ized, there were serious coverage and interoperability issues that were not yet sorted out and handsets were only beginning to be something that did not require a car to transport them.In the mid-1990s, if a teen owned a mobile telephone it was likely an indicator of an over-pampered rich kid rather than today's sense that it is a more or less essential part of a teen's everyday identity kit. Hence, in less than a decade, this device has established itself tech- cally, commercially, socially and in the imagination of the people.It has changed the way we think about communication, coordination and safety and it has changed the way we behave in the public sphere. The mobile telephone has become an element in our sense of public and private space and in the development of our social and psychological personas.It has become an arena wherein the language is being played with, morphed and extended.Finally, it is reaching out into ever-new areas of commerce and interaction. All of this is, of course, interesting to social scientists.As brought out by Woolgar later, this is, in some ways, a type of experiment writ large that has engendered serious insight into the functioning of the social group and the individual in soc

The aim of this book is to shed new light on this theoretically and practically significant issue, and questions the role of technology and culture in social change. It challenges us to reconsider and rethink the impact of new information and communication technologies on civil society, participatory democracy and digital citizenship in theoretical and methodological contributions, through the analysis of specific cases in Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, China, Colombia, Kenya, Netherlands and the United States. Access to information and communication technologies is a necessity, and the importance of access should not be trivialized, but a plea for digital literacy implies recognizing that access is the beginning of ICT policies and not the end of it. Digital literacy requires using the Internet and social media in socially and culturally useful ways aimed at the inclusion of everybody in the emerging information/knowledge society. Technology matters, but people matter more.

Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for real time coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens text to each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than a simple technical innovation or social fad, more than just an intrusion on polite society. This book, based on world-wide research involving tens of thousands of interviews and contextual observations, looks into the impact of the phone on our daily lives. The mobile phone has fundamentally affected our accessibility, safety and security, coordination of social and business activities, and use of public places.
Based on research conducted in dozens of countries, this insightful and entertaining book examines the once unexpected interaction between humans and cell phones, and between humans, period. The compelling discussion and projections about the future of the telephone should give designers everywhere a more informed practice and process, and provide researchers with new ideas to last years.
*Rich Ling (an American working in Norway) is a prominent researcher, interviewed in the new technology article in the November 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine.
*A particularly "good read," this book will be important to the designers, information designers, social psychologists, and others who will have an impact on the development of the new third generation of mobile telephones.
*Carefully and wittily written by a senior research scientist at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, and developer of the first mobile telephone system that allowed for international roaming."