EDITOR Fred Sampson [e-mail]

How Society was
Forever Changed: A Review
of The Mobile Connection
Brian Romanko

frog design | [e-mail]

I found myself reading Richard Ling’s The Mobile Connection in the discomfort of an airport terminal gate. When I say discomfort, I refer not only to the hard vinyl seat and poor lighting but also to the multitude of fellow passengers chatting loudly on cell phones. The audible barrage of one-sided conversations is a distraction to which society is reluctantly growing accustomed. We soon may not imagine a world without it. While the book did little to quiet the Bluetooth-equipped gentleman sitting next to me, it did provide an illuminating and enjoyable understanding of how and why we arrived in this cell-phone-rich society.

Truly disruptive technologies are rare. New products that fundamentally shake the status quo don’t just grow on trees. Even more rare are technologies that disrupt society and fundamentally alter interpersonal communications. With rapid advances of technology, the mobile phone has done all this with unprecedented speed. The astounding pace has fascinated researchers and businesspeople alike. Rich Ling is one of those fascinated researchers, and he has documented the rise of the mobile phone in captivating detail in the Mobile Connection.

Ling has the appropriate background for the task. His career as a research scientist for Telenor (Norway’s largest telecom company) provides a foundational body of experience. His work there focuses on the interplay between technology and society. The Mobile Connection appears to be a culmination of his research findings as applied to mobile telephony.

At a tactical level, the book is logically organized into eight chapters across 200 pages. A historical perspective of mobile phone adoption is provided, followed by five chapters dissecting the impact that cell phones have had on our lives.

For instance, Ling describes how mobile telephony enables a new level of “microcoordination.” This is “the redirection of trips that have already started [and] the iterative agreement as to when and where we can meet friends.” We are no longer required to agree on meetings with a fixed time and place. Coordination is fluid.

These five chapters don’t focus entirely on the enablement offered by mobile devices. Equal time is spent discussing the ways in which the technology has become a sociological pain. Unfortunately, for every person who finds benefit from cellular phones, at least one other has the opposite response. My time at the airport is evidence of this.