Moving Cultures: Mobile Communication in Everyday Life.

Tami Oliphant is a Ph.D. candidate in Library and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

The public has been bludgeoned with research and articles praising the whiz-bang technological savvy of Generation Y or the Millennials. This type of media coverage tends to be somewhat superficial and clichéd, but also entertaining (i.e., the BBC recently tracked responses from a 13-year-old boy as he traded his iPod for a Walkman for a week). In their scholarly tome, Moving Cultures, authors Caron and Caronia explore the ways in which adolescents have created, co-opted, and incorporated mobile phones into their everyday lives.

The authors draw on social science theory and ethnographic research to provide a compelling framework in which to analyze the various cultural and social dimensions of teenagers’ use of mobile phones. The book is well-organized, with each chapter devoted to a different aspect of mobile phone use, such as “New Social Scenarios,” “Now Playing: Mobiles, Discourses, and Advertising,” and “Intergenerational Communication: Changes, Constants, and New Models”—a revealing chapter that shows how the mobile has changed relationships between and among family members. Within family structures a mobile acts both as a surveillance tool (for parents) as well as a tool that allows children greater degrees of freedom and independence.

One of the key themes the authors explore is how mobile technology shifts space. For example, a mobile phone allows the absent to be present, it morphs public space into private space and vice versa, and many interactions take place in “nowhere places” (places devoid of any social significance) during “no-when times” (times when no specific activity is happening). The authors show that teenagers’ use of text messaging and chatting is not meaningless—all of this activity underpins what the authors dub “verbal performance.” Teenagers use the mobile to create culture and to define and negotiate group membership.

Moving Cultures is recommended for academic libraries as it provides a rigorous but fascinating glimpse into current youth culture. The study is ultimately very reassuring—the kids are all right.