Sadly I am not in the Boston area right now, but for all others who are there, I would recommend to check this out. If anybody does, it would be cool, if he or she could report it here or on another blog. And I hope there will be an Audiocast as well.

Cell Phone Culture
Thursday, November 17, 2005
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Bartos Theater, Media Lab
20 Ames Street, MIT

Abstract
No contemporary cultural artifact embodies the genius and the disruptive excess of capitalism as clearly as the cell phone. Ubiquitous in most developed societies in Europe, the Americas and Asia, the cell phone has become a laboratory some would say an asylum for testing the limits of technological convergence. Less a telephone today than a multi-purpose computer, cell phones are game consoles, still cameras, email systems, text messengers, carriers of entertainment and business data, nodes of commerce. Particular age cohorts and subcultures have begun to appropriate cell phones for idiosyncratic uses that help to define their niche or social identity. This Forum will examine the cell phone as a technological object and as a cultural form whose uses and meaning are increasingly various, an artifact uniquely of our time that is enacting, to borrow the words of a contemporary novelist, a ceaseless spectacle of transition.

Speakers
James Katz is professor of communication and director of Rutgers University's Center for Mobile Communications Studies, which he founded in 2004. Katz' research focuses on how personal communication technologies, such as mobile phones and the Internet, affect social relationships and how cultural values influence usage patterns of these technologies. His books include Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology (Transaction, 2003, editor) and Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk and Public Performance (Cambridge, 2002, co-edited with Mark Aakhus). He is also the author of Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Expression (MIT Press, 2002, with Ron Rice).

Jing Wang is professor of Chinese cultural studies, and the head of Foreign Languages & Literatures at MIT. Her research interests are focused on contemporary Chinese popular culture and its relationship to marketing and advertising. She worked at Ogilvy in Beijing for two summers as a consultant for the Planning Department, and is currently finishing up a book manuscript [Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture]. Wang's presentation on cell phone branding and youth culture in China is based on some of her work at Ogilvy.

Free and open to the public.

More information: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum

Cell phones plug Africa's poor into mobile banking

Cell phones are serving as a bank in your pocket, providing virtual accounts for South Africans excluded from the financial mainstream by exorbitant charges and branch networks clustered in wealthy white suburbs.

[...] A 2003 survey estimated that only half of South African adults had a bank account, but a third of those without an account owned a mobile phone. Cell phones have spread quicker than bank accounts across the rest of Africa.

"People might not have shoes but they have a cell phone," said Brian Richardson, chief executive of Wizzit, a small start-up that pioneered cell phone banking in South Africa. "We can turn that phone into a bank in your pocket."

FinMark, a British-backed non-governmental organization that looks at ways financial markets can help the poor, estimates at least half of all bank accounts in South Africa will be administered via cell phones within five years.

From the Q&A [of] Anthropologist Mizuko Ito

Q: What are some of the factors that determine how much impact a technology is likely to have?

A: I think the main factor is the degree to which it builds on people’s existing practices, lifestyles, and social lives. That’s how you get these breakthrough technologies, like text messaging.

That's one reason the Blackberry works so well. It (just) takes email and adopts it for the mobile phone. Now with disruptive technologies this takes a bit longer, but then...;)

See also:
What is the ultimate mobile device for now?