Mobile Communication in Everyday Life - Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections
By: Joachim R. Höflich, Maren Hartmann (Eds.)
Frank & Timme, 2006
Table of Contents

Mobile Communication in Everyday Life takes a closer look at the mobile phone as an object of inquiry in the tradition of the so-called media ethnography. Consequently, the benefits and limitations of such research designs are the focus of the book. Some contributions focus on the tension between private and public communication, others on cultural dimensions.

Extract from Virpi Oksman's Mobile Visuality and Everyday Life in Finland: An Ethnographic Approach to Social Uses of Mobile Image

In recent years, as camera phones and digital cameras have become more common, sending visual messages has become increasingly easy. Visual communication is used most importantly between members of the immediate circle: MMS creates closeness between friends and family members and adds emotion to the communication; messages are often humorous and they function to maintain and enforce relationships and social bonds. Mobile visual communication has become one means of communication to complement the more traditional ways of keeping contact. For instance the news about the arrival of a baby or a new pet is delivered immediately through MMS, whereas before sending photographs in a letter was perhaps the most commonly used method.

[...] Photos are mailed only to intimates such as a lover, a spouse or a very close friend. Decisions about sending an image or what kind of a photo to send are made based on social relationships (Okabe, 2004:10). Van House identified four traditional uses of photos:

• constructing a personal
• and group memory;
• creating and maintaining relationships; and
• self-presentation. On the basis of camera phone studies, a fifth category was also identified:
• functional images.

From their data, the researchers concluded that camera phone use encourages experimentation with a more expressive use of images (Van House, 2004:3). Kindberg et al. (2005:46) observed in their study that the most common reason for capturing a mobile image was to enrich mutual experience by sharing an image with those who were co-present at the time.

Authors with Websites/Blogs:
Lee Humphreys
Mimi Ito
Bella Ellwood-Clayton
Richard Ling
Santiago Lorente
Richard Harper
Steve Hodges
Friedrich Krotz