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International Journal of Cultural Studies
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The mobile phone as media

Harvey May

Queensland University of Technology, Australia, h.may{at}qut.edu.au

Greg Hearn

Queensland University of Technology, Australia, g.hearn{at}qut.edu.au

This article focuses on the mobile phone’s permeation into ‘everyday life’ through products, knowledge and cultural processes. The convergence and blurring of industry boundaries increasingly see entertainment, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and lifestyle products and services combine. The possibilities that digital economies (via products and services) provide in shaping our experiences - and how others experience us - lend support to Featherstone’s comment that the ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ has arrived. The resulting consumption is an experience economy, where a broad range of mobile phone users, with or without technical savvy, expendable income and aesthetic ambitions, can harvest from the ever-increasing palette of the digital domain. Throughout the 20th century, visions of utopia and dystopia have often run alongside such major developments in technology, especially those that have the capacity or likelihood to transform and disturb conceptions of the everyday. Outlining a number of current states of play and future scenarios for the mobile phone in the everyday, we suggest that mobile phone analytics will shift from the utopian and dystopian towards analyses by more conventional theoretical and methodological tools and approaches found in media, cultural and policy studies, as well as in the social sciences and other disciplines.

Key Words: cultural economy • dystopia • everyday life • technology • utopia

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 195-211 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1367877905052417
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