Рубрика:
36
Students in Beijing explained the importance of maintaining contact with families
in which they are the only children. Go-go dancers in Bangkok said that mobiles had
given them a new chance to arrange dates free of a middleman. Somali traders on
dhows moored in Dubai explained how their mobiles allowed them to keep up with
the movements of goods between Mogadishu and the Middle East. In Birmingham,
teenage girls convinced that because mobile phones ‘make it cool to talk’, even their
most taciturn male friends are becoming more communicative.
Teenagers have become the conduits through which mobile phones have found
their way into the wider society. For the young throughout the world the sense of
freedom of movement and the privacy afforded by the mobile are highly valued. In
spite of the high incidence of phone theft in the UK, they value the security of
knowing that assistance-often a lift home-is only a call away.
In Japan the teenage generation has become known as oya yubi sedai. The thumb
tribe, on account of the dexterity with which they text, unaccountable to an older
generation.
Mobile phones encourage and respond to the mobility. In China, which is
witnessing vast movements of people, the mobile has become a crucial part of
migrant life: a way to keep in touch with families back home and also a means of
establishing oneself in a new social environment. In Thailand, many students said
that they could move south to Bangkok only when their parents were assured that
they could keep in touch by mobile phone.
Connecting people rather than locations, the mobile phone alters people’s
expectations about what is possible and desirable and changes the parameters of their
social lives. It affects their perceptions of themselves, their boundaries and capacities:
it is ridiculous to compare a mobile to a prosthetic organ but carried on the person,
often all the time, it is something to which people grow attached. It alters the
experience of solitude, providing a stream of ways to fill dead time and constant
reminders – not always welcome – that one is never quite alone.
Mobiles have changed the parameters of public space, too, blurring the edges of
the private world. Visible and audible to all, their usage has rewritten many social
rules about where, when and what one should communicate.
It is in developing countries that the mobile phone’s impact has been the most
immediate. Bangladesh is one of several countries in which mobiles are used as
public village telephones, sometimes powered by solar energy, and often offering
access to the latest digital services. The mobile has become a political tool, too.
Gossip, jokes and trivia first spread text messaging across the Philippines; but during
the fall of the government last year, vital news and information moved around the
networks.
Notes:
1. leap (leapt,
leaped)
2. dhow n
3. moor v
4. obscurity n
1. to move or do sth suddenly and quickly
2. an Arab ship with one large sail in the shape of a
triangle
3. to attach a boat, ship, etc. to a fixed object or to the land
with a rope
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