Mobile Phones and Teenage Emancipation

Sydney.
We're now in the final Mobile Media 2007 keynote session for today, which opens with Rich Ling. He begins with some data collected in Norway, which show that in age groups between 9 and 25, there is a tremendous change in the use of SMS, mobile, instant messaging, and email, as opposed to landline telephony. It is also evident that since the late 90s, mobile phone ownership amongst teens and adolescents has grown to close to 100% in Norway, and these groups are also the most prolific senders of text messages. Why this quick and thorough growth in mobile phone ownership especially in the teen age range? Rich suggests that teen emancipation is a key driver here.

Traditional societies are characterised by intergenerational stability and knowledge transfer from generation to generation; this is no longer the case in post-industrial societies where new technologies and techniques are constantly being introduced. The child must learn new skills separating them from their parents, and the peer group acts as a midwife for this process of emancipation from the parental environment. Such emancipation is not a one-off event, but conducted through specific rites of passage through which the teen becomes emancipated and seeks out their adult role (developing their own attitudes towards institutions, personal economy, friends, sexuality, education, consumption, work, personal style, etc.).

The peer group itself becomes a key institution in this context; where the child-parent relationship provides a sense of stability, the peer group relationship provides a chance to lead, follow, and make individual decisions in a process of negotiating one's own sense of identity; it allows individuals to be vulnerable amongst their equals, to understand social interactions outside of the family, to develop social conventions, interactions, and communal hierarchies of their own. Social network analysis examining acts of communication between members of a peer group allows for the detailed examination of such communities and their structures, and this may also explain the key role of the mobile phone as a means of further enhancing such peer communication.

So, mobile communication changes the dynamics of emancipation, and may co-vary with the intensity of peer interlinkage. and the intensity of family cohesion (which are not mutually exclusive, of course). The structure of the network and the position of the individual within it are important modifiers in this process, and a power dimension is played out in both the familial and the peer interactions - some calls are more potent than others.

Technorati : Mobile Media 2007, communication, emancipation, mobile, network, phone, teenagers
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