Mobile Phones – social, cultural or technical??

In her paper, Personal Portable Pedestrian: Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use, Ito (2004), describes how mobile phone adoption and usage among the Japanese is embedded in a set of social – technical – cultural contexts. According to her, a “technosocial” framework provides a better approach to study technologies in society, because technologies and their usage patterns are determined by the technosocial ecologies in which they are evolving. Using the example of text messaging among young Japanese women, she explains, that the practice was not only adopted by the larger Japanese population, but also led to design innovations in technologies. Therefore, it was the social popularity of text messaging and the cultural value associated with it, which gave rise to the technical innovation. Further she explains, that the “urban ecologies” characterized by densely populated streets, public transportation and crowded living conditions have also resulted in people being more comfortable in exchanging messages rather than making voice calls.

I recently came across this article, which states that camera phone market is growing in India and youth is driving this growth. In my research on mobile phone usage among Indian youth, all the young people I interviewed, said that they would like to have a camera in their mobile phone. This may not really be an innovation in technology, but it certainly is an example of how the demand for camera phones is promoting the makers to add features and new capabilities to the mobile phones.

The above two examples of text messaging and the camera phones describe how the social and cultural value placed on social networking through text messages and owning a camera phone has led to evolution in technology within a particular context. I am interested in collecting any examples of such innovations in technologies particularly mobile phones which have grown out of the social and cultural value placed on it.