Corinne Martin

Images in Mobile Communication

This volume provides an original perspective on mobile communication, focusing on the emerging deployment of images in mobile phone usage: photography, video, mobile television, mobile internet, etc. Deeply embedded in our audiovisual culture, images possess the undeniable power to reshape the future of the mobile phone as an “individual mass medium”. In this collection, European researchers in media and communication studies, sociology, anthropology and political science present empirical and conceptual work on a wide range of issues, including cultural change, new forms of sociability on individual and societal levels, tactics and strategies of users and producers, and finally, representations and imaginaries of the mobile phone in other established media.This book is written for researchers and students of sociology, communication studies and cultural studies as well as for practitioners of interactive media and online communication.

Images and Representations of the Mobile Internet

The success of the mobile phone has no equal in the recent history of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies). According to the ARCEP,1 the equipment rate of the French population grew up to 80% between 1994 and 2005. And it exceeds 90% in 2009. According to the sociology of uses and the way this sociology developed in France (Jouet, 2000), the mobile phone has been studied as a means of interpersonal communication and mediation with family, friends and work acquaintances. Its appropriation by a large majority of the French population has made it a banal object, perfectly integrated in the routines of everyday life’s users (de Certeau, 1984). With the advent of images (MMS, Multimedia Messaging Services, in the beginning of the 2000s and then camera phones) and the mobile Internet, technological innovation has caused the mobile phone to evolve into a form of mass media. The first commercial start of the mobile Internet dates back to 2004, it was composed of optional subscriptions with pay-per-use (duration of the connection and/or quantity of data downloaed). At the end of 2007, the first “unlimited mobile Internet” packages arrived on the market, coincidentally with the first generation of iPhone in Europe. For the network operators, the goal was to foster the development of the mobile Internet, which at the time was lagging. In such a context of emerging uses (our study was carried out in spring 2009), we wanted to understand how representations of this innovation are constructed among these different social actors. Our project began as a reflection on resistance against the use of the mobile Internet in a polemical context concerning its new commercial offering. The representation of the mobile Internet produced is in a way an instantaneous, historically situated image of the reception of this innovation and it will ultimately evolve.