Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don't answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted. Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family

in the South African context MXit, to announce get-togethers, to exchange photos, and to work out the various dimensions of their social lives. Looking at another mediation form, teens are the dominant users of texting (Ling 2010; Ling, Bertel, and Sundsøy 2012), but they are more marginal users of email. For many teens, texting or Facebook is the forum in which to exchange their views on a recent party or to gossip about the new couple in their class. By contrast, there is the perception of a

(Mumford 1963, 14). It is impossible, for example, to run a train line, a telephone company, a factory, a hospital, or an airport without reference to time (Thompson 1967; Mumford 1963; Zerubavel 1985, 8, 16). There is the plane that has a takeoff “window” ending at 10:23, the truck delivering bakery goods that will be at the store in a half hour, and the stoplights timed for five-minute intervals. In many cases, these sequences are organized to facilitate the flow of complex systems. In

Heaven Is a Daily Routine”  47 leading up to that transition was characterized by reliance on natural cycles or other time regulation regimes (e.g., manually rung bells, water clocks, sundials). Eventually there developed a critical mass of people who had access to clocks and understood how to tell time. This transition led to the embedding of timekeeping in society. Helping “Citizens of Honor to Lead Orderly Lives”: The Legitimation of Clock Time As a technology diffuses and increasingly

developments enabled people to use the system for increasingly mundane activities, which, in turn, contributed to the idea that a critical mass of people was available via the mobile phone. It was not only well-heeled business people that could afford one. Rather, the mobile phone was adopted by all sectors of society in many countries. This diffusion came first in the affluent countries, but it has followed progressively in those locations with a lower GDP. “If I Didn’t Have a Mobile Phone

a fake, we have the opportunity to say it was just something that we had heard or read. Urban legends are a way to help us understand how people frame the dark sides of mobile communication. The rise and persistence of this form of contemporary folklore indicates that we are not completely comfortable with the values implied by the diffusion of technologies into society. The various assertions have a certain tenacity. The doggedness of these tales may just as well be a marker of our broader