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Mobile Phone Use In Context

2005 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference Proceedings

Studying Mobile Phone Use in Context: Cultural, Political, and Economic Dimensions of Mobile Phone Use
Carolyn Wei University of Washington cwei@u.washington.edu Beth E. Kolko University of Washington bkolko@u.washington.edu

Abstract This paper discusses the need for studying mobile phone use within the context of a society, with consideration of the cultural, political, and economic factors that influence phone use. Such contextual study is especially valuable in a culture that sharply differs from the industrial, predominantly Western perspective in which mobile phones and applications are developed. This paper presents a case study of mobile phone use in Uzbekistan, a Central Asian republic with a unique socio-political environment that is experiencing growing mobile phone use. A review of literature related to mobile phone use in developing, non-Western countries is presented. Some results of interviews about perceptions and use of mobile phones in Tashkent are discussed. Keywords: mobile phone use, technology studies, cross-cultural communication, usability

Studies of mobile phone use are predominantly in such settings of highly developed digital societies and still technologically emerging societies. But we have yet to understand how mobile phones are being used in places that have existing telecommunication networks but not modern, pervasive systems. In such digitally nascent settings we can see from a fresh perspective how culture and the available infrastructure influence users’ decisions to start using a mobile phone as well as their decisions about how the mobile phone is actually used. Researchers will better see how culture influences technology use as well as how the technology itself transforms daily life. Since access to technology will be somewhere inbetween primitive and cutting-edge, we can more clearly triangulate how much the transformation is dictated by...