Privacy and Fame by Karniel Yuval;Lavie-Dinur Amit; & Amit Lavie-Dinur

Author:Karniel, Yuval;Lavie-Dinur, Amit; & Amit Lavie-Dinur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 6

Popularity in Your Pocket

Your Private Self Exposed on Your Mobile Phone

Trying to examine and understand privacy exposure is almost impossible without a thorough examination of mobile phones, which have drastically changed our notions of the personal and private space. In their book Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, which was published before the invention of the smartphone, James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus (2002) highlighted the dependency of modern mankind on the mobile phone stating how “over the years, the telephone has dramatically changed how people live their lives and see their world” (Schezter & Cohen, in: Katz, Aakhus 2002, p. 38).

Cui, Chipchase and Ichikawa (2007) argue that the mobile phone is a ubiquitous information and communication tool. Today, for many people the mobile phone is the first thing that they interact with in the morning, and one of the last objects they use before going to sleep at night. The mobile is typically used in almost every context in between (Chipchase, J. et al., 2005).

Shin Dong Kim (2000) has found that people who use mobile phones have a stronger tendency toward collectivity and an active social life at the expense of private life, insinuating weak boundaries between their social and private lives. Kim gives a variety of examples he has encountered which demonstrate how the line between the public and private spheres is blurred for mobile users: For example, a woman talking about intimate subjects on her mobile phone sitting in the subway train, without noticing nor caring that strangers are listening (Shin Dong Kim, 2000).

BIRTH OF THE MOBILE PHONE

Although the first mobile connection was made in the 1970s, it was not until the twenty-first century that the device began to significantly influence the way people interact. The “cellular culture” as defined by Gerard Goggin (2006) was officially inaugurated when the mobile phone became more easily accessible to a significant number of people around the world. When reviewing the technological changes in mobile phones, the 1980s are considered the period when the classic form of the mobile phone was stabilized. It was the decisive shift to a stand-alone portable telephone which provided the material basis for a set of new design features that are now regarded as standard for mobile phones (Googin, 2006, p. 1).

According to Fortunati (2006), the beginning of the dramatic change happened in the 1990s when the second-generation digital mobile system became dominant and reshaped the technological-cultural atmosphere. Mobile phones became smaller, more portable, and domestic. They became part of our everyday lives and this was accompanied by the inclusion of new features, capabilities and communicative architectures, as well as cultural expectations and routines—all in this pocket-sized technology (Goggin, 2009). These technological changes hastened the death of privacy as we know it and reshaped our grasp of its cultural boundaries (Den Hoven, 2008).

Goggin (2006) contends that the power of mobile phones was unclear at the beginning of the century. However, their rapid influence quickly transformed them from a simple voice call instrument to an essential tool for everyday life.

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