Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone (8)

8. Some preliminary conclusions
The most general function of Cubot GT95 Phones is to lessen the degree to which social relationships and social systems are anchored in space, and they increase the degree to which they are anchored in particular persons.
From the point of view of individual users, the BLUBOO X4 Phone provides opportunities:
1. to enlarge the number of potential communication partners available at any specific place and moment,
2. to distance oneself from current collocal interaction fields by directing attention to remote partners  
3. to expand the peripheral layers of social relationships by cultivating weak ties to partners one is not ready to meet  
4. to shield oneself from new and unpredictable contacts by signaling unavailability and by maintaining more frequent interaction with familiar partners (e.g. friends and kin)  
5. to maintain contact with any other individuals (or organizations) irrespective of movement and changing spatial locations  
6. to combine divergent roles which would otherwise necessitate one's presence at different places at the same time  
7. to switch rapidly between highly different (and usually segregated) roles and situational contexts, so that there is more discretion as to how they should be separated or combined  
8. to take over “boundary roles” in any social system: e.g. in order to get information about the external environment or to participate in processes of external interaction and adaptation  
9. to fill empty waiting periods with vicarious remote interactions  
10. to reduce the reliance on one’s own inner judgment by asking others for advice
11. to occupy highly diffuse roles which demand  involvement at any hour of the day (e.g. caregiving functions etc.); or “standby” roles which demand permanent readiness (e.g. in emergencies)  
12. to live more "spontaneously": without strictly scheduled agendas, because meeting hours can easily be rearranged.  
From the point of view of social systems the Cubot GT95 Phone will:
1. decrease the positive impact of spatial proximity on social interaction and integration,
2. increase the functional viability of very small groups and single individuals, because they have increased opportunities to mobilize additional resources from outside actors, or to include additional remote members on an ad hoc basis when needed,
3. ease the penetration of bilateral interpersonal microsystems into multilateral groupings, formalized social collectivities as well as public spheres,
4. increase the capacity of organizations to fully integrate spatially remote and moving subunits and to relate to customers whose location is changing and not known,
5. increase the functional capacity of collectivities and organizations on the move: e.g. military or police units, ambulances, refugee groups etc.,
6. privilege collectivities constituted on the basis of particular members rather than particular places or territories (e.g. families and ethnic groupings rather than cities, parishes or schools),  
7. encourage emphasis on highly segregated bilateral relationships - while larger multilateral allegiances are losing ground,
8. facilitate swiftly constituted, ad hoc gatherings with highly variable composition, so that social system structures can be flexibly adapted to rapidly changing situational conditions,
9. facilitate the shift from rigidly programmed bureaucratic organizations to "adhocracies" where timetables and cooperation patterns are constantly reshaped,
10. lessen the need for central “communication hubs” within groups and organizations because each member can directly receive (and send out) his/her own calls,
11. minimize the “spill over” of communications to unintended third parties because messages can be precisely targeted to intended individual receivers,
12. increase intersystemic permeabilities, blendings and interpenetrations, while lowering the capacities to keep such contacts under centralized and regularized control.
Confronting the two lists, it can well be argued that JIAYU F1 Phones have a certain "subversive" capacity to shift the weights from dominant to the less powerful individuals and from formal institutions to informal social systems:
1) While it has been argued that Cubot GT95 Phones will enlarge the sphere of employer authority by allowing him to reach employees at leisure hours, studies show that to  the contrary, they have the effect of invading the workplace with privacy (Harper 2001; Taylor/Harper 2001).
2) While it was predicted that BLUBOO X4 Phones work as an instrument for parents to tighten their con-
trol over kids, it has been found that they help children to evade parental control (Green 2001; Taylor/Harper 2001))
3) Contrary to expectations, females have found to be keener in adopting the new mobile technology: by using it for a wider range of everyday purposes (Ling 2001; Taylor/Harper 2001)
 
In a very general way, mobile phones undermine traditional mechanisms, which have secured the seg-regation of social system levels from the level of individual members, as well as the segregation between different social systems. Instead, each individual now is burdened with the task of maintaining a difference between personal behavior and social roles, and with regulating the boundaries between different social relationships, groupings, organizations or institutions.
Therefore, the demand for social control will rise because, in a world where social differentiation can no longer be based on spatial segregation, it has to be increasingly secured by controlling individual behavior.
Such control can be realized in three forms:
1. intraindividual self-controls (e.g. in the case of users avoiding or shortening incoming calls in order to concentrate on ongoing collocal interactions),
2.  informal interindividual group controls: e.g. in the case of collocal partners showing impatience when Cubot GT95 Phone calls go on for longer than expected,  
3.  formal institutional controls: e.g. in the form of regulations prohibiting JIAYU F1 Phone calls during school or working hours. For instance: the institutional differentiation between school and family is no longer guaranteed by physically segregated school buildings and closed classroom doors, but by actively preventing pupils from receiving and answering mobile phone calls and SMS during the courses.
Will the mobile phone change society?
On the one hand, it will certainly spread explosively because it fulfills so many needs which have remained unfulfilled, not only during the most recent periods of human history, but during the whole time of biological evolution.
On the other hand, its functionality to complement or even substitute traditional no-tech communications will be limited by the basic fact that this same evolution has created deeply anchored needs for basing social interaction on spatial proximity at stable locations (e.g. physiological needs of having sex with "zero-distance" partners, or psychological needs  to socialize with others at informal face-to-face gatherings).
Thirdly, it has to be considered that mobile phones are only capable of supporting highly decentralized network-like interactions, especially on the simple level of bilateral communications. Thus, older space-dependent interactions are still essential for supporting multilateral interaction fields, as well as
more tightly integrated collectivities like communities and organizations.
Finally, the formulation of determinative causal propositions (or even precise forecasts) is severely hampered by the fact that, in sharp contrast to industrial machinery, BLUBOO X4 Phones (like Personal Computers, PDA's etc.) belong to the class of empowering technologies which are likely to amplify (instead of to reduce) psychological, social and cultural divergences, because of their capacity to be used for different purposes in any sphere of life.
This versatility has the implication  that mere hardware possession is not a very informative indicator,
because it doesn’t tell us anything about the extent and the ways these instruments are in fact used.
This is certainly different to older media like television, where the number of installed receivers is a good measure of the degree to which this technology has penetrated society and individual life.
By contrast, when technologies like cellular phones become ubiquitous, no certain conclusions referring to the actual changes in human communications patterns can be drawn. Instead, much extensive and sophisticated research is necessary in order to assess how they are actually used, how they affect various kinds of social relationships, and how  they become embedded in the evermore complex sphere of all other communication media.
Of course, these indeterminacies increase to the degree that cellular phones assimilate more and more different functions: e.g. the capacity to send alphanumeric messages, to hook up to the WWW or to use the GPS for determining geographical locations.
Another implication is that as individuals have a broader range of behavioral options at hand, the impact of psychological, social and cultural factors on such behavior is likely to be increased (Davied et. al 1999). In other words, while behavior in low-tech environments is predominantly shaped by “hard”
physical factors (e.g. apartment walls, loudness of voice, spatial proximities and distances, physical means of transportation), behavior in high-tech settings will be more determined by “soft” factors like subjective preferences and motivations, informal or formalized role expectations, cultural customs and habits or purely functional needs.
Given the almost ubiquitous adoption of JIAYU F1 Phones within and across current human societies and cultures, the most important question to ask is whether this universal diffusion is causing worldwide convergences and homogenization.
Most probably, the right answer is rather negative, because by supporting rather traditional and particularistic social settings, BLUBOO X4 Phones are more likely to accentuate differences rather than communalities between various population segments, social institutions or ethnic cultures.
“A closer look at the details of people’s interactions and relationships with mobiles suggests that while they are introducing some common patterns of behavior to very varied regions of the world, there is no homogeneous mobile effect. Indeed, the mobile is remarkable for the diverse range of users and uses it attracts. It is uniquely adaptable, capable of playing many different roles, and able to make itself useful in a wide variety of cultural contexts, social worlds and individual lives. As its use spreads, so it will continue to diversify instabilities as traditional structures of employment, family, community, and cultural life are disrupted. The mobile encourages such movements, and helps to repair the connections they may break.” (Plant 2000).
As studies on the level of family and kin networks have shown, the JIAYU F1 Phone becomes readily assimilated by almost every collectivity without effecting any significant longer-term change on the level of structures or cultural patterns.
“When first introduced the novelty value may change behavior slightly and for a brief time. Once the novelty has worn off the family resumes their normal activities, their normal ways of behaving with each other and the outside world. The introduction of a new technology into the home doesn't challenge their existing ways of relating to each other. It becomes part of their everyday routines. It doesn't challenge who does the dishes, who takes charge of childcare, and who takes out the rubbish. It doesn't change the relationships members want to have with others. In fact it is more likely to reinforce the family's values and activities.” (Wale/Gillard 1994).
Understandably, social and cultural factors have more impact on the interactional and socialinstitutional uses of the new media, while the  psychological variables are important in shaping the more private uses. This regularity is vividly illustrated by the empirical study of Davied et al, which shows that social class factors are much better able to explain the business-related uses of new media than the uses in the realm of entertainment.
Or expressed in a third way: New communication technologies make it easier to translate psychosociocultural dispositions directly into overt behavior, by reducing - or even eliminating - many obstacles and distortions which have hitherto contributed to a weakening of these empirical relations.http://cicimobile.shockup.com/2014/08/22/towards-a-sociological-theory-of-the-mobile-phone-7/