| The widespread proliferation of mobile telephony in the United States and around the world has generated increasing scholarly attention to the intersections between technology and social life. Rather than contribute to the prolific body of research on users, my project works to denaturalize the present understandings of the cellular phone through the (re)construction of specific articulations of the device that have circulated in U.S. media culture over the last two decades. I focus on how the cell phone is culturally construed as a tool for personal and public safety, as an ideal device for household and family management, and finally as a public offense and threat to social order. To do so, I turn to a variety of media artifacts to establish the intertextual context that both constitute and document the curiosities, tensions, fears and perceptions of this new technology.; The dissertation proceeds with analysis of three articulations of the cell phone. First, I examine how the cell industry evoked discourses of safety/security to infiltrate the consumer market, ultimately reinforcing the binary of vulnerable woman/protective patriarchy. By appealing to the infallible discourse of "safety," surveillance of the self and others is legitimized, and the crisis communications of Columbine and 9/11 advance the cellular phone in the public consciousness. Next, I trace the articulation of the cell phone as a means to manage the family and domestic sphere. Media culture emphasizes how cell phones can be used by parents to simultaneously bridge spheres of their public and private lives, and are cast as a key device for the whole family, allowing for the "remote parenting." Finally, I outline areas of tension that emerge in light of the presence of mobile phones in public. The fears and anxieties in cultural circulation about the cell phone's relationship to public life mirror those of previous electronic media in public space. Taken together, this project redresses a gap in mobile telephone research by attending to the persistent and mutually reinforcing mediated images and discourses that form a framework for the cultural expectations and understandings about the technology in U.S. society. |
