Listening to Crawford and Goggin’s presentation on mobile telephony research at ANZCA 2009. Constrasts assumptions about the end of / decline of social cohesion and community because of mobile communications; and the rise or, reinforcement of community ties – this is the normative dialectic within the research field. Similar dichotomies throughout the field: isolated / connected; closed world / open world Youth are seen as excessive in both directions – occupying ‘extreme’ polar opposities at the same time; eg mobile telelphony closes off young people from the world, and yet they are too connected! useful insights: who is young? (because ‘youth’ is the focus) youth and technology are consistently aligned by commentators from 18th C onwards youth are a focus for particular attention because, from an adult perspective, they give a slimpse of what general social life might be like in future, when those youth become adult “youth as developmental narrative”: dependency to self-sufficiency through “trials of emancipation” – reviewing Ling’s work on mobiles; challenges the fixity of the ‘adult’ as ‘developed’ entity after childhood or youth youth is not the same category in different cultures youth as overly idealised state of individual freedom, read from the perspective of constrained … Click to read more →