[Sci-tech-public] Communications Forum: CELL PHONE CULTURE on Thursday, Nov. 17, 5-7 p.m. at MIT

[Brad Seawell]

MIT COMMUNICATIONS FORUM


Cell Phone Culture

Thursday, November 17, 2005
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Bartos Theater, Media Lab
20 Ames Street, MIT


Abstract

No contemporary cultural artifact embodies the genius and the disruptive 
excess of capitalism as clearly as the cell phone. Ubiquitous in most 
developed societies in Europe, the Americas and Asia, the cell phone has 
become a laboratory some would say an asylum for testing the limits of 
technological convergence. Less a telephone today than a multi-purpose 
computer, cell phones are game consoles, still cameras, email systems, text 
messengers, carriers of entertainment and business data, nodes of commerce. 
Particular age cohorts and subcultures have begun to appropriate cell 
phones for idiosyncratic uses that help to define their niche or social 
identity. This Forum will examine the cell phone as a technological object 
and as a cultural form whose uses and meaning are increasingly various, an 
artifact uniquely of our time that is enacting, to borrow the words of a 
contemporary novelist, a ceaseless spectacle of transition.

Speakers

James Katz is professor of communication and director of Rutgers 
University's Center for Mobile Communications Studies, which he founded in 
2004. Katz' research focuses on how personal communication technologies, 
such as mobile phones and the Internet, affect social relationships and how 
cultural values influence usage patterns of these technologies. His books 
include Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal 
Communication Technology (Transaction, 2003, editor) and Perpetual Contact: 
Mobile Communication, Private Talk and Public Performance (Cambridge, 2002, 
co-edited with Mark Aakhus). He is also the author of Social Consequences 
of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Expression (MIT Press, 2002, with 
Ron Rice).

Jing Wang is professor of Chinese cultural studies, and the head of Foreign 
Languages & Literatures at MIT. Her research interests are focused on 
contemporary Chinese popular culture and its relationship to marketing and 
advertising. She worked at Ogilvy in Beijing for two summers as a 
consultant for the Planning Department, and is currently finishing up a 
book manuscript [Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial 
Culture]. Wang's presentation on cell phone branding and youth culture in 
China is based on some of her work at Ogilvy.

Free and open to the public.

More information: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum


Brad Seawell, program coordinator
MIT Communications Forum
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum
14N-430
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
voice 617-253-3521
fax 617-253-6105

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