30 Cellphone Cultures

Dr. Babitha Justin

The gadget within your grasp

The cheap mobile phone is the most destructive device to hit humanity since shoes …

Like shoes, mobile phones have become an item that almost everyone can afford and aspire to

As communication is the backbone of human civilization, wireless communications have occupied modern life and the imagination in many ways. With the advantage of speed, combined with accuracy and efficiency, cell phones have transcended the barriers of time, space and distance. They have also disseminated themselves enormously as an equipment of communication; they have become prosthetic extensions of arms for the young and old alike and, probably for the first time in human history, they have dodged the tricky terrains of the digital divide pertaining to class, gender and race. Having long ceased to be just a piece of technology, they have become cultural objects and commodities of mass consumerism. This fast developing reality has not only changed the age-old concept of communication, but also has transformed the lives of people in terms of customizing new vistas of knowledge for them and allowing them to carry the universe literally in their grasp. A cell phone has become central to a lot of activities that have transformed ideas of family, relationship and friendships; work, creativity and leisure; media and concepts of individual and social communication. This cultural symbol of the modern era has arguably undergone many transformations within itself as well. From a simple mode of oral and textual communication, it has become a multi-functional and multi- sensory medium through which many sweeping social and cultural changes have been heralded. In many countries, it has become a means in which modern and traditional forms of living have been reassembled, rethought and redefined.

According to statistics, India has an estimated 933 million mobile users as on 15th May 2014. On an ever increasing stride, cell phones have not only revolutionized the communication ecologies of the twenty-first century, but it had also redefined the concept of communication in various ways. It has revolutionized oral, written and spoken transmission and has provided personalized zones of virtual-real communication. It should be noted that the popularity of cell phones is not only in their doubling up as a communication device and equipment with snob value at the same time, but also in the polysemic nature of the device which has made it enduring and irresistible. The gadget assumes many subtle meanings and uses according to the context. A mobile gadget within your grasp could not just make calls and text messages, but it could be used as a camera, an organizer, a gaming device, a GPS, a web browser and also a social networking tool. Apparently many cell phone companies have been locking horns over years and years together for violating patents, violations over ‘pinch to zoom’, rubber-banding technology, stolen designs, etc. At the same time they have been trying to incorporate more multi-functional qualities and to enhance the utility and the style quotient of cell phones so that it is possible to conduct multimodal communication from anywhere to everywhere, anytime. Cell phones have helped the family networking, peer-to-peer networking among youth, social networking amongst political, religious and gendered communities, etc, to communicate with an unimaginable ease which almost makes a mockery of time, space and distance. Cell phones have also helped the individual’s identity to find its complete expression, enabling each individual to set up the network of wanted connections. Nevertheless, this freedom to choose and connect without intermediaries gives a semblance of autonomy which is at once bewitching and deceptive. The flash political mobilization and mob activism effected by cell phone communication, which are hailed to be truly spontaneous and unpremeditated, may not actually be so. The notion of ubiquitous and the perpetual contact enabled by wireless network, simultaneously enriched by the internet, is paradoxical because it confers a seeming autonomy to people’s contact, but, at the same time, commits them to the inescapability of a surveillance system which has the power to access any information about the user at once.

Youth and cell phones

Young people constitute the primary group who may, not without justification, be called “the guinea pigs of cell phone revolution.” Youth are instrumental in fuelling the sudden growth of cell phone from being a simple gadget of communication to a multi-functionary status symbol with possibilities for multimodal operations. Communication tycoons target the youth for testing many features of cell phones which range from haptic and tactile interfaces, to complex psycho-motor skills which enable fast texting and gaming. Studies reveal that the usage of cell phones among youth is increasing day by day, and the dependency and involvement of the youth with the cell-phone on a daily basis is at a peak. The multi-functionality of cell phones has appealed to youth in a big way and there are indications that even the happiness index of youth, depends, to a large extent, on the day-to-day use of cell phone. Sara Collins observes:

Now, adolescents and teenagers are glued to their phones because there is the ability to have almost everything one could need on a single device whether it is texting, listening to music, playing games, checking emails, surfing the web, using the GPS, or watching videos. That being said, how has this shift to a cell phone using youth impacted their emotional and mental health as well as their social interactions? The survey concluded that the majority of adolescent’s overall happiness and contentedness is positively impacted.

Studies also reveal that cell phones with social networking helped in furthering the social quotient of the youth, as they connected with friends, interacted with their peers inside and outside their social groups, connected with family by sharing pictures, events, etc, and by exchanging social and political ideas and opinions. There was a global involvement with happenings in various spheres of life and also the nurturing of creativity through an environment that gives them greater exposure to both recent and archived trends. Researchers also noted that while being located in their individual bubbles of home-turf security, youth an increased opportunity to pan through the diverse vistas of knowledge as well as to develop and nurture respect and tolerance for dissimilar universes of experience. Hence, they are also known as ‘digital natives’ as they find this gadget as natural extensions of their lives than anything that is strange or exotic or beyond their comprehension. Cell phones also become a cultural object, through whiich they project and subsume their selves, and enact forms of power and agency through their digital cultural practices. The cell phones are sites on which the youth engage with, negotiate, and redefine themselves within a consumer culture. They help their many nodes of social existence grow, add, delete, connect, disconnect, merge, split, alienate and diversify.

For youth, cell phones create new dating cultures, intimate personal and group relationships and peer-group interactions, they help in time-based scheduling and micro- co ordinations of events and they also seemingly attenuate institutional and parental control over personal lives. Subsequently, we can also notice the evolution of evolution of ‘flash mobs’. Cell phone has been linked to extensively the development of informal grass roots political action; for example, the overthrow, in 2000, of President Estrada in the Philippines, as well as more general forms of anti-globalisation action and protest (see Rheingold, 2002). The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the rise of the Namo phenomenon in India also owe a lot to the mobilization of the youth through cell phones.

Even though cell phone provides a significant site for the expression and enactment of young people’s everyday cultural and social practices, the ubiquity and inevitability of the device in the modern day context impact the young in both positive and negative manner.

The whatsapp generation

In February 2014, in the biggest ever internet horse-trading, Facebook took over the instant messaging App, WhatsApp. In one of the most speculative gambles in software history, Facebook shelled out a whooping 19 billion for a company of five years standing with just fifty five employees. The instant popularity of WhatsApp was one of the reasons behind this take over. WhatsApp culture can be deemed as a subculture and how it has influenced cell cultures in a major fashion makes it interesting. It is an individual and group interactive app which has both the features of SMS and MMS ingrained into it. Once downloaded, this app is completely free and handles more than 10 billion messages (text and multimedia messages everyday.) WhatsApp was started in 2009 by two ex- Yahoo staff, Jan Koum and Brian Acton and, soon it is one of the most popular instant messaging apps on the cell platform. Instantaneously, it became popular among the youth and it was used as a better alternative to texting. Photos, videos, weblinks and messages could be sent to individuals and groups. Apparently, this app also promised privacy with no backlogs attached. The questions which linger are: did the takeover cast a death knell of internet cultures and ushered in a new cell and ipad culture? Will the IM culture (instant messaging) replace social networking activities, precisely because of its harmonious resonance with the graspable device and individual sense of privacy?

SMS culture

Txt msg ws an acidnt. no 1 expcted it. Whn the 1st txt msg ws sent, in 1993 by Nokia eng stdnt Riku Pihkonen, the telcom cpnies thought it ws nt important. SMS – Short Message Service – ws nt considrd a majr pt of GSM. Like mny teks, the *pwr* of txt — indeed, the *pwr* of the fon — wz discvrd by users. In the case of txt mssng, the usrs were the yng or poor in the W and E. (Agar, 152)

The history of SMS tells us that the Short Text Messaging Services were built into cell phones as an insignificant and additional capability.

A number of telecommunications manufacturers thought so little of the SMS as not to design or even offer the equipment needed (the servers, for instance) for the distribution of the messages. The character sets were limited, the keyboards small, the typeface displays rudimentary, and there was no acknowledgement that messages were actually received by the recipient. Yet SMS was cheap, and it offered one-to-one, or one-to-many, text communications that could be read at leisure, or more often, immediately. (Goggin, 35)

Contrary to the expectations, SMSes became very popular among the youth especially, for the cheapness and the novelty of being able to send texts messages along with conversation, as a rejoinder or a preamble. SMS created a new culture where language could itself be abbreviated, compressed and de-vowelized to fit into the fast and cryptic world they were living in. Especially the one-to-one and one- to- many shared texts became an interminable part of television culture. Every user had the freedom to flout linguistic and syntactic rules to create a subculture of individual freedom in texting and messaging. Easy to use with either a nimble touch or in QWERTY key pad, SMS cultures brought in new innovations in expression and communication. Reality shows elicited interactive audiences to augment ‘reality’ and SMSes were used as a powerful medium to obtain public votes and opinions. Multimedia functions were built into SMS services to create MMS (Multimedia Messaging) which shared images, video and audio files and this took it another level of creativity and innovation. Thus, the SMS culture had become a new trajectory of mobility in communication, wherein oral sounds could either be complemented or done away with altogether with texts and images.

In the texting culture, language underwent a lot of changes which were functional, cryptic and irreverent to a certain extent. To be more precise, technology has become the most influential catalyst in a change in language to such an extent that it conveyed the most remarkable transformation in spelling, grammar, syntax, etc. Subtle and noticeable changes have nuanced the vocabulary; semantic changes and other modifications have brought in new perspectives and paradigms in which people, especially the young, use language in technical contexts. Through abbreviations, the language of mobile phones and internet chats have been revolutionized to such an extent that, abbreviations like OMG, LOL, ROTFL, etc, have become popular among the youth culture across the globe. In the book Txtng by David Crystal, he explores in detail some of the abbreviations which are frequently used in the texting cultures all over the world.

B	Be
B4	Before
@	at
R	Are
&	and
2	To, too, two
Sum1	Someone
Lol	Laugh out loud

Concerned language enthusiasts have been doing their rounds predicting a complete language disaster, for example John Humphrys exploded in the Daily Mail that texters are:

vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

Crystal is of a different view when he observes that that never has been such a been a linguistic phenomenon like SMS texting which has aroused such curiosity, suspicion, fear, confusion, antagonism, fascination, excitement, and enthusiasm, all at once. He feels that while texting has in fact added more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language and it has also added a new dimension to language use. To be more precise, the use of English language.

Crystal adds that “a new medium for language doesn’t turn up very often, which is why the linguistic effects of electronic communications technology have attracted so much attention” (2008, 80). Notably, the usage of expressions and attitudes in the form of smileys and emoticons has become an integral part of the techno-cultural change in language. In the habit of reinventing language through itself, the text- language in itself has become a decoding message, where you have to decipher acronyms, abbreviations, punctuations, signs, symbols and alphabets.

Smart phones

A smart phone is a mobile phone that is able to perform many of the functions of a computer, typically having a relatively large screen and an operating system capable of running general-purpose applications.

Today’s smart phones have been around since last six years when Apple introduced the smart phone in mass consumer market, but in reality they have been in the market since 1993. The difference between today’s smart phone and early smart phones is that early smart phones were predominantly meant for corporate users and used as enterprise devices and also those phone were too expensive for the general consumers. (Sarwar, Rahim)

Smart phones are named after their smart and profound impact on areas that include education, business, health and social life. The smart phone cultures not only create surprisingly new facets of connectivity but also individual bubbles of personalized spaces and micro cultures. In business and trade, smart phones with smart applications as publishers, distributors and service providers, generate huge revenue by providing ads as a part of mobile application. But they have affected sales of the PC market adversely as a large number of people have switched to smart phones to read newsfeeds, post status, updates, read and reply to messages and post photos (Sarwar, Rahim). In the field of education, they have transformed classroom teaching with teaching aids and apps that take teaching out of classrooms. The use of internet and high-speed mobile browsing have in fact provided an alternative channel to educational services. However, on the other flip side of it all, smart phones are also used clandestinely in the classrooms for social networking, texting and in many occasions, to cheat during exams. Experts in the health sector agree that the mobile applications and handy-internet connectivity help the society access health facilities and information emphatically and the same time the 24/7 obsession with smart phones cause many health hazards to the user. It disconnects an individual from social interaction and causes non-substance addiction when the users get glued to video games and other interactive mechanisms alike. Smart phones, while enabling us to remain connected all the time with its enhanced technology in the field of education, health, entertainment and business and trade, can also become Frankensteins of our culture if there is no monitoring and usage modulation.

Apps culture

The development of the apps culture tells us the transformation of cell phones “from a voice device to a multi-channel device to an internet-accessing mini-computer” (Kirsten) Concurrently, a large market of software applications designed specifically for cell phones has been developed alongside it. Apps are end-user software applications which contain large bytes of audio-visual information which are designed for smart phones. They enable the user to perform specific activities in the field of entertainment, gaming, banking, maps, navigation, search, shopping, banking, education, finance, travel, religion and lifestyle. There are both paid apps and free apps and you name any activity, you have the apps custom made for you.

Erving Goffman considers this rampant use of apps as a phenomenon of globalization where the use of props and tools enhance the modern individual’s projection of the most desired self on her audience (Goffman 1959). It can be seen clearly that while traditional roles and relationships still exist, the modern techno-individuals have been inducted into a culture of the self which improves on itself with constant reinventions, re-modelling and reconstitutions. “Agger would contend that the developments in communication technology are a fundamental aspect of the fluidity of relationships. The self is not a static entity but can be redefined at will, reinventing itself daily”. This aspect of a fluid state of the self-corresponding with that of the concurrent technical fluidity was explained in techno-anthropological terms by Baudillard. He highlights a phenomenon called ‘neotribalism’ which he describes as “modern fluid tribes who fulfill the desire to belong. Membership in such tribes is not founded on traditional categories of age, class, race and gender, as neo-tribes believe that such pigeonholing is insufficient in defining individual identity. However, individuals will adopt props in order to create self-identity in the neo- tribes where the body is adorned only to be made into a spectacle” (Rippin, 15). It has to be noted that the increase of cell phones “has contributed to spread of the space flows and timeless time as structures of everyday

Cell phone and society, change in patterns of behavior

Scientists believe that cell phone cultures which thrive on ubiquity, interconnectedness and constant technological changes generate an interrelated web of the individual’s relation with technology. As a result, new social-individual behaviours and rituals arise from the user’s management of her everyday lives. Cell phone culture has influenced behavior patterns (from the day to day ritual of waking up with an alarm and checking the phone at work, at leisure and during community gatherings) , language use (change in linguistic and semantic patterns) , relationship management (where cell phones are used to for new dating cultures and where the privacy and freedom of technology nurture illegitimacy within conjugal relationships), presentation of the self (through the upgradation and customisation of the phone) and the experiences of new vistas of knowledge through updated forms of technology , etc.

Studies say that cell phones have revolutionized human lives in such a way that it has diffused its impact over the rich and the poor, the rural and the urban, the male and the female, and it has also effaced almost all the digital divides that have separated the world into haves and have-nots. As cell phone has become an individualized tool of communication, “used in all spatial contexts to build a new space, a space of selective communication, connecting to wherever the other communicators are located at any given time. Users of the mobile phone have privileged connectivity over mobility.” (Castelles 175)This is particularly true of low income groups, in many third world countries where cell phone is the only device for communication.

In Cell Phone Nation, Jeffrey points out to the fact that cell phones in India have positively influenced the lives of common people like the vegetable vendors and fishermen. It was mentioned that, after the inboard motor that changed the lives of fisher folk, the next crucial change was that of cell phone (Jeffrey 59). Studies in Japan and China indicate rather disturbing trends of that point out to the alienation of human beings from the forces of ‘real’ socialization as the etiquettes and mannerisms gets hijacked by ‘virtual’ socialization.

A major change that happened is the changing pattern of relationships which have become more fluid, and the use of technologies like internet dating, emailing, text messaging and WhatsApping have made modern relationships more fluid, making interpersonal relationships more tentative, loose, quickly addable and deletable.

Unlike ‘real relationships’, ‘virtual relationships’ are easy to enter and exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use and user-friendly, when compared with heavy, slow-moving, inert, messy, ‘real stuff’. A twenty-eight year old …pointed to the one decisive advantage of electronic relation: ‘you can always press ‘delete’.(Bauman)

Perpetual contactability and the notion of being in touch 24/7 again provide an illusion of perfect manageability of the self. There are studies which indicate that the use of cell phones in public is one of the ways of advertisements and identity managements. The user prioritizes the most information about herself to be portrayed and disseminated to the audience. Rippin encapsulates the phenomenon which helps the individual to manage different selves, thus: “Paradoxically, the mobile gives the user the freedom to experiment with the notion of self, but the inability to maintain control over audience segregation results in a potentially fragmented identity.” She adds, “One of the consequences of being contactable “24/7” is that impression management becomes difficult to sustain. … Like any good actor, the role must be learnt off by heart, remembered and performed upon demand.” (Rippin, 76)

Besides reinventing the selves, cell phones have also an indelible impact on the way memory is exercised by the user. During the era of land phones, the phone user could remember phone numbers and would refer to them in the phonebooks where they were written. Now with phone numbers saved in the cell memory, as well as with speed dials, the art of numerical memorizing is no longer necessary. With the technical storage capacity of cell phones, the capacity to remember numbers is not longer used. At the same time, once cell phone is lost, stolen or damaged, the user is likely lose all the contacts. Cell phone’s impact on human concentration in class rooms, workplaces and domestic spaces is also a new phenomenon, as users check their cell phones for messages and status updates whenever they feel the anxiety of being not-connected. Such short spans of concentration especially in academic and work spaces (which infiltrates into domestic spaces) are again indicative of one of the many layers changes in the patterns of human behavior.

Religion and cellphone cultures

Very recently the Vatican had warned the believers that cell phones are bad for any kind of spiritual relief. On the other hand, cell phones have provided alternative or new spaces for religious people to express their views, beliefs and affirm their religiosity in many ways. Ultraorthodox Jews in Israel use the ‘Kosher Cell phone’, which is designed with filters to bowdlerize unsavory internet content and adapt technology to suit their lifestyle. The leaders of the community disabled internet and also created a call plan which makes calls within the community very cheap. At the same time, there have also been instances of religious awakening and mobilization through cell phones. Like others who have domesticated, individualized and appropriated the device, religions have also welcomed cell phone: “The phone was welcomed in many Muslim countries. It offered automatic and precise prayer timing, alarms to note the call to prayer, direction finding to position the user towards Mecca and the full text of the Holy Qur’an with English translations”. (Jeffrey, 19) In India, the screensavers of many cell phones featured the pictures of saints and many ring tones and caller tunes buzzed with slokas, mantras and bhajans. Moreover, daily horoscopes, predictions and sooth-sayings were also text messaged to the user on a daily basis at an affordable price. It is to be noted that religion in a compact and graspable form appealed to all religions including Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims and propaganda along with religious mobilization soared with cell phone use.

Gendering cellphones

Women’s use of technology and its impeding distractions have been widely debated and discussed. There were many stories of the ban of cell phones to women, honour killings that have occurred with mobile dating and at the same time researches also highlight the empowering nature of cell phones. The anxiety of women going astray and immoral could be read into the incident where the elders in the Lank village in the Uttar Pradesh state of India forbade unmarried women from using cell phones. They feared that the women were using phones to make plans to elope and choose their own partners by defying the caste and class barriers. Horst and Miller in their pioneering study of the effects of the mobile phone on society in Jamaica were noted that for women cell phones were valued much more for personal than social use. For women, they wrote, ‘ often living on their own (men having migrated to seek work), the mobile reinforced existing practices of keeping in touch with acquaintances to make it easier to get a loan or other support in times of need. The mobile intensified and extended customs, that arose ‘from a long gestation in Jamaican history and experience’ (Horst 59). Jeffrey and Doron comment on the empowering, autonomy and liberation from the age old restrictive social customs in India thus: “In India, the cheap cell phone enabled young couples to talk to each other unknown to disapproving elders, for daughters-in-law to talk to fathers-in-law as they had not done in the past and for such transactions to occur in tens of millions of families almost daily from the early years of the twentieth-century.”(Jeffrey, 78)

The anxieties of the autonomy the phone provided, especially to women and the transformation of cell phone as an instrument of change, especially in connecting lives and liberating users from age old, rigid values were reflected primarily in the cell medium itself in the form of video clips and lurid songs. Jeffrey and Doron mention a video clip called the Mobile Wali (A woman with the mobile phone) which portrayed women mobile users as skimpily clad libertines who led a wayward life and challenging established rules of conduct. The worry of the negative effects of the internet and mobile phones had actually reached paranoid heights as technology has been blamed for everything from the rise of divorce rates, to political unrest, to teenage suicides and the over throw of the government. The flexibility and technical adaptability of cell phones have made them sites of anxiety and control as well as it signaled a new vulnerability, especially when used by women and children. Jeffrey and Doron note that in 2002, the cover of India Today, one of India’s largest circulating news magazines, anxiously articulated that that it was “Love in the time of SMS”, suggesting that SMS stood for

“some more sex” and that cell phones were the new Viagra. Interestingly in this piece and several following pieces, much was made of the fact that women, in particular, were taking advantage of this medium to explore their sexuality, thwart their family’s plans, or circumvent their husband’s control (Jeffrey 67). Anxieties apart, we can also see that cell phones enabled the delivery of high quality pornography to anybody’s doorstep. Pornography, hand-in-glove with new technology, took improved forms and was democratized easily as local and foreign clips flowed into the market. Apart from boosting the business on a large scale, cell phone users could watch the clips discreetly and also share them to their friends. Jeffrey notes that: ‘Mobiles had major advantages over DVDs. To view a DVD required equipment (a player and a television set), privacy (hard to come by in a joint family in cramped quarters) and regular electric supply. A mobile phone needed none of these. In this sense, the mobile phone was classless: it brought porn to the poor’ (Jeffrey 78). Cell phones facilitated new kinds of crimes which went beyond simple thefts: from experiencing harassment and bullying while attending to fake calls to being led to devious valleys of crime and terrorism, the gadget within our grasp created new facets of fraud and debauchery. The anonymity and privacy provided by the mobile phones made it easy for common man and woman in conducting risky activities like cheating, stalking, intimidation, bullying and sexual harassment. Cheating at the time of examination and tests, a universal phenomenon, was another common fraud facilitated by cell phones.

With the new gadget that has brought in new cultures of technology, religion, socialization and gender equation, along with the innovations, our own anxiety and fears have been projected as well. To an extent, this unease can be justified as the gadget in our grasp has to potential to make life amenable as well undo the process of progress.

Instructional design: Glossary

1) Communicative ecology is a term used in the field of media and communications research. It is a conceptual model used to analyse and represent the offline and online or the physical and digital relationships between individuals, collectives and networks during social interactions, discourse, and technological and media communication. It refers to “the context in which communication processes occur” (Foth & Hearn, 2007, p. 9).

2) Neotribalism: Coined by Michel Maffesoli , French sociologist, who predicted that future societies would embrace nostalgia and look to the tribal organizational principles of the past for guidance. He also claimed that the post-modern era would be the era of neotribalism.

3) Polysemic device: A multi-functionary device, which could be a phone, a text messenger, a web browser, a GPS and an entertainment system.

4) Haptic interfaces: Are interfaces used in touchphone technology which recreates the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user

5) Kosher cell phones: ‘Kosher Cell phone’, is used among an orthodox section of the Israeli Jews and is designed with filters to bowdlerize unsavory internet content and adapt technology to suit their lifestyle. The leaders of the community disabled internet and also created a call plan which makes calls within the community very cheap

6) Apps: Software applications or self-contained programmes which are designed to fulfill the specific needs of smartphone users.

Reference:

• Agar, Jon. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. Cambridge: Icon, 2003. Print.
• Castells, Manuel. Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, jack Linchuan Qiu, Ataba Sey. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global perspective. London: MIT Press, 2004. Print.
• Crystal, David. Txtng: the Gr8 Db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
• Foth, Marcus and Hearn, Greg. ‘ Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the Communicative Ecology in Inner-City Apartment Complexes.’ Information, Communication & Society 10(5). Web. 15 May 2014. http://eprints.qut.edu.au .
• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: London: Penguin, 1959. Print.
• Gorney, Elizabeth. “The Language of Texting: Altering English or a Language of its Own.” Undergraduate Review: a Journal of Undergraduate Student Research 13 (2012): 39-42. Web. 18 June 2014. <http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/ur/vol13/iss1/9>.
• Jeffrey, Robin and Assa Doron in Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India. UK: Hachete, 2013. ebook. Flipkart. Web. 11 April 2014.
• Lloyd, Robin. “Mobile Phones for Women: A New Approach for Social Welfare in the Developing World” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mobile-phones- for-women/
• Purcell Kirsten, Roger Entner and Nichole Henderson . “The Rise of App Culture” Pew Research Internet Project. Web. 14 Sept 2010. <http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/14/the-rise-of-apps-culture/>
• Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2002. Print.
• Rippin, Hannah. “The Mobile Phone in Everyday Life”. Fast Capitalism. 1.1 (2005): 14-15. Web. 20 June 2014. <http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_1/rippin.html>
• Sarwar, Muhammed and Tariq Rahim Soomro. “Impact of Smartphone’s on Society”.European Journal of Scientific Research . ISSN 1450-216X / 1450-202X Vol. 98 No 2 March, 2013, pp.216-226. Web. 17 May 2014.<http://www.europeanjournalofscientificresearch.com>

I.          Photographs