What are you currently working on?

I am currently playing around with some thoughts on how AI-based mobile platforms will become more agentic. The idea is that the platforms, such as dating sites, chat forums, larger group chats, etc., will moderate/edit the communications that we send and receive. This may mean that we need to always apply a type of tacit Turing test to our communications to parse out the bits that are human-generated and those that are generated by AI bots. 

 

Can you share a project that changed the way you think or work? 

I remember the original focus group transcripts that really turned me on to mobile communication. It was in the early 1990s. I had been working at the Norwegian Telecom operator Telenor. I was working on a digital network project, but somehow got a hold of a transcript of a focus group on mobile telephone users. The system was slowly diffusing into society at that point, and Telenor wanted to understand the perspective of the users. When I read the transcripts, the sociology of it all jumped off the page. Some users wanted the most ostentatious mobile phone they could afford.

Others thought it was all too much. There were people talking about the convenience of the system, and others who were annoyed to tears about how people were using mobile phones in public. For me, this was a turning point. There were so many different interpretations and uses of the technology. I knew that there had to be a lot of good insight one could get from studying this new technology.  

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Which piece of work feels closest to your heart, and why?

Perhaps some of the writing on microcoordination is important, but I think that the book that is most central for me is Taken for grantedness. This is my third book, and its main theme is how mobile communication has become structured into society. Earlier books gave an overview of mobile communication (The mobile connection), and how mobile communication supports social ties (New tech, new ties). However, Taken for grantedness really considers how mobile communication is not just a “nice to have” technology, but how it has become socially expected.

 

A close second would be some of the ethnographic stuff I have been able to do through the years looking at rag pickers use of mobile phones in Myanmar (pre-coup), women in Kenya, and the food markets in Côte d'Ivoire. Interestingly (or maybe ironically), my chance to work on country-wide social network data was also exciting and stretched my mind in new directions.

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Finally, I have a fond spot for all the people I have had the chance to collaborate with through the years. What a rich experience!

 

What's a question you keep returning to?

How has mobile communication changed social institutions?  I see that there is a strong thread of communication studies that looks at the cognitive dimensions of technology use. In a sense, I am looking in the opposite direction. I am more interested in how our use of communication technologies changes institutions such as work, the family, education, gender roles, transportation systems, dating, production and marketing, etc.

 

If you had a tagline or motto, what would it be? 

Take care of yourself, take care of the planet, and cultivate your curiosity.

 

If time, money, and logistics weren't a concern, what dream project would you dive into?

If I take the “logistics” dimension of this, I wonder what kind of work I could do if I were able to gain access, to pass, into different groups and understand their use of mobile communication.

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Goffman talked a lot about “passing” in his work as an agricultural specialist on the island of Unst in the Shetlands in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and as an assistant physical therapist at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., for the book Asylums. He talks about having a plausible reason to be in a setting. Somewhat similar studies are Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Levittown by Herbert J. Gans.

Others have taken it even further. I am thinking of people like John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me, Günter Wallraff in The Lowest of the Low, and Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickle and Dimed. In these cases, they quite literally took on the status of the people they were writing about.

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It would be fascinating to “pass” into different groups at the bottom of the global pyramid (but also maybe at the top) to understand their use of the technology. What does the world look like for a beggar in Dakar, Senegal, or a piece-rate seamstress in Hội An, Vietnam, or a Syrian refugee in Amsterdam? How does having a phone (or not being able to afford one) effect everyday life? You can also ask the same questions for homeless people in the Global North. 

 

What's one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out as a scholar? 

It will be ok. Things can look dark sometimes (getting a critical review, not getting a promotion/award/etc). You may need to seek out a somewhat different path, but if you are persistent, it will somehow work out.

 

Who's someone whose work deserves more attention - and who you want to nominate as the next featured scholar? 

Lara Wolfers