This article focuses on the mobile phone’s permeation into
‘everyday life’ through products, knowledge and cultural
processes. The convergence and blurring of industry boundaries increasingly see
entertainment, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and lifestyle
products and services combine. The possibilities that digital economies (via
products and services) provide in shaping our experiences - and how others
experience us - lend support to Featherstone’s comment that the
‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ has arrived. The resulting
consumption is an experience economy, where a broad range of mobile phone users,
with or without technical savvy, expendable income and aesthetic ambitions, can
harvest from the ever-increasing palette of the digital domain. Throughout the 20th
century, visions of utopia and dystopia have often run alongside such major
developments in technology, especially those that have the capacity or likelihood to
transform and disturb conceptions of the everyday. Outlining a number of current
states of play and future scenarios for the mobile phone in the everyday, we suggest
that mobile phone analytics will shift from the utopian and dystopian towards
analyses by more conventional theoretical and methodological tools and approaches
found in media, cultural and policy studies, as well as in the social sciences and
other disciplines.
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