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My mobile phone beeps at 9.07 in the morning. The first text message of the day has arrived. 'Hope you weren't offended by my e-mail. Say something.' In the lift at work, on my way into the newspaper office where I work, my mobile beeps again. The message is from my boss: 'Hi, can you write something about the internet for next week? Jari.' In the office I sit down at my desk. At 11.03 my mobile beeps. The message is from my boyfriend: 'My angel.' Five minutes later, the mobile beeps. This time, the message is from my aunt, who is visiting Helsinki: 'Shall we meet in front of the Old Student Union Building at five o'clock?' During my lunch break, the mobile beeps - again. 'ILYVM. Although soon I won't dare read your messages, they're so full of riddles and crushing criticism.' The day wears on: the phone rings, the mobile beeps. My friends tell me what they're doing, my colleagues ask about work matters, I thrash things out with my boyfriend, who is abroad. I tap in my responses, talk to answering machines, arrange meetings, cancel them. All day, I do not spend more than an hour away from my mobile. We Finns call them kännykkäs, which is derived from käsi, the word for hand. And that's what they are: extensions of the human body. Finns have gone crazy over their mobiles. There will soon be more mobile connections in Finland than there are people. This nation, once considered taciturn, sent about 700 million text messages last year. Hey, hello! Seven hundred million text messages! That means almost two million messages a day. But it does not mean that text messages are replacing speech. Telephone bills have doubled, for Finns are also talking to one another on the telephone more than ever. But they no longer sprawl on their beds chattering into a cord phone or stand by the hall telephone table to talk, but ring from one mobile to another, on the trot, continually, from every street corner. The most typical mobile conversation begins, 'Where are you? What are you doing?', and ends, 'Can't talk any more. Got to go. Bye'. The mobilisation of Finland has been so rapid and so obvious that even the academic world has woken up to it and begun to study it. Traditionally, the digital society has been studied pre-emptively: attempts have been made, for example, to prepare for the transition that the information society brings with it (you know: everything is changing, the transformation is enormous, the meaning of time and place change, and then we will be living in that media studies cliche, the global village). In the case of mobile phones, the situation is different. In Finland - Nokialand - the digital society, and particularly one of its manifestations, the mobile telephone, is already so strongly present that it can be studied empirically, here and now. A peculiar mobile phone culture has developed in Finland, and has been studied by, among others, the sociologists Pasi Mäenpää and Timo Kopomaa. Kopomaa's book, Kännykkäkulttuurin synty ('The birth of mobile phone culture', Gaudeamus, 2000), explores the role of the mobile phone in Finns' work, leisure and, in particular, urban life. Pasi Mäenpää's article, 'Digitaalisen arjen ituja' ('Fragments of digital reality', in 2000-luvun elämä, 'Life in the 21st century', Gaudeamus, 2000), depicts the mobile phone as part of the urban way of life. The birth of a homogeneous mobile phone culture has been easy in Finland, according to Kopomaa, because the urban way of life in Finland has a short history. The mobile phone has not remained the province of any one group or class; it is used by everyone. Mäenpää, on the other hand, presents observations and interpretations of the influence of the mobile phone on people's everyday lives and relationships. He believes that the mobile phone has given rise to a use culture of its own, creating a new urban culture and even new ways of life. The sociologist and the mobile phone is a fitting combination: Finnish mobile-phone users are, indeed, rich in the social networks, the interpolation of the private and the public and the urban neo-locality etc. so beloved of sociologists. In describing mobile phone culture, the sociologist can revel in traditional campfire comparisons and ponder new notions of community. Kopomaa describes mobile-phone users who participate in a 'society of souls' and gather to 'socialise'. He is also enthusiastic about the 'enlivening' of the urban scene, as increasing numbers of people speak freely into their mobiles, and their faces become more expressive or even smiling. An extreme example of the urban mobile-user is, according to Kopomaa, the rollerblader who glides through the city, attending at speed to both work matters and social relationships. Mäenpää describes the equal-paced world created by the mobile phone, in which 'life is lived spatially in different places, but subconsciously keeping pace with others'. 'Hi, what are you doing, I'm going to sleep now,' a young mobile-user announces to her friend at night. And what do you think she does when she wakes up? For foreign journalists, too, it is little short of astonishing that this taciturn northerly nation has suddenly begun to talk into tiny portable telephones and send millions of mini e-mails - the maximum length is 160 characters - to one another. Last September, the Silicon Valley-based magazine Wired devoted as many as 17 pages to Nokia and the Finnish mobile-phone culture. Specialising in computers, information networks and e-commerce, the magazine is read by at least a million influential figures in the field globally, and in this special issue Finland - that arctic laboratory of information technology - was projected as an exotic manifestation of mobile-phone culture. According to Wired, this is what things are like in Finland: 'Like schools of fish, kids navigate on currents of whim - from the Modesty coffee bar to the Forum mall for a slice of pizza or a movie to a spontaneous gathering on a street corner, or to a party, where SMS (text) messages dispatche don the phones summon other kids or send the group swimming somewhere else.' But can this be the whole truth about Finnish mobile-phone users? An example: my mother, a 53-year-old secondary-school head, has a mobile phone; my sister, a 22-year-old student, has a mobile phone; my brother, a 10-year-old schoolboy, has a mobile phone. My father, my two other sisters and my boyfriend, and his parents and all my colleagues have mobile phones. Naturally, for in Finland you seldom meet anyone who does not. But does my mother wander on a whim through the city or hang about on street corners after receiving a text message? Not likely. There are very many different ways of using mobile phones, although newspaper articles like to claim otherwise. The use made of them by young urbanites is one - certainly the most widespread and obvious - manifestation of mobile-phone culture. My mother likes to switch off her mobile phone from time to time. She turns it off at night, and when she goes to our house in the country, it is turned off for days, although she may collect her messages in the evenings. And just think - sometimes my mother leaves her mobile phone at school for an entire evening and night! What does her youngest daughter have to say to that? 'Are you mad, mum, someone might ring!' My sister sleeps with her mobile beside her, and never switches it off. In lectures, at the pictures and in the library, the mobile is in vibrate mode, but switched on all day. My sister is wired 24 hours a day, and proud of it. Someone might ring, after all! My ten-year-old brother is only allowed to ring his parents from his mobile. And when the mobile rings, the conversation generally begins, 'Hello, it's mummy here. Where are you?' For my mother, her mobile is a telephone. For my sister, her mobile is a 'place', where she is always available. For my brother, his mobile is his parents' way of supervising where exactly he is. What kind of a world is it, where families communicate by mobile telephone? There has already been debate in Finland about mobile-phone fathers and mothers who telephone their children when they are working late and tell them to heat up some pizza in the microwave oven. It has been suggested that people will no longer meet when everything can be dealt with over the telephone. That is not how things have turned out. According to the studies by Kopomaa and Mäenpää, too, the mobile telephone concentrates the use of space and time. The mobile phone is used to agree when to meet; it does not replace meeting. A large proportion of the mobile-telephone calls of, in particular, young urbanites, is taken up with arrangements to meet. The mobile telephone is also often used to say one is running late. A confession: I blushed when I read one researcher's suggestion that mobile telephones increase lateness. I myself have a saved text message which reads 'I am 15 minutes late'. I can send it hither and thither throughout the day, as circumstances demand. It is difficult to say whether I would be late more or less often without my mobile phone, or whether I would simply not call to say I was going to be late. Does constant availability result in liberation or dependence? Is the difference between work and leisure excessively blurred when one has to make oneself 'available' even at weekends or on holiday? Are people without mobile telephones excluded from some social relationships, since they cannot be contacted on the trot? The mobile telephone increases the efficiency and effectiveness of time use, but where is the efficiency in ringing one's friends from the bus and saying: 'talk to me, I'm on the bus and it's boring.' Kopomaa's and Mäenpää's studies, too, ponder the paradoxical lines of development created by the mobile telephone: a life governed by the mobile telephone is simultaneously both flexible and planned and extremely discontinuous and attention-deficient. With a mobile telephone, one is always 'at home', and at the same time always in motion. The mobile telephone helps one to contact people, but makes unavailability impossible. Life with a mobile telephone is constant living in the future. Ordinary life governed by a mobile telephone is sharing everything here and now - but not with everyone. The mobile telephone increases spontaneous contacts, but only with those whose number is to be found in its memory. If one wishes to worry, or if one is otherwise fond of dichotomies, mobile-phone culture, too, offers causes for anxiety. What about a young person who does not have a mobile telephone, whose friends wander through the city, directed by their mobile phones? Will he or she miss the best parties? There are no longer very many mobile-phoneless young people in Finland. The latest report reveals that 15- to 25-year-olds young people living in the Helsinki area spend an average of 6,000 Finnmarks a year, or 500 Finnmarks a month on their mobile phones and internet connections. Most young people are students. Good luck to fathers, mothers and credit companies. And welcome to the new economy, which makes billions of Finnmarks out of the fact that (young) users want to change their ringing tone and mobile-phone logo a couple of times a week - at five Finnmarks a time. The new generation's telephones and services will perhaps change the entire face of the recently born mobile-phone culture. The mobile telephone as we now know it appears to be only an intermediate stage on the road of technological development. The internet is rapidly penetrating the mobile telephone, and with it banking services, money, cameras, remote control, compass and video. In the future, the mobile telephone will be less a mere telephone, more a fusion of the computer and IT whatever. What sort of remote community life and culture will it create? At first, all we are getting are new kinds of postcards and difficult menus, expensive services, and a huge media fuss over the new economy and e-commerce. At the moment in Finland it looks as if it is economically most profitable to harness the nation's brains to invent more logos, joke pages and chat-lines for mobile telephones. When all Finns have been provided with mobile telephones, it will be ensured that it is no longer possible to manage without them in banks, at the cinema, in parking lots or travel agents. It is 18.40 and my mobile beeps, for the thirteenth time today: 'The sun's shining! To the terrace, and fast!' And again, ten minutes later: 'We're at the Engel café.' And five minutes later: 'The sun's gone in, we're going to the Strindberg. Hurry up!' We end up spending the evening at my house. We set up a mobile-phone park on my mantelpiece: 25 mobile phones lying neatly in a row. Top of page |