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New Tech, New Ties:
Rich Ling
How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion
The MIT Press
April 2008
On Sale: March 31, 2008
256 pages ISBN: 0262122979 EAN: 9780262122979 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Winner, Media Ecology Association's 2009 Erving Goffman
Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social
Interaction. and Honorable Mention, Sociology & Social Work
category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the
Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the
Association of American Publishers. The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone
strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a
traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a
location and ask hopefully if someone is "there"; with a
mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to
friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we
are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent
friends, what happens to our relationship with the people
who are actually in the same room with us? In New Tech, New Ties, Rich Ling examines how the mobile
telephone affects both kinds of interactions—those mediated
by mobile communication and those that are face to face.
Ling finds that through the use of various social rituals
the mobile telephone strengthens social ties within the
circle of friends and family—sometimes at the expense of
interaction with those who are physically present—and
creates what he calls "bounded solidarity." Ling argues that mobile communication helps to engender and
develop social cohesion within the family and the peer
group. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Erving
Goffman, and Randall Collins, Ling shows that ritual
interaction is a catalyst for the development of social
bonding. From this perspective, he examines how mobile
communication affects face-to-face ritual situations and how
ritual is used in interaction mediated by mobile
communication. He looks at the evidence, including
interviews and observations from around the world, that
documents the effect of mobile communication on social
bonding and also examines some of the other possibly
problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in
small groups.
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